On the rising backlash against the campus pro-Hamas protests

History will NOT view these embarrassments as it did the student rebellions of the late 1960s.

The Ivy League youth of today have demands.

Very. Serious. Demands.

They want freedom. For Hamas, natch. From the river to the sea, and who knows where after that? Maybe Paris, Paris is nice in the spring, as long as you don’t publish cartoons of the Prophet that the faithful don’t like. Then they kill you.

They also want Doordash. The Doordash is more for themselves.

—

(From the rivvvvver! To the seaaaaa! Unreported Truths will be freeeee! Unless you pay for it, so please do. 20 cents a day.)

—

These two demands came together this week in the person of Johannah King-Slutzky. Yes, even her name is a parody of itself, a Joseph Heller novel in three words. King-Slutzky is a Columbia University graduate student writing a dissertation on “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860.”

In other words, King-Slutzky is on her way to a long and full life of unemployment, broken for short stretches of jobs supported by compulsory deductions - taxes and union dues. (Per her now-deleted Columbia Web page, she worked as a “a political strategist for leftist and progressive causes and remain[s] active in the higher education labor movement.”)

—

(They all look like this. Why do they all look like this?

ALT: I haven’t been so disappointed in a Slutzky since Caroline Ellison!

ALT ALT: She is ROCKING that keffiyeh scarf! Or should that be kaffiyeh? It’s like Hanukkah, a holiday I’m guessing King-Slutzky celebrated growing up, you can never tell exactly how to spell it!)

—

Where was I before King-Slutzky’s flowing locks distracted me?

Oh yes, the Columbia protests. Speaking on behalf of the nitwits who had occupied a central building, King-Slutzky demanded the school provision the protestors with water and food.

“Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation,” she said, in all apparent seriousness. “This is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for.”

By then, the protestors had been inside for the building for hours. Hours!

This high-pitched whine was too much even for the assembled reporters. One responded, "It seems like you're saying, “We want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food.”"

To which King-Slutzky responded that food was a capitalist construct and food delivery the opium of the masses, and by the way there’s this really great Chinese place on 108th and Amsterdam and could somebody please pick her up a double order of the pork and crab soup dumplings, because all this protesting made her hunnnngry?

Nah, she didn’t, but she might as well have. She had humiliated herself so thoroughly that the arrival of the New York City Police to end the protest a few hours later must have come as a relief.

Like basic humanitarian aid, I tell ya!

—

But it isn’t just Columbia.

All over this great land, students at America’s finest universities are cutting their last weeks of class and getting high in tents protesting the very existence of Jews Israel.

Because colonialism and occupation and genocide. That last one is a particular kick in the teeth, given that Jews faced an actual genocide which some of the real alter kockers* are still alive to remember.

(*Yiddish for oldster.)

Really, what this is all about is being naughty and sticking it to the man.

Defund the police worked out about as well as could be expected, and climate change is so boring. Who wants to protest the weather, anyway? Besides, the California snowpack came roaring back this spring. Atmospheric rivers or whatnot.

So Hamas it is. Let a thousand Palestinian flags fly.

—

(I pahked my cahh-bomb in Haahvahd Yahd!)

SOURCE

—

The protestors, and a few of their media compadres, are trying to wrap this spring’s nonsense in the mantle of the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War.

The analogy makes total sense, except in every way.

It’s not just that the United States isn’t fighting in Gaza and no American soldiers are dying there. By the spring of 1968, the United States had largely turned against Vietnam - a war killing up to 500 Americans a week in a country that could not be considered a vital American interest no matter how hard the White House pretended it was.

Famously, on Feb. 27, 1968, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, who had just traveled to Vietnam, said that the United States could not win the war. The broadcast supposedly led President Lyndon B. Johnson to say if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost Middle America.

A month later, Johnson said he would not run for reelection. He had won in 1964 in a landslide, but the war and its unpopularity doomed his Presidency, a tragedy that has been well-documented.

So the students in 1968 were genuinely speaking on behalf of a huge swath of Americans who hated the Vietnam War. (Even so, many older Americans turned against the protests when they turned violent over the summer.)

The current protests, on the other hand, feel like a particularly ugly roleplay.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza has bogged down and killed too many civilians, but it comes in response to an awful and unprovoked attack on Israeli civilians on Israeli soil. And do these protestors really understand what it means for them to support Hamas - an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group that is about half-a-degree removed from the butchery of the Islamic State?

—

(Word salad, word salad.)

—

Meanwhile the protestors themselves come across as weirdly entitled and weak. If they’re so certain of their own righteousness, why do they insist on wearing masks? Why do they whine so whenever anyone challenges them?

As the University of Florida said in a statement after Florida Highway Patrol troopers made several arrests:

The University of Florida is not a daycare and we do not treat protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.

These protestors aren’t the vanguard of a broader social movement. They do not speak for many - much less most - Americans. They represent only themselves.

—

(Just do it or I’ll come to your house with a bullhorn!)

—

Even the White House appears aware of the risks their antics run to the Democratic Party.

President Biden gave a three-minute speechette this morning to say that “the rule of law must be upheld” and that “order must prevail... it’s against the law when violence occurs, destroying property is not a peaceful protest... dissent must never lead to disorder.” (Imagine the screaming and gnashing of teeth if Donald Trump had made that simple statement of fact.)

I doubt the younguns care what Grandpa Joe says at this point, though. They’re having too good a time.