Wasted Anger & Misdirected Youth
Disruptions, Violence, Offense, Hate, and Rank Ignorance have Characterized the Campus Protests
Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words…
[T]he protests have displayed an incoherent mix of campus progressivism, hardcore Islamism and Arab nationalism, and revolutionary anarchism and communism, including open praise for North Korea. The only unifying thread would appear to be opposition to Israel and its alleged imperial patron, the United States.
Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.
, The People Setting America on Fire (TabletMag.com)
[The protesters] had their whole lives ahead of them and now they’ve robbed themselves of their own futures. Now was their time to be real heroes in their own fantasty microcosm, becoming freaks of their own design. Instead, they are braindead and masked spineless sheep lauding themselves as the saviors of our societies, while terrorising Jewish professors and students alike off campus, and we only have Gen X to blame. These children have been raised to prioritize their feelings above anything else. They’ve never once been told to shut up, sit down and defer to an adult.
At this point, it’s worth taking a moment to pause and reflect on what these people are explicitly praising. On October 7 2023 Jihadist death squads rampaged through towns and villages in Israel, killing unarmed Jews and Israelis. They burned people alive; tortured, mutilated and beheaded others. They shot hundreds of innocent young people in cold blood - happy, joyful people who were at a festival with friends to dance and listen to music and enjoy life. Their fighters separated family members and murdered parents in front of their kids. They raped and assaulted women next to the corpses of their friends. Palestinians took to the streets in large numbers to spit on the desecrated dead body of a young woman, and to beat up elderly hostages. Others called their parents to say things like ‘mum, Dad, I killed 10 Jews, you’ll be so proud’ (actual quote).
I see it everywhere these days: a lack of nuance and logic in our political discourse. It has always been so I guess… but the elevations of feelings, intuitions, and sentiment as “ways of knowing”-and the derangement of our beliefs and fragmentation of our cultural narratives driven by political extremism and social media-are certainly having a corrosive effect on our conversations. The latest notable example is the spate of campus protests concerning the war in Gaza. Many people oppose the war in Gaza… so they automatically support the protesters. Many more Americans (71%) support Israel’s right to wage what it claims is a war of self-defense, and so they are unlikely to credit the protesters whatsoever. However, it is possible to oppose Israel’s operations in Gaza and still criticize the protests. This is not unheard of, but it’s far too rare in my opinion. Protests should be assessed not only based on their issue of focus, but also their tactics and their messaging.
I believe that these protests are some of the most ridiculous in human history. I make no comment here about the war in Gaza or Palestinian nationhood or IDF operations; rather, I want to focus on the nature of a series of protests which have dominated the news cycle for weeks and generated enormous controversy while doing nothing for the Palestinians and probably only increasing the average American’s emotional tendency to support Israel. I’m writing here about the protests and the protesters only. I want to discuss their messaging (briefly), their tactics, and their character-namely, their childish infatuation with violent (and counterproductive) rhetoric, combined with their stunning level of immaturity and entitlement.
To launch a successful protest you need several elements:
You must focus on a salient issue, one which can arouse public sentiment. Ideally it’s one which is heretofore unknown, where public exposure will help your cause. If that’s not the case public pressure and displays of support can still be useful.
ASSESSMENT: Valid
You must have concrete goals and make specific demands. There’s a tendency toward fragmentation and disorder, so the organizers should brief the participants on what they’re trying to achieve. These ends should be realistic and discrete. Ending racism among police is not a discrete demand. Stopping fossil fuel production is not realistic. Ending ‘divestment’ can be a reasonable and discrete demand but everyone (including the protesters, the targeted institution(s), and the media) should know what you’re talking about when you say ‘divestment’. What grants and fellowships and contracts and funding does Columbia University (for example) share with Israel? The protests aren’t choosing to focus on that because that is not their real focus. Rather, they are protesting to show disapproval for Israel and approval for the Palestinian cause (and, in many cases, Hamas). There are no effective concrete goals behind these protests.
