When you're on "the right side of history" anything is justified... These people have no moral compass to guide them. They just drift, and glom onto whatever is trending on Tik Tok. If the algos changed, you could find the same citizens out protesting against Hamas next month. There is no reasoning or thought behind this, I suspect, it's just follow the leader. Pathetic. This is such a lame side of humanity.
Another great piece. I really appreciate your incisive analysis and style. I also appreciate your inclusion of a critique of American parenting styles and the "kindergarten vibe" observation. I'm watching all of this in disbelief but then I have also been baffled by how colleagues and friends are raising their kids - constant affirmation and acceptance. We talk to youth (up to 28 years old) as if we are in a pediatric therapy session - asking where they feel things in their bodies or what color might represent their feelings, etc. It's bizarre and cult-like. It teaches nothing about self regulation or growing up. Then they become unhinged and dangerous as we are seeing. And still, parents will affirm.....
"Sound like a lot more fun than studying for finals." More fun and very easy, with the added benefit of being part of the crowd and signaling a self-congratulating righteousness. I'll bet there aren't many, if any, STEM majors in those crowds of revolutionaries. I had to laugh at a short clip taken in a math class at MIT. The professor had to let an activist student in to campaign briefly. He came in waving his "Palestinian" flag. The math students looked completely detached, waiting for him to leave so they could get back to work. Any who compare Israel to apartheid South Africa are immature and not worth listening to. The comparison should be apartheid SA and the campus mobs. I say this as one who, as a 12-yr-old in the early 70's, wrote a SA embassy and told them I was interested in learning more about the country. They thought I was an apartheid supporter and for the next 10 years or so I received the government propaganda paper, South African Digest. The similarity between the old SA government propaganda and the babbling from the campus mobs is striking.
The revolution might not be televised, but it will be infantilized. These juice-box Jacobins couldn’t run a lemonade stand, though the girl who pointed-out that they are doing the job they were trained for shows promise.
To the numbskull on Columbia's campus in pink sunglasses and matching nail polish: college is not Sunday school. You were assigned Edward Said not to receive it as gospel but to critique it--to critically dissect Said's arguments alongside a variety of other texts offering varying points of view.
Here's the rub. This current generation of undergrads probably was taught Said by someone who did present it as gospel, accompanied by, if anything, the works of Frantz Fanon and the Little Red Book. If there is a silver lining to all this, academic leaders will wake up to the monsters they've been producing and re-producing and finally start to take seriously the idea of intellectual/ideological diversity. At a university, that is the only diversity that matters.
> You were assigned Edward Said not to receive it as gospel but to critique it--to critically dissect Said's arguments alongside a variety of other texts offering varying points of view.
Sadly given the state of modern Academia they probably were assigned Said to receive as gospel.
It's not clear which parts of Said they may have read and be referring to here, but to the extent that demonstrators have been taking an anti-Israel, "from the river to the sea" line, they are not aligning with his views.
Edward Said believed, ultimately, that the destiny of Palestinians and Israelis was "inextricable" from each other. There is no possibility of either population being driven out, ever, which means no possibility of peace or security without some kind of mutual accommodation.
I wish the protesters would just hold up signs that say PEACE and nothing more because there is no more to say. Then I would believe in what they are doing and support that movement wholeheartedly. Anything else, any side taking that results in the murder of anyone, anywhere (i.e. military actions or terrorism) will not solve the problems and we will continually only get more death and war. What are we all thinking? Like how is this going to solve anything? Nothing is ever solved, is it?
Peace. There is no more to say. Whether we like it or not it is quite simple and will come down to that some day and I am tired of innocent human beings being murdered for us to get there.
Peace has been offered repeatedly by Israel to Hamas - Lay down your arms and release the hostages unconditionally, and there will be no more conflict. Hamas continues to fight and use civilians as human shields - hiding weapons and ammunition in the mattresses of a maternity ward? This sounds like a Hamas problem.
Israel, for its own sake, needs peace with Palestinians, not with Hamas. Peace with Hamas was always impossible - equally so before Oct. 7 - because war with Israel is the *entire purpose* of Hamas. It is the basis of their power and reason for existing.
This is why it was so deeply cynical for Netanyahu to (by his own account!) deliberately empower Hamas relative to the PA, and to cross-border peace initiatives.
It's hard to get upset with PEACE. My American grandfathers prayed for it in battle and my American grandmothers prayed for it at church with others during the war. It is the one thing that supersedes all; that we all agree on.
The price of fighting ruins all of us for many generations.
