It is not easy to be Joe Biden. He has pretty much hit rock bottom when the American protesters on both sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict find one thing to agree on—their disdain for the incumbent president:
In Biden’s defense (not that he deserves any), the participants in the ongoing campus protests are not exactly of the strongest intellectual fiber. This was put on full display at Fordham University, where people who appear to be faculty members try to stop the New York Police Department from dismantling their ongoing protest. As an insult to the police, they yell “NYPD KKK”—referencing the Ku Klux Klan.
Most NYPD officers are black, Hispanic, or Asian. Whites make up only about half of the lieutenants and sergeants.
The protesters, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly white. Maybe it feels good for white people to hurl racist slurs at black police officers? Maybe they don’t understand what KKK means? After all, they don’t seem to have much of a grasp of what the Israel-Gaza conflict is all about.
Since many of the protesters at Fordham appear to be faculty members, these questions are certainly merited. Either way, the protests at America’s college campuses are getting tedious. I had hoped initially that there would be some civil discourse attached to the protests, with an effort at highlighting the substance of the conflict they all seem to care so much about.
None of that has happened. The protesters add nothing of value to the public discourse, and they bring nothing of substance to the debate over how to best end the conflict between Israel and Gaza. They have disrupted class schedules and in at least one case, the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), the disruptive activities on campus have led to the cancellation of the graduation ceremony.
What are the protesters really hoping to accomplish?
The answer to this question is a lot more banal than we might want it to be. At this point, protesting has become a lifestyle; the people who are disrupting campus life have lost track of why they are doing it. The very protest itself is the reason to protest.
The participants remind me of my old dorm buddy from college, who admitted at one point that he would jump on almost any protest just to “have done it.” The cause did not matter; as his girlfriend pointed out, “you have no ideals to protest for.”
The campus protests around America now seem to have reached this very point. The original motive for the protests was to support the Hamas terror group and to dispense open-air antisemitism. But the motive of supporting the Hamas terror group has slowly withered away. The protest now carries on for its own sake.
When Columbia University, after wobbling and fumbling for days, finally put their administrative foot down and began suspending protesting students, the reaction from the mob was not what true activists would have said. There was no reasoning about how ‘we have accomplished a great deal, let’s go back to our classes.’
No. Their reaction was to occupy one of the administrative buildings.
Not only did this perpetuate the protest, but the protesters very likely also believed that by preventing the administrators from going to work, they could prevent the university from kicking them out of the school.
Unlike earlier during the protest, the university begged for the NYPD to respond to the occupation of the administrative building. And the NYPD did respond in force. In a swift, decisive move, they ousted the protesters from the building and arrested many of them.
The arrests appear to have shocked the protesters—for once, their actions had consequences. We have to keep in mind that those among the protesters who are college students belong to a generation that suffers existential trauma when someone speaks of them using the wrong pronoun. They have been allowed to build their own ‘truths’ for most of their young lives—and have been supported in this by parents, teachers, and professors.
With that said, we probably should not hope for too many consequences, at least not in terms of the law. The Columbia University protests are taking place in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The District Attorney for this district, Alvin Bragg, is fully preoccupied with sham-prosecuting Donald Trump. His office will not have time to deal with out-of-control college students. At worst, those kids will get a slap on the wrist and be sent on their merry way.
Life itself will probably punish them more harshly; some of these students might actually have to live with the repercussions of their protests. If their university actually follows through on its threat to suspend them and deny them the right to graduate, they could miss out on one of the most privileged starts a young person could have to his or her adult life: a degree from one of America’s top universities.
Even the protesters who are not punished by their school could be in for a rude awakening when it comes time to get a job. Famous entrepreneur and Wall Street investor Kevin O’Leary explains to Fox Business that “like most corporations, he hires a firm to check into the background of potential hires.” Thanks in part to AI technology, he says, it has become easier to search videos online from dramatic events such as these protests.
According to Fox Business, O’Leary is not the only business expert “warning that student protests could hurt young people in their job search.” Emily Levine of professional recruitment firm Career Group Companies, job candidates have had their job offers revoked, and employees have been fired because they participated in “controversial behavior.”
I am fully convinced that none of the participants in the current, often violent college protests, are in any way concerned about their coming career prospects. That is unfortunate, because I am equally fully convinced that Kevin O’Leary and Emily Levine are both correct. Some of the protesters will solve this problem by disappearing into inconspicuous jobs deep within our government bureaucracies. Others will try to make it in academia, where—as the two front figures in the Weather Underground terror group showed us—you can be as adamant a terrorist as you want and still make a career for yourself.
Overall, though, the reactions from societal institutions to the college riots (which is what they really are) have been tougher and far less ‘tolerant’ than the almost-absent response when well-organized mobs ran amok across the country in 2020. This has probably also caused some consternation among the college rioters: since police around the country essentially let the 2020 rioters run amok with impunity, why would they intervene now?
