Campus “protests” by cosplaying kids are dominating the news — when was the last time anyone heard anything out of Israel or Gaza?

These kids are freaking hilarious — and sad

To watch the news the last couple of weeks you would think that the pro-Palestine protests on American college campuses are shaking the very bedrock of Western civilization. Breathless reporters have been reporting breathlessly from in front of breathless mobs of teenagers and early twenty-somethings, along with some decidedly thirty- and forty-something outside agitators. The reporters speak in the same urgent cadence they employ when they report breathlessly from airline crash scenes and approaching Category 5 hurricanes. The only difference is the backdrop, and the fact that unlike college protests airline crashes and hurricanes have consequences in the real world.

Let’s be crystal: What’s happening at colleges and universities the last couple of weeks are not acts of civil disobedience in the service of a greater cause. They’re barely even protests in any meaningful sense. They’re attention-seeking temper tantrums. Let’s hope that’s all they ever prove to be.

Ignorance is bliss

To wit: Videos have gone viral in which students admit they have no idea what they’re screaming about, but they’re giving it the college try anyway. In one video a student at New York University said, “I wish I was more educated.” It was perfect. If you can find a better microcosm of the modern college campus, I’m all ears. It’s a safe bet that most of these kids can’t locate Gaza or Israel on a map. Or New York, for that matter. 

If you can watch a bunch of entitled dolts on the manicured quads of private universities decking themselves out in Keffiyahs (always with the Keffiyahs) and Palestinian flags and chanting genocide-themed nursery rhymes without laughing, you are made of sterner stuff than me. A majority are wearing masks like it’s 2021. Think of the stupidity behind that: The masks mean either they’re still worried about catching COVID or they think they’re hiding their identities from authorities.

Hey kids, here’s a pro tip: If authorities could identify, locate, and arrest hundreds of January 6 rioters in their homes thousands of miles away months and even years after the attack, they’ll find you taking bong rips in your dorm room.

But back to the media coverage. All the signs and smoke and barricades and screaming and chanting and masks and arrests and general foolishness make for killer imagery. Why spend hours, days, weeks, or months doing the hard work of investigating and reporting stories that matter to actual people’s lives when you can scoot over to USC between commute crunches and grab a few dramatic minutes of video of college kids doing what college kids do? The media are phoning it in.

The Boston Globe referred to campus “occupations,” as if Harvard Yard has become a modern day Sudetenland. Not to be outdone, the New York Times ran videos of masked, Keffiiyahed kids and their adult instigators at Columbia University smashing windows with hammers and marching across campus with their arms linked. It was like January 6 and the 1971 Coca-Cola hippie commercial had a baby, and that baby was accepted to the Ivy League. The stories are riddled with quasi-jingoistic language.

Usurping actual news

There’s an irony in the media’s obsessive coverage of the sturm und drang on campus over the last week or so: When was the last time you heard anything about the actual Israel-Hamas war? These students have made the conflict all about themselves. They’ve taken the air out of the room. Instead of learning more about the ongoing conflict Americans are being treated to headlines like, “In Portland State University’s library, protesters were fortifying for a standoff.” No word recently about the Gazans fortified inside their homes as the bombs rain down, or the Israelis fortified in theirs as the latest salvo of Hamas rockets comes inbound. I have not seen a single story about Israel or Gaza in at least a week, and I’m pretty sure the war is still going and people are still dying over there. Even President Biden took the time to make a statement about the protests. Last week Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a statement during his trip to Beijing. The United States is involved in at least three active hot wars right now while simultaneously trying to manage a resurgent China — and the leader of the free world and senior Cabinet members have to spend time telling the kids to settle down.

Two nights ago pro-Israel counter protesters showed up at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA (aside: every rational, decent person I know is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine). Yesterday morning the internets and airwaves again were filled with breathless reportage from the alleged skirmish. KTLA reported, “Aerial footage from Sky5 captured the chaotic scene, including countless clashes between the two sides. The number of people injured and the severity of the injuries were unclear.”

Aerial footage! Countless clashes! Unknown numbers of injuries! Last night the grown-ups finally had enough and sent in the cops to clear the encampment, which fittingly had come to resemble an illegal homeless camp filled with piles of garbage and graffiti. In the car on the way to the dog park yesterday evening nearly every radio station had reporters on campus, again reporting breathlessly. The kids “are really getting ready for anything,” said KABC with Walter Cronkite seriousness. I hadn’t realized there were so many local reporters left in this town.

The media did their level best to make last night’s action look like the next storming of the Bastille. News sites and social media this morning have been full of blurry action shots, as if the people taking the pictures were risking life and limb to Bring You The Story from a hot battle zone. As opposed to, say, reporting from the actual battle zones about which all this bouleversement allegedly is about.

