Does Columbia Want to Elect Donald Trump?

By Rich Lowry

Monday, May 06, 2024

 

‘Let’s finish what they did in 1968,” a Columbia protester said the other day.

 

In political terms, that would mean electing Donald Trump.

 

The disorder of 1968 — when LBJ declined to run again and Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace faced off — played right into the hands of Nixon, who rode his opposition to the riots and campus unrest into the White House.

 

As Luke Nichter writes in his book on the 1968 campaign, The Year That Broke Politics, “the great debate of the campaign, the issue that consistently struck the nation’s nerve, and where there were the greatest differences among the three candidates, was law and order.”

 

That’s not going to be true this year, when other issues loom much larger than do the student protests. But if “law and order” is broadly conceived to include the chaos at the border (as well as conflict abroad), it is a major theme of 2024 and has inarguably undermined Biden’s presidency. In sheer magnitude, the mayhem of 1968 was much larger and more consequential than anything that is happening today. After the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, as Nichter notes, more than 50,000 federal and National Guard troops were called out “in one of the largest peacetime deployments on American soil in history.” The rioting rumbled on for a week in Washington, and LBJ later wrote of his “sick feeling” as he watched smoke fill the D.C. sky.

 

Nixon also went out of his way to position himself as the statesmanlike centrist, which is never Trump’s impulse and rarely his tone.

 

Nichter explains that Humphrey sought to differentiate himself from Johnson to appeal to liberals, while Wallace ran to Nixon’s right. This ceded the center to Nixon. Pat Buchanan would recall that, while Nixon “was positioned as tough on law and order, he did not try to rival George Wallace.” (Ronald Reagan was actually harsher on the subject than Nixon.)

 

This allowed Nixon to own the issue, while, with his relatively moderate tone, he won strange new respect from the elites who had, heretofore, disdained him.

 

Nixon’s voice was firm but not harsh, alarmed but not apocalyptic — his toughness always leavened by hopefulness.

 

Of course, together with Buchanan, Nixon worked out the theme of “the silent majority.” In a speech in May on CBS Radio, he referred to it as “the silent center,” in other words, “the millions of people in the middle of the American political spectrum who do not demonstrate, who do not picket or protest loudly.”

 

In a different radio broadcast, on NBC in March, Nixon spoke of “the number one issue of 1968 — the number one issue in the United States — and the number one issue in the world. This is the problem of order.” “By order,” he explained, “I mean peace at home, and peace in the world. I mean the containing of violence, whether by armies or by mobs or by individuals. I mean the essential stability, the decent regard for the rights of others, that makes life livable and progress possible.”

 

Polling showed that crime was the top domestic issue. In a Gallup poll in May, Vietnam was the foremost overall issue, at 42 percent, but as Nichter points out, all the law-and-order-related issues added up to 47 percent. Nixon thought no other issue offered such “a clear-cut choice.”

 

For a while, Humphrey shifted to his own law-and-order theme. He gave a speech in October calling for $1 billion, as Nichter writes, “to hire more police, speed trials, and upgrade prisons.” It didn’t get him anything. According to Nichter, Humphrey made his gains at the end of the campaign by emphasizing a populist message that won back Wallace voters.

 

The Democrat got close to Nixon at the end, winning 42.7 percent to the Republican’s 43.4. But he was wiped out in the Electoral College. “The 57 percent of the vote for Nixon and Wallace came just four years,” Nichter writes, “after Johnson had won 61 percent of the popular vote in defeating Barry Goldwater.”

 

To what extent will history repeat itself? Again, the violence this year barely compares to 1968, and statesmanship isn’t Trump’s mode, nor are members of the elite going to soften in their opposition to him.

 

But the stark choice between a candidate who is perceived as strong and emphasizes the importance of order and a president who is perceived as weak and has presided over disorder — both here at home and abroad — obviously works to Trump’s advantage. In the latest Economist/YouGov survey, 58 percent say Trump has very or somewhat strong leadership qualities, while 64 percent say Biden has very or somewhat weak leadership qualities. Biden consistently lags behind Trump on the question of who can be trusted to handle the issues of crime and the border, which rate among the top issues of the election.

