April 2024 campus riots

From VDH:

https://twitter.com/VDHanson/status/1786018294220386426

Victor Davis Hanson

@VDHanson

The Campus Cry-Bullies How did we get to the point that at our ‘elite’ universities, privileged students were de facto running the universities, resulting in zoom courses for the law-abiding and abbreviated if not cancelled graduation ceremonies for the majority? Answer: the Columbia pro-Hamas cry-bullies have sized up their faculties, college administrators, and blue-state mayors. These young narcissists rightly have concluded that most privately sympathize with the pampered students—likewise, supporting the Hamas/Gaza terrorist cause, despising Israel, tolerating anti-Semites in their midst— and given worry over their titles, salaries, and careers—covertly siding with these young fascists in keffiyehs. So, the more the rioters heard of official “deadlines” and “consequences”, the more they understood the subtext of “we don’t really mean it” and laughed their warnings off. The protestors do not expect January 6th consequences for breaking into closed buildings at Columbia and “illegal parading”—when hundreds were jailed and sentenced to years in prison, and Ashli Babbitt was lethally shot for the misdemeanor of entering a broken window. Instead, they brag, as did one recent Columbia agitator, that, like those who jump turnstiles on the subway, they all will “be back out in 24 hours.” So again, the pro-Hamas crowd’s expectations rightly dovetail with the exemptions given the BLM/Antifa thugs of 2020. After four months of riot, arson, 1,500 police officers injured, 35 killed, and $2 billion in property destruction, the perps earned little if any punishments. Blue-state local and federal officials called that violence “a summer of love”. Or as the current Vice President then cheered on the protestors, “And everyone should take note of that on both levels. That they’re not going to let up. And they should not, and we should not.” So the students are used to officials loudly talking while carrying twigs. They do not expect to be expelled or even suspended as they vandalize, destroy, bully Jews, block their passage, scream “Death to America”, and bark that Israel and its Jewish population should be wiped out. Foreign students who break laws also expect they will never lose their student visas and be deported. The more they cry for Jews to, “Go Back to Poland”, they more they mean, “I like it here and am never going back home to those beloved Middle East hellholes I left”. The whiny students see their faculty as fellow prolonged adolescents, petulant whiners who went straight from graduate school to professorships to tenure, without a way stop in a taxi, on a tractor, or behind the counter. Both student rioters and faculty then alike see the majority of quiet students who now can’t get to class, enter their dorms, or have a graduation at best as collateral damage, but more likely as “fools” who deserve the chaos they get for the price of their tuition. Remember, most of the rioting takes place on blue-city campuses in blue states. So protestors also correctly discount the weary official boilerplate and empty rhetoric—and know they will not face the sort of police who in Georgia, Florida, or Texas actually broke up illegal demonstrations and riots, and  carried off the shrieking arrested. Finally, the students, both American and foreign, view with ridicule and contempt the frightened “Don’t!” Biden administration. They know Joe’s threats to Putin or Iran provedempty, and likely sides with Hamas. And at home he is a timid hostage to a few thousands Muslim voters in Michigan. They know he has overseen an epidemic of lawlessness in our cities. They know that 10 million lawbreakers with impunity crossed Biden’s destroyed southern border. They know he and Mayorkas are already salivating at the idea of importing thousands of pro-Hamas Gaza “refugees” into the borderless U.S. where they can join their brothers in arms. So the protests will continue, if not intensify—as the students will correctly consider all college presidential deadlines merely as “negotiable”, and dismiss the law-abiding students and us the taxpayers who subsidize tax-exempt endowment incomes and underwrite $2 trillion in government student loans, as, well, chumps.