ASSESSMENT: Invalid
You must be organized. This requires a pre-arranged set of tactics and it requires leaders and spokespeople. This is extremely important, for without these elements you just have a big mass of people, milling about, which can easily become a mob. Maybe they’re all there for the same reasons, maybe they’re not. Maybe they will damage property and assault bystanders and police, maybe they won’t. If someone brought a gun to the protests and starting shooting Columbia University security officers the protesters would almost certainly disavow them… but on what basis? Who’s leading their effort? My impression is that these protests (like Occupy Wall Street or BLM in 2020) lack a coherent structure. This lack of discipline might seem attractive, for it allows many casual and ignorant participants (see the female NYU student below) and swells the rolls, but it’s a massive weakness and it essentially undermines points #1 and #2. If you’re not all there for the same reasons, using the same tactics, then you’re just an angry crowd.
ASSESSMENT: Invalid
“Then again, until we see any of them wearing a vest packed with actual C4 and roofing nails—like real terrorists—it’s all just cosplay”
You must be disciplined. This is impossible without #3. Many protests attract malefactors, counter-protesters, media, and police. You must be ready to deal with all of these in a uniform and planned fashion. A single person going off-script when talking to a journalist or a single person striking a police officer can erase all of the progress of an event or movement, Opponents are always ready to exploit such missteps and when they happen it must be disowned and condemned by the organizers. Not only have people publicly praised Hamas (not just participants, but speakers), assaulted staff and bystanders, strewn garbage across the site, closed down movement to parts of campus, made shockingly ill-considered statements to the media (‘humanitarian aid’, ‘ 9-11 call for tampons’) but no one has addressed these devastating errors. Perhaps they have, but if so it was not effective, for I’ve been reading and watching material concerning these protests for weeks now and I have yet to see a disavowal. These protests are not just undisciplined… they are possibly the most undisciplined protests of all time.
The protesters would certainly appeal to the seriousness of their issue, and they do. “How can you worry about litter when Gazan children are dying?!”
They’re ostensibly not protesting the deaths of Gaza children-they’re protesting their universities and their relationships with Israeli institutions (although I’ve already explained this a red herring).
The people angry about the deaths of Gazan children are already on your side. You must appeal to those uninformed or undecided. THAT is the purpose of a protest. These kids mistake their urgency and their sincerity with effectiveness and worth and that is a HUGE issue these days, not just for these protests but for all protests and indeed for beliefs in general.
ASSESSMENT: Invalid
These protests do no exist in a vacuum. Before I recount some of their more flamboyantly narcissistic and self-defeating highlights I want to tie this piece to a larger tendency: social media has changed how we organize socially and understand the world and express our views. Unfortunately that has come at the cost of political efficacy. Protests are a tool, but too many people today have forgotten that and evaluate protests only on the perceived worthiness of their chosen issue. This is foolish. Many people seem to think that it’s better to do something, even if that is just standing outside with a sign. Were the choice between staying quiet in your home and protesting a serious political issue protests would be superior. That is never the choice though. Protests must be a part of a larger political strategy, and this must involve education, concerted political pressure, fundraising, and (sometimes) violence or civil disobedience. If you’re enraged at an injustice and you go out and smash a window you have not helped, and you’ve probably hurt, your cause.
We are arriving at the logical conclusion of this kind of flattening of complex political realities: every serious issue demands action and any action short of terrorism becomes justified… because the issue is serious! Unfortunately there are usually not that many committed and informed people surrounding any particular issue. It’s far more likely that people will use the disruptions to steal, or burn buildings… or mug for social media. We have arrived at the era of protests that only exist because people want to display their feelings about an issue, rather than ones that arise because people are united around a direction of change. I think if we experience another decade of what we’ve seen during the past few years (cynical and childish people of privilege spilling onto the streets effectively to virtue signal and generate images and videos for their Instagram and TikTok) the entire concept of political protests will become denuded and ridiculous. Protests are important tools for reform, too important to be diluted by children without self-control who want to advertise their opinions to the world. We live in the era of the narcissistic insta-protest.