 

So, no, the brief takeover of Hamilton Hall at Columbia didn’t equal 1968, but it — and similar disquiet on other campuses — got disproportionate attention. Any echo of that annus horribilis helps Trump, with perhaps a homage to Chicago 1968 still to come.

Welcome Self-Awareness from the New York Times

By Luther Ray Abel

Sunday, May 05, 2024

 

Semafor published an insightful interview from the deck of the Titanic. It’s an interview worth reading for its content as well as the (in my view) inescapable air of the Gray Lady’s terminal illness and the burst of apologetic energy that is released before one slumps into the gurney. Joe Kahn, executive editor of the Times, is the subject of the interview. Ben Smith, Semafor‘s editor in chief, is the questioner. The Bari Weiss and James Bennett episodes are visited and given official review — fascinating damnation through faint praise. It’s an interview worth our time as we consider legacy media’s financial struggles, the need for a deep editorial roster to best inform the public, and the threat of ideological capture.

 

From Semafor:

 

Joe: I don’t think that this generation of college grads has been fully prepared for what we are asking our people to do, which is to commit themselves to the idea of independent journalism.

 

Ben: Does that make you more likely to hire kids from state schools, outside that elite group, or kids who didn’t go to college?

 

Joe: I’d be open to it. And I’m open to graduates from whatever school who understand what they need to commit to being in an independent news environment. But I don’t think we can assume that they’ve been trained for that, if they’ve been trained for safe spaces. The newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.

 

Don’t you feel like there was a generation of students who came out of school saying you should only work at places that align completely with your values?

 

Ben: Don’t you think we all sort of said that to them?

 

Joe: I don’t think we said it explicitly. I think there was a period [where] we implied it. And I think that the early days of Trump in particular, were, “join us for the mission.”

 

Ben: Was it a mistake to say that — even to think it?

 

Joe: I think it went too far. It was overly simplistic. And I think the big push that you’re seeing us make and reestablish our norms and emphasize independent journalism and build a more resilient culture comes out of some of the excesses of that period.

 

You can read the rest here.

 

For the sake of public information, I hope Joe Kahn can save the ship. But given the Times‘ inaction regarding its progressive staffers, Kahn appears to be baling out the ship with a milk jug — heroic effort with little to no effect.

American Exceptionalism and the NYPD

By Seth Mandel

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

One of the most telling aspects of the pro-Hamas student encampments is their participants’ pathological aversion to police—both for what it says about the campus bubble and for what it reveals about the demonstrators’ antipathy for Jews.

 

“I don’t really know how to process the fact that, at the bare minimum, there are going to be 100 cops at the [graduation] celebration,” Columbia student Suleyman Ahmed told the Wall Street Journal. Ahmed wasn’t part of the protests, the Journal explains, but when he heard there was going to be a police presence on campus through the end of the semester a couple weeks away, “he couldn’t concentrate on cramming.”

 

Whether that’s true—it’s hard to imagine a person carrying such exquisite fragility into adulthood—or whether Ahmed was just mimicking the debilitating sense of entitlement around him is less important than the fact that he was unashamed to say this sentence out loud to a newspaper reporter. In the bubble of “elite” campus culture, this is a normal thing to say. One is left wishing there were some institution that could prepare college graduates for the world.

 

Meanwhile, the reluctance to call in the police by campus administrators has, in roughly 100% of cases, proved not just foolish but dangerously irresponsible. At Columbia, about a quarter of those arrested for violently taking a campus building were unaffiliated with the university. At the City College of New York the same night, more than half of those arrested were unaffiliated with the school. Twenty-two of them violently impeded police clearing of an occupied building.

 

NBC’s reporting shows just what a tourist attraction these protests had become. One of those arrested was anarchist James W. Carlson, whose rap sheet over nearly twenty years of violent demonstrations includes aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and attempted lynching. Another arrestee had reportedly been fired from the New York Botanical Garden for cheering on Hamas’s campaign of mass slaughter, child murder and sexual torture on Oct. 7.

 

Two others have arrest records related to their behavior at various protests over the years. The cause isn’t what matters to these folks; what matters is causing violence and disorder. If you are the parent of a student at one of these schools, you have plenty of reason to wonder why the institution cultivated this atmosphere and then delayed allowing police to restore safety and remove violent trespassers from campus.

