Fascism is Trending, Quite Literally
The only appropriate place to hold a protest is in the past...
“They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.” Howard Zinn
Earlier today I was waiting in line at Wawa to pay for my 20oz Hazelnut with cream and sugar (the only time I commit such blasphemy as I generally drink coffee as God intended, black,). An elderly gentlemen, probably in his mid-70, dressed as if he just came back from competing in the best stereotype of an East Coast suburban grandpa, his voice creaking and breaking spoke a bit louder, “this is for his coffee too” he said and nodded toward the police officer standing inline between us. I’ve always had mixed feeling about this version of the “pay it forward” even though I’ve given up my first class seat on the plane for active service folks.
I watched as the old man tried to open his fist as his hand visible shook, couple crumbled and sweaty dollar bills and a few coins barely exposed by the stiffened fingers refusing to give way to the cashier. The cop barely mouthed “thank you” and extended his arm to show his coffee and something else that I did not notice because my eyes were glued to the tattoo on his forearm.
Iron cross and and what looked liked part of a number 8 and a few letters…
This fucking fascist in full uniform barely acknowledged a meaningful gesture from the member of the community, who by the looks of it could ill afford to even do it, he is technically supposed to “serve and protect” while I am sure scrolling through last night’s fascist terror porn unleashed across our once proud nation.
I am sure he wished he was there to gas our kids at Columbia or to beat up a professor at Washington University in St. Louis to within an inch of his death to… I don’t.. I can’t.. I wanted to write something about UCLA but at this point my hands are shaking and I am fighting off tears for the third time today because what I saw live streamed across the campuses in the United States of America last night was indistinguishable from the live streams from Tbilisi, Georgia:
Cops kneeling on protester's heads
Snipers on rooftops overlooking student commons
Campus police tackling professors trying to deescalate violent arrests and protect their students
Cameramen being arrested for livestreaming the crackdowns
CNN correspondent Miguel Marquez tweeted: “I've covered lots of this sort of stuff around the world, and I've never seen this many police moving into one area.“
If I was not holding back a little, I may have used a certain comparison.
Thanks to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (I mean outside of Yevgeniy Prigozhin, has there been a more self-inflicted career suicide?), barely a couple of days ago I thought to myself that even though it is an incredibly low bar, we finally found something that we all can agree on: shooting a puppy in the face or really killing a dog is beyond the pale. I am glad that we as a society could pass this test! Yay us!
Apparently, that’s as far as our empathy, compassion and most of all humanity extends nowadays.
You can think what you will about student protests across hundreds of the American colleges and universities, you can think what you will about antisemitism and Zionism, NONE OF THAT JUSTIFIES WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT ON OUR WATCH. We’ll get back to the antisemitism and Zionism in a hot minute, let’s first focus on why none of that or anything else matters. Before the bloody hell of fascist stormtroopers was unleashed on our children, before these GI Joes wannabe started to beat up journalists and arrest hundreds of faculty and students, we learned that it was all easily avoidable and without the alleged hysteria of Hamas boogeyman or whatever evil de jour was on duty last night.
Throughout the day, administrations of multiple schools announced reaching agreements with student protesters and end to the encampments and craziness. For example, Northwestern University announced it has reached a deal with pro-Palestinian protesters, ending an encampment of students and faculty, but allowing peaceful demonstrations to continue through June 1. To “appease” these revolutionaries, Northwestern had to agree… *checks notes* to:
"Answer questions from any internal stakeholder about holdings, held currently or within the last quarter, to the best of its knowledge and to the extent legally possible,"
Reestablish an Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility in the fall, which will include representatives from students, faculty and staff,
Pledge funding for two Palestinian faculty members and the full cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduate students annually.
Under the agreement, Northwestern says tents will be removed immediately but one aid tent will be allowed to remain. Protesters will need to suspend the use of "non-approved" amplified sound." Protesters who refuse to follow the agreement will be suspended and non-affiliated individuals must leave campus.
Brown University reaches a deal with the protesters last night as well. Students have agreed to clear encampment by 5pm. In exchange the Brown University Board will vote on a divestment measure in October, among other concessions.
