Everything the Media is Getting Wrong About the College Protests

As of right now, students do not have access to where their money is going when they pay tuition fees to this university.

So, crucially, our first demand is full disclosure of financial investments.

Crucially about Israel, right?

Well, we want to know where all of the money is going.

We think that that's key for students to know where their money is going, whether it's about Israel or not.

But then, with this knowledge, we would like to pursue full divestment from two things.

First, from all arms manufacturing companies.

Whether it's the current genocide in Gaza or other armed conflict around the world, our university should not be investing in that.

This is a situation where we should be learning and contributing to education and a safe community, not to international conflict.

And secondly, we request and demand that the university divest from all holdings and any entities that sponsor or are complicit in Israeli occupation, apartheid, and the current genocide in Gaza.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I have bronchitis right now, as you may be able to hear, and I was initially going to take the week off to just try to deal with it, and I ultimately...

And I ultimately decided not to do that because of how passionately I feel about what we're going to talk about today.

So I have my cough drops, I have my coffee, I have my inhaler, and I hope that you'll bear with me through the rasp and the nasal while we just try our best to muscle through it today.

So, the other night here in New York City,

quite close to my apartment where we're recording this right now, hundreds of New York police clad in riot gear, guns drawn, descended upon Columbia University's Hamilton Hall, where about a hundred students were occupying and protesting for Columbia to divest from Israel.

The New York police arrested those 100 or so students.

As this was happening, I was tuned in to WKCR, which is the Columbia student-run radio station.

It's run by 10 or 15 Columbia University students, and they were on the ground reporting live from what they were describing as this chaotic, pretty violent clash between police and student protesters.

So I'm getting reports from Teddy now that there may be an unconscious student in front of Hamilton.

Do you have any further confirmation of that, Teddy?

Yeah, I have a view of video from someone in Harley looking down onto Hamilton.

And yes, there's an unconscious student on the ground.

They have removed most of the debris and furniture on the side.

And there's an unconscious student on their side on the ground in front of Hamilton.

Yes, and we now have a confirmation that there is a fire alarm going off in Hamilton Hall.

We are not sure of the cause of that.

I would also like to note that I did see one student being dragged.

The student did look very limp.

I'm not sure if that was a form of resistance or if that was the student who had passed out.

And I was flipping back and forth between WKCR and CNN, and I could not believe the difference in what this small on-the-ground student-run radio station was reporting to a few thousand listeners versus what CNN was reporting to the rest of America.

And what we have seen on the videos so far is actually the most organized and calmest and most professional police intervention we've ever seen on a college campus.

I could not reconcile these two accounts of what was happening at Columbia University in real time.

It seemed impossible to me.

The intellectual dishonesty with how these campus protests are being reported has gotten so egregious that I just started to make a list of everything I saw which was incorrectly reported.

At first, due to what I think is an understandable lack of information available at the time, but what's turning into what increasingly feels like a commitment to misunderstanding and misrepresenting this movement and these students.

So, today I'm going to attempt the impossible task of correcting the record.

And I say impossible because there's just so much partial or total misinformation about what is happening across America right now.

Nevertheless, we will try.

Before we get into it, if you would like to support the show or myself as a creator, the best, best, best way to do that is through Patreon.

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And one way or another, I hope that you can kick back and strap in because I have over 20 pages of notes to get through right now.

So let's just start.

All right, a little background.

You probably know this, but we're going to do it anyway, just so everything is in context, right?

Following the October 7th attack seven months ago, which killed roughly 1,200 Israelis, Israel has been conducting a brutal airstrike campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, as well as ongoing indiscriminate killings of Palestinians in the West Bank, which has resulted in the deaths of over 34,000 Palestinians, with thousands more missing under the rubble, also likely dead, and these numbers are just growing every single day.

More than 14,000 Palestinian children have been murdered, and thousands more have been orphaned.

More than half of all homes in Gaza have been destroyed.

Three quarters of school buildings have been destroyed.

Less than a third of the hospitals in Gaza are even partially functional.

Israel has continued to designate safe zones, which I put in air quotes, for Palestinian refugees inside of the Gaza Strip.

only to bomb these safe zones, the most recent of which has been Rafah.

We are witnessing one of the most horrifying crimes against humanity of our lifetime, for which Israel has been globally condemned basically everywhere except the United States, because the United States is Israel's strongest ally and provides Israel with billions of dollars in military funding every single year, which comes out of our tax dollars.

So, yes, I do think you should have an opinion about this.

Many American universities, which are, at the end of the day, businesses, invest in companies that do business with Israel and, by extension, profit from Israel.