 

The “unaffiliated” numbers seem to be common wherever they were recorded; two of four arrested at the University of Arizona, for example, fell into this category. Violence within the encampments at UCLA spurred retaliatory attacks from outsiders. Police presence was resisted by the pro-Hamas campers up until the demonstrators lost their monopoly on the violence, at which point the complaint changed to what took the cops so long?

 

There is more than a little irony in that. The NYPD faced down the violent protesters with remarkable restraint, as expected. But their presence was important for another reason: Jewish history is replete with the gathering storms of anti-Jewish mob violence either encouraged or ignored by police. In the 20th century, in the wake of some of the worst pogroms in the Russian Empire, Jews in the Belarussian city of Gomel organized to fight off impending attacks. The police acted against the Jewish defenders and the courts put thirty-six of them on trial alongside a few pogromists.

 

Any time Jews were protected by police from mob violence, they were accused of bribing the cops, so routine was police cooperation with the pogromists. Often police action was just for show: It would signal to pogromists in one place to disperse and reassemble elsewhere in town to continue the rampage. Police were the only ones able to disarm Jews ahead of planned pogroms. And anti-Semitism has been so rampant in security forces throughout Jewish history that appealing for protection before expected attacks could just as easily exacerbate the coming violence.

 

This is what made the intervention of New York Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD so symbolically powerful. That symbolism of historic progress is precisely what the demonstrators sought to prevent. It is undeniable that these encampments have both preached and practiced violence against Jews around them. America has distinguished itself—largely but not solely thanks to the NYPD—as an exception to the historical pattern of tolerating or encouraging mob violence against its Jews. This week the country proved itself still capable of living up to the ideals that make it indispensable to the cause of freedom.

The Fight to Define Anti-Semitism

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, May 01, 2024

 

The race is on: Can Congress save the American Jewish community from destabilizing a rare plank of cross-ideological consensus?

 

First, the good news. The House of Representatives ended the day on a high note by passing a bill, sponsored by GOP Rep. Mike Lawler, to codify a specific definition of anti-Semitism for the purposes of federal antidiscrimination laws. The definition in this bill was the product of a fairly broad communal organization known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, made up of government and private sector representatives of about three-dozen or so countries focusing on modern anti-Semitism.

 

In the grand scheme of things, the importance of defining anti-Semitism with granular specificity is debatable, but two factors argue convincingly in favor of going through the effort to do so. First, we should know what we’re talking about when we’re talking about a timeless threat to the Jewish people. Second, when it’s used in the protections of civil-rights law, the more specificity the better. IHRA settled on the following: “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

 

IHRA provides a list of contemporary examples, and the ones about Israel have been the source of the most debate. In the end, it’s a good definition, and a popular one within the Jewish community. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella of organized U.S. Jewry, celebrated the passage of the bill late this afternoon.

 

Unfortunately, IHRA needed the boost, because for months the post-Oct. 7 consensus in the Jewish community has been weakening.

 

The closest thing to an alternative definition is the Nexus project, an effort by activists and academics to shield a segment of the political left from accusations of anti-Semitism by excepting common progressive transgressions. Let’s put it this way: If you begin your sentences with the phrase “As a Jew…” you probably back the Nexus definition. There are plenty of folks in the Nexus camp working in good faith, but the progressive political determinations behind its existence are unavoidable.

 

In January, the Forward carried a head-scratcher of a story: The Nexusites were—in the midst of a global hurricane of left anti-Semitism, no less—building a political operation to challenge IHRA and ensure not only that the American Jewish community spends resources fighting amongst itself but that this intra-communal fight would take on a political shade.

 

Now, when you read about the Jewish community preparing to punch itself in the stomach, the first question that comes to mind is, of course: How is J Street involved? And the answer is Kevin Rachlin, who announced he was stepping down as a top J Street lobbyist to take the helm of Nexus’s newly formed political operation.

 

“We’re not anti-IHRA,” said Rachlin about the organization created solely and specifically to oppose IHRA.

 

In any event, Democratic politicians loved the idea of being able to hand out “get out of anti-Semitism free” cards to party members who were poised to be like teenagers speeding down the highway with a PBA card in the glovebox. In December, reportedly on the advice of Nexus-affiliated activists, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) led a Democratic revolt against Republicans’ attempts to slap down rising anti-Semitism dressed up as criticism of Israel. I explained at the time how Nadler’s own argument disproved the point he was trying to make, but the effect was clear: Whatever semblance of a truce the American Jewish community had going since Oct. 7 was off. We’d been agreeing with each other far too much and it was giving Jerry Nadler indigestion.

