“Trump’s Contested Antisemitism Fight is Accelerating Again,” announced the New York Times on March 21, noting how he’s suing Harvard and UCLA for antisemitism, while preparing cases against Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. Renewing the campaign launched by his Executive Order 14188 (January 25, 2025) and subsequent actions, the administration is again using the accusation in its attack on higher learning. The claim might once have seemed merely cynical. Today it reads as something more revealing: an instance of the political style Jim Chandler describe in The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning. For here we encounter not just hypocrisy, but irony. A movement long entangled with nativist and conspiratorial rhetoric now casts itself as the arbiter of moral injury—while directing its force against one of the central institutions of American intellectual life, and one in which Jewish scholarship has been deeply embedded. What matters, however, is less the contradiction than the form. This is accusation as spectacle: a drama staged in advance, indifferent to adjudication, and largely immune to refutation. Under such conditions, even irony falters. The exposure of the ruse becomes part of the show. Chandler discusses the early antisemitism campaign in his pamphlet, where he describes more broadly the political culture in the Age of Trump shaped by “kayfabe,” where performance blurs truth and falsehood, and where irony—once a weapon of critique—no longer works. The pamphlet will be out this summer, but subscribe to read it online this spring, along with a group of invited commentators.