Some of them invest in companies like Google, which works directly with Israel by providing technology to the Israeli defense force.

And so what started less than a month ago as a single protest at Columbia University has grown to tens of thousands of students at more than 100 American universities protesting and demanding that their schools disclose which companies they have financial ties with and divest from the ones which profit from their partnership with Israel.

Hence, you may have heard the slogan, disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest.

There has been so much said about these protests over the last few weeks, so much hand-wringing about who these students are, why they're protesting, the methods that they're using to protest.

And so I've tried my best to separate what's being said and I think what needs to be corrected about the discourse on these protests into like a few different buckets.

And we're just going to start going through them and taking an honest look at what the hell is really going on here.

Campus anti-Semitism in the United States is once again the center of a contentious House hearing, this time the head of Columbia University.

Of the ways that the hatred of Israel and Jews has erupted on college campuses.

Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases they lost the plot.

The fear among Jews in this country is palpable right now.

The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a new bill to fight anti-Semitism.

The measure, which will now be considered in the Senate, allows the Education Department to restrict funding to universities that tolerate anti-Semitism.

There is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for anti-Semitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.

The first thing that I want to address are the accusations of anti-Semitism, which you've probably heard about.

On Passover a couple weeks ago, the the White House put out a statement condemning a rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses directly tied to these protests.

Marsha Blackburn tweeted, terrorist sympathizers are threatening the safety of Jewish students during Passover.

We cannot tolerate this disgusting behavior in the United States.

There have been non-stop segments on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, all of them about this supposed dramatic rise in anti-Semitism on campus.

And I want to talk about that for a second.

And as you probably know, I'm Jewish, but I'm not going to make this entire argument rest on the fact that I'm Jewish.

I want to zoom out for myself for a minute.

To start, it is not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel.

It is not anti-Semitic to call for your university to divest from Israel.

Israel is not synonymous with Jewish people.

Israel is a state.

A state which for 75 years has subjected the Palestinian people to a brutal apartheid regime.

I know, I know, I said apartheid.

Some people are going to get mad at me, but let's talk about it, right?

When I say apartheid, what do I mean?

Well, if you're Palestinian, there is a demoralizing checkpoint system which restricts your ability to move and travel.

There is the regular seizure and demolition of Palestinians' homes.

There is the denial of citizenship to Palestinians.

There is the denial of the right to return for Palestinian refugees who were displaced.

There are the unlawful killings of Palestinians, which, like I said, the killing of Palestinians in the West Bank has just like been a thing for way longer than this most recent escalation of violence.

There is the illegal military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which are the Palestinian territories which surround Israel.

And there are the Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, which have been globally condemned as illegal.

This isn't my opinion.

None of what I just stated is like, well, I think that's happening.

This is just what's what's been going on in Israel for 75 years.

This word apartheid, it's treated like a buzzword, but it's not.

It's what's happening.

And accusations of apartheid have been levied by members of the United Nations, by Amnesty International, and by a whole bunch of other human rights groups.

So, no, Jews are not Israel.

And it's so intellectually dishonest when people conflate these critiques of Israel as a violent, racist apartheid state with anti-Semitism.

And in my opinion, and this is my opinion, it's bad when people, like a lot of the people that we're going to talk about today, conflate Jews with Israel.

Because when the whole world is looking at Israel as this ruthless apartheid state, and you're over here on CNN saying that that's offensive to Jews, that wraps us all up in the crimes against humanity that Israel is committing.

That's why so many thousands of Jews, like myself, are saying, not in my name.

Do not commit this genocide in my name.

I do not sign off on this.

I do not want this.

This is not Judaism.

This is nationalism.

Even just the other night, thousands of Israeli citizens in Israel are marching in the street calling for a ceasefire.

Are you going to accuse thousands of Jews in Israel marching, calling for in part the same thing that the students at Columbia are calling for, anti-Semitic, while they're marching down the streets of fucking Tel Aviv?

So what's actually going on here?

Is there anti-Semitism on campus?

Well, I'm not going to say it hasn't happened.

There have been a few rare documented examples.

And I'm mentioning this because I think it's more effective to address and condemn this bad behavior, no matter how rare, instead of sweeping it under the rug out of concern that it'll make your movement look bad.

I think this is what a healthy movement and what a healthy community should do.

Like, this is not the Catholic Catholic Church, you know?

And so, for example, one of the student leaders at Columbia was caught on video saying Zionists don't deserve to live.

That's despicable.

There's no room in an anti-genocide movement to call for the killing of other people, no matter how much you disagree with them.

And this person was rightfully condemned, and they were banned from campus.

And I think a healthy movement does push this shit out.