Slap-fighting is not “violence”

Funny, then, that there wasn’t much in the way of violence or chaos in the pictures and videos. Like images from campuses around the country, at UCLA it was mostly shoving matches and a few kids screaming like they were being drawn and quartered as they got arrested. I didn’t see anything in the way of actual threats or injuries. Anyone who’s ever been involved in an actual fight, or for that matter anyone who’s ever seen one, knows the difference between people who want to hurt each other and people trying to look like they want to hurt each other. They mostly maintained a safe distance, here and there running up to the barricades and tugging on a piece of plywood. The videos are reminiscent of a couple of frat bros after a couple too many beers bumping chests in the bar and shouting, “You wanna go, man? Let’s go, man! I’ll go right f**king now, man!” All the while they’re secure in the knowledge that neither of them is going to do anything. There’s more violence in the tightly controlled environment of a boxing gym. At least in there people are actually trying to hit each other. One guy at UCLA did get grazed in the head and bled a little bit. Must have been brutal, bro. [Update: Jewish social media is reporting that yesterday at UCLA five male anti-Israel protestors bludgeoned a Jewish girl unconscious. These are the “protesters” calling for “peace.” There’s another word for them: “cowards.” Isn’t it curious how the massed media haven’t reported that story?]

Another video captured two burly cops taking down a woman who turned out to be a professor (!!) at Emory University after she made the grievous mistake of swatting one of them in the head from behind as he wrestled with another protester. It is glorious to watch her screaming “I’m a professor of economics!” during the take-down. For some reason it reminded me of the SNL “Dysfunctional Family Dinner” sketch where Will Ferrell’s middle manager character impotently shouts “I drive a Dodge Stratus!” when his family presses his buttons. By the end of the video the good professor appears to have wet herself. Normally it’s the adults who admonish the kids, “See what happens?” On America’s college campuses, they’re acting out right alongside them. She’s an economics professor, she ought to understand the concept of incentivizing behavior.

My favorite picture from all the protests is of a wild-eyed kid at UCLA wearing a red Kiffeyah (of course), ski goggles, and a gas mask, hiding behind a sawed in half plastic trash can and what appears to be a large Tupperware or Rubbermade lid, menacing police with a tennis racquet. Ironically, the tennis racquet is blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag. The Veuve Clicquot golf umbrella in the background is a perfect touch. You cannot make this stuff up.

Incidentally, I believe the final score was 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 in favor of the cops.

This, Dear Readers, is comedy gold. L.A. Times photo

Inevitably, the protests and the coverage have quickly devolved into self-parody. In addition to Roger Federer at UCLA, a protesting student at Columbia University was captured on social media wailing to police, “F**k you, it’s finals! Can I go home?” Mind you, she said this from behind a barricade. She could go home. All she had to do was leave.

The protests reached the nadir of foolishness when a Columbia “student leader” called Johanna King-Slutzky went before cameras begging for food and water to be delivered to kids illegally squatting in an administrative building. The “occupation” forced the school to cancel classes for the presumptive majority of students who simply want to get educated. King-Slutzky (my new favorite last name) brayed, “I mean, it’s crazy to say since we’re on an Ivy League campus — but this is like, basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for, like could people please have a glass of water?”

And there you have it. Barricading yourself in a building indefinitely without thinking to bring so much as a few bottles of Poland Springs does not constitute a humanitarian crisis that requires “aid.” It constitutes abject stupidity. These kids locked themselves in a physically untenable situation and now they’re expecting the grown-ups to bail them out. Stay tuned for the hunger strikes.

Also, does the building they chose lack running water, or are the precious protesters too good for New York City tap?

The new Lost Generation

In the end there is something desperately sad about all of it. Look at the girl in the picture up top on the left. She’s all of 18 or 19 and already has multiple piercings in her face. Because these days piercings pass as personality traits. She’s dyed her hair red and spent a lot of time picking out her Keffiyah and applying angsty black eyeliner. In a different era she’d have spent that time painting her face in school colors before cheering her team at the annual homecoming game. It’s the same thing, the same channeling of youthful energy. The only question is the direction in which it’s channeled. She and the kids in the other pictures are trying so very hard to find meaning. We have unmoored an entire generation from the traditions and institutions that used to provide the logical framework for life. They’ve been taught that any semblance of authority is oppressive. They have no guardrails.

