For those beginning to despair that anybody would do anything about the unrest, even anarchy, gripping university campuses across the country, it was a sight for sore eyes: after clearing out the protestors and their encampment at City College of New York (CUNY) this week, the NYPD pulled down the Palestinian flag, raised by the student occupiers over its Harlem Heights campus, and restored the Stars and Stripes to its rightful place on the university flagpole.
Maybe the forces of sanity as well as law and order were getting a grip at last.
Just a little further south on Manhattan’s west side the NYPD had already cleared out Columbia University’s ‘Little Gaza’ encampment and retaken the Ivy League university’s Hamilton Hall, which was being trashed by pro-Hamas occupiers.
At the weekend the university authorities said they would not call in the NYPD to avoid ‘further inflaming’ the situation and would instead concentrate on ‘de-escalating the rancor’.
Student militants, egged on by outside agitators, rewarded this restraint by seizing Hamilton Hall, smashing doors, windows and property in the process.
So the appeasing academic authorities were forced to call in the police after all.
After clearing out the protestors and their encampment at CUNY this week, the NYPD pulled down the Palestinian flag, raised by the student occupiers, and restored the Stars and Stripes to its rightful place on the university flagpole. (Pictured: UCLA on Thursday morning).
It was a sight for sore eyes: Maybe the forces of sanity as well as law and order were getting a grip at last. (Pictured: UCLA on Thursday morning).
By Wednesday morning, cops had retaken Hamilton Hall with admirable military precision and minimal violence, arrested 119 of the occupiers and tossed the detritus of the encampment into dumpster trucks.
University bosses have now asked the NYPD to stay on campus until the university breaks up later this month and the students disperse for the summer.
The protestors are being charged with trespass, criminal mischief and burglary. It remains to be seen if Manhattan’s left-wing district attorney Alvin Bragg, elected on a pledge to destroy Donald Trump rather than keep the peace, proceeds with prosecutions against them, or the 173 arrested at CUNY.
Across the nation there’s been a hardening of attitudes and responses towards the student protests, many of which have quickly gone from being pro-ceasefire in Gaza to pro-Palestinian to pro-Hamas.
The Washington Post calculates 1,700 have been arrested in the past two weeks. The right to free speech and to protest (almost a rite of passage for any student worth their salt), which no sensible person is denying, has deteriorated into violence, destruction, intimidation and brute anti-Semitism.
Even the soft-headed bosses of UCLA on the West Coast were forced this week to call in the forces of law and order after the campus was desecrated by a night of fights between opposing factions.
When finally given the go-ahead, the police cleared the Los Angeles campus of protestors and encampment without undue fuss or violence, marching out the occupiers handcuffed but unmasked, which let us see just how young many of them are.
Police in New York and LA have cause to be satisfied with jobs well done.
Encampments have been torn down from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, to Tulane in New Orleans. At Yale, protestors dispersed after they were threatened with suspension and arrest.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the University of Florida set the gold standard for how to deal with these agitators.
‘This is not complicated,’ university authorities said. ‘The University is not day care and we do not treat protestors like children. They knew the rules, they broke the rules and they’ll face the consequences.’ All is now largely quiet on the Florida campus front.
So, belatedly, some universities have found their voices and discovered their spines.
So have many in Congress, including some Democrats, appalled by the anti-Semitism endemic in the protests, and even some in the liberal-left media.
But all this has only served to amplify the recent deafening silence from the one person above all others who should have been speaking for the nation at this time: President Biden.
For days, as university unrest spread and descended into violence then ugly anti-Semitism, with Jewish students being excluded from campus in echoes of the early days of Nazi Germany, and as swastika graffiti started appearing where Jewish students gathered, not a word emanated from the Oval Office.
Until finally, with pressure mounting from friendly networks like CNN, Biden was dragged to the podium Thursday – and what he said was pathetic.
Speaking for just a few minutes, he issued platitudes about the lawlessness of ‘destroying property’, notably mentioning ‘islamophobia’ in the same breath as ‘anti-Semitism’, before making a swift exit. He didn’t identify a single university by name and defended the right to protest.
The truth is, this all seems to be inspired by base political calculation.