So there have been rare and most definitely abhorrent instances of anti-Semitism, but there's really no world in which these instances represent the movement as a whole.

Like for the most part, cries of anti-Semitism are mostly smears attempting to shut down any valid and necessary criticisms of Israel.

And why is nobody talking about how many Jews are participating in and often leading these pro-Palestinian protests?

I've been to some of them.

I've been to anti-Zionist Jewish protests where hundreds and sometimes thousands of Jews are in attendance and getting arrested.

What about the safety of Jewish students who are protesting in support of the Palestinian cause?

When we're having these never-ending conversations about the safety of Jewish students on campus, which Jewish students exactly are we talking about?

Simone Zimmerman, a student at Columbia, tweeted from the Columbia encampment, which has now been raided and shut down.

Tonight at Columbia, Jewish students led a full Shabbat service at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

Minutes later, Muslim students had their evening prayer service, all surrounded by love.

Please do let the world know.

There are ways to live that aren't being a paranoid bigot.

Another Jewish Columbia student named Jonathan Ben-Menachim, in an article called I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia, don't believe what you're being told about campus anti-Semitism.

He wrote, here's what you're not being told.

The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus.

Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto our campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates.

Just the other day, Annalise Orlik, a middle-aged woman, a professor at Dartmouth, was wrestled to the ground and zip-tied by cops while trying to protect her students from being arrested.

Annalise Orlek says she was there to support her students students when she says police threw her to the ground.

The violence came with the police.

The violence was welcomed in by Dartmouth and

it's really outrageous.

It's really shameful in a sleepy little campus, you know, in a rural area like Dartmouth that they brought in this ridiculous

show of arms and strength and violence.

Annalise Oralik is a Jewish woman and the chair of Jewish studies at Dartmouth University.

And so while hundreds of Jewish students and professors are being arrested on campuses across the United States, CNN aired a segment with host Dana Bash where she talks to Zionist influencer and actress Noah Tishbe about supposedly rampant anti-Semitism on campus.

Where does this hate come from and how is it connected to the pro-Palestinian protests we see raging on college campuses?

Joining me now are Noah Tishbe and Emmanuel Acho.

And then turns it into a promotion for Noah's forthcoming book where she once again monetizes the claim that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

So I do believe that this book couldn't have come in a more appropriate moment in our culture.

Ted Cruz, okay, this one is fucking remarkable.

Ted Cruz tweeted, quote, the anti-Semitic protests at universities are funded by George Soros.

What?

You are using an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about like Jews running the banks and the world to smear anti-war protests as anti-Semitic?

What is going on here?

Am I losing my fucking mind?

You know, there's something so disingenuous about far-right politicians like Ted Cruz suddenly being so concerned about anti-Semitism on campus after spending how many years allowing and sometimes actively embracing wildly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to thrive on the right?

I mean, Fox News for the past three weeks has been running non-stop coverage of this supposed wild rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Fox News, until they fired Tucker Carlson last year, ran 400 episodes of Tucker Carlson where he was talking about the great replacement theory, which is an anti-Semitic conspiracy that says that racialized groups, including Jews, are conspiring to replace the political power and representation of white Americans.

These are media moguls and politicians who have happily proliferated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that put Jews in danger about Jews running the banks, about Jews running the media, about Jews this and Jews that, and George Soros and the Jewish cabal.

These are people who have happily flirted with QAnon.

And now they're going on and on about how we must condemn anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Like, this is not about anti-Semitism.

These people don't care about the well-being of Jews.

These people care about limiting our ability to criticize Israel, which we should all be doing.

Because once again, Israel has killed 34,000 Palestinians in the last seven months.

And while we're on this topic still, like, Why is there so little discussion about Islamophobia on campus?

Where are the United States Senate hearings about racism on campus?

Last week, this video went viral from Ole Miss of these white fraternity students harassing this black woman who was protesting in support of Palestine.

And they were jeering at her and yelling at her and filming her.

And one particular student went notably viral for pretending to be a monkey and making monkey sounds at her.

And so, surely, there's going to be widespread media coverage on Fox News and MSNBC and CNN and the New York Times to denounce racism on campus, right?

I mean, it hasn't happened yet, but it's coming, right?

I'd like to take a quick break from the show to thank the sponsor of today's episode, Blue Land, who, along with my supporters over on Patreon, make it possible for me to spend 12 hours a day going down right-wing online rabbit holes, which you know what?

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And now let's get back to it.

So the next thing I want to get into is why these students are protesting.

There's been this prevailing rhetoric that the students who are protesting across college campuses don't really believe in the cause that they're protesting for, or they're misinformed, or they have ulterior motives, or there's some foul play.