Unlike other schools, Wesleyan University went even further, saying it will not clear an encampment so long as it remains non-violent:
Such a stark difference to the jawdropping campus-wide email sent by the University of Chicago's president:
Princeton University, before any protest encampment was even created, preemptively told the students: if you set one up on university property, you get one warning to stop. If you don't stop, you'll get arrested, be barred from campus, and face academic discipline.
Indiana University, went even further, having snipers (!!!) on the roofs throughout the protests, what’s more, is that even though there’s plenty of pictures and videos of the snipers on the rooftops, and even a pictures of one of the deans escorting the snipers, the university DENIED that there were any sharpshooters deployed.
Echoes of Umberto Eco’s “the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak” are still resonating in my mind.
In other words, unless you are a bloody fascist like Governor Abbott celebrating the arrests of protesters because of the views he says they were espousing, which is obviously a ridiculous violation of students' free-speech rights or the administration of Columbia or UCLA, there clearly were ways to avoid the massacre last night.
Why did not Columbia and others take such a path? Why has the situation in Gaza spun colleges into chaos? One of the students during these protests asked: "Why does a university invest in an arms manufacturer in the first place?"
Because over the last few decades our higher education campuses have been weakened as actual communities, where people mingle, interact and get to know and trust each other. Because, our higher education institutions have been deteriorates from educational centers to moneymaking schemes for profit. And of course because I truly hope that the young people that we raised really really do not like seeing tens of thousands, many of them children be starved and blown up?
The post World War II neoliberal ideals and especially the trickle-down shift led to non-stop slashing of public funding, gradual privatization, skyrocketing of tuition and a trillion dollar student-debt crisis. I mean it’s been less than three decades since I was a freshman at Rutgers. My first year, including room and board cost me either $6800 or $8600. It’s been a while and I don’t remember exactly, but really, either is far cry from the almost $32,000 it would cost this year.
One demand students are calling for across practically every single protest is Israeli divestment. Divestment, in and of itself, is not a new request. It is something that has been requested many a time in the past, most notably in the 1980s in protests against the South African apartheid. We barely talk about this and even less about why colleges and universities are so resistant to divestment, now more than ever.
The reason for this resistance is largely because over the years colleges shifted their endowments from low risk to private equity and hedge funds who were promising and delivering big returns. Obviously, the more you invest, the more you will get in return. This meant that schools started to shift toward funding fields of study that would produce future wealthy donors - in other words NOT humanities. In theory, this should have been a positive for the schools, faculty, students, etc. Sadly, in reality, rather than spend the billions in endowments on financial aid, lowering tuition, funding faculty or staff, it is used to improve branding and rankings.
I am not an accountant but I assume there’s significant tax implications here for both, the institutions and the donors - donors write the donations off and colleges, as technically non-profit organization, avoid taxes all together. Who pays? The students and the faculty of course, and the American taxpayer.
This is precisely why you keep seeing arseholes like Bill Ackman threatening the colleges and the students. Hey, at least Ackman is transparent in his fascism. Others, like New England Patriots owners Robert Kraft, are much more nuanced but still hold a $14 billion over Columbia’s proverbial head as a threat.
Let’s summarize, we have out of control cost of tuition, college affordability evaporating, cuts in many fields of study, low pay for staff and faculty, yet endowments grow and grow. Hedge funds promise money and invest in anything that does regardless of morality. Universities want money in their endowments, so they accept it and pay BILLIONS in fees to hedge fund managers.
The landscape of hedge funds and endowment has made colleges more resistant, not simply because they care about Israel but because so many of their investments are tied to Israel (and the military industrial complex). So, anything to jeopardize that will be ignored, dismissed, or rejected. So in the end, colleges and hedge funds have an codependent relationship which is ultimately harming colleges and making them less financially stable. And colleges are forced to sacrifice their morality in favor of money. And students become less and less important to them.
I mean, look at it this way, college president roles have evolved into more of external de facto CEO rather than internal academic/scholar dedicated to the educational mission of the school. They don’t care about the voices of students and faculty, as it is no longer a community of learning, they only care about the external voices of those with deep pockets who will fund their lavish salaries and help improve their rankings.
We heard and read so much about the spoiled rich brats being bored and therefore protesting about something they know nothing about… Yet somehow, Yale is able to pay their police officer almost $100k a year.
