Substack Notes, Vol. 8.1
Apr. 29 - May 1st; PROTEST EDITION
These are some of the notes that I’ve encountered or written during the past few days. The Substacksphere is alive with delighted contempt for the comically melodramatic student protestors, who have occupied spaces on many campuses. They usually claim that this is for Palestine or something but their presence has sucked much of the oxygen out of the cultural room. I have yet to encounter a conversation about GAZA or the Palestinians provoked by the protests. It’s certainly creating awareness and bringing pressure but it’s only awareness of how ridiculous these people are and pressure on the administrations which have nurtured and coddled this kind of behavior for decades. The effects of the protests have had absolutely nothing to do with the Palestinians.
Rather, the protests are all about the students, in their focus and intent. It is an opportunity to signal virtue in the grandest terms possible for many of them. It might even feel a bit real… but that’s obviously a delusion. The protests have certainly lessened the average American’s sympathy for the Palestinians (inasmuch as it’s done anything) and it’s made most people thoroughly sick of these people and this subject. These were protests which created apathy and destroyed the credibility of the people and organizations involved. Well done!
Pretend Revolutionaries
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.
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.
This all started yesterday morning, when a wave of undergrad students rushed Kirkland Hall, where Vanderbilt’s chancellor’s office is located. Thus began their sit-in—a response to the college administration shutting down a student government vote over whether the school should divest funds from Israel.
The protesters remained there for nearly 21.5 hours—blowing Harvard’s 12-hour “hunger strike,” also known as a good night’s sleep—out of the water, before police began removing and arresting students, some of whom have since been suspended.
There are many dumbfounding moments from this latest campus frenzy—for example, when the students, arms linked, called the black police officers protecting the chancellor “puppets.” When food was brought in from Panera Bread by the administration for the officers but not the students, it was treated like a human-rights abuse.
But the tampon takes the cake. (Major props to Steve McGuire for compiling the best episode of the internet since yesterday.)
Here’s what went down: during one of those 21.5 hours of the protest, probably at an ungodly one, a few of the student demonstrators decided to call 911. That’s because their friend, who was part of the sit-in, had to change her tampon.
Specifically, she was “being denied the right to change her tampon that has been in for multiple hours, which leads to an increased risk of toxic shock syndrome.”
The frankly Zen-like 911 operator, who deserves a raise, was understandably confused. “Ma’am, do you have an emergency?”
Um, yes?! The student on the phone requests urgent medical assistance.
“You’re telling me your friend in Kirkland needs an ambulance. Is that what you’re telling me?”
Then in another video, one of the protesters—in a keffiyeh and a mask—approaches the police and an administrator, who was indeed in a sweater vest, demanding to know WHAT. WILL. HAPPEN. to her friend, should she leave the sit-in to change the tampon in question. The adults calmly explain that she won’t be arrested if she leaves the building. But can they confirm that she will never be arrested, ever?!
“She does not feel safe,” someone says off-screen, punctuating it with claps.
This whole thing makes the Nick Christakis Halloween costume struggle session look like a teachable moment. It must be seen to be believed. Watch all the videos in Steve’s thread here.
For starters, if having a tampon in for “multiple hours” is grounds to call for an ambulance, I should have been dead years ago. Second, this student was being denied no such right. All she had to do was get up, leave the protest, and find one of the hundreds of bathrooms that she had access to elsewhere on campus. Pro tip: wear a pad to the all-night protest. The First Amendment doesn’t come with a heating pad.
It’s all very Karen, to borrow a trope from 2020, especially when a protester demands the administrator find someone who can get them some answers. Just like middle-aged women who think dressing down the manager will somehow earn them a full refund, these students have convinced themselves that by linking arms and screaming “shame” at their college’s chancellor, they are stopping a war in the Middle East.
Don’t these authority figures realize they are standing in the way of a global intifada, which is also—obviously—a totally good thing?
Suzy Weiss, The Free Press
thefp.com/p/tampongate-babies-in-bars-p…
American universities remain places where magnificent things are happening… yet simultaneously many campuses seem overrun not only with the usual petty hatreds and dreary fads, but also at least in some quarters with a horrifying collapse in respect for the necessary foundations of American democracy and civic peace.
Sitting atop these troubled institutions, we have too many “leaders” of extraordinary mediocrity and conventional thinking, like the three hapless presidents blinking and stammering in the glare of the television lights. Assaulted by the angry, noisy proponents of an absurdist worldview, and under pressure from misguided diktats emanating from a woke, activist-staffed Washington bureaucracy, administrators and trustees have generally preferred the path of appeasement. Those who best flourish in administrations of this kind are careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment and checking the appropriate identity boxes on job questionnaires.
By Walter Russell Meade, Tablet Magazine
“What’s the point of having ‘fuck you’ money if you don’t ever say fuck you?” - Tech executive, on taking a hard line against disruptive activism at work…
Now, you might argue that this is a difference which makes no difference, the distinction between “wokeness is dying because the mainstream are fed up with woke people’s extremism” and “wokeness is actually secretly winning by merging itself into the mainstream and changing it a bit for the better.”
But that’s wrong. There’s a big distinction, and it’s an important one. When we look back, one of these views will put the people behind wokeness in their rightful place in history alongside the McCarthyites and the lunatics of the Salem witch trials: villains at the heart of some of our darkest, most terrible chapters in history. The other view, which Hinsliff is pushing, will paint the people behind wokeness as heroes, whose acts of extremism were merely noble sacrifices “to break down doors” for the greater good of progress.
To which, and I absolutely hope that someone manages to get this in front of Gaby Hinsliff so that you, Gaby, can read these words yourself:
Fuck you.
The woke activists who sent death threats toKathleen Stock, to JK Rowling, and to countless other women for simply speaking their minds and telling the truth? They are not heroes, Gaby. They do not deserve praise for “breaking down doors.” Some of these activists literally wanted to kill women.
The countless vulnerable young people — often gay, autistic or both — who were coaxed by woke people to undergo unnecessary, experimental, irreversible body modification surgeries? They’re victims, Gaby. Their victimhoods, their stories, are what need to take historical precedence above all else.
According to the US EPA’s MAGICC climate model,
if the United States completely eliminated fossil fuel consumption today, it would only lead to 0.33 degrees F lower temperature by the end of the century (i.e. 2100).