There's been this ongoing narrative by a lot of media people that seem to think that all of the protesters on college campuses are just like doing this to feel cool.

Olivia Rheingold wrote in the Free Press an article titled, Camping Out at Columbia's Communist Coachella.

And so here's an excerpt from that article.

It's a Monday afternoon at Columbia University, but hundreds of students are not in class.

They're camped out on a lawn in front of the main library, making friendship bracelets, painting scraps of cardboard, and gossiping about the Zionists on campus.

What should I do?

A girl with a mullet pops out of a tent to ask her friend.

She's holding a Sharpie in her hand, staring at a blank poster board.

I'm thinking, dikes for divestment.

A few steps away in front of a sign that says paint your nails for Palestine, a girl is fanning her freshly polished red toenails.

Nearby, a student with Farah Fawcett's hairstyle, except purple, is frantically asking other students if they've seen her vape.

Okay, Olivia Rheingold.

Like, yeah, okay, first of all, they're making friendship bracelets and painting their nails.

Hello, they're college students, but also, can I pose an honest question?

How should they be protesting?

Because when they're chanting in the streets, you call them disruptive.

But when they're laying out in the grass, you make fun of them for not going to class.

But when they break into a building, they're violent.

But when they're making friendship bracelets and having blue hair, they're pathetic.

What do you want them to do?

How can they get their message across in a way that Olivia Rheingold of the Free Press will approve of?

Philippe Lemoyne wrote on Twitter, my basic model of student protests is that in general, students don't know shit about what they're protesting against.

They do it because it's cool, makes them feel like they're part of something important and they want to be with their friends.

And then Nate Silver responded and wrote, this is probably right.

Most people don't form political opinions through deep examination of the issues or reasoning from first principles.

It's more like picking some particular fashion label or way of dressing.

especially for younger people who face more peer pressure.

Look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that like groupthink has no place in this whole thing.

When you're a late teenager in your early 20s, you want to feel part of something.

It feels good.

No denying that.

But I really struggle to believe that that's the chief motive here.

How hard is it to believe that college students don't want their tuition money to support the indiscriminate murder of Palestinian civilians?

Why is that such a hard thing for us to like, why do we have to invent a hundred different conspiracy theories about they want to feel cool, they want a place to vape, they want to paint their nails, they want to feel like they're a part of.

Why is it so hard to imagine that a lot of these students are just against death?

Scott Galloway, an NYU professor, went on the news to say that students are turning to, quote, anti-Israel protests because they're not having enough sex.

Part of the problem is young people aren't having enough sex, and so they go on the hunt for fake threats.

And the most popular threat throughout history, type into Google anti-Semitism and pick your century.

Like, okay, first of all, have you ever met leftist college students?

They're fucking.

Trust me, Scott, they're fucking.

Like I mentioned before, there are ironically anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that these pro-Palestinian protests are funded by left-wing Jews, which is made even more ironic by the fact, by the way, that there have been pro-Israel counter-protest demonstrations, which were literally funded by billionaire Bill Ackman and Jerry Seinfeld's wife, Jessica Seinfeld.

Just last week, while pro-Palestinian students were sitting peacefully in their encampment at UCLA, a group of about 100 pro-Israel counter-protesters got extremely violent with them, tearing down their barricades and shooting fireworks into their encampment.

And just before that happened, Jessica Seinfeld was posting on her Instagram story about how she made a personal $5,000 donation to pro-Israel counter-protesters at UCLA.

And the billionaire Bill Ackman did the same thing for GW.

So, like, okay,

why are the students protesting?

If it's not the sex, if it's not to feel cool, it's not to feel like you're part of something, why are so many thousands of students protesting?

Young people like myself, like all of these college students, like frankly anyone online, we have been bombarded with images of dead Palestinians every day for seven months.

It is really not hard to understand why tens of thousands of student protesters at hundreds of universities across America and the world are asking their universities to stop funneling their tuition money to support apartheid and mass death.

It's just not.

Next, are the protests violent?

The university protests have been widely categorized as violent, as extreme, as dangerous.

Protesters have often been referred to as terrorists, which also feels like a particularly racialized smear.

Just a few days ago, President Biden tweeted, quote, in moments of dissent, there are always those who rush in to score political points.

But this isn't a moment for politics.

Okay, Joe.

This is a moment for clarity, so let me be clear.

Peaceful protest is protected in America.

Violent protest is not protected.

It's against the law.

So I would like to start this segment by clarifying that 99% of these protests are, and I cannot stress this enough, students sitting in the grass.