Viewed from that vantage, the protests are not surprising, they were and are inevitable. If it wasn’t Gaza it would be something else. That girl has been taught that her college — for which her family presumably is paying dearly for her to attend, and for which she may be going deeply into debt — is part of an oppressive neocolonial global patriarchy of which the war in Gaza is just the latest manifestation. Or something. Of course, that oppressive neocolonial patriarchy’s diploma is worth a lot of money, so she’s not going to leave. Instead, she’ll gnaw gently on the hand that feeds her, performatively gnash her teeth and rend her garments at protests, and plead for “humanitarian aid.” Then, in a couple of years, she’ll collect her Ivy League winnings and get on with life. For the rest of her days she’ll tell herself that in college she Did Something. She’ll try hard to believe it. Deep down, I suspect she never will.

That’s a lot to read into a picture of a stranger. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the kids acting out on campus this month know more about how the world works than I suspect. Maybe that young woman has seriously studied the history of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maybe the protestors are versed in the nuances of the Balfour Declaration, UN Resolution 181, and the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Maybe she believes her protest will make a difference. Maybe she feels an affinity for the Palestinian people in her very bones. Maybe, but I don’t think so.

I think these kids make everything all about themselves because they are a new Lost Generation. Yes, they are prone to the narcissism that social media creates. More importantly, though, they grew up in the shadow of 9/11 and two failed wars. They grew up during the Great Recession, the rise of Trump, the long, hot summer of 2020, and three years of COVID lockdowns. They are coming of age at a time when their country has again entangled itself in bloody conflicts in distant lands, conflicts that may yet ensnare this generation in actual combat. In short, these kids have never gotten to so much as catch their breath, and they’ve never been able to fight back. At least in a real war you can pick up a gun and start shooting. These kids have spent their lives fighting a spiritual war for which they are unarmed and unprepared.

At the same time they’ve been fed a steady diet of wokeism on campus and in the media and entertainment they consume. The very people responsible for those failed wars, economic calamities, and ultimately the lockdowns have brainwashed this generation into not holding them accountable. Instead, the culprits are abstract “systems of oppression.” They’ve been taught to see oppression, exploitation, and state violence everywhere they look, including in their own communities, schools, even their own families. It’s one of the most insidious sleights of hand in history, and these kids are the marks. Meanwhile, the rough beast that is our political class slouches ever closer to Bethlehem, literally. The kids are most assuredly not all right, but the military industrial complex is doing just fine.

It’s all theater. Maybe a few students will end up getting expelled, or maybe they’ll claim a few more professorial and administrative scalps. But the system itself will be just fine. Those selfsame professors and administrators will go right on filling young people’s heads with the same toxic, hateful ideological brew that inevitably metastasizes into what we’ve seen the last week. The establishment is not worried.

Useful idiots in a deadly serious game

As dismissive as I am of the campus protests, there is a whiff of seriousness beneath the pretentious surface. Six days after the October 7 Hamas attacks, before Israel launched its counterattacks, before there was an Israeli-Hamas war, massive anti-Israel protests occurred around the world. One was just a couple of miles from my home. Protesters descended on the Israeli consulate in West Los Angeles. They called for Israel’s destruction, popped off smoke canisters, and shut down traffic. They menaced passers-by.

Along with a friend I watched the protest that day. I didn’t see people justly outraged by a humanitarian crisis. I saw blind, naked hate. I saw and heard racism and antisemitism. I heard people questioning an entire race’s right to exist. It was ugly, and it was vicious. I never thought I’d see anything like it in my country, much less my neighborhood. It was the worst of humanity on full display.

The truly frightening thing was the protest’s high degree of organization, and even more so the extent to which it was identical to anti-Israel protests worldwide. The yellow and black signs were the same size and in the same font. The mobile stage towed behind a pickup truck was the same. Most unnervingly, the yellow-green vests worn by scores of organizers were the same, as was the way in which those vested individuals acted as human gateways, determining who was let inside the cordon and who was not. I’ve seen images of these exact same tactics in pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests everywhere.

Maybe all those groups in all those cities and countries were able to achieve this extraordinary level of national and even international coordination in a matter of days after the October 7 attacks. Maybe. Or maybe the protests were an extension of those attacks, the first tendrils of hate extending into cities globally. Maybe what’s happening on campus was part of the plan all along. Maybe it’s just getting warmed up.

In that sense, the student protesters disrupting campuses this month are what student protesters have always been: Useful idiots. Students are easy to rile up, especially these days when they have no other direction for their youthful energies. The girl who wished she was more educated, the kid screaming his face off, they’re nothing but fodder. When they chant “from the river to the sea,” when they cheer Hamas, they know not what they do.

In the end, these kids are burning off pure adrenaline, and Coachella and Stagecoach are both over.

They’re just looking for the next mosh pit.

Grownups cleaning up after the kids made a mess at UCLA