Kill for purity

“A daughter of a prominent general in the People’s Liberation Army, Ms. Song was enrolled at Beijing Normal University Girls High School when she and classmates responded to Mao’s call for young people to turn against intellectuals, educators and others who supposedly held bourgeois values,” The New York Times reported this month in her obituary.

“On Aug. 5, 1966, students attacked Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old mother of four who headed the school. She was kicked and beaten with sticks spiked with nails. After passing out, she was thrown onto a garbage cart and left to die.”

Capitalizing on this opportunity (get it?) the GOP (Gelatinous Old Pucks) have posted on Tik-Tok and other Communist websites an animated version of JD Vance’s 2021 speech to the National Conservatism Conference titled “The Universities are the Enemy.”

Doubling down in his 2022 campaign for Senate, Vance said that universities are dedicated to “deceit and lies, not to the truth,” if you can believe Inside Higher Education, whose writers appear to be suspiciously educated.

Vance continued: “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country, and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Colleges, he said, “are enforcing dogma that is hostile to American conservatives.”

Wow.

How shall we attack them, you slimy little schmuck?

In a February interview this year with The European Conservative, Vance suggested taking away the tax-exempt status of private universities, and punishing “the university bureaucracy focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Universities, exemplified by Harvard, Vance insisted, “are just paper tigers. We should be really aggressively reforming them in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

So: Vance’s answer to a malign influence he hates is to institute a malign influence he likes.

Or something.

He touted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s approach to dealing with “left-wing domination of universities,” which Vance said should be a model for the conservatives in the United States. That approach involves “seizing control” of universities.

He doubled down on his support for Orbán’s methods in a May interview with "Face the Nation," claiming that universities are “controlled by left-wing foundations,” not taxpayers.

Fellow Republican boot-stepper Ron DeSantis “fixed” that problem in Florida, by forcibly converting New College into a right-wing bluster factory, whereupon one-third of its professors quit.

No wonder big-shot Republicans are eye-gouging one another, and us, in their pursuit of a monument to Song Bin Bin, whose face, Vance and Drumpf believe, should be added to those other guys on Mount Rushmore. (What were their names? You could look it up.)

Ms. Song later apologized for beating her teacher to death, and moved to the United States.

Perhaps she felt she’d be more welcome here.

Her teacher’s widower, Wang Jingyao, took photos of his wife’s battered body and of posters her murderers had hung in their apartment after breaking in. One sign threatened to “hack you to pieces,” another to “hold up your pigs’ ears.” For being a high school principal.

Chairman Mao praised Song Bin Bin and gave her a new name: Song Yaowu. He said that the name Binbin (“Gentle”) did not fit her, and that she should be called Yaowu (“Militant”). Two days after that praise of murder, on August 20, 1966, an article lavishly praising Chairman Mao was published under the name Song Yaowu in the Guang Ming Daily newspaper. Song later denied that she wrote it.

Wow. Just like Trump not really being endorsed by Jamie Dimon.

To bolster Song’s credits, state-controlled Chinese newspapers gave her credit for killing many more people, if you can believe the notoriously left-wing Encyclopedia Britannica.

Perhaps I am giving this column the wrong focus. Maybe it should not be on Song Bin Bin, but on the teacher she murdered, Bian Zhongyun.

“The teenagers who killed Bian Zhongyun were not feral as much as well-drilled,” journalist Tania Branigan wrote in her 2023 book “Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution,” observing how “the Party had raised this generation to fear the enemies of the people.”

Enemies of the people, hey? Wow. Just like Donnie “Small Hands” Drumpf. I wonder where he got that campaign slogan. The People’s Daily, I suppose.

After Song apologized in 2014, her murdered teacher’s widower told The New York Times that Song Bin Bin “is a bad person, because of what she did,” but that he believed Ms. Song and her classmates were not solely to blame: “The entire Communist Party and Mao Zedong are also responsible.”

Wow, Sherlock: Where’d you get the clue?

Bin Bin Song got a Ph.D. from MIT in 1989.

Talk about an enemy of the people …

How dare she educate herself like that? When she could have been pumping out children?