The salary in and of itself perhaps would not have raised my eyebrow if not for the knowledge that NYPD annual budget exceeds military budgets of most countries in the world and well, I don’t even want to know what the fact this contraption yesterday is supposed to be:
In my college days, I worked for the campus PD as part of the student security program for three years, one as a supervisor. Let me tell you from that hand experience, the cops I worked with (and I mean it with the deepest respect) were more like Paul Bart rather than the Rambos from last night… and don't even get me started on equipment. But I digressed…
Just a few years ago, many politicians and university administrators vigorously defended the free speech rights of white supremacists and homophobes to speak and protest on campuses and refused the safety concerns of BIPOC & queer students. The same politicians and university administrators now are brutally repressing kids whose only crime seems to be their desire to express their right of freedom of speech, empathy to those suffering and demand to turn back the clock and just maybe return our higher ed institutions to what they should be: communities of learning rather than money mints for the Wall street.
I mean…. They're fuckin' kids with signs, folks.
That's all they are.
You can go about your business.
These aren't radicals. As someone told me the other day: "It's a bunch of nerds sitting on the ground praying, chanting and doing homework." Most of them are still going to classes.
If you really think about, a multi-racial, cross-class, and multi-generational anti-genocide movement is a good thing.
As Ben Ehrenreich writes, “for anyone who is new to this (or under 30), ten years ago the idea of huge Palestinian solidarity encampments spreading over more than 100 US college campuses would have been entirely outside the range of political possibility. Yes, please register this; it's incredible, previously unthinkable.” Yes, I am about to talk about antisemitism. But before we address the current discourse, let’s take a quick trip down the memory lane. Specifically, let me share Keith Gessen’s reminder on the actual antisemitism at Columbia through the history:
Want to know a secret? Columbia University, like most elite institutions in the U.S., does in fact have a rich history of anti-Semitism. The English Department for years did not want to hire Jews; they felt Jews could not teach the poetry of Wordsworth. Lionel Trilling became the first tenured Jewish prof in English in the 1940s, but only after being told that as a Freudian, Marxist, and Jew, he would not fit in. Brian Boyd in his Nabokov biography tells the story of a Columbia professor at a dinner party complimenting the newly emigrated Nabokov on his beautiful Russian. “All we hear around here are Yids.” (Nabokov, whose wife Vera Slonim was Jewish, got up and left.) Joseph Pulitzer, who gave the original bequest to the university to start its Journalism School (where I teach), was kept off the name of the school and the building that housed it, for years, because he was Jewish. I could go on. Jews were kept out of these spaces not by leftist revolutionaries but by genteel white supremacists—the very people whose descendants now claim to be worried, very worried, about anti-Semitism.
I’ve shared this take from David Austin Walsh, on my personal Facebook the other day:
I mean, look, there are really two distinct (albeit overlapping) antisemitism discourses.
One is an attempt to unfairly smear campus protestors as antisemites to delegitimize them.
The other is an intra-Jewish dispute about who gets to be considered authentically a Jew.
There’s plenty about the former all over the interwebs and I’ve touched on it last time myself, but for the most part, nothing that's happening on campuses now -- sit ins, building takeovers, encampments -- is at all outside the standard vernacular of student protest. What's unusual is administrators calling in riot cops on their own students. There are entirely too many accounts clearly demonstrating the remarkable contrasts in the vibes at the off-campus versus on-campus pro-Palestine rallies.
The college kids have been remarkably disciplined and on-message; the off-campus protests, meanwhile, continue to be dominated by PSL-type weirdos and unlike the campus protests, there *is* actual overt antisemitism at the off campus ones. Clips like this from Monday's Passover seder at the Columbia encampment - Jack Halberstam reads an especially contemporary interpretation of the Four Children - continue to show the same thing: not only are the student protestors, as a whole, far from antisemitic, but the encampments are actually spaces where people are collectively engaging with Judaism in powerful and liberating ways.
Yes, there’s been plenty of actual examples of antisemitism and outright pro-Hamas propaganda. However, the generally accepted narrative is that all the protests and most students are antisemitic, if not openly pro-Hamas. “I should note: I don't say this lightly, but this is exactly the kind of weaponization of antisemitism for political purposes” and specific to here and now it is weaponization of antisemitism by the fascists and for the fascism.