Isn't it pretty remarkable how right-wing media has spent years convincing us that American college students are the most delicate little soft snowflakes, socially incapable of meeting the pizza delivery guy at the door.

But now they're telling us that these same 19-year-olds are well-funded, well-equipped terrorists capable of the destruction of America?

I want to address and correct some wildly misrepresented events that have happened at these protests, starting with the flag poke incident.

Sahar Tartak, a Zionist activist and Yale student, was filming pro-Palestinian demonstrators on campus when one of these students, who was walking past her and clearly has no idea that she's standing there filming because it's crowded, accidentally pokes her with their pro-Palestinian flag.

This event was uncritically reported on as a stabbing by a hundred different media channels, including Fox News, where Sahar made a guest appearance to talk about how she was stabbed.

Anti-Israel protests turning violent, injuring our next guest.

She wrote a column on this saying, quote, I was stabbed in the eye at Yale.

Barry Weiss, again in the free press, wrote an article called, They Were Assaulted on Campus for Being Jews, where she writes about how, quote, at Yale, Sahar Tartak was stabbed in the eye.

And then she also publishes in the free press a first-person narrative essay from Sahar Tartak called, I Was Stabbed in the Eye at Yale.

Quote, the school has allowed anti-Israel students to run roughshod over their most basic policies.

Yesterday, I paid the price for their inaction.

Sahar,

you were accidentally poked.

And I'm sorry for that, to be clear.

I'm sure it was, at worst, unpleasant.

I don't envy you for having been poked, but are we fucking for real right now?

You guys are lucky I have bronchitis and can't really like emote properly in the way that I would to these stories because my goodness.

Morning Joe, MSNBC's morning news show, ran a segment where they invited the New York deputy commissioner to come on and show to the camera one of the chains that they collected after arresting student protesters at Columbia University, where he said, quote, this is not what students bring to school.

This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities, trying to make the case that these students were like uniquely violent and had access to these like professional tools of destruction and terrorism or something.

It is a bike chain.

It's a bike chain.

And so my question is like, okay, whatever.

The cops are idiots.

But like, did none of these normal ass people on the set of Morning Joe look at this guy showing to the camera a bike chain, calling it some like kind of uniquely professional weapon, and be like, hey dude, that's a bike chain.

Why was this aired?

Why was this tweeted by Morning Joe after it was aired?

Has no one ever ridden a bike?

Has no one ever locked up a bike?

What?

Fuck me.

There have been a lot of photos published in local and major news outlets of the pro-Palestinian encampments looking like total messes with the tents toppled over and waste everywhere and garbage and just like shit strewn about.

And these photos are supposed to serve as evidence that these are violent protests, that these are disorganized.

But the thing is, all of these photos have been taken right after the cops raid the encampments, which is why there's never any students in these photos.

It's like, yeah, the encampment looks a mess because there was just a violent clash with police and nobody was given any time to clean up.

Of course, this is how it looks right now.

And so, all of this is to say, I just am not buying into this thing that, like, these

protest encampments are putting like students at risk.

Like, they're, again,

just kids sitting in the grass.

And yes, sometimes they're chanting, sometimes they're marching.

These are the hallmarks of what it means to peacefully protest, you guys.

But you want to talk about what's actually endangering students with violence in this situation?

Cops and the sometimes violent counter-protesters.

I'll give you some examples.

Like I mentioned earlier, peaceful protesters were just sitting in their UCLA encampment when they were violently attacked by pro-Israel counter-protesters who shot literal fireworks into the encampment.

They were tearing down the walls.

And before we can even move on from this, I want to mention that the Los Angeles Times wrote an article about this where the headline initially and correctly says, UCLA cancels classes after counter protesters violently attack pro-Palestinian camp.

That's accurate.

That headline was changed to after violent protests at UCLA, UC president launches investigation into response.

Violent protests?

Who was violent?

Who was doing the violence?

They were peaceful protests until pro-Israel counter protesters shot fireworks into the camp.

Again, this isn't my opinion.

This is the timeline of events.

It's all well documented.

I don't understand why there is this unbelievable resistance to describing these events for the public as they're actually happening.

And mind you, while the pro-Israel counter-protesters were violently attacking the peaceful ones, the police did nothing.

It was only later that the police came in, raided the encampment, and arrested 200 peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters.

And right after this raid occurred, the LAPD police chief Dominic Choi tweeted, quote, I am thankful there were no serious injuries to officers or protesters.

This is a lie.

This is a lie.

I don't even know how you lie like this when there is footage of cops raiding the UCLA encampment and shooting rubber bullets at students.

Rubber bullets hurt, you guys.