 

Lawler’s bill, helped by Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s efforts, today overcame Nadler’s disapproval to advance a common understanding of anti-Semitism at a crucial time. But the Democrats have been unnerved by the so-called “tentifada”—the various Jew-baiting encampments springing up around college campuses—and a number of powerful politicians are very clearly terrified of the quad-dwellers occupying buildings and making demands.

 

The hope is that the bipartisan IHRA support can outrun its challengers, or build up enough momentum to shame Nexus into finding better things to do with its time and resources than politicize anti-Semitism and re-divide the Jewish community at a moment when doing so would be especially damaging.

How Children Became Guinea Pigs

By Madeleine Kearns

Sunday, May 05, 2024

 

We know from detransitioners — those who once identified as trans but now accept their sex — that the internet presents many dangers to unhappy, lonely children.

 

This theme appears multiple times in the Cass report, the recent independent review commissioned by NHS England to investigate what went wrong with its main gender youth clinic.

 

Hilary Cass, the senior pediatrician commissioned to write the report, noted that there is considerable evidence suggesting that social-media use contributes to mental-health problems in young people. She also noted that girls spend more time on social media than boys do. And highlighted the need for “more investigation into consumption of online pornography and gender dysphoria.”

 

Many of Cass’s concerns echo those expressed in Jonathan Haidt’s seminal work The Anxious Generation. Though Haidt discusses gender dysphoria only briefly (and does so in a characteristically measured way), he nevertheless paints a picture of a generation in distress — the critical context for understanding why so many youths today rebel against their own bodies.

 

The thrust of Haidt’s argument is that the transfer of American teens’ social lives “onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities” is “the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental health that began in the early 2010s.”

 

Haidt notes that the ill effects of this “great rewiring of childhood,” as he puts it, have been exacerbated by a parenting culture that exhibits “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world.” The result is that children regularly encounter hardcore pornography, cyberbullying, new and aggressive forms of social and peer pressure, and even communication with adult strangers online.

 

By “real world,” Haidt refers to experiences that are “embodied” and “synchronous,” that involve “one-to-one or one-to-several” communications, and that occur in communities “with a high bar for entry and exit.” Whereas by “virtual world,” Haidt is referring to experiences that are “disembodied” and “asynchronous,” that involve “one-to-many communications,” and that take place where there is “a low bar for entry and exit.”

 

Each of these when applied to the transgender phenomenon is worthy of study.

 

Consider “disembodied” experiences of sexual initiation: hardcore pornography instead of the age-appropriate rites of passage like asking someone out (or being asked out), holding hands, or a first kiss.

 

This is a theme in Detrans, a new book by Daily Signal reporter Mary Margaret Olohan, which documents “true stories of escaping the gender ideology cult.” Olohan writes, “Pretty much every detransitioner I spoke with was exposed to pornography at a very early age.”

 

One detransitioner, Helena, told Olohan that, with pornography consumption, “the very idea of being a ‘woman’ becomes repulsive.” Helena continued: “Ideally, a girl should be able to explore sexual ideas in a safe way, when she’s old enough to choose it herself, in ways and with people that are age appropriate for her. . . . Today, that developmental pathway has been hijacked.”

 

Moreover, that children are being socialized in primarily “disembodied” ways also helps explain why some young people do not consider how they will be harmed by the bodily changes brought about by so-called transition drugs and irreversible surgeries. Real-world consequences may appear less daunting when you’re immersed in the virtual world. What does loss of sexual function mean to a young person whose idea of a sexual relationship was formed by violent, degrading pornography?

 

That a large proportion of communications are “asynchronous,” referring to text-based posts and comments (not video calls, which are synchronous) allows for anonymity, rumination, and a constant state of anxiety and distraction. Rather than picking up on social cues in a real-world, live conversation, many young people feel the need to constantly check what is being said, and they mull over how to reply. All of this, again, can contribute to feelings of loneliness.

