You Don’t Need to Be a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind’s Blowing at Columbia

By Jeffrey Blehar

Saturday, April 27, 2024

 

If you have a heart, then it is tough to sit in the position that I do and savage dumb college kids all day without at least a twinge of guilt. They are kids, after all — the one thing they definitively lack, especially en masse, is maturity. And those of us lucky enough to be born and raised before the iPhone era will never fully understand how the advent of “everything now” infinite content, panopticon online peer pressure, and the status opportunities afforded by public performance on social media have permanently warped the younger generation.

 

Bluntly put, subjecting young people to these conditions is a great way to sow the seeds of narcissistic sociopathy. So should we be surprised that we’ve now reaped a harvest of elite college youths who, from our older perspective, come across like uniquely narcissistic sociopaths? What commands the most attention about the campus protests against Israel is not the vehemence of the hatred on display, but the ultimate vapidity of the majority of students involved.

 

These students may not necessarily know what they want, but they certainly enjoy the social frisson of what they’re doing. They are led only by their all-conquering personal need for psychological validation. But that does not make them any less of a civic threat — their belief in their innate virtue rather than in any political principle other than the cause of the moment makes them easily molded clay for people with actual agendas.

 

We want to look away from protesters who barely understand the slogans they’re chanting — or shrink from the logic of them when forced to face it — and tell ourselves “they’re just kids.” But at this late date I think we’ve all come to realize that “they’ll grow out of it” turned out to be wildly wrong as a thesis. Rather, the rest of us got sucked into it. The reason any of what’s going on at Columbia — on elite campuses around the country — matters is because these people are destined by their pedigree to be our elite tastemakers, academics, and HR representatives in the future.

 

That’s why I pay attention to the kids these days. The kids matter, and they are not alright. Anyone seeking proof of this need look no further than one Khymani James, current undergraduate leader of the anti-Zionist protests at Columbia University and extremely online deranged advocate for virtuous murder. I’m sure you’ve heard this story already, so I’ll just give you the highlights. What you need to know above all else is that he was not taken out of context in any way.

 

James is the very loud and very shrill-sounding pro-Palestinian activist whose antisemitic cant has featured heavily in news coverage of the Columbia protests. And he has a past. He’s been at this since long before October 7, and his unfiltered posting history brought him earlier this year to the attention of Columbia University administrators after he publicly announced on Instagram that, if a Zionist ever approached him physically, “I don’t fight to injure, I fight to kill, see you all in New York, January 2024!” I have now had the misfortune to carefully listen to and transcribe the entirety of James’ preliminary disciplinary hearing from January 2024, an experience akin to staring directly into the mouth of madness for five straight hours, and after it all I’m not sure what I can tell you about him other than that he is a deeply broken, delusional fanatic who poses an obvious physical threat to his fellow students.

 

It has to be emphasized how supportive the administrators speaking to James are during this hearing — which we only have video of because James livestreamed it to Instagram for his adoring fans, a thought to stash away in your back pocket. They insist this will not lead to disciplinary consequences like suspension or expulsion. They take pains to put him at ease. The job here, in their words, is to “navigate” the process, so that there is no “escalation.” After preliminaries (and well aware of his public audience, which his private one is not) he reads a prepared statement — a tantrum of public defiance too embarrassingly written to recount here at length — after which we move to the Q&A round of the event.

 

This is where he grotesquely elaborates upon his worldview, to the tune of lines like “I think that taking someone’s life in certain key scenarios is necessary, and better for the overall world.” He mentions Hitler, and argues that just like Hitler needed to die, and French slaveowners in Haiti needed to be slaughtered in the Haitian revolution, so too does anyone who believes the Jews deserve a homeland. Why? Because they were “exacting an immense amount of harm against the world.”

 

These were masters who were white supremacists. What is a Zionist? A white supremacist. And so let’s be very clear here: I’m not saying that I’m going to go out and start killing Zionists. What I’m saying is that if an individual who identifies as a Zionist threatens my physical safety in person, i.e. puts their hands on me, I am going to defend myself, and in that case/scenario, it may come to a point where I don’t know where to stop. Does that make sense?”