Like rubber, rubber bullets is not like toy gut.

Like rubber bullets fucking hurt.

and students were injured and there are photos of injured students in the hospital with bloody heads like this one one person who was at the encampment uh tweeted a selfie of their head wrapped with blood coming out of their chin uh and they captioned it that was me dot dot dot free palestine and then they tweeted another photo from the hospital where they're holding up their bloody kefia and they tweeted the caption thank you everyone for the well wishes.

Leaving the hospital now with 11 staples and four stitches in my dome.

Despite all of this, I'm so proud of everyone that was there tonight and I'm filled with hope.

We will see a free Palestine in our lifetime.

How does the LAPD police chief tweet there were no injuries, no one was hurt?

And you have this fucking guy on a hospital bed covered in blood.

from being shot with rubber bullets by your cops.

Hamilton Nolan tweeted something that I thought was really astute and summarizes everything I've been saying, which is, he wrote, quote, having police violently break up protests and then calling them, quote, violent protests is an old trick that succeeds only when the press takes the bait, which is what's happening now.

Yeah, that's what's happening now.

These are peaceful protests that are being violently broken up over and over again, only to be called violent protests, which they are not.

When the New York Police Department entered Hamilton Hall to arrest all of the students who were occupying it, you know, the story that I opened the episode with, it was confirmed by the Manhattan DA that one of the cops' guns fired when they were inside of Hamilton Hall.

That is violent.

That is putting student safety at risk.

It's not chance.

It's not even breaking a window.

That is a gun firing.

That is a student that could have been dead.

And you want to tell me that the real threat to student safety here is a bunch of kids sitting in the grass, painting their toenails, as was so astutely reported on in the free press?

Yeah, sure.

Let's talk about Hamilton Hall for a second.

Hamilton Hall is a historic building on Columbia University's campus that pro-Palestinian protesters broke into at around 1 a.m.

on April 30th, a week ago, and occupied through the following night when they were violently arrested by hundreds of NYPD in riot gear, which is what I was talking about at the top of the episode.

Columbia students have a history of occupying Hamilton Hall in protest.

They did it during the infamous 1968 student protests against the Vietnam War and the construction of a segregated gym.

And they did it again in 1985 during the student protests calling for Columbia to divest from South African apartheid.

All of these protests, by the way, were also viewed as nuisances at the time, and of course today are regarded as as righteous and brave.

On the night following the break-in last week, all of the occupiers in Hamilton were arrested.

Footage from that night showed students being shoved to the ground.

One particular video shows a student being thrown down a flight of stairs by a cop.

It's pretty jarring shit.

Now, in order to enter Hamilton Hall, a few of the student protesters broke a window on the door of the front entrance.

There were a number of photographs that became extremely well circulated of a masked student using a hammer to break the window on the door.

These were the photos that launched, you know, a thousand think pieces about how violence is bad.

And I have a few feelings about this.

First of all, yes, this is a type of illegal and non-peaceful protest in the sense that, yes, destruction of private property occurred.

I will happily differentiate this from what the vast majority of this protest movement is, which is, again, like I have said, students sitting in the grass.

But this is also, at the end of the day, a broken window, right?

And I have a hard time taking it seriously as anything more than that, especially when Israel has been bombing Gaza relentlessly for seven months, which very few American politicians seem to really care about stopping.

There are no universities left in Gaza.

You know, a lot of these pro-Israel people keep making jokes of like, well, if the student protesters, if they want to protest so badly, then why don't they go to school in Gaza?

Hey, dude, there's no universities left in Gaza.

Israel bombed them all.

And especially when we live in a country built upon this exact type of protest.

Following the break into Hamilton Hall, Biden led this press conference where he said, quote, dissent must not lead to disorder.

Dissent is essential to democracy, but dissent must never lead to disorder.

My dude, Joe, you are the president of a country that prides itself on its history of exactly that.

You know, when civil rights activist John Lewis said, get into good trouble, you know, good trouble, that slogan that Democrats love to trot out, like John Lewis wasn't referring to voting for Hillary Clinton.

There's been this ongoing myth that everything we're seeing right now on college campuses bears no resemblance to previous successful protest movements, which, you know, unlike the current movement, have all been seared into American history as decidedly good things.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, which is a very influential pro-Israel group, tweeted this jab at protesters where he wrote,

You're not actually taking a stand if you're unwilling to stand up and be counted.

The heroes of Seneca Falls, Birmingham, Stonewall, and so many others, they faced far graver risks and never tried to hide their faces, nor menace those with whom they disagree.

There is so much here, but I just want to start with:

what do you guys think Stonewall was?

