Stand Firm, Boomers — the Student Protesters Actually Are Idiots

By Jeffrey Blehar

Sunday, May 19, 2024

 

It was with unexpected interest that I read Elizabeth Spiers’s “guest essay” for the New York Times over the weekend, titled “Dear Boomers, the Student Protesters Are Not Idiots,” and not just because it was akin to a brief visitation from a tattered ghost of cocaine-addled early 2000s New York City online scenester “journalism.” (She was the founding editor of Gawker, although she left when it was still just a catty, petty upstart devoted to vandalizing the pieties of the New York publishing scene rather than the worst den of sleaze to ever exist.) Now she lectures to journalism students at a prestigious school — a very apropos post-career sinecure — and is here to tell us that she knows these kids, she has met these kids in her classes, and people like me are simply just getting these kids all wrong.

 

In the current panic, the protesters are described as somehow both terribly fragile and such a threat to public safety that they need to be confronted by police officers in riot gear. To justify the police department’s excessive response at Columbia University, Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry showed Newsmax viewers a large chain and a book with the title “Terrorism” that had been recovered from one site of protest. The former was a common bike chain Columbia sells to students and the latter was part of Oxford University Press’s lovely “Very Short Introductions” series, which covers topics from animal behavior to Rousseau and black holes.

 

Ha! What rubes. She chalks up this misapprehension to the generation gap — hence the title of the piece — and says that it’s less about politics (though that obviously plays some kind of role, she concedes with distinct vagueness) than about a generational divergence in attitudes towards protest.

 

Spiers is a gifted writer, so on a technical level I tip my cap to her adroitness in reaching her intended audience. The passage above is indicative; the language is elegant in how it plays to left-wing and elitist biases by name-checking Newsmax (meant to signal: “disinformation alert!“). The deputy commissioner, supposedly overhyping the threat, is depicted as the clueless sort of dunce who doesn’t grasp that of course kids are going to want to read about terrorism while camping in tents and chanting in defense of it.

 

But this is not what people like me are reacting to, and it is insulting to omit the real issues to make light of the idea that danger could possibly emerge from this frothing protest milieu. We are instead reacting to people like Khymani James, who was permitted for months — at the very university Spiers writes about! — to loudly broadcast disturbing threats of murder, call for the murder of all Zionists (by someone else, mind you, because they deserve it like Hitler did), and defend all this and more to Columbia administrators in disciplinary hearing he live-streamed to his fans. We are reacting to an administration that allowed him to then go undisciplined for four more months until he came to national notice during the ongoing “occupation” at Columbia, of which he was one of the main student leaders.

 

Spiers writes: “And though they are educated to participate in civic life, as soon as these students exercise their First Amendment rights, they are told that protecting private property is a more pressing public concern.” Once again this shifts her audience’s gaze to things far less easy for them, with their liberal hearts, to credit as legitimate concerns. Unmentioned is the chaos on campus and the professional (and often violently lawless) outside agitators taking over sections of the school, harassing students and visitors alike. Not mentioned is the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, achieved by smashing windows, erecting barricades, and temporarily holding a service worker hostage — which ended with the protesters desecrating the place. Not mentioned is the issue of Jewish students who have long since learned to tolerate mobs that chant for the elimination of Israel but draw the line at threats of violence and attempts to physically or socially eliminate them from the same right to enjoy campus life that all should share.

 

No, it’s really just Boomers vs. Zoomers. “It doesn’t matter how virtuous the cause, [one “protest scholar”] explained; older generations start with a bias against students.” I suppose there is something to that, but if that’s so, then it’s little more than further evidence that wisdom is usually acquired over time. (Sorry, kids, but what P. J. O’Rourke said is true: Age and guile beat youth, innocence, and a bad haircut.)

 

So I am here to hopefully put some steel in your spines, Boomers. I may not be one of you, and, yes, you’ll always be hippie turned yuppie punch lines to me whenever I need to reach for an easy joke, but you are absolutely right to judge these kids. Not just the ones at Columbia but those all around the country. There are two ways to properly judge them: (1) on the moral rancidness of their cause and the thuggishly playbooked manner in which they disrupt class and student life, and (2) on how easily three-quarters of these dumb bastards either don’t know what it is they believe or are unwilling to defend it out loud. It is perfectly okay to judge them on those bases. Be not afraid!

 

Because it matters to actually know what it is you stand for and why and be willing to defend it in public, if you ever expect to get far with American voters. (The American Left? That’s a very different matter, I suppose.) However much a cliché it may be to mention it, it genuinely is appalling how many students seem willing to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” without being able to name either the river or the sea in question or what the meaning of “shall be free” is to those who’ll be doing the “liberating” in that case. Either they do not know or they actively seek to avoid knowing. Meanwhile, I can tell you that the men who crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 knew exactly what it was they stood for, and they were willing to explain it to any man who would listen.

 

Which of course brings me to the moral judgment of these protests. It is no surprise that a generation of students raised on DEI initiatives and settler-colonialist theory are more prepared to join pro-Hamas mobs than their parents’ generation would have been. For children who only read about the civil-rights era and dream of attaching themselves passionately to something that gives them a sense of meaning (and social belonging) — an entire generation with a carefully bred set of educational priors — the “abolish Israel” movement is an easy flytrap to get lured into.

 

But what of it? I can understand how they arrived at their incorrect views, but that makes them no less incorrect. Why should I have to cater to this ignorance — which boils over into bloodthirsty antisemitism far too often to simply dismiss — for even one second or respect any institution that chooses to? Having rehearsed these arguments countless times, there’s no need to revisit them here, but at the very least let it be said that an education in history makes me realize how boundlessly stupid the concept of “settler-colonialism” is as an analytical framework for “applied social justice.” Am I seriously being asked to privilege the sincerity of student protest over its content, its conduct, and its morality?

 

The answer for Spiers, I suspect, is yes: Mere sincerity of conviction really does seem to sanctify the kids and their protest, regardless of their ignorance or the vileness of whatever their beliefs are. “I am exhilarated to see students using protest. . . . It allows them to stand up for their values, invest in what’s happening in the world and hold decision makers accountable, even if it means putting themselves at risk.” We are asked to credit the moral seriousness and “awareness” of a younger generation simply because of its “investedness” and quietly decline to consider the causes they are protesting for. “Abolish Israel and send the Jews back to Poland” is the sort of thing I thought would strike most as unreasonable, but apparently for some it merely expresses an enviable purity of spirit.