Pretend Revolutionaries
The Farce of Ivy League Protests
Fifty-six years ago this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university: stop funding military research, and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby Black neighborhood. After a week of futile negotiations, Columbia called in New York City police to clear the occupation.
The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk’s office. “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up,” Mark Rudd, the student leader and future member of the terrorist Weather Underground, wrote in an open letter to Kirk, who resigned a few months later. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.
“Zionists don’t deserve to live… Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
-Khymani James, CU Student Protest Leader
“I actually met a lot of Jewish students that are in the encampment, and I think that it is really unfortunate that people don’t care about the fact that all Jewish kids should be kept safe, and that we should not have to tolerate antisemitism or bigotry for all Jewish students, whether they are pro-genocide or anti-genocide.”
-Rep. Ilhan Omar
Six weeks ago a group of Harvard students embarked upon a much-advertised hunger strike… for 12 hours. This action was taken ‘in solidarity’ with other students at other institutions who were protesting on behalf of the Palestinians... or something. I honestly can’t remember and I care too little to Google the details at this time. I always thought of a hunger strike as a prolonged period without nutrition, executed in order to bring pressure to bear upon some hierarchy by leveraging human emotions of concern or sympathy. If your concern is skyrocketing upon hearing the news that dozens of Harvard students went without food for 12 hours please be assured: no one died during this hunger strike. The strikers desisted after a period so brief that few people would recognize it as ‘hunger’ at all. In fact, most people on earth go without food for 12 hours almost every 24. It’s called sleeping. I stop my hunger strike most days at breakfast, committed political revolutionary that I am.
Protests often have an air of the symbolic. That is unavoidable and it can even be useful. That is not the case with the Gaza-focused protests which have erupted across Ivy League campuses in the past few weeks, most notably (and, it would seem, viciously at Columbia University).
Let us count the ways:
The protesters have chosen an ethically incoherent position. While supporting the rights and safety and national aspirations of Palestinians would allow access to a vast reservoir of sympathy, that would require a careful denunciation of the virulently anti-Semitic rhetoric and aims of Hamas, which has repeatedly made clear their dream of killing every Jew on Earth.
Lacking a knowledge of history and comparative politics, these students have jammed the war in Gaza into an awkward European oppressor versus brown oppressed heuristic. This is historically untenable for several reasons: (1) Jews have the longest-running unbroken historical ties to Israel (2) About 75% of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, meaning they’re Arab and North African, not European (3) most of those Jews left their OWN communities across North Africa and the Middle East in the 1930’s and 1940’s due to communal violence and the threat of it (4) Israel is a country which is not only mostly brown and regionally indigenous, but is also around 1/4 Muslim Arab, etc. etc. “Students will go home when Israelis go back to Europe” said one protestor’s sign at the GWU campus. He would probably be surprised to learn that only about 20% of Israelis have any kind of ancestral tie to Europe (and those are mostly ancestral-most Ashkenazi Jews in the country were born in Israel).
If the protestors left aside their violent, Fanonist rhetoric and were actually advocating for the Palestinians they would win much more support… but what fun would that be?
Bad things have happened on both sides of this conflict. If you make excuses for Oct. 7 (or, worse, celebrate it) you have completely ceded the moral high ground and betrayed your weird, bloodthirsty, ideological perspective. The fact that this isn’t a topic of concern for many of the protestors reveals how cut off they are from mainstream culture and opinion in the U.S.
The protestors have chosen tactically questionable strategies. One benefit of protests is to raise awareness of issues, but that’s basically impossible for an event like the war in Gaza. Awareness is already at (or close to) maximum saturation. They claim to want divestment by their colleges from Israel… but what does that mean in practice?
In reality the families and family businesses of the protestors probably have much close links to Israel and extract more benefit from those ties than Columbia University in toto. Even Saudi Arabia and Egypt now have close ties with Israel… but Columbia University shouldn’t? This kind of demand is no longer even sourced from a kind of Arab populism. It’s instead uncomfortably close to the priorities of Hamas and Iran.
