If there is one living figure who can be credited with popularizing the worldview according to which Hamas and Hezbollah are “social movements that are progressive,” while J. K. Rowling is “in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism,” it’s Judith Butler.
The notion that the outré ideas promulgated in America’s universities would stay in those institutions, like an ivory-tower Las Vegas, is no longer tenable. In a cover story for New York magazine this month, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer makes “the moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies” irrespective of age or psychiatric history. Meanwhile, a shockingly large number of Americans showed support for Hamas in the immediate aftermath of its brutal massacre of 1,200 Israelis last October. If, as Andrew Sullivan memorably put it several years ago, “we all live on campus now,” Judith Butler is the queen of the quad.
