Meanwhile on the International front....

It's about a bunch of stupid kids (and maybe outside agitators manupilating them). But it is true that when the cops get involved, you then have a situation (in this case) where you are adding a bunch of stupid cops with no sense, to a situation with a bunch of stupid kids, and that has the potential to end badly.

Thankfully, in the Columbia sweep, it looked like they handled it reasonably well, even if they called in enough cops to really occupy Gaza, presumably to make sure everyone on the force got some overtime pay. Too bad the foofs in Columbia's administration who dithered and let it get out of hand don't have to foot the bill. It was a win-win for Mayor Adams. Public opinion will be with a "law and order" stance, and he got to grease the police.

 

Anecdotal. ... but 1) Spot polling I saw from various campuses showed that most of the actual students didn't have very extreme views, even if they skewed sympathetic toward Israel or Gaza. I get that it could have been a small minority getting a lot of attention, but a lot of this felt like it was something out of Beirut or Amman, not the U.S., and in fact, a lot of what you were getting wasn't just anti-Israel, it was anti-American (which may naively appeal to some of the students who have been raised with the simplistic oppressor / oppressed thing I keep bringing up, and which is why they have been so easily manipulated). But what you have been seeing in the encampments has been extreme and didactic (and hateful), not 19-year-old-protesty. 2) At least in NYC, the materials showing up at NYU and Columbia were remarkably similar, suggesting coordination of some sort. 3) Yesterday, a mob of idiots chanting inane slogans took over Penn Station, acting rowdy (and FWIW, they all streamed through the emergency door to ride the subway without paying). ... they were catching an uptown A train heading for Columbia's campus. I was assuming they weren't students.

 

I think we tend to simplify what was actually happening (as people were experiencing it at the time) after the fact, which is why you came up with that conclusion. Anything from the 60s or early 70s has gone down as "Anti Vietnam," so that simplistically it is "right side of history." But there was a lot of idiocy during that time period. The building occupations on various campuses, students dressing up and acting like revolutionaries, the sometimes violent things that happened, etc. weren't all that noble. Much of it was just 19-year-olds acting like 19 year olds, and they often crossing the line.

One thing I would also point out. ... I wouldn't just consider the history in the U.S. We're not that exceptional in reality regardless of our past, and we're susceptible to the same mob behavior that has been on the wrong side of global history throughout time. January 6 should have awakened people up to how that might happen here in a way that a lot of people think, "Nah, could never happen in the U.S."

And if you look globally, some of the most oppressive places on earth were borne from student movements and protests, including Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba and the student movement in Iran that seized the American embassy, held hostages and made the Ayatollah into a dictator. Mob behavior is very often NOT on the right side of history.