It's amazing how often history repeats itself this way, where the most intelligent and educated people of an advanced society - the academia and intelligentsia - fall into the grip of a collective and mutually-reinforcing insanity that feeds directly into rising totalitarianism. While it's happening, they perceive it as the path of progress and peace until it's too late.

What's happening in U.S. academia happened in revolutionary-era France, and again in early twentieth-century Russia, then in Spain and Italy, and then in Germany. Time and again they just don't see it - they always imagine that they are far too educated and enlightened to be swept along by groupthink - they even imagine they are leading the resistance against the mentality of the uneducated masses while all along being co-opted by populists.