 

Here I am reminded of a trans-identifying teenager I know of who sadly killed himself. When I interviewed his local community, I discovered that he had essentially been leading a double life. To the people he interacted with in real life, he was a gay teenage boy. To the trans activists he met on the internet, he was a young trans woman.

 

Asynchronous experiences also distort a person’s sense of self, as she comes to rely on the dopamine hit of someone “liking” her post. And she can feel utterly crushed in the absence of a “like” or, worse, when she gets a negative response. Many trans youngsters describe a sense of “euphoria” that when they “come out” as trans, the sense that the whole world embraces their new identity. But in the real world, most people do not embrace the new identity, since sex is an immutable (and usually observable) fact of life.

 

Then there are communities with a “low bar for entry and exit.” As many detransitioners learn the hard way, it is not trans activists who offer unconditional love and acceptance — generally, it is their parents and families.

 

We will look back on this period and see two overlapping experiments: first, in giving children unfettered online access; second, in allowing mentally fragile adolescents drugs and surgeries that result in permanent bodily harm. The results from both are disastrous and ongoing.

Check Your Privilege

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, May 03, 2024

 

Which moment from the past week best captures the absurdity of pro-Hamas campus protests?

 

This one flagged by Jonah Goldberg is a strong contender:

Marxist dummies dying of thirst a few hours into their “revolution” in the middle of one of America’s wealthiest cities plays like a conservative satire of communist economics. But that’s not the moment I’ll most remember from all this.

 

This scene from the University of Alabama is another keeper, a rare example of “horseshoe theory” captured in the wild. Turn down the sound if you’re at work or around children, as it’s salty:

The right-wingers there seem to have believed that insulting the president would antagonize the left-wing radicals whom they came to counter-protest, never mind that those are the people most likely to refer to Biden as “Genocide Joe.” Now that the two groups have realized they’re allies, who knows what wonderful things they might accomplish together?

 

I wouldn’t choose that moment as the most memorable of the week either, though. The one that sticks in my mind wasn’t captured on video but in print, by a reporter for The Atlantic who went to Columbia University to check out the scene.

 

Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”

 

If you’re answering a question about the eliminationist ambitions of your cause by mumbling glibly about “privilege,” you either haven’t spent a second thinking seriously about it or you have thought about it and decided that those ambitions are morally acceptable.

 

Menace or cringe. There are no other options.

 

We should spend some time on the concept of “privilege,” though, and not just because it’s eternally hot stuff among the politically conscious campus set. It turns out to be a useful lens through which to examine the protests themselves.

 

***

 

Ask a progressive to define “privilege” and they’ll say … a lot, I’m sure, much of it unintelligible. Leftist political theory as a genre is famously turgid, obtuse, and overly dependent on jargon, the better to signal its alleged sophistication. The woman in the first clip above provides a minor example: After reading her summary of her dissertation, I can’t make heads or tails of what she’s writing about.

 

But we can define the concept simply ourselves. “Privilege” refers to how supposedly neutral institutions end up favoring the interests of politically powerful groups. If a city announces a new “stop and frisk” policy to reduce crime, for example, and the police disproportionately target African Americans in applying it, that’s white privilege at work. If a man gets paid more than a woman does for doing the same work, that’s male privilege.

 

Whether under the law or under capitalism, formal equality is a ruse designed to obscure the fact that true power depends on race, sex, education, and wealth. That’s the leftist view of privilege in a sentence. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread,” Nobel Prize-winning author Anatole France wrote. Policies against vagrancy, begging, and theft apply to everyone in theory but in practice serve the interests of the privileged gentry exclusively.

 

No wonder, then, that Israel slots easily into the “privileged” role among progressives in its conflict with the Palestinians. It’s whiter, wealthier, better educated, and follows the same Western political norms that the privileged here in the U.S. have used to exploit the dispossessed. And of course Israelis have claimed what the left believes is rightly Palestinian land as their own: “Privilege” doesn’t get any more unjust or obnoxious than evicting someone from their home and convincing much of the rest of the world to endorse it.

 

Inevitably, progressives are destined to loathe Israel and to do what they can to reduce the power disparity it enjoys with the Palestinians. (“Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”) What makes the campus protests noteworthy is that this righteous fury about privilege is being carried out by people who are themselves some of the most privileged on Earth.