I understand the point you are making that this is about protest specifically and so takes on a different context because that is what the essay is about and that is what my comment was directly about.
So even addressed in only that matter, this is not WWII..not yet anyway. We are not army against army yet about to embark on the loss of millions more. We don't want it to grow to that point, we all so very much want it to wane. That is why I clearly stated that I wish the protesters would not take sides at this point (even if they hold a particular side) and only call for PEACE. From a protest standpoint I would find that unifying and the absolute right energy and pressure point to put on all world leaders. Nothing more nothing less. Just that simple prayer.
Sin has been around for a very long time and antisemitism is sin on steroids; it seems to be manifesting itself all over these days particularly as a hobby for misguided youth whose naivete is exceeded only by arrogance. With the return of Jesus Christ getting closer every day, Satan knows that his time is limited, and this stuff is getting worse. Stay close to Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel.
SPDS - student protester derangement syndrome, a sudden, irrational urge to denigrate a protest against an obviously problematic war, prompting the sufferer to use all the standard tricks of political spin and rhetorical exaggeration (selectivity, overgeneralization, reliance on certain sources of information) to portray all student protesters as hysterical and superficial. In 1968, while soldiers were raping and machine gunning Vietnamese women, you would have been making fun of the flowers in the protesters' hair.
We should all join you in criticising the hypocrisy of the universities. But I honestly do not know what makes someone get this mad at people who are almost expressing a protected belief about what have to be at least 15,000+ dead civilians, a number that is sure to climb as the Rafah offensive likely proceeds.
The protesters have not decided that "their real enemy is…Zionism", they have decided that zionism is the enemy of *palestinians *. Disagree with that all you want, march down there yourself and tell them why they're wrong. But sneering at 19 year-olds via a series of disconnected hot takes while comfortably ensconced behind a screen is both dishonorable and sad.
Tell you what Nick.....go volunteer in Gaza. March down there yourself since you are so committed to the cause. See if you can actually cash the checks your mouth continues to write via the yap-tap-tapping on your computer from the safety of your desk. Get some skin in the game for once.
Wow! What’s happening in those Universities is nothing short of vile racism. So no more lectures from liberal, middle-class moralists like you please. The last time Jew hate bubbled to the surface in the West was in the German Universities of the 1930. The similarities are both striking and disturbing. The events should worry anyone that takes even the slightest interest in history. It proves that once again, students need to be carefully guided by academics and not have their minds poisoned by cosplay Marxists that don’t live in the real world themselves. The thing that always strikes me about people who read and obsess over Marx is that they believe they have found the road to Utopia; they know all about how to destroy a society but nothing about how to actually build one!
Excellent essay, the most interesting section for me was the discussion about Soros sowing discord. But Soros is not the only member of the billionaire class doing this and it certainly did not begin with him. It's upsetting that conservative media quickly dismisses the current ubiquity of post-modernist values in the West as "Marxist" or Communist" when in fact the corporate capitalist class has been the financial sponsor all along. I've yet to see a special by any prominent journalist, including Tucker Carlson, discussing how billionaire philanthropists have been destroying the foundations of Western societies since the 60s.
An excellent starting point is Heather McDonald's essay from 1996 "The billions of Dollars that made things worse" discussing the role of the Ford Foundation in every major disruptive movement since the 60s. Ever wondered how feminist/chicano/black studies permeated universities across America, look no further than Ford Foundation grants. Wondering who created the models for the failed welfare state adopted by Johnson's "Great Society," Ford Foundation. Ever asked yourself how affirmative action (the foundation of preferential treatment in America today) was adopted by every major institution in America, look no further than the arguments of McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy national security advisor and President of the Ford Foundation.
If you've ever asked yourself why criminals are coddled in America, and how wanting to lower crime is called racist and police are under attack, look no further than funding from a variety of foundations. Deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 60s and 70s, foundations to the rescue once more. Last but not least, climate change and the attack against fossil fuel extraction is sponsored by none other than the scions of the oil industry such as prominent members of the Rockefeller and Getty families. It could be argued that American philanthropy, as practiced by the largest foundations, such as Ford/Carnegie/Rockefeller/ are the worst things to happen to America and Western civilization. Yet most conservatives think philanthropy is another one of those great innovations of the capitalist system that has enabled the progress of the West.
There are a variety of explanations for why the winners of capitalist system are attacking the societies in which they live freely, but until independent journalists start asking the question: "Why are porminent members of the top 1% trying to destroy the system from which they benefit through philanthropy?" we may never find out what the hell is going on. Perhaps that's the point altogether.