‘Protesters’ loot stores and claim that it’s an expression of anger at the police and the government. This kind of event is incredibly common these days. Not only does these kinds of actions hurt particular issues-they make the public increasingly cynical about the entire idea of protests. These campus activities have had the same effect.
The insta-protest par excellence was the Black Lives Matter ‘movement’ of 2020. Based upon a horribly graphic and fatal arrest video and a vague (but potent) sense of injustice stoked by the media the United States experienced possibly its largest acute wave of national protests in history. Many people were angry but they weren’t exactly sure what their anger was about. Very few people knew the actual statistics around race and police killing (which showed that black American citizens are not at a greater risk of death at the hands of police than white ones). Their anger was visceral and fed by a great deal of public sentiment combined with misleading news stories. The people who did understand the issue and the associated statistics mostly chose not to protest, for that very reason. Even rarer than knowledge among the protests were goals: what were they trying to accomplish? What were the protests for? What policy or legal changes were protesters trying to bring about? No one really knew. Consequently, almost nothing changed. A bill which included some moderate and mostly unconnected policing reforms was introduced and failed in Congress (which does not usually deal with law enforcement policy-that is left to states and especially localities). Some cities dramatically cut their police budgets, but virtually all cuts were reversed within a year or two. These protests were among the largest in American history and probably the costliest in terms of property damaged and lives lost during a short period of time. That’s not why they were notable though. These protests were the biggest waste of political energy in the history of the United States. If you care about police reform you should oppose such protests, not support them. They have destroyed the possibility of national police reform legislation for a generation.
Effective and serious protests might try to negotiate with their institutions (using the protests to introduce escalating levels of pressure onto presidents and administrators) to accomplish their stated goals (‘divestment’) and would be further careful to appeal to the mass of American voters and policy-makers. That is not the way these protests have proceeded. Protesters have fought police, blocked students from accessing their own campuses, and written and said and done hateful things many, many times. The actions might be emotionally satisfying and they might be radical but they are not productive. They are as counterproductive as protest tactics can get without killing people or burning down whole neighborhoods. The truth is that these protests are not attempting to be ‘successful’ according to the normal standards of protesting because the participants are merely excited to be out there, camping out, dancing, doing something. Unfortunately what they’re doing will not help their cause, neither their stated cause of divestment nor their larger cause of protecting Palestinian civilians. To them, that’s frankly okay. Causes these days are just captions to reels and posts online. The protesters have passion to spare but they have no larger purpose and they have no discipline. Without discipline a political movement is lost. It simply fragments and devolved into a mass emotional outburst based upon mob psychology. The struggle between Palestine and Israel has had more than enough of that kind of thing already.
These recent protests revolving around the war in Gaza have effectively created a novel metric for evaluating protests: childishness. I don’t mean intemperate rage or displays of emotion. I mean pure, spoiled, laughable entitlement.
Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. “The university would rather see us dead than divest,” said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department “would rather watch us be killed than protect us.” (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. “There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system,” said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.
Protesters launched a ‘hunger strike’ (which they duly reported to the campus newspaper)… then abated after 12 HOURS.
Some particularly ridiculous examples:
Last week, we heard Marxist poetry PhD candidate Johanna King-Slutzky announce the need for ‘humanitarian aid…’ for protestors barricaded inside Hamilton Hall.
Isra Hirsi, Barnard student and daughter of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, told CNN counter protestors used chemical weapons against her and her comrades. The ‘chemical weapon’ turned out to be fart spray.
Last month, at a 21-hour
tantrumsit-in at Vanderbilt University, a student called 911 to demand her fellow insurrectionist be granted safe passage to a washroom to change her tampon.At Portland State University, a phalanx of protesters burst forth from the campus library in bike helmets and makeshift trashcan shields, charging toward a police barrier where they were promptly clotheslined.
Mental children making weapons and shields and play-acting is not the sort of thing likely to rally public opinion
I doubt that those militant acolytes of Malcolm X or those inspired by Mandela ever sent out, from the Hall, a spokesperson like the petulant, anemic Ms. Johannah King-Slutsky. The po-faced PhD candidate, who has all the charisma of a DMV worker, made a statement to the press—well, actually, it was more of a whine—about something, well, that never happened: i.e., the university preventing food and water to be brought in to the Hall. A reporter asked if Columbia was actually doing this? Well, no, but “we want a commitment that they will not violently prevent us from doing so.” So that would be a no?