 

Who, after all, is more privileged than an Ivy League student attending school in the financial capital of the world’s richest country? To be born an American is to be born into privilege, assured of freedoms and a standard of living that most of the world envies. But even within that privileged sphere, a degree from Columbia means your ability to earn considerable wealth and the considerable additional privilege that comes with it depends only on your willingness to do so. The chumps camping out on the quad in Manhattan in pup tents are part of the global elite by any definition of the term.

 

And, importantly, they know it.

 

A few days ago a post about the protests by attorney Elica Le Bon swept across The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. Her analysis was irresistible: Isn’t the nonsense going on at Columbia a simple case of protesters acting out their fantasies of glamorous oppression by “role-playing” as Palestinians, she asked, with the university administration thrust into the role of Israel?

 

They’re “liberating” buildings and “taking back” land on campus. They’re requesting “humanitarian aid,” as in the first clip up top. Many are wearing keffiyehs. Some are wearing Hamas headbands! And according to Le Bon, all of it is downstream from their immense privilege: “You don’t see this in lower-tier schools from kids of lower socio-economic standing because they aren’t plagued with the guilt of privilege that they’re seeking to launder through Middle East role-plays of feigned suffering. This is as first-world dystopia as it gets.”

 

They’re privileged, they know it, they’re uncomfortable with it, and they’re seeking absolution by taking on the trappings of the dispossessed and rebelling against the nearest authority. It’s not a campus intifada or even a protest, really. It’s group therapy.

 

That’s a satisfying analysis. For one thing, it jibes with the humiliating coddling of students that we keep seeing:

They’re not adults rising up on behalf of Palestine, they’re children playing the jihadist equivalent of “cops and robbers” with their campus president. So why shouldn’t they be coddled? Children often are.

 

Le Bon’s explanation also accounts for why the protest effort seems so unserious. It’s cockamamie to vent one’s grievances with Israel at the leaders of American universities, who have no influence over the war in Gaza and more often than not are as stridently leftist in their politics as the protesters are. And it’s pointless to agitate for days on end without making any meaningful demands. The closest the students have come is to call on their schools to divest from Israel, but as others have noted, they don’t seem especially serious about that. If they were, they would use their financial leverage by withdrawing en masse and starving the administration of tuition revenue until it capitulates.

 

The fact that they’re not doing that suggests that they care about the privilege that comes with a degree from Columbia just a bit more than they care about divestment from Israel. That leaves the protests feeling less like an earnest attempt to influence international affairs and more like an unsanctioned extracurricular activity—it’s all inherently juvenile and unserious.

 

As much as I like Le Bon’s read on all of this, though, it’s missing something. There’s another layer of privilege among the protesters that she overlooks.

 

***

 

Many observers of the protests, Jonah included, have noted that universities besieged by Hamas-LARPing dopes are merely reaping what they’ve sowed. “Administrators have spent much of the recent past recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged,” Tyler Austin Harper wrote recently at The Atlantic. “Now the leaders of those universities are shocked to find that their charges and employees believed them.”

 

Academia could select for kids who show intellectual humility and curiosity, to borrow a point from my colleague Sarah Isgur. Instead they’ve selected for kids who feel not merely entitled to demand that their elders “check their privilege” but morally justified in acting aggressively to make sure they do.

 

All told, one might say that progressives, the great enemies of colonialism, have … colonized higher education over the past half-century.

 

And you know how settler-colonialists are. They can be very defensive when you demand that they vacate territory they regard as rightly theirs.

 

The behavior of campus progressives this month has radiated the sense that American universities are “theirs” in a way that isn’t true of other students. It’s been pointed out repeatedly but can’t be emphasized enough that the sort of disruption in which they’ve engaged wouldn’t be tolerated from those whose political beliefs offended the administration’s leftist orthodoxy. In a piece published on Thursday by The Free Press, Abigail Shrier writes:

 

The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.

 

…

 

Punishment is meted out swiftly and mercilessly, and with no consideration for free speech principles, any time Confederate flag flyers are posted, any time students hold culturally insensitive themed frat parties, any time colleges uncover student use of the N-word while in high school (or even a word in Mandarin that sounds like the N-word), or even when students or faculty make the familiar conservative argument that affirmative action sets black students up to fail. Rinse and repeat and repeat.