Brilliant article, Jenny. Extremely well written, the restrained anger in every line was delicious and made your argument perfect in pitch. I think you were too fair on the 1968 Vietnam demonstrations at Kent though. All of that was so cynical, just like what’s going on now. Those cosplay students of yesteryear only became really interested in the war after Johnson went after their colleges with the draft. It was all perfectly fine for them when working class white and black boys were doing the dying beforehand. It’s worthwhile noting that many of those that squeezed out of it, like Biden who had the draft deferred an incredible five times, are now running the US via the White House and Civil Service! It seems no coincidence that those destroying the American dream right now for their own political ends are those the burnt the flag back on those soul destroying demonstrations! As far Soros and other bad actors are concerned, they can spend as much money as they like trying to bring down the west with their falsehoods because, at the end of the day, the wisdom of the crowd will always trump their lies. Especially today, we are far too well informed by social media for them to get away with it - no wonder our political elite want to shut it down! Keep up the good fight. Love your stuff.
The whole Soros thing is deliberately exaggerated by poor journalism. The WaPo had a thorough article on it yesterday explaining that bits of money via various grants had reached the students. Some several years ago. Yet all this becomes the evil Mr. Soros is funding agitation. He is the favorite boogyman.
WaPo presents facts after researching where the money comes from. Other 'journalists' simply take rumors and repeat them and/or take facts and twist them just to fit their point without research.
There was a time this was true. I used to love reading it, but now it is so unbelievably bias. Unfortunately. WaPo is now just as likely to propagate rumor if it supports their narriative
When you're on "the right side of history" anything is justified... These people have no moral compass to guide them. They just drift, and glom onto whatever is trending on Tik Tok. If the algos changed, you could find the same citizens out protesting against Hamas next month. There is no reasoning or thought behind this, I suspect, it's just follow the leader. Pathetic. This is such a lame side of humanity.
I try to have a little more faith in people, but I see your point and it's hard to argue against.
Another great piece. I really appreciate your incisive analysis and style. I also appreciate your inclusion of a critique of American parenting styles and the "kindergarten vibe" observation. I'm watching all of this in disbelief but then I have also been baffled by how colleagues and friends are raising their kids - constant affirmation and acceptance. We talk to youth (up to 28 years old) as if we are in a pediatric therapy session - asking where they feel things in their bodies or what color might represent their feelings, etc. It's bizarre and cult-like. It teaches nothing about self regulation or growing up. Then they become unhinged and dangerous as we are seeing. And still, parents will affirm.....
"Sound like a lot more fun than studying for finals." More fun and very easy, with the added benefit of being part of the crowd and signaling a self-congratulating righteousness. I'll bet there aren't many, if any, STEM majors in those crowds of revolutionaries. I had to laugh at a short clip taken in a math class at MIT. The professor had to let an activist student in to campaign briefly. He came in waving his "Palestinian" flag. The math students looked completely detached, waiting for him to leave so they could get back to work. Any who compare Israel to apartheid South Africa are immature and not worth listening to. The comparison should be apartheid SA and the campus mobs. I say this as one who, as a 12-yr-old in the early 70's, wrote a SA embassy and told them I was interested in learning more about the country. They thought I was an apartheid supporter and for the next 10 years or so I received the government propaganda paper, South African Digest. The similarity between the old SA government propaganda and the babbling from the campus mobs is striking.
The revolution might not be televised, but it will be infantilized. These juice-box Jacobins couldn’t run a lemonade stand, though the girl who pointed-out that they are doing the job they were trained for shows promise.
Oh my god, "juice-box Jacobins" is one the best phrases I've ever heard!!
To the numbskull on Columbia's campus in pink sunglasses and matching nail polish: college is not Sunday school. You were assigned Edward Said not to receive it as gospel but to critique it--to critically dissect Said's arguments alongside a variety of other texts offering varying points of view.
Here's the rub. This current generation of undergrads probably was taught Said by someone who did present it as gospel, accompanied by, if anything, the works of Frantz Fanon and the Little Red Book. If there is a silver lining to all this, academic leaders will wake up to the monsters they've been producing and re-producing and finally start to take seriously the idea of intellectual/ideological diversity. At a university, that is the only diversity that matters.
> You were assigned Edward Said not to receive it as gospel but to critique it--to critically dissect Said's arguments alongside a variety of other texts offering varying points of view.
Sadly given the state of modern Academia they probably were assigned Said to receive as gospel.
It's not clear which parts of Said they may have read and be referring to here, but to the extent that demonstrators have been taking an anti-Israel, "from the river to the sea" line, they are not aligning with his views.