There are two major differences. First of all, the 2020 riots were organized and funded by left-wing groups and networks that operated with the consent of the establishment left in American politics. Those riots served a higher political purpose: to portray the incumbent president Donald Trump as inept and weak, and to drum up hostility against him among black voters.
Many opinion polls back then showed that blacks had already begun a movement of defection from the Democrat party. Since they could not win those voters back with reason and policy records, the Left used the riots to make the presidential choice an emotional one.
No such political motive exists this time around. Very few American voters are going to choose our next president based primarily on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Therefore, the Democrat party has little if anything to win from these riots dragging on into the summer.
Secondly, Joe Biden is the incumbent president. Social unrest never looks good for the sitting president; it did not do so in 2020, and it does not do so in 2024 either. The isolation of the riots and protests to college campuses means that the general public still has not bothered to form an opinion on the matter. However, if the protests were to drag on—and especially if they were to spread to general urban areas—then Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats would have a major political problem.
The leaders of the Democrat-led cities where most of the rioting has taken place have also tried to take action to contain the social unrest. The reasons why it took the Los Angeles police so long to address the protests at UCLA are more in the hands of the university administration than anything else; if it were up to the LAPD, they would do what their colleagues in New York have done.
The only explanation for why the protests continue is that there are other Democrats who are responsible for ending them but lack the backbone and adult sense of responsibility to do it. These are the leaders of the protest-ridden colleges, who are now faced with a perfect storm of political tolerance. If it continues into the summer, it will sooner or later catch up with the Democrats outside of the collegiate grounds but, for now, the fallout of the protests is contained.
It is possible, though, that the protests will continue, but that would—again—happen only because of the ineptitude of the university leaders. They, on the other hand, are trapped by their own politically radical academic agenda: not only do they condone political bias in course curricula, but they also encourage all kinds of non-classroom political radicalism, all in the name of fashionable verbal vanity such as ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance.’
Now they are caught in a trap between their politically correct adversity to antisemitism and their politically correct tolerance of general political radicalism. It is time to collect the harvest of dragon’s teeth, and the university administrators don’t know what to do with it.
At the end of the day, public order will prevail. The more unpopular Joe Biden becomes, the more desperate the Democratic Party will grow in its efforts to save him from a humiliating disaster in November. Since the Democrats’ political structure is built not as a political party but as a power machine, it can make its parts move in ways that benefit the top almost regardless of what the cost is to those lower in the food chain.
This is where spineless college leaders will reach a point where they fear the wrath of their fellow Democrats more than they fear the screams from the campus mob. At that moment, the protests will end.
Campus Protests: What Is the Point Anyway?
Photo: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
It is not easy to be Joe Biden. He has pretty much hit rock bottom when the American protesters on both sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict find one thing to agree on—their disdain for the incumbent president:
In Biden’s defense (not that he deserves any), the participants in the ongoing campus protests are not exactly of the strongest intellectual fiber. This was put on full display at Fordham University, where people who appear to be faculty members try to stop the New York Police Department from dismantling their ongoing protest. As an insult to the police, they yell “NYPD KKK”—referencing the Ku Klux Klan.
Most NYPD officers are black, Hispanic, or Asian. Whites make up only about half of the lieutenants and sergeants.
The protesters, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly white. Maybe it feels good for white people to hurl racist slurs at black police officers? Maybe they don’t understand what KKK means? After all, they don’t seem to have much of a grasp of what the Israel-Gaza conflict is all about.
Since many of the protesters at Fordham appear to be faculty members, these questions are certainly merited. Either way, the protests at America’s college campuses are getting tedious. I had hoped initially that there would be some civil discourse attached to the protests, with an effort at highlighting the substance of the conflict they all seem to care so much about.
None of that has happened. The protesters add nothing of value to the public discourse, and they bring nothing of substance to the debate over how to best end the conflict between Israel and Gaza. They have disrupted class schedules and in at least one case, the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), the disruptive activities on campus have led to the cancellation of the graduation ceremony.
What are the protesters really hoping to accomplish?
The answer to this question is a lot more banal than we might want it to be. At this point, protesting has become a lifestyle; the people who are disrupting campus life have lost track of why they are doing it. The very protest itself is the reason to protest.
The participants remind me of my old dorm buddy from college, who admitted at one point that he would jump on almost any protest just to “have done it.” The cause did not matter; as his girlfriend pointed out, “you have no ideals to protest for.”
The campus protests around America now seem to have reached this very point. The original motive for the protests was to support the Hamas terror group and to dispense open-air antisemitism. But the motive of supporting the Hamas terror group has slowly withered away. The protest now carries on for its own sake.
When Columbia University, after wobbling and fumbling for days, finally put their administrative foot down and began suspending protesting students, the reaction from the mob was not what true activists would have said. There was no reasoning about how ‘we have accomplished a great deal, let’s go back to our classes.’
No. Their reaction was to occupy one of the administrative buildings.
Not only did this perpetuate the protest, but the protesters very likely also believed that by preventing the administrators from going to work, they could prevent the university from kicking them out of the school.