 

Anyone who doubts that university “tolerance” policies are being applied arbitrarily is invited to parade through a campus with an image mocking Mohammed and see how long it takes the administration to act, Shrier continues. But you don’t need a hypothetical as provocative as that: Recall the icy panic that gripped the brain trust at Yale when a student merely used the words “trap house” in an invitation to an event in 2021.

 

What’s the word again for when the rules of supposedly neutral institutions favor the interests of politically powerful groups?

 

The special privilege that progressives enjoy at American universities doesn’t factor into Le Bon’s read on the protests but it explains some of their more grotesque excesses. It emboldens them to use tactics that wouldn’t be tolerated by disfavored groups, like occupying buildings. But it also encourages them to try to limit access to parts of the campus as if they own the joint. Which, in a manner of speaking, they do.

Setting up de facto checkpoints to control access to your territory feels very settler-colonialist.

 

One of the first things you learn in property law as a law student is that property rights include the right to exclude. No student on an American campus should properly be able to claim that right against any other; the fact that some campus protesters have done so betrays their sense that the university is their property. They dominate the culture; they expect special dispensation from the authorities; they’re possessive of the land and of the privilege it grants them, so they police it for trespassers. The rest of the U.S. might sympathize with Israel but school is their turf. Go figure that they’ve resorted to the otherwise inscrutable tactic of pitching tents in order to symbolically broadcast their claim to it.

 

As you might hear at a campus football game: Whose house? Our house.

 

So Le Bon’s theory of teenagers cosplaying as Hamas to expiate their privilege as Americans is true but incomplete. The other part of the explanation for what’s happening is progressives reveling in and ultimately abusing their privilege on campus to misbehave on behalf of causes with which the fellow travelers who run the school sympathize.

 

The former is juvenile and embarrassing, the latter is domineering and corrupt. Menace and cringe, again.

 

***

 

All of this feels familiar, no?

 

It’s strange to think of campus progressives simultaneously play-acting as the dispossessed by rebelling against the powers-that-be and behaving as the powers-that-be themselves by aggressively policing their sphere of influence for dissent. You can’t represent the popular resistance and the ruthless establishment at the same time.

 

Except that you can, sort of. There’s another political movement that I write about from time to time that routinely tries to pull that trick.

 

It too postures as a popular insurrection against a corrupt establishment and it too has become a corrupt, ruthless establishment enforcing ideological orthodoxy within its own political niche. Like the kids who took over that building at Columbia, it’s even been known to find itself in a standoff with police from time to time.

 

In fairness, many members of that movement are much less privileged than the average Ivy League student. But plenty are just as privileged, if not more so. And their leader is one of the more privileged people who’s ever lived.

 

The two sides do have some stark differences on the subject of mask-wearing, though, it must be said.

 

All anti-establishment political projects that achieve partial success are destined to be privileged and dispossessed, I suppose. Whether it’s progressivism on campus or Trumpism on the right, a felt sense of dispossession is the moral energy that attracts recruits, and ruthless enforcement of orthodoxy in its own ranks is the mechanism that protects its privilege within its own niche.

 

I strongly prefer not to be governed by either, but there wasn’t much I could do about that when I was a college student and it seems there isn’t much I can do about it as an adult. America loves angry, aggrieved, self-righteous children. We get the government we deserve.

Joe Biden Is 2024’s Chaos Candidate

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, May 04, 2024

 

Higher prices, a broken border, raging wars, violent campuses — is this what Joe Biden promised Americans four years ago?

 

Quite the opposite: In his 2020 convention address, Biden said that he would lead America away from Donald Trump and toward “a different path,” where “together” we would “take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite. A path of hope and light.”

 

Leave aside, for a moment, the garbled metaphors and syrupy language. Consider instead how far away America is from Biden’s gossamer vision. Here is a man who pledged a restoration of national unity and global tranquility if he became president. Not only has he failed to achieve his goals. His very policies put them out of reach. We were promised competence. We got chaos.

 

Back in 2015, Jeb Bush warned his fellow Republicans that his billionaire rival for the GOP presidential nomination was “a chaos candidate. And he’d be a chaos president.” Republican primary voters ignored him. Trump won the nomination and the presidency. His years in office were tumultuous, to say the least. Yet today’s electorate views the instability that Trump brought to Washington differently than the disorder that Biden unleashed at home and abroad. Once there was a single “chaos president.” Now there are two.