 

Well that sure makes sense to me, as long as we understand that what you’ve just announced to the world is your willingness — nay, outright appetite — to commit murder in the second degree. But of course, Columbia’s administrators want James to know that he’s the real victim here. “What resources do you feel are available to you here at Columbia?,” they ask. His response: “I don’t know of any resources at Columbia that would protect me. I mean, this meeting alone, I feel is an example of institutional violence.” (Don’t worry though – when directly prompted, he mentions that he feels safe in this particular meeting “because I’m in Greece right now on vacation.”)

 

His rant continues, the performative outrage blooming, as he demands to stop being hailed before Columbia’s committee for his advocacy of Zionist murder. “There should not be Zionists anywhere. Zionists are Nazis. Zionists are fascists. [. . .] People who hold those types of ideologies? The world is better without them. That’s what my comment is indicative of. And I will stand on that.”

 

The livestream continues after the disciplinary hearing ends, and at that point James ascends from mere antisocial narcissism up to paranoid megalomania, referring to himself constantly in the third person, and this is the last excerpt I will inflict upon you:

 

And so, don’t ever run up on me, unless you’re looking to die. Duh! . . . I don’t post that on my Instagram story for no reason. I actually mean that . . . Remember what I said earlier ‘I think before I speak, I think before I act?’ Well I remember writing that post ‘I fight to kill.’ I remember thinking before I wrote it, and then I posted it. What the fuck? I mean of course I’m gonna stand on my own ten toes. So what we’re not gonna do – what we’re not gonna fucking do – is try and approach Khymani violently, or physically. That’s what we’re not going to do. [whispers ominously] We’re not going to do that. We’re not gonna do that. Because again, people in the past who have done that? [boastful laugh] WHOOO!!”

 

He then sways and prays: “Sometimes I’m not gonna do anything. The universe will do it for me. But sometimes the universe acts through me. Sometimes the universe uses me as an agent of lessons.” What particular lessons those might be, he wants you only to guess at — in fear. If I’m a Columbia administrator and see that, the next thing I do is call the police. Right now Khymani James is out there every day, daring people to lay hands on him as he shrieks for the genocide of anyone who thinks Israel has a right to exist. He seeks a curious sort of martyrdom: the sad necessity of having to righteously murder his enemies with his own bare hands.

 

Yesterday morning James gave an interview to CNN where he proudly stated he stood by his views about the desirability of slaughtering Zionists: “I think we need to shift the conversation from ‘people’s comfort’ to the hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced, the tens of thousands of people who have been murdered by Israel.” Then, seemingly minutes later, he rushed out a statement that reads for all the world like it was written for him by an outside PR professional in a desperate rush. I will not bother to reprint it here, since it amounts literally to “So hey guys, uh  . . . here’s what I wish I had said.” As an attempt at damage control, it was singularly unsuccessful – but then some people cannot be helped.

 

As this piece was being drafted, the New York Times reported that James had been banned from Columbia University’s campus after the one-two punch of his CNN interview and comically inadequate PR statement, so I no longer have to title it “Why Is Columbia Allowing a Murderous Madman on Campus?” He has not as of this writing been expelled — nor would the story end there even if he eventually is. For the sad truth is that this piece is not about Khymani James so much as it what he represents — the erratic, violently self-righteous voice of American youth, unmoored to any solid principle except the invigorating power of grievance.

 

I wanted this piece to be about the failure of Columbia University’s administrators rather than one student. And ultimately this is about the administrators; not those who admitted him — I doubt they regret anything — but those who have allowed him to remain. Remember the framing of James’ original livestreamed disciplinary hearing? This is a man who was hailed before Columbia for ranting about his willingness to kill in the heat of the moment. And over and over during that hearing, James said everything I have recounted above directly to Columbia’s staff. He did not scribble it in a madman’s diary, or record a posthumous video to be discovered by police later. He publicly announced to his own school that he is ready and willing to kill obstreperous Jews for the crime of Zionism — only if he is “forced to,” mind you — and the administration’s only response was to ask him: Do you feel safe? Three months later, circumstances have forced their hand — but make no mistake, James and his ilk will return until they are wholly uprooted, and until they are so they will only radicalize further and further.