Do you think Stonewall was a meeting?

Do you think Stonewall was an email?

Do you think Stonewall happened in a conference room?

Stonewall was a riot.

Stonewall was violent.

People threw bricks.

Yeah, that's the first brick at Stonewall.

That's not just a meme.

That's a thing that happened.

And you know what?

It's also why gay people have rights.

What does anyone gain from sanitizing history like this?

You know, Rosa Parks broke the law by refusing to give up her seat to a white person.

Like, I know it's unthinkable now that that was the law, but that was the law.

The black college students who congregated every day in 1960 at a whites-only lunch counter in the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworths department store were illegally occupying space in a privately owned business.

People were arrested at these sit-ins.

These sit-ins that are widely revered in America today as like brave and righteous.

And not only were these protesters arrested at the time, but people disapproved of them then.

Gallup, the polling organization, released this poll that they did in 1961, where they asked people if they thought whether or not sit-ins were hurting or helping the civil rights cause.

More than than half of people in 1961 said that sit-ins at lunch counters were hurting the civil rights cause.

Don Lemon also tweeted a jab at the Columbia students, writing, peaceful nonviolence was the predicate of the civil rights movement.

Taking over a building and destroying property feels January 6th-ish to me, shrug emoji.

What are you talking about?

What's the point of this?

The civil rights movement was filled with events that, strategically speaking, very closely resembled the occupation of Hamilton Hall.

Why are we sanitizing history like this?

There's also been this collective outcry from traditional media and TikTokers alike that the protesters on these college encampments won't talk to them, or they ask the media people to speak to specifically chosen media liaisons from the encampments.

And this is supposed to be like evidence that the protesters are hiding something sinister about the encampments encampments and that their intentions as a movement aren't as transparent as they seem.

This girl, Montana Tucker, who is a singer and influencer with 3 million Instagram followers, for whom she's been posting pro-Israel content over the last several months.

She also went to the Grammys wearing this pro-Israel dress.

She visited one of these college encampments in California, and when they wouldn't speak to her, she started crying as if she had been attacked.

We've been seeing all over the news all the craziness that's happening on college campuses, especially at UCLA.

So I decided to come here for myself.

Do you mind if I interview?

I'm not going to talk to media.

Excuse me, do you guys want to tell me what's going on here?

No, sorry.

I'm not letting any media if you can't just help me.

Okay, we were just standing outside just trying to

ask you guys a few questions.

A lot of us just don't feel comfortable.

I can direct you to media liaison.

We're not gonna

interview with you today.

Not gonna engage engage with people that are gonna be

pushing us.

Never seen anything like this in my life.

No, agitators aren't allowed to.

They won't speak to me.

No one will speak to me.

There's a desk over there with mediators.

I've spoken to them.

They won't speak to me.

Well, then you can try to go.

I've tried.

And this lady specifically is telling me I'm an agitator.

Don't engage with agitators.

Just trying to understand what you're protesting.

For some reason, no one from your guys' team will let you guys speak.

And I don't know why you guys can't speak to me.

And like, this is so intimidating and scary for you guys to be standing here.

I literally have walked around for the past two hours just asking peaceful questions: like, what's going on here today?

Why are you guys here?

And no one can speak to me.

And you guys are laughing.

I don't understand how this is funny.

I genuinely wanted to learn from you, and I wish we could have ended in a hug.

That's actually what I hoped from this.

That's my dream from all of this: that we could understand each other.

Sister, why are you crying?

You are a famous influencer who walked up to a peaceful protest with a camera crew and expected content.

And for what?

Why do you feel entitled to this?

And why is the fact that they wouldn't give you TikTok content threatening your safety?

Your safety was never threatened.

They just don't want to talk to you.

And that's their right.

ContraPoints, who I obviously love and who's been on this podcast a few times, wrote, conservatives spent 20 years scavenging student protests for monetizable triggered lib content and now are are shedding literal tears that protesters won't talk to them anymore.

Put simply, students are seeing through the bullshit.

Like, yeah, they're not going to give you TikTok content because they know exactly what you're there for.

Another TikToker did this and it like again went viral on Twitter with all of these journalists being like, why won't these evil protesters talk to us?

What are they hiding?

I'm in New York City right now standing outside of a Palestine protest.

I want to know if they actually understand why they are protesting and see if they can give me any good answers.

What are you guys out here protesting for?

No comment.

Why are you guys out here today?

Speak to the organizers.

Why can't I?

I wanted to ask you though.

Official statements from the organizers only?

In the simplest terms, why are you guys protesting?

Why are you guys protesting today?

I'm okay thank you.

