Sometimes Democratic hypocrisy becomes so repulsive that I feel like venting. Is Michelle Obama gaslighting us shamelessly, or is she truly suffering a debilitating memory loss when she tells us that she can’t sleep at night because of what Trump and his administration are doing to violent illegals? From what I can determine, her husband during his presidency kicked out over 5 million unwanted poachers. To my knowledge, Democratic district judges never tried to stop this process, while the legacy media were entirely cool with the mass deportation.

Obama’s expulsions followed the deportations of another Democratic administration, that of Bill Clinton, who also booted out lots of illegals. At that time Hillary, who is now grieving for those whom Trump is brutally deporting, seemed quite unfazed by her husband’s actions. Nor did the media, which is now raging over Trump’s supposed inhumanity, show the slightest concern about these hard-to-miss mass deportations. Moreover, I can’t recall state and local Democratic officials refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in carrying out its searches. Since the Democrats were then doing the deporting, there was no agonizing moral dilemma for local Democratic leaders to address.

But allow me to note the obvious. Those deportations took place before the Democrats’ working-class base noticeably shrank or before the DNC noticed this shrinkage; and so instead of trying to keep out illegals who could provide unskilled labor at a lower cost than the indigenous population, Democratic leaders dragged in tens of millions of “undocumented” people as future Democratic voters.  Once that fateful decision was reached Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer stopped speaking about the need for a border wall, and our last Democratic president welcomed in a multitude of illegals and even paid for their travel and living expenses once they arrived. Presumably TV commentator Ana Navarro, who has famously compared illegals to “black slaves who were brought here against their will,” did not mean to include in her condemnation those illegals expelled by her party. She was only referring to the 150, 000 or so illegals whom Tom Homan has  rounded up while working for Trump, not for the far, far greater number whom he helped expel while working for Obama.

Democrats and their media allies continue to gnash their teeth with unprecedented hypocrisy while the Trump administration struggles to deports illegal rapists and MS-13 gang members. Meanwhile, Democratic federal district judges exercise questionable constitutional authority by prohibiting ICE from removing these dangerous residents. But perhaps I’m being unfair to Democratic actors! They’re just trying to expand their voting base, an activity that justifies in their minds such tasteless histrionics.

At least equally hypocritical has been the behavior of American academics currently screaming about the supposed threat to their intellectual freedom. Last week the Guardian hailed “the pushback by American universities against Donald Trump’s assault on higher education.” As a “slide into authoritarianism” is taking place here nationwide, universities are signing petitions, calling for the restoration of their freedom, and holding National Days of Actions in defense of their endangered rights.

These demonstrators and their media cheerleaders show all the moral consistency of American communists in an older America. Those earlier leftists wailed endlessly about American despotism while defending mass murder in Stalin’s Russia. I don’t recall the academic petition signers and demonstrators whom the Guardian extols for their bravery and passion for liberty exhibiting the slightest concern about freedom when their guys were in power. When did they complain about Democratic administrations treating men on campuses accused of harassing women as guilty, even if no evidence of harassment could be produced? When did those academic hypocrites bewail the gender and racial quotas enforced by the Democrats, or offer to protect the right of faculty to resist the nonstop LGBTQ directives imposed by college administrations? As a professor for many decades, I never encountered institutions that believed less in freedom than our supposed citadels of “higher education.”

Trump’s threat to academic freedom consists of his decision to make government grants to educational institutions contingent on their practicing tolerance, perhaps for the first time. The Trump administration is requiring universities to practice the non-discrimination they unconvincingly pretend to be already enforcing. They will also be obliged (horror of horrors!) to rein in violent Hamas protests on their campuses.

Sometimes these calls for normal civil behavior cause academic swamp creatures to go mad. Last week, a retired Jewish professor of my acquaintance complained to me about all the “McCarthyism” that Trump was unleashing on American campuses. It dawned on me that this was a turbid reference to Trump’s efforts to, among other things, control anti-Jewish riots—something this person should welcome given his stated concerns about anti-Semitism running riot in this country. Unfortunately, this gentleman couldn’t accept non-leftist efforts to deal with the problem that obsessed him; and he therefore denounced Trump’s measures to protect Jewish students as right-wing repression. By now I’ve learned it may be futile to confront academic crazies with unvarnished facts.