The protestors are ridiculous. Aside from their words or their tactics or their goals, they are effectively a large group of rich kids camping out on a lawn, surrounded by a small army of Columbia University security officers (with whom I used to work occasionally) and dozens of police. Not only are they richer and safer and more idle than 99.99% of people on Earth… they are safer than 99.5% of people in NEW YORK CITY and their presence on their lawn requires tens of thousands of wages from the cops who must guard them (to satisfy their coddling and awkwardly-placed administration and their ever-anxious parents).
If they broke up the protests and routed that money directly to Palestinians they would accomplish 1000x more for the people of that region than they are doing now.
But that gets to the heart of the matter: if they routed their $70,000 per annum tuition to the people of the region they would benefit those people 1000x more… but then they wouldn’t be able to personally benefit from it.
Et cetera, et cetera…
Political change requires sacrifice and effective political action requires risk. These students refuse to sacrifice anything and they’re too cowardly to actually risk anything. They are caught up in a fantasy in which they can make signs and make out in the grassy environs of CU. This is the same fantasy that they operate with daily: “I will be a campus radical and get a great career and change the system from within.” That might work, but it won’t if your ambition is to dismantle the system. At some point every political revolutionary must choose between personal safety and profit and the revolution… but they already chose. Rather, they’ve never faced the choice. And they never will. They will live their entire lives displaying their rhetoric and their opinions like so much Instagram flair, too scared to break with the ‘oppressive’ institutions and too greedy to leave them. They were, are, and will remain the richest and safest KIDS (and I mean that in every sense) in America. Ask them: if they had to choose between their education and their status and their careers, and helping the people of Gaza, what would it be? We already know… they already chose.
By any means necessary… unless those means require leaving school, or personally fighting, or creating effective popular organizations, or learning about the Middle East and its history, or giving up any of their family wealth, or risking anything, or doing anything other than camping out and making signs. Other than those marginal qualifiers these students will win victory, by any means necessary!
Watching college campuses roiled by demonstrations, it is tempting to compare 2024 with the Hippie era. There are plenty of similarities, but there are also important differences. I claim that the stereotypical personality of the Hippie was high in openness. The stereotypical personality of today’s social justice activist is high in neuroticism.
I think that the Hippies were mostly healthy psychologically. Although some cults did form, and some factions were extremist in their goals and tactics, the overall Hippie phenomenon was not a cult and the extremists were a minority. Because its distinctive personality characteristic was high openness, it was aligned with free speech and with trying to persuade (the early anti-war actions on campus were “teach-ins” at which government officials were invited to debate anti-war faculty) rather than to cancel. People who were mostly straight could still be accepted by Hippies.
Because Hippies were not highly neurotic, the anti-war movement was able to do more than sprout protests on campuses. It was able to gain sympathy and support from the general public and engage successfully in the political process.
The social justice activists strike me as closer to being a cult than a movement. I think that the cult attracts people who are unhealthy psychologically. They have a lot of negative emotions, and the social justice ideology serves to validate and reinforce those emotions.
The dream of so much modern education is that by affirming and supporting and pacifying kids and keeping them safe we will create a generation of kind, gentle, and tolerant citizens.
Instead, we will create a legion of neurotic play-actors, who lack seriousness and credibility and courage. If you suppress debate and competition and aggression you create a group of people even more in love with the rhetoric of violence and destruction because they lack the tolerance for even minor discomforts and the bravery to even vocalize their own feelings.
While these unfortunate people will lack the boldness or commitment to actually instantiate their bloody dreams their softness and their externalized self-hatred will be sand in the gears of American society. These kids will never create a revolution… but they could weaken the system enough to allow other, more psychopathic characters to do it.
From Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson):
Beware of The Deadly Progressive Touch-
Recently, viral videos have highlighted the furor—and narcissism—of progressive elites when they rarely face the consequences of their own actions.
The most hilarious video was the defiant DA of New York’s Monroe County, dripping with elite condescension. She felt she had the right to go 20 mph over the speed limit, ignore a patrol car signaling her to pull over, and then in her garage dress down hoi polloi officers for daring to treat her like she was a mere citizen.