Puh-leeze, dear. “Violently preventing?!” Drama queens, all you kids; you’re shameless. You’re always exaggerating some dire consequence if you don’t get what you want. You’re an entire generation of Chicken Littles, squawking about imminent catastrophe—but you’re all crying wolf. This press conference was a stunt, intended presumably to give Ms. Hyphenated Slutsky an internet moment she can use to boost her progressive activist street cred or something—in actuality, it made her a laughing stock. Maybe she should have passed the mic to the non-binary queer for Palestine who stood stoically and inexplicably behind Johannah throughout, wearing acid wash jeans, a crop top and the requisite keffiyeh. They/Them might have at least been entertaining! Alas, Ms. King-Slutsky drawled on, admonishing the Columbia “community” for putting students at risk of dehydration and death from starvation (something unlikely to occur during what ultimately amounted to a 17 hour sit down)—she pleaded that they were asking only for “basic humanitarian aid!”
When protesting you want to be taken seriously and earn public sympathy. These activities have manifestly failed on both counts. This exchange probably reflects the instinct of many observers:
: If you were advising law enforcement in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, how would you tell them to approach the current wave of campus protests?
Christopher Young: I would avoid getting involved as much as possible. The universities created this problem, and it’s not fair for them to ask the cops to come in and fix it. The universities have their own security forces. The state schools have their own police forces. They can expel people. They created this mess; it seems like they really encouraged it. Then it got out of hand, and now they want to be rescued. There’s no upside for the cities and police departments to bail out the universities.
The news (which is often generally supportive of peace protests) has been alive with damaging and ludicrous stories about these individuals and their movement:
Protesters damage school buildings and assault staff:
Protesters threaten to murder public officials:
Protesters are not only free but trained and encouraged to use violence in their protests:
Protesters beat a Jewish student unconscious:
There were unconfirmed reports of fights breaking out, resulting in injuries. An unverified video circulating online showed a Jewish student allegedly beaten by a mob of activists.
Protesters brawl with ‘counter-protesters’:
The local CBS News affiliate reported that earlier Tuesday, clashes broke out between protesters and Jewish students after the encampment blocked their way to the library in the middle of midterms.
Bystanders are assaulted and American flags are burned:
https://twitter.com/Davidlederer6/status/1780143103048888493
Bystanders are assaulted and American flags are burned:
Students are assaulted and American flags are removed:
Protesters use anti-Semitic language:
https://twitter.com/StopAntisemites/status/1780642468762902912
Students are assaulted:
Students are questioned and blocked from walking their OWN campuses based on their appearances and professed political beliefs:
Students are questioned and blocked from walking their OWN campuses based on their appearances and professed political beliefs:
‘Are you a Zionist?’ Checkpoints at UCLA encampment provoked fear, debate among Jews
Students are questioned and blocked from walking their OWN campuses based on their appearances and professed political beliefs:
Here's a posse of unbearably woke, hyper privileged Columbia students manning a barricade that they've set up to prevent 'Zionists' from moving around campus, while 'Allahu Akbar' rings out in the background.
