What you’ve heard a great deal of lately has to do with the supposed elite college campuses, the Columbias, UCLAs, Northwesterns, and even NYUs, wherein radical leftists (some of whom are actual college students; most are not) have shut down essential access and function of the universities in question in the name of the Palestinian terror group Hamas and in support of the war it started against, and is losing badly to, Israel.
This has been put forth as a crisis because in some ways it is. It’s a crisis for Joe Biden, because it makes him look weak just as the George Floyd riots four years ago made Donald Trump look weak. Biden’s situation is probably worse than Trump’s was in 2020, of course, because the people shutting down those supposedly elite campuses full of his voters are … also his voters.
In fact, Biden’s team clearly believes that if he can’t turn out the Arab vote in Michigan, he’ll lose that state, and there is virtually no way Dirty Joe gets reelected without carrying Michigan. So, he’s done everything he can do to pander to Hamas and its supporters, which includes the hard-left-leaning organizations who in their brilliance decided to fund these protests amid a tough election fight in which Democrats are not in an advantageous position.
It looks like 1968 on those campuses. And like 1968, this year’s Democratic National Convention is in Chicago. Unlike 1968, there is no Mayor Daly ready to crack skulls and restore order in the streets when the radicals get out of control. Instead, the city has a Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is as likely as not to stand with the hard-left-leaning loons seeking to disrupt the convention.
So yes, Team Biden and its party have a problem. They have let the radicals into their tent and even given them control of the place, only to find that the radicals not only can’t dig a proper latrine but also have an affinity for filth.
Those in the pro-Hamas gang make very poor bedfellows.
The great P.J. O’Rourke famously wrote that you can judge the momentum and heft of a political movement by how many attractive women attach themselves to it. In 1968, it was reasonably clear that the anti-Vietnam set was full of the cool kids — as misguided and compromised as much of it may have been.
You don’t see too many swell lookers in those keffiyehs these days, though.
And here’s the thing: Where those protests are not encouraged and coddled by faculty and administration, they tend to be quite peaceful and very puny.
On red-state campuses, moreover, it turns out that the counter-protesters are where it’s at.
You’ve no doubt heard about the fraternity men at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who stood surrounding the American flag and kept it from desecration by the pro-Hamas demonstrators. Counter-protesters overwhelmed the pro-Hamas gang at Alabama and Ole Miss.
And at my alma mater Louisiana State University, there was more than just counter-protest. There was merciless, hilarious ridicule:
Of course, it’s a nonsensical attack to disparage Hamas and its supporters based on their lack of success on the ball field. That’s why it’s funny.
But it’s also funny because it’s true — in a larger sense.
These people are losers. And the now-viral smartass at LSU exposed them as such in ways that are instructive. You can even take that exchange to 35,000 feet as a metaphor for the red-state critique of the American Left as a whole.
No, they have no championships. They do none of the things that bring home titles. They don’t have positive behavioral habits, they don’t work productively, they’re weak in all the ways that matter, they lack focus and control, and they don’t pull together for the greater good.
That’s true of Hamas. And it’s certainly true of the dupes who protest for them. You surely saw this:
That’s Johannah King-Slutzky, a graduate student in English literature who is one of the leaders of the protests at Columbia. And she was unwittingly poetic in her illuminating description of those protesters who, having overtaken one of the school’s buildings, found themselves short of vittles and begging the university whose academic mission they had compromised for “humanitarian aid.”
Don’t say the pro-Hamas protesters can’t learn. They’ve got Hamas’ game down to a science already. After all, Hamas started the war back on Oct. 7 of last year by committing the most outrageous genocidal atrocities against Jews since World War II, only to then find themselves in a humanitarian crisis when the power and water that they didn’t provide to their own people and for which they were instead dependent on the Israelis were both cut off.
It turns out, though, that the Palestinians are used to being losers. Their suffering is essentially the only currency they can wield on the world stage; it’s really their only exportable good.
Does that work for the professional protesters and indoctrinated, entitled snowflakes wrecking Columbia and these other universities?
I have my doubts.
These kids can’t monetize their suffering. They’ve never suffered, unless you count the emotional damage wrought upon them by the idiocy of high school. There’s a reason those protests only seem to flourish on campuses where the administration and political leadership, whether city or state, are in support.
Champions suffer. The history of Israel, Europe, and the United States are replete with the suffering of patriots and heroes, men and women who were willing to give their lives to the cause of human dignity and liberty — but more than just dying in wars, they were also willing to give their lives to build societies worth dying for. “From the river to the sea!” has nothing to say about constructing a civilization.
That’s a very different thing than the suffering of a people who are OK with letting billions of dollars of humanitarian aid be spent on rockets and terror tunnels so that when they start a war, they can’t generate any power or potable water for themselves and are reduced to begging their enemy for those life-sustaining services.
Pro-Hamas goons defaced a statue of George Washington at the university which bears his name. That’s what you’re reduced to when you have no championships to boast of — and never will.
Somewhere, P.J. O’Rourke is looking down on these guys and snickering.
READ MORE on the riots:
Sue the Members of the College Boards
The Blessing of the College Riots
Squad Members, Defiant Amid Ouster Threats, Intensify Backing of Anti-Semitic Protests
