There will always be people who take current events to a tragic extreme. But when one considers the charged anti-Jew climate at the elite institutions across our nation, it’s hardly surprising that someone decided to up the ante.

Patrick Dai is a 21-year-old junior at Cornell University. He was arrested by federal authorities after a series of threats were allegedly issued against Cornell Jewish students on an unaffiliated website. The threats included stabbing or slitting the throat of Jewish males, raping and tossing Jewish females off buildings, and beheading Jewish babies. The one that really got him into hot water though was threatening to shoot up the 104 West building. This particular building houses a kosher dining hall and is next to the Jewish Center on the Cornell campus.

Dai’s threats have earned him a charge that has the maximum sentence of five years in prison and $250,000 in fines with a supervised release after serving his sentence for up to three years.

Dai’s mental state, according to his parents, had taken a terrible turn after 2021, when Dai succumbed to severe depression. Is he another victim of the poor mental health outcome from the pandemic lockdowns, or is it something deeper?

Could his depression stem from his collegiate environment and the ever-increasing rabid activism that tends to lead its adherents down the road to poor mental health outcomes?

Not two weeks after the October 7 massacre against Israel, a professor at Cornell named Russell Rickford was made infamous by his remarks at a pro-Palestinian (read: pro-Hamas) protest. He said that the attack was “exhilarating” and “energizing” because it represented a shift in the balance of power. Rickford is now on a leave of absence from the school, but Rickford is hardly the only one to express such anti-Jew sentiments.

According to the Cornell Daily Sun, the college newspaper, there have been instances of anti-Israel graffiti on campus rallies and a general feeling of terror from the Jewish students having to endure this rise of anti-Semitic rhetoric in the wake of an attack perpetrated against Israel.

Dai may be mentally fragile, and it’s a mercy he was stopped before anything more dangerous than online threats occurred. However, Cornell and other colleges that have encouraged the anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, pro-decolonization Marxist rhetoric are entirely to blame for the shameful actions of these college students.

Should another mentally fragile leftist activist student choose to follow Dai’s example and their professor’s encouragement, the consequences would be devastating.