 

My colleague at Commentary magazine, Abe Greenwald, points out that the past three and a half years have seen a whittling away of the arguments Biden used against Trump. Biden said Trump and his family business were corrupt — only to find himself embroiled in his own family scandal. Biden flogged Trump’s mishandling of classified presidential records — only to have a special counsel investigate him for a similar offense. Biden described Trump as a sower of discord — only to preside over an America coming apart.

 

The widespread sense of confusion and disappointment, the general feeling that the country is a mess, best explains why Biden is losing to Trump. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that just 25 percent of registered voters say Biden’s years as president have been “mostly good for the country.” Forty-two percent of voters say the Trump years were mostly good. A whopping 46 percent of voters, meanwhile, told the Times that Biden’s presidency has been “mostly bad” for the country. Thirty-three percent said the same of Trump’s term in office.

 

Nostalgia is a powerful drug. But voters are not simply looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. They have perceived, on their own schedule and in their own fashion, the connections between Biden’s policies and the economic and social conditions they deplore. The trillions in federal spending that gave rise to inflation. The unwinding of immigration protocols that sparked the border crisis. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that killed 13 U.S. servicemen and signaled to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping that America was in retreat.

 

Rather than move swiftly to address the sources of public discontent, Biden and his team have alternated between denial and spin. Price increases would be temporary — and when the cost of living continued to outpace wages, we were told to blame corporations and “big sandwich” and be grateful for high employment and GDP growth.

 

Migration would be seasonal — and when the number of unauthorized border crossings since Biden took office rose to more than 6 million, with more than 2 million illegal immigrants allowed to enter the country, we were told to welcome the newcomers, or blame Republicans, or remember that, as Biden said during a May 1 fundraiser, “immigrants [are] what make us strong,” unlike “xenophobic” countries such as Russia, China, and . . . “Japan.”

 

America would spy on terrorist groups in Afghanistan and fight militants with our “over-the-horizon” capability — and when ISIS-K began killing Afghans, Pakistanis, Iranians, and Russians, we were told that everything was under control. When Putin resumed his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we were told that America would stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes and that Putin “cannot remain in power,” even as fear of escalation led us to slow-walk weapons deliveries that would have given the Ukrainians a strategic advantage.

 

And when Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, and killed 1,200 men, women, and children, injured thousands more, and kidnapped hundreds of civilians, including American citizens, Biden visited the Jewish state and pledged his support, before gradually distancing himself from Israel’s war on terrorism in a desperate effort to placate the left wing of the Democratic Party.

 

Biden’s combination of bold statements and lazy and clumsy execution allowed America’s adversaries to work their will, from eastern Ukraine to the Middle East to the South China Sea. His reluctance to confront the antisemitic Left contributed to the atmosphere of ambivalence toward pro-Hamas protesters on America’s college campuses. On May 2, when Biden denounced the campus violence in hastily scheduled remarks, it was after much prodding. His comments were brief and late and ineffectual. They were a reminder that a chaotic world reverberates inside the White House, where failed presidents hurriedly react to events rather than establish new facts on the ground.

 

In a contest between chaos presidents, Trump has a double advantage. Not only is he a challenger whose record is viewed more favorably than Biden’s. He is also associated, rightly or wrongly, with authority, with law and order, with the police and the military and the working-class elements in American society. Biden, on the other hand, leads a party highly dependent on the college-educated and advanced-degreed, on campus culture, on pro-Palestinian and even pro-Hamas factions, on activists who desire nothing more than to take to the streets, harass “Zionists,” and tear down the established order.

 

A few commentators, watching the unfolding disaster on campus, have drawn parallels between 2024 and 1968. While there are some similarities, you do not have to look decades into the past for a precedent to the current election. Look at 2016. Then, Donald Trump benefited from chaos on the southern border, rising terrorism, violence against police, and voter dissatisfaction with the economy. He benefited from an opponent whom few voters liked and who often seemed elitist and out of touch. He benefited from the notion that his peculiar brand of crisis was preferable to the crises generated by contemporary American liberalism. That is why people chose Trump. And why they look like they are about to choose him again.