An anonymous group funded a giant screen on the UCLA campus showing looped footage of Oct. 7 atrocities. These kinds of displays are a bad sign for any protest:
Protester vocalizes the possibility of himself ‘murdering Zionists’:
Protesters glorify Hamas:
Protesters glorify Hamas:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1785175482436329644
Protesters glorify Hamas:
https://twitter.com/AGHamilton29/status/1781882805015744826
Protesters glorify Hamas:
'When they say all this garbage, all this slander about Hamas, and about the Muslim Brotherhood, and others that are out there fighting the fight...which side are you on? We're on the side of the fighters!” - Protester at MIT
Protesters glorify Hamas:
Protesters glorify Hamas:
Protesters chant ‘Death to America’:
Protesters chant ‘Death to America’ while blocking traffic:
Protesters chant ‘Death to America’ while burning American Flags:
This is a tiny sampling of the headlines which have gone worldwide in the wake of these protests. Not all of them are from the campus protests, but the campus protesters are not disavowing these kinds of words and actions. They’re not disavowing anything. The trend is towards increasing radicalism and blood thirst and an almost gleeful urge to offend and debase. Seemingly NO message or act is out of bounds for these people… unless it’s message of patriotism, or tolerance. These headlines are ubiquitous enough that even fairly disengaged people have seen some of them. Are these crimes convincing the fence-sitters or winning public sympathy? Of course not. They’re tarnishing the entire movement, as such errors tend to do.
What do polls indicate about the protests and their tactics? The data is not encouraging for their movement. Remember: you’re trying to marshal public sympathy, so your tactics should be geared towards that end and your words and actions must contribute to that goal. I don’t see any evidence that these protesters are factoring in the attitudes of the larger society. In fact, it seems as if they are literally trying to be as offensive and disruptive as possible. Here are some recent poll results:
Only 28% of Americans support the protests. 47% oppose or strongly oppose them. Most of the supporters are almost certainly people sympathetic toward the suffering of the Palestinians. Even many of them would probably allow in private that this movement has been a mess.
30% if respondents believe that most of all of the protesters have been peaceful. 35% believe that NONE of them have been peaceful.
Only 12% of respondents believe that administrators are equal in their treatment and policies toward different protest groups (a bad sign since 95% of the protests have been pro-Palestinian, and very few are pro-Israeli).
Only 25% of Americans polled think it would be just for universities to divest from Israel.
Only 12% of Americans consider blocking traffic to be an acceptable protest tactic. 36% support the idea of occupying lawns or buildings. 21% support disrupting public events.
I believe that disapproval rates of the protesters and their tactics would be even greater if more people know about the incidents I’ve mentioned here. NOBODY, but the most foolish or ideologically committed, would support attacking police or beating students.
Keep in mind: only 15% of people polled (in early May) think Israel should be carrying out larger and harsher operations in Gaza. These are the hardliners, which can safely be ignored by protesters. “In terms of where Americans' sympathies overall lie in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 31% say more with the Israelis, 17% more with the Palestinians, and 28% with both sides equally.” 30% say that Israel’s response has been too harsh. Even that number is larger than the number who support the protests!
Let’s leave the particulars of these protests behind for a moment. Imagine a protest movement without these hundreds of gaffes and misjudgments and displays of entitlement. Imagine a protest movement that doesn’t assault anyone or set up checkpoints on campus and which does NOT block black and Jewish students from passing or chant pro-Hamas slogans or actively minimize and deny the horror of Oct. 7th. Imagine a protest movement that just protests-that presents a unified face to the world and behaves with moderation (or immoderation, provided it’s strategic!) and doesn’t disrespect the police or Jewish students or the American flag. Wouldn’t this be better, for its own purposes? Wouldn’t this be more effective? If you want the IDF to stop operations in Gaza you should be (privately, at least) more critical of these protests than anyone else. They are ruining the chances for success of your political aims and they are lessening the popularity of your movement.
A successful protest should win the sympathy of the politically-disengaged, the moderate, the average-the worker, the police officer, the doctor, the driver. Not only have these protests not shifted the views of anyone that I know towards sympathy for the Palestinians, they are actively disliked by even friends who sympathize with the Palestinians. By people like me (news readers who are skeptical of their claims) they are reviled as few activists in the United States have been. Our disgust for them is probably even greater than it was for the destructive BLM protests/riots in 2020.
If you sympathize with the protesters’ ideas you might not recognize or be willing to admit the reality: these protests have not only damaged public opinion regarding the Palestinian cause, they have damaged their own universities and the futures of many of their participants, badly. By any measure these protests have been a failure.
They’ve been immensely entertaining though.
And yet, Israeli needs to stop blowing up kids and I'd rather like it if my money wasn't used to shoot children in the head.