Another was the Emory professor screaming (“I am a professor!”) when handcuffed and hauled off her campus by Georgia law enforcement. She exited whining to cameras that she had only “lightly” hit a policeman on the head (“I impulsively hit him on the head very lightly to get his attention and they grabbed me.”). And then there was the Bakersfield fiery leftist who bragged to the City Council about murdering them in their homes, only to flicker and weep in court when facing felony indictments.
Progressive hothouse plants assume their supposed moral superiority exempts them from living by the rules in the manner of others. But sometimes it is not just the police who anger them, but the very Frankensteinian monsters they created who do not cooperate with their degreed and elected enablers.
In California, an epidemic of crime, from theft to assault, has struck liberal politicians in the last few months, including most recently Adam Schiff, the leftwing mayors of San Jose—Matt Mahon—and Los Angeles—Karen Bass, and even the unhinged district attorney of Oakland Pamela Price. Critical legal theory, no-bail, and defund the police apparently offer no protection.
Sen. Chuck Schumer thought it a neat trick in 2020 to assemble a pro-abortion throng outside the Supreme Court doors, and threaten Justices Kavanagh and Gorsuch by name. He grandstanded that they would not know what would soon “hit” them as they reaped the “whirlwind”. Now a pro-Hamas whirlwind hit his own home, in the fashion leftists not long also did with impunity to Supreme Court Justices’ homes—then to the sudden silence of the otherwise loud Schumer.
Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky kindly invited his own law students to his home for dinner—only to have his hospitality hijacked by pro-Hamas activist students that commandeered a microphone to spout their drivel, leading to a scuffle with his wife. The cry-bully mob offered no exemption to the dean—who in antisemitic fashion was portrayed on campus posters as a veritable IDF vampire. They also seemed indifferent to (or emboldened by?) the fact that Chemerinsky in the past has often offered advice about how to get around statutes prohibiting race-based hiring by not explicitly mentioning the operative agenda of diversity. And of course, in the past he had encouraged more campus protests to combat “racism”.
Most college presidents, many hired under DEI pressures, are now being eaten alive by their own ideologues, shocked that pro-Hamas activists are at heart fascistic and anti-Semitic and, well yes, spout “hate speech”.
So terrified college presidents talk tough, virtue signaling to alumni and donors by issuing “deadlines”, and promising“consequences” —but otherwise usually ending up negotiating and extending or making new deadlines to their campus occupiers. So the pro-Hamas crowd takes over their campuses, and often forces all students either to finish the semester remotely or to have their graduation ceremonies cancelled or abbreviated. And all to the applause of Hamas in Gaza and delight of the mullahs in Iran.
The left in the last 30 years absorbed America’s maininstitutions and hallmarks. And now from Disney and Anheuser-Busch to the Ivy League to CNN and blue-state big cities, it has more or less destroyed their brands and reputations.
The progressive touch eventually turns everything to dross.
As the “student protests taking place on college campuses across the country in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict” continued, Noah Rothman (Leans Right bias) sees the protestors as tools “of the already powerful, whose primary goal is the acquisition of even more power,” while The Atlantic (Left bias) argues that the students lack perspective and have “allowed the intoxicating language of liberation to blind them to an ugliness encoded within that struggle.” Imagine what they could accomplish were they this concerned about their own country’s problems (homelessness, drugs, poverty, etc.)? Additional evidence that these affluent and “elite” students have lost perspective include:
A recent Gallup poll shows that only 2% of American’s view the Israeli/Hamas conflict as “the most important problem facing the country today.” Other citizens appear to prioritize the economy (30%), immigration (28%), and poor government leadership (19%).
The daughter of Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, Isra Hirsi, claims to be homeless after being suspended from Columbia University for refusing to comply with NYPD orders to vacate the South Lawn of Columbia University’s Morningside Heights Campus. One would think that someone capable of affording the $90K-per-year tuition could rely on her multi-millionaire parents for a little assistance.
https://hoisttheblackflag.substack.com/p/the-gifted-the-rich-the-clueless?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2