Yeah,

I don't think it would be a good idea if we

just to be a part of the cause.

And what's the cause?

Yeah, I'm not the right person to talk to either.

It's not our job to talk to.

We're just showing the support.

We're not the spokespeople of this event.

This is the wrong people to talk to.

I'm not asking for the spokesperson.

I'm just asking why you guys are protesting.

I'm not, I can't, I, this is, why are you guys here today?

We're not interested in speaking with you.

Peggy Noonan, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, visited the Columbia University encampment before it was torn down by police, and she wrote an article about her visit where she wrote, quote, I was on a bench taking notes as a group of young women, all in sunglasses, masks, and keffiyas, walked by.

Friends, please come say hello and tell me what you think, I called.

They marched past, not making eye contact, save one, a beautiful girl of about 20.

I'm not trained, she said, which is what they're instructed to say to corporate media representatives who will twist your words.

I'm barely trained, you're safe, I called, and she laughed and half halted.

But her friends gave her a look and she conformed.

Like, what, Peggy, what do you want?

This hand-wringing about protesters avoiding the media is so ridiculous to me because this is literally just good organizing on behalf of the students.

And I, for one, think it's really impressive that they continue to demonstrate their ability to do this.

They are avoiding being manipulated in some of the very ways we have discussed over the last hour.

Like, the kids are all right.

I want to top off this episode by highlighting one more thing that I see kind of a lot, which are comparisons drawn between pro-Israel rallies and pro-Palestine protests.

A lot of people will tweet videos and photos from these pro-Israel rallies, where they'll be upbeat,

no one's wearing a mask, seems kind of jubilant, and there will oftentimes be these like snarky remarks made about how like this is how the Israel side protests, you know?

And that's, of course, supposed to be contrasted with the sometimes anger and the masks and the tension that can sometimes occur at pro-Palestinian protests.

You know, the pro-Israel gatherings will often look more like parties, where the pro-Palestinian protests will look like protests.

And all I really want to say to that is it's not a protest if you are on the same side as the state.

What exactly are you rallying for?

More money to be be sent to Israel?

There are these sinister implications that are often attributed to the fact that so many pro-Palestinian protesters wear masks, and there's a really simple explanation for why that is.

First of all, COVID and the flu.

But second of all, we live in a world with AI facial recognition technology and in a world where simultaneously people's jobs and opportunities and offers are being threatened for being involved with the pro-Palestinian cause.

That's just not happening to people involved with pro-Israel activism.

And so, if we're speaking about the fear of professional repercussions, you have no reason to be masked at a pro-Israel rally.

Your jobs aren't being threatened.

Your offers aren't being rescinded.

You have aligned yourself with power and you have aligned yourself with the state, at least on this issue.

You're not protesting, you're just hanging out.

There's a lot more, I think, that we could say

Trying to correct what has been incorrectly reported and portrayed about these protests has been, at least to me, it's felt like a game of whack-a-mole where every time you correct one thing or attempt to set the record straight, CNN or Fox or the New York Times publishes another thing that is just like wildly untrue or skewed to make pro-Palestinian protesters look bad.

And

it's just, it's an impossible task.

But today,

today we have tried.

I want to close this episode by expressing my utmost support for the pro-Palestinian protesters.

I support this movement, and I support these students.

Just the other night, I was in Washington Square Park where a number of Jewish students from the pro-Palestinian encampment at NYU, which is where I went to school,

led hundreds of people in the park for Friday night Shabbat services in solidarity with Palestine.

And it was extraordinarily beautiful.

It was extraordinarily well organized.

These students have such power and such clarity in their convictions, despite all of the madness in the media.

And they gave me so much hope.

And they also just solidified my belief that like This is also a Jewish movement.

This is a movement, the pro-Palestinian movement is one that inevitably has so much space for Jews because liberation is a Jewish value.

Again, if you would like to support the show, the best way to do that is Patreon.

If you made it this far, I really appreciate you.

If you learned something or perhaps would like to share this episode with a friend or a relative who keeps sending you links to things that are telling you how unsafe Jewish students feel on college campuses.

Interestingly, never the pro-Palestinian Jewish students are being violently arrested, but, you know, or they're sending you stuff about how the protesters are violent or like this, that, and the other.

Like, if this was helpful to you, maybe it'll be helpful to someone else.

I really appreciate you tuning in.

I have tried my best to accomplish what I set out for today.

And I guess it's up to you to decide if we've done a decent job or not.

But honey, we tried.

Bronchitis and all.

I'm going to go take a shower and have some tea.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

Seriously, I do.

And it means a lot that you listened today.

And until next time, stay free.