Edward Said believed, ultimately, that the destiny of Palestinians and Israelis was "inextricable" from each other. There is no possibility of either population being driven out, ever, which means no possibility of peace or security without some kind of mutual accommodation.
Excellent post, Pete.
Thank you, Jenny. We don’t often agree, but I’m with you today!
We don’t?? Well thank you for sticking around long enough to find something we do agree on! That warms my cynical old heart! 😂😂👏👏💕💕
We need to listen to more than one point of view. (Just in case we’re ever a little bit wrong.) I bet we agree on that also.
I wish the protesters would just hold up signs that say PEACE and nothing more because there is no more to say. Then I would believe in what they are doing and support that movement wholeheartedly. Anything else, any side taking that results in the murder of anyone, anywhere (i.e. military actions or terrorism) will not solve the problems and we will continually only get more death and war. What are we all thinking? Like how is this going to solve anything? Nothing is ever solved, is it?
Peace. There is no more to say. Whether we like it or not it is quite simple and will come down to that some day and I am tired of innocent human beings being murdered for us to get there.
Peace has been offered repeatedly by Israel to Hamas - Lay down your arms and release the hostages unconditionally, and there will be no more conflict. Hamas continues to fight and use civilians as human shields - hiding weapons and ammunition in the mattresses of a maternity ward? This sounds like a Hamas problem.
Israel, for its own sake, needs peace with Palestinians, not with Hamas. Peace with Hamas was always impossible - equally so before Oct. 7 - because war with Israel is the *entire purpose* of Hamas. It is the basis of their power and reason for existing.
This is why it was so deeply cynical for Netanyahu to (by his own account!) deliberately empower Hamas relative to the PA, and to cross-border peace initiatives.
Would you hold that sign ‘PEACE’ in front of Allied soldiers in world war 2?
It's hard to get upset with PEACE. My American grandfathers prayed for it in battle and my American grandmothers prayed for it at church with others during the war. It is the one thing that supersedes all; that we all agree on.
The price of fighting ruins all of us for many generations.
I understand the point you are making that this is about protest specifically and so takes on a different context because that is what the essay is about and that is what my comment was directly about.
So even addressed in only that matter, this is not WWII..not yet anyway. We are not army against army yet about to embark on the loss of millions more. We don't want it to grow to that point, we all so very much want it to wane. That is why I clearly stated that I wish the protesters would not take sides at this point (even if they hold a particular side) and only call for PEACE. From a protest standpoint I would find that unifying and the absolute right energy and pressure point to put on all world leaders. Nothing more nothing less. Just that simple prayer.
That prayer for peace ended October 7. Reality bites.
Absolutely true. They will only respect Israel when they win. Not love, just respect.
Thank you for resurrecting the term "program" to describer the October 7 massacre. It is well deserved.
POGRAM. Stupid autocorrect.
Sin has been around for a very long time and antisemitism is sin on steroids; it seems to be manifesting itself all over these days particularly as a hobby for misguided youth whose naivete is exceeded only by arrogance. With the return of Jesus Christ getting closer every day, Satan knows that his time is limited, and this stuff is getting worse. Stay close to Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel.
SPDS - student protester derangement syndrome, a sudden, irrational urge to denigrate a protest against an obviously problematic war, prompting the sufferer to use all the standard tricks of political spin and rhetorical exaggeration (selectivity, overgeneralization, reliance on certain sources of information) to portray all student protesters as hysterical and superficial. In 1968, while soldiers were raping and machine gunning Vietnamese women, you would have been making fun of the flowers in the protesters' hair.
We should all join you in criticising the hypocrisy of the universities. But I honestly do not know what makes someone get this mad at people who are almost expressing a protected belief about what have to be at least 15,000+ dead civilians, a number that is sure to climb as the Rafah offensive likely proceeds.
The protesters have not decided that "their real enemy is…Zionism", they have decided that zionism is the enemy of *palestinians *. Disagree with that all you want, march down there yourself and tell them why they're wrong. But sneering at 19 year-olds via a series of disconnected hot takes while comfortably ensconced behind a screen is both dishonorable and sad.
Tell you what Nick.....go volunteer in Gaza. March down there yourself since you are so committed to the cause. See if you can actually cash the checks your mouth continues to write via the yap-tap-tapping on your computer from the safety of your desk. Get some skin in the game for once.
