Culture wars often begin on university campuses.

In the 1930s, book burning was common on German campuses. During the late 1940s and early 50s, McCarthyism thrived on American campuses. Today, hard-left extremism is rewarded by radical faculty and students.

Today’s campus culture wars feature attempts to censor “politically incorrect” (a term devised by Stalinist culture warriors in the 1920s and 30s) speakers — a broad category that includes conservatives, free-speech liberals, and centrist supporters of Israel. I know, because my talks have been protested at Johns Hopkins, the University of California, and Columbia. Efforts have been made to censor me — a liberal Democrat and centrist Zionist who supports the two-state solution and opposes Israel’s settlement policies.

Among the worst campuses in the world is Vassar College, which once boasted an excellent academic reputation but now is home to many faculty members and students who reject education and demand that hard-left propaganda be taught in classrooms. No longer is the object to teach students how to think; the current goal of the culture warriors of the hard left is to tell them what to think. And the “what” includes intolerance of dissenting views, rejection of the free market, and an abhorrence of American culture and values.

At the beginning of the current academic year, a group of Vassar students distributed a hard-left “disorientation guide” that advocated violent resistance to the “white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, capitalist values” of the Vassar “corporation.” The document called for students to “host a Molotov cocktail-making workshop” to “disrupt alumni fund-raising events,” and to “slap a Zionist.” It singled out a Jewish trustee for his support of Israel, and demanded that the university become “tied” to Palestinian resistance “as comrades in the struggle against racism [and] cisheteropatriarchy.” Whatever that concocted word means, it certainly would seem to include the anti-gay, anti-transgender, and pro-patriarchy actions of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority. But facts never get in the way of hard-left (or hard-right) extremist ideologies. In fact, the guide berates Vassar for building a science center rather than “funding racial awareness.”

Nor are the students interested in “dialogue.” Instead they want to “control” or “destroy Vassar.”

The students who distributed this guide learned well from their professors. As Ziva Dahl, who studied political science at Vassar, put it: “[I]n terms of its progressive curriculum and faculty, Vassar College now reaps what it has sown — partly due to some members of the faculty who espouse a postmodern ideology that attacks traditional Western values, divides the world into the powerful and powerless, and radicalizes students against the supposed evils of colonialism, capitalism, and white privilege. Some of the curriculum glorifies revolution and the fight against oppression. Students are marinated in identity politics…”

The campus is the training ground for our future leaders, and although Vassar may be among the most extreme battlefields of the one-sided culture war currently being waged on campuses, it is not alone. Similar disorientation guides and radical curricula are all too common on campuses around the country, where propaganda substitutes for education and where dissenting views are punished by downgrading and peer pressure. This is a dangerous phenomenon whose effect can already be seen in the mainstream media and political culture wars that have weakened the center and emboldened the extremes.

The tolerant center — traditional liberals and conservatives — must reclaim its role in education, politics, and the media. America had been blessed by the absence of intolerant extremists from our mainstream. This blessing is under siege by radical faculty, students, and recent alumni who seek to destroy our culture and replace it with what they call “progressive” values, but which, in reality, are repressive in the extreme. Their heroes are not Jefferson, Madison, and Roosevelt, but Stalin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh. For many of them, the open marketplace of ideas is simply another capitalist tool designed to favor the well-educated, those who can garner factual support, and those who can articulate their arguments in a manner that makes them persuasive. Why do we need a marketplace if there is only one truth, and the radical left has a monopoly on it?

We must win the culture war against these uncultured censors, or we will lose America.