The Biden campaign thinks, rightly, that their man can’t be re-elected without the votes of the young.
Cops have retaken Columbia’s Hamilton Hall with admirable military precision and minimal violence. University bosses have now asked the NYPD to stay on campus until the university breaks up later this month and the students disperse for the summer. So, belatedly, some universities have found their voices and discovered their spines.
But all this has only served to amplify the recent deafening silence from the one person above all others who should have been speaking for the nation at this time: President Biden.
In 2020, he won around 60 percent of the young vote, a massive margin essential to the much smaller margin overall which elected him president. But a recent CNN poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 51 percent to 40 percent among the under 35s, echoing a previous Fox News poll which gave Trump an 18-point lead among the under-30s. These are election-losing margins.
Shameless Joe doesn’t want to make things worse by overly scolding the student protestors. For some reason he thinks the pro-Palestinian views of the privileged, entitled elite currently cosplaying as Gazan refugees in makeshift encampments are representative of young people in general.
There is scant evidence for this but it’s what he and his advisers believe. Hence the refusal to use the presidency as a bully pulpit to make clear what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to protest, surely a core function of any responsible president.
Instead of some blunt truths about the limits of protest in a democracy, Biden is trying to buy young votes.
His efforts to write off all outstanding student-loan debts were thwarted by the Supreme Court but he’s found several substantial workarounds, most recently cancelling $6 billion in debt for students who went to a now defunct network of private arts colleges accused of defrauding students.
So far, he’s managed to wipe out $160 billion worth of student loan debt for 4.5 million college graduates, about 10 percent of all outstanding student loans.
It represents vote-buying on a grand scale which even the corrupt, bad old days of Tammany Hall could not match, a massive federal subsidy to the already largely affluent. Another student debt bonanza is scheduled to drop this Fall, just in time for the election.
The administration is also hoping to court the young vote with its plans to reclassify cannabis from its current strict Schedule I category, along with other seriously harmful illegal drugs, to a Schedule III drug, which will place it alongside Tylenol.
Perhaps the president thinks if young folks use some of their student loan forgiveness windfall to get high on pot they might be more inclined to vote for him in November.
There is no sign that any of this is working for Biden. Nor can we be sure that the student protests have passed their peak. After all, we are dealing here with a phenomenon of the Democrats’ own making.
The power of violent protest to change public policy has been absorbed by today’s protestors from the example of the post-George Floyd riots of 2020. The widespread looting and vandalism which scarred many American cities in the aftermath of Floyd’s death went largely unpunished.
The truth is, this all seems to be inspired by base political calculation. The Biden campaign thinks, rightly, that their man can’t be re-elected without the votes of the young. (Pictured: UCLA on Thursday morning).
A recent CNN poll shows Biden trailing Trump by 51 percent to 40 percent among under 35s, echoing a previous Fox News poll which gave Trump an 18-point lead among the under-30s. These are election-losing margins – and Shameless Joe doesn’t want to make things worse by overly scolding the student protestors. (Pictured: New York City on Tuesday).
Indeed, Democrat mayors and city councils dismissed the violence as justified and courted the protestors by slashing police budgets and ceasing to prosecute crimes deemed minor, such as shoplifting (hence the spree of shoplifting and other crimes which followed).
Though many Democrats have since thought better of all this, there was little condemnation from them at the time. The Democratic convention that summer of 2020 had nothing to say about what was often urban anarchy. Then vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris even backed a bail fund to aid the protestors.
If, rather than dissipating in the months ahead, the pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas protestors gather pace through the summer, culminating in serious unrest and violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August, then Biden will pay a political price much wider than his inability to buy young voters.
It was the chaos of anti-Vietnam War protestors trying to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention which helped tilt Middle America to Richard Nixon that year and gave Republicans the presidency.
Back then the Democrats could at least count on the stern Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, and his sometimes-brutal police force to deal harshly with the protestors.
This August, the Democratic establishment will be dependent on Brandon Johnson to keep the streets of the Windy City safe for delegates, a far-left mayor who is pro-Palestinian and with America’s largest Palestinian population in his greater metro area — but who doesn’t even have the confidence of the Chicago Police Department.
Good luck with that, Mr President. You’re going to need it.
