Successful diplomats are duplicitous by craft, and often by nature: they move, furtively, beneath statesmen’s public phrases and grandiose claims., to negotiate with foreign powers in an endless “vortex of lustful, murderous, satanic desires,” as the late Charles Hill, a former diplomat and speechwriter for Henry Kissinger, put it in his book “Grand Strategies”. They serve their superiors reliably, but sometimes secretly, and sometimes run afoul of their superiors’ domestic interests by distorting what they tell them about deals made with adversaries to keep out blood-dampened tides.

Donald Trump has just offered himself America’s UN Embassy to a noisy sycophant whose heightened tactics against American citizens on college campuses have been on display since 2023, as I noted in January in a long essay for Salon on the origins of American preoccupation with Israel/Palestine. As Chairman of the House Republican Conference, Rope Elise Stefanik in New York named herself an official alarmist on anti-Semitism by chairing a December 5, 2023 committee hearing on what she called the “rot of anti-Semitism” in student protests against the war in Gaza.

She demanded that university presidents at the hearing give her a “yes or no” answer hypocritically accusatory question on campus protesters: “Does the call for genocide of Jews violate (a given institution’s) rules on bullying and harassment?” It is sometimes true, sadly, that protesters who chant “From the river to the sea” or who hold Israel “fully responsible” for Hamas’s violence on October 7, 2023, are historically uninformed and politically immature. But far from “calling genocide on the Jews,” as Stefanik has insisted, they are condemns genocide and accusing Israeli Jews of having committed it.

At that House hearing, this congresswoman flipped the script on the protesters, calling their intentions genocidal and casting university presidents as their enablers. In doing so, she dealt a political blow not only to the university presidents, demanding their resignation because their response to her inquisition did not satisfy her anti-anti-Semitic agenda, but also strengthened Conservatives’ long-running campaign against liberal university leaders, whom they accuse of destroying higher education. Stefanik and other Republicans have criticized university administrators for outsourcing their institutions’ prestige and services to state-capitalist authoritarian regimes abroad, but not in a way that strengthens liberal education itself, as I warned in an essay and interview for the Carnegie Council’s quarterly magazine.

I have refuted the Republican blame game against liberal educators elsewhere and often. But Stefanik’s ambassadorial nomination makes me note that she herself just two years ago called for university presidents to resign. asked to resign from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics advisory board for her vocal support of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Her “public claims of voter fraud … have no basis in evidence” and her “public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect” , said the school’s dean.

With a tenacity Trump no doubt admired, Stefanik refused to resign. Only when she was removed by the institute’s board did she resign, mercilessly (again like Trump), claiming it was a “badge of honor to join the long line of leaders who have been boycotted, protested and suspended by colleges and universities across America.” . . . The decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse, and ultimately the student experience.”

To add irony to that irony, when Stefanik was a Harvard student from 2002 to 2006, she lived in the college’s Winthrop House, named for John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who oversaw its public celebration of the Puritans’ genocidal assault on the land . the indigenous Pequot people. In 1637, colonial soldiers had surrounded a large Pequot settlement when Puritan leader John Mason “set fire to the village, which, owing to the strong wind blowing, was soon in flames,” according to James Truslow Adams’ 1921 Pulitzer-winning “The Founding “. of New England”:

In the dawn of a May morning, as the men of New England stood watch over the flames, five hundred men, women and children were slowly burned alive.

The IDF may have bettered the Puritans in Gaza, but there’s no minimizing the Harvard founders’ delight in their genocidal attacks on indigenous peoples, which they explicitly modeled on the attacks of biblical Israelites, as I described in the Salon essay referenced above.

Want a daily digest of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletterCrash course.

Anti-anti-Semites like Stefanik are right to insist that Hamas’s Intentions Against Jewsin Israel and beyond, are genocidal and nihilistic, and that Hamas is a despotic overlord of Palestinians under its rule in Gaza. But Stefanik has invented the alleged condonation of genocide by leaders at Harvard and other major universities, and has suppressed the truth about Harvard’s support for genocide—and that of similar institutions—not long after the college’s founding.

Anyone expecting Stefanik to be a more constructive force on the UN Security Council than John Bolton or Nikki Haley were during Trump’s first term will be sorely disappointed.