Unlike earlier during the protest, the university begged for the NYPD to respond to the occupation of the administrative building. And the NYPD did respond in force. In a swift, decisive move, they ousted the protesters from the building and arrested many of them.
The arrests appear to have shocked the protesters—for once, their actions had consequences. We have to keep in mind that those among the protesters who are college students belong to a generation that suffers existential trauma when someone speaks of them using the wrong pronoun. They have been allowed to build their own ‘truths’ for most of their young lives—and have been supported in this by parents, teachers, and professors.
With that said, we probably should not hope for too many consequences, at least not in terms of the law. The Columbia University protests are taking place in the New York City borough of Manhattan. The District Attorney for this district, Alvin Bragg, is fully preoccupied with sham-prosecuting Donald Trump. His office will not have time to deal with out-of-control college students. At worst, those kids will get a slap on the wrist and be sent on their merry way.
Life itself will probably punish them more harshly; some of these students might actually have to live with the repercussions of their protests. If their university actually follows through on its threat to suspend them and deny them the right to graduate, they could miss out on one of the most privileged starts a young person could have to his or her adult life: a degree from one of America’s top universities.
Even the protesters who are not punished by their school could be in for a rude awakening when it comes time to get a job. Famous entrepreneur and Wall Street investor Kevin O’Leary explains to Fox Business that “like most corporations, he hires a firm to check into the background of potential hires.” Thanks in part to AI technology, he says, it has become easier to search videos online from dramatic events such as these protests.
According to Fox Business, O’Leary is not the only business expert “warning that student protests could hurt young people in their job search.” Emily Levine of professional recruitment firm Career Group Companies, job candidates have had their job offers revoked, and employees have been fired because they participated in “controversial behavior.”
I am fully convinced that none of the participants in the current, often violent college protests, are in any way concerned about their coming career prospects. That is unfortunate, because I am equally fully convinced that Kevin O’Leary and Emily Levine are both correct. Some of the protesters will solve this problem by disappearing into inconspicuous jobs deep within our government bureaucracies. Others will try to make it in academia, where—as the two front figures in the Weather Underground terror group showed us—you can be as adamant a terrorist as you want and still make a career for yourself.
Overall, though, the reactions from societal institutions to the college riots (which is what they really are) have been tougher and far less ‘tolerant’ than the almost-absent response when well-organized mobs ran amok across the country in 2020. This has probably also caused some consternation among the college rioters: since police around the country essentially let the 2020 rioters run amok with impunity, why would they intervene now?
There are two major differences. First of all, the 2020 riots were organized and funded by left-wing groups and networks that operated with the consent of the establishment left in American politics. Those riots served a higher political purpose: to portray the incumbent president Donald Trump as inept and weak, and to drum up hostility against him among black voters.
Many opinion polls back then showed that blacks had already begun a movement of defection from the Democrat party. Since they could not win those voters back with reason and policy records, the Left used the riots to make the presidential choice an emotional one.
No such political motive exists this time around. Very few American voters are going to choose our next president based primarily on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Therefore, the Democrat party has little if anything to win from these riots dragging on into the summer.
Secondly, Joe Biden is the incumbent president. Social unrest never looks good for the sitting president; it did not do so in 2020, and it does not do so in 2024 either. The isolation of the riots and protests to college campuses means that the general public still has not bothered to form an opinion on the matter. However, if the protests were to drag on—and especially if they were to spread to general urban areas—then Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats would have a major political problem.
The leaders of the Democrat-led cities where most of the rioting has taken place have also tried to take action to contain the social unrest. The reasons why it took the Los Angeles police so long to address the protests at UCLA are more in the hands of the university administration than anything else; if it were up to the LAPD, they would do what their colleagues in New York have done.
The only explanation for why the protests continue is that there are other Democrats who are responsible for ending them but lack the backbone and adult sense of responsibility to do it. These are the leaders of the protest-ridden colleges, who are now faced with a perfect storm of political tolerance. If it continues into the summer, it will sooner or later catch up with the Democrats outside of the collegiate grounds but, for now, the fallout of the protests is contained.
It is possible, though, that the protests will continue, but that would—again—happen only because of the ineptitude of the university leaders. They, on the other hand, are trapped by their own politically radical academic agenda: not only do they condone political bias in course curricula, but they also encourage all kinds of non-classroom political radicalism, all in the name of fashionable verbal vanity such as ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance.’
Now they are caught in a trap between their politically correct adversity to antisemitism and their politically correct tolerance of general political radicalism. It is time to collect the harvest of dragon’s teeth, and the university administrators don’t know what to do with it.
At the end of the day, public order will prevail. The more unpopular Joe Biden becomes, the more desperate the Democratic Party will grow in its efforts to save him from a humiliating disaster in November. Since the Democrats’ political structure is built not as a political party but as a power machine, it can make its parts move in ways that benefit the top almost regardless of what the cost is to those lower in the food chain.
This is where spineless college leaders will reach a point where they fear the wrath of their fellow Democrats more than they fear the screams from the campus mob. At that moment, the protests will end.
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