Wow! What’s happening in those Universities is nothing short of vile racism. So no more lectures from liberal, middle-class moralists like you please. The last time Jew hate bubbled to the surface in the West was in the German Universities of the 1930. The similarities are both striking and disturbing. The events should worry anyone that takes even the slightest interest in history. It proves that once again, students need to be carefully guided by academics and not have their minds poisoned by cosplay Marxists that don’t live in the real world themselves. The thing that always strikes me about people who read and obsess over Marx is that they believe they have found the road to Utopia; they know all about how to destroy a society but nothing about how to actually build one!
I’ll sneer at anyone who posts a sign ‘by any means necessary’. Because I fucking know what that means. And so do you
Idiot of the Year award!!! You don’t look like you’re 19 Nicholas, and therefore have no excuse for this idiocy.
Awesome piece. I'd send you a congratulatory card, but would I have to mark it "written by a non-Zionist"?
Reminds me of the meme with a patient talking to her therapist:
Patient : I'm really anxious about the climate
Therapist : Have you tried gluing yourself to a pavement?
Excellent essay, the most interesting section for me was the discussion about Soros sowing discord. But Soros is not the only member of the billionaire class doing this and it certainly did not begin with him. It's upsetting that conservative media quickly dismisses the current ubiquity of post-modernist values in the West as "Marxist" or Communist" when in fact the corporate capitalist class has been the financial sponsor all along. I've yet to see a special by any prominent journalist, including Tucker Carlson, discussing how billionaire philanthropists have been destroying the foundations of Western societies since the 60s.
An excellent starting point is Heather McDonald's essay from 1996 "The billions of Dollars that made things worse" discussing the role of the Ford Foundation in every major disruptive movement since the 60s. Ever wondered how feminist/chicano/black studies permeated universities across America, look no further than Ford Foundation grants. Wondering who created the models for the failed welfare state adopted by Johnson's "Great Society," Ford Foundation. Ever asked yourself how affirmative action (the foundation of preferential treatment in America today) was adopted by every major institution in America, look no further than the arguments of McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy national security advisor and President of the Ford Foundation.
If you've ever asked yourself why criminals are coddled in America, and how wanting to lower crime is called racist and police are under attack, look no further than funding from a variety of foundations. Deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 60s and 70s, foundations to the rescue once more. Last but not least, climate change and the attack against fossil fuel extraction is sponsored by none other than the scions of the oil industry such as prominent members of the Rockefeller and Getty families. It could be argued that American philanthropy, as practiced by the largest foundations, such as Ford/Carnegie/Rockefeller/ are the worst things to happen to America and Western civilization. Yet most conservatives think philanthropy is another one of those great innovations of the capitalist system that has enabled the progress of the West.
There are a variety of explanations for why the winners of capitalist system are attacking the societies in which they live freely, but until independent journalists start asking the question: "Why are porminent members of the top 1% trying to destroy the system from which they benefit through philanthropy?" we may never find out what the hell is going on. Perhaps that's the point altogether.
Brilliant article, Jenny. Extremely well written, the restrained anger in every line was delicious and made your argument perfect in pitch. I think you were too fair on the 1968 Vietnam demonstrations at Kent though. All of that was so cynical, just like what’s going on now. Those cosplay students of yesteryear only became really interested in the war after Johnson went after their colleges with the draft. It was all perfectly fine for them when working class white and black boys were doing the dying beforehand. It’s worthwhile noting that many of those that squeezed out of it, like Biden who had the draft deferred an incredible five times, are now running the US via the White House and Civil Service! It seems no coincidence that those destroying the American dream right now for their own political ends are those the burnt the flag back on those soul destroying demonstrations! As far Soros and other bad actors are concerned, they can spend as much money as they like trying to bring down the west with their falsehoods because, at the end of the day, the wisdom of the crowd will always trump their lies. Especially today, we are far too well informed by social media for them to get away with it - no wonder our political elite want to shut it down! Keep up the good fight. Love your stuff.
The whole Soros thing is deliberately exaggerated by poor journalism. The WaPo had a thorough article on it yesterday explaining that bits of money via various grants had reached the students. Some several years ago. Yet all this becomes the evil Mr. Soros is funding agitation. He is the favorite boogyman.
If you’re taking WaPo seriously, you’ve got a problem. Soros is indeed evil.
WaPo presents facts after researching where the money comes from. Other 'journalists' simply take rumors and repeat them and/or take facts and twist them just to fit their point without research.
There was a time this was true. I used to love reading it, but now it is so unbelievably bias. Unfortunately. WaPo is now just as likely to propagate rumor if it supports their narriative
Edward Said. Who was the biggest liar. He wasn’t Palestinian. His crap started a lot of this horseshit.