What Began at Columbia May Climax in Chicago

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

 

Early on in October of last year, when the first truly terrifying protests against “Zionism” — protests which, it is too often nowadays forgotten, were well under way before Israel began its counteroffensive into Gaza in November — erupted in a New York City campus building, I wrote a piece titled bluntly, despairingly: “It Can Happen Here.” If you will permit me the indulgence, I would like to quote its upsetting prescience at length:

 

What truly enrages me is that I see where this is all going. When institutions such as Cooper Union tacitly yield to tactics like these without imposing severe and permanent consequences, they mainstream it. Radical organizations — and Palestinian “justice” organizations are the sine qua non of the campus variety — are inherently radical: They push boundaries, test limits, and always seek to escalate. We will be getting more of this in the future because of the lack of backlash now. The confrontations will be heightened. The rhetoric will be even more sweepingly bloodthirsty. Tempers will flare even higher as the implicit threats become explicit, gleeful — maybe even chanted by a crowd. […]

 

What haunts me is that the logic of it all leads toward violence. In the event of a ground invasion of Gaza, protests like Cooper Union’s will not merely start to happen on campuses everywhere, they will start to compound, as the stakes get raised with each new “outrage” from Israel that must be answered with even more insane rhetoric. How long, then, before some madman from the crowd chooses to attack? The hatred these people feel in their hearts is real; we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of pretending that they are not exactly who they say they are. How long before it boils over? And who will be able to claim that they did not see this coming, when it has been coming for two millennia already, and has returned once again?

 

Flash forward almost exactly half a year from that day, and Columbia University’s campus is now closed, amidst a storm of antisemitic “protest” that has veered well into outright intimidation and thuggery. Angry students mouthing mindless slogans have occupied the school’s main quad in the sort of freshly bought tent city that keeps REI’s online business humming along, demanding “justice for Gaza” and a “Free Palestine” (“from the river to the sea,” as they will all nonchalantly proclaim to you) while casual participants from New York City — a town that harbors neither antisemites nor crazy people, to the best of my knowledge — are joining in the protests from outside the gates, hurling even more vile words at students and genuinely menacing them. Who could have possibly predicted it?

 

“Columbia has fallen,” I saw one agonizingly earnest left-wing New Yorker write on social media, and I had to snort. Leave that sort of overdramatic sentimentality to the hysterics and alums watching their degrees plummet in reputational value — everyone else knows that Columbia fell long ago. (As a colleague of mine at NR joked yesterday morning, Columbia University has a long-hallowed tradition of shamefully losing complete control of its campus and student body, one whose lowlights make UC-Berkeley look like a comparatively docile and well-ordered realm of rhetorical prudence.) A rabbi on campus told Jewish students to physically leave campus as soon as possible, for their own safety. Megadonor Robert Kraft just announced he’s suspending all further contributions to the school. Things look bad for them — at this rate, Columbia’s going to end up with a worse reputation than Brown.

 

I joke about all of this, however bleak and bitter my tone, not just because I feel like Cassandra. (It was so easy to predict this horror coming, yet so pusillanimously denied by many on the Left.) No, it’s also because, selfishly, all this is occurring at arm’s length, from the remove of a college campus in a distant city. It’s America’s problem, yes, but on a day-to-day level, it’s not my problem. Not my problem yet.

 

For you see, I live in Chicago.

 

On Friday, before Columbia’s campus descended from mere inanity into genuine insanity, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote a small piece that I fear is going to look every bit as prescient in the months to come as mine from last October now does. He called it “Rehearsal for Revolution,” and argued that as these crowds gather a critical mass of “loosely aligned” young people — those who talk themselves into caring about Palestine and attending simply because that’s where the cultural “heat” is — they are becoming mobs. And they’re dangerous mobs at that, because not only are they adrenalized for spontaneous righteous “street action” by the tenor of the times and their strength in growing numbers, they are run by a mini-generation of activists who have actual experience in directing crowds learned from the Floyd riots. These kids are imbibing a “revolutionary faith” of a sorts, however seemingly incoherent and illogical to our bemused perspective, and much of that faith is based around the simple desire to believe and act in the streets on behalf of their perception of moral right and wrong.

 

And it all heads inexorably toward one destination: Chicago in August. In what has proven to be a stroke of historically (nay, almost cosmically) resonant bad timing, the Democrats scheduled their national convention to renominate popular and spry incumbent Joe Biden in my fair town. And if Israel is still in Gaza — or, to be frank about what protesters want, still in the Middle East at all for that matter — then things are about to go down like an ugly remake of 1968. (Back last year when news of the convention coming to Chicago came down, I described the city as announcing a cool new “pop-up street crime hotspot” for August 2024 — and boy did I ever undersell that one in retrospect.)

 

In 1968, images of Mayor Daley’s cops beating radical left-wing students with billy clubs flooded the evening news and, by all standard accounts, played a key role in narrowly tipping the 1968 election to Richard Nixon. Unimaginative Democrats envision a replay of that scenario and wince, but they wince only because they are fools; they have failed to consider how much worse it can get. Richard Daley is dead and buried, and the old Chicago machine of “law and order and graft” is a broken down, rusted-out hulk.

 

Instead, Chicago has Brandon Johnson as mayor, less an independent individual so much as a cyst-like extrusion of the Chicago Teachers Union, who hates the Chicago Police Department (the feeling is mutual), avowedly takes the side of youth criminals in youth crime, and has been unable to shake ShotSpotter off of his administration like an oaf haplessly groping for the lollipop stuck to the seat of his pants. If you thought the Chicago PD in riot gear beating protesters was bad PR for the Democrats, imagine the Chicago PD doing nothing at Brandon Johnson’s orders while large parts of the city burn. (I suspect that will be worse for Democratic chances in November!)

 

The curse of Cassandra is to live long enough to see all of your prophecies of doom — prophecies belittled or dismissed by your social betters in their time — come horribly to pass. I’ll hit my knees nearly every night between now and August, praying that my fears are wrong, and that we can all have a laugh at my expense once the worst fails to happen.

 

But I look out my window now, as the United Center sits in the near distance. I have visions of its perimeter ringed by nighttime flames and smoke — soon. And I don’t intend to be around to find out whether I’m right or not; I lived through that once with the George Floyd riots. I saw my neighborhood looted by professional gangs, called “protesters,” and cheered by the media. I witnessed the blockading of Lake Shore Drive and the raising of the lift bridges to prevent mobs from savaging the downtown Loop, like an outtake from from World War Z. I’ve seen it all before. Once is enough for any lifetime. I will not live through it on the ground twice.