If you are buying and promoting this narrative, let me tell you, you are not being a “friend to Israel,” you are literally being a fascist corroborator.
There are entirely too many people professing to care about Israel who are bloody white nationalist garbage or vile neo-nazis or Christian fascists and they do not care about Jews AT ALL. I’ve shared the poster for the Christian nationalist United for Israel march at Columbia last week, here’s one of the organizers explaining that they're actually excited about rising antisemitism: it's a sign the End Times is near and Jews will convert to Christianity.
As Julia Ioffe wrote, the *most* antisemitic thing happening on college campuses right now is the fact that Republicans have goaded college presidents, who now fear for their jobs, into joining the GOP in using Jews as a political weapon.
The head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt has stressed repeatedly that he is concerned about rising antisemitism. Unfortunately, he has also made clear that he cares about antisemitism only as he defines it and as it affects people who agree with him. That’s why according to ADL the number of antisemitic incidents skyrocketed last year, since Greenblatt unilaterally decided to start including “From the river to the sea” as examples of antisemitic incidents. Well, I understand the sentiment and I know exactly why Greenblatt may argue that it is an antisemitic phrase… except, I happen to dislike maps that show only one state comprising all of Israel-Palestine.
This is only one of dozens of receipts of Israeli officials or organizations or governments openly erasing Palestinian statehood and clearly stating that Israel exists from the river to the sea. I mean, it is literally in the Likud’s party charter! The only people I despise more than hypocrites are the fascists. Lucky me, in this case they happen to represent a Venn circle.
Oh and their collective hypocrisy has no bounds. Columbia still has its official website up lionizing the protesters of 1968 who occupied university buildings to protest the Vietnam War until the NYPD, in Columbia's own words, "stormed" campus, creating a "fallout that dogged Columbia for years.
The other day I’ve read that settler colonialism is turning into the new neoliberalism, a real thing that people twist to whatever political point they want to make that has basically nothing to do with the original issue. I wish I bookmarked it so that I can give credit and link, but this is in a sense a good segway to the second discourse on antisemitism that David Austin Walsh mentioned.
In my entire almost 50 years I have never felt myself more Jewish than over these last few months while being labeled a “self-hating” Jew. The greatest tragedy of the Jewish people since the Holocaust was not the October 7th massacre, it is the devil’s bargain that American Jews made post-World War II with the white Christian Americans: they have made a golden calf of their own liberation, a Moloch, and are sacrificing the men, women, and children of Gaza to its flames. In a dark twist of historic irony, Jews in the name of Zionism are desecrating what we have called holy, we have become Amalek.
In the 1950s, with McCarthyism (which was incredibly antisemitic) starting to wane and the success of the establishment of the state of Israel, many American Jews (similar to the rest of the world) started to become less and less religious. This created a significant void. Jewish community, the essence of being Jewish, for better or worse, was built around the shared religious practices and experiences. Secular Jews began to be accepted in golf clubs, upscale condo associations and resorts and of course across American academia and corporate institutions (mind you, we are yet to see a truly prominent Jewish politician - with all due respect to the distinguished Senator from the great state of Vermont).
You are invited to a brunch on Saturday with the colleagues, do you accept or say no because you vaguely remember being bar-mitzvad’ed a couple decade prior?
You are invited to a Christmas party at your boss, do you accept or stay home and celebrate Hannukah, even though you barely recognize the tradition?
"Assimilation," in the most neutral sociological sense started to take place: Jewish Americans began to move literally and metaphorically freely in American society, as an indivisible part of that society. The cost? The loss of the millennium old sense of community, newly founds false assumption of assumed “whiteness” and most of all, gradual institutionalization of Zionism from a nationalist movement to essentially a religious cult culminating with what we see today: complete and utter inability to recognize that criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism is not only NOT antisemitic, but actually is necessary unless you want a monolithic totalitarian fascist cult, which with Bibi, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and the rest of the Kahanists, it really has become.
Here’s Charlie Kirk for example, reiterating this myth when he says: “Jews are experiencing the hate that we white people have been experiencing the last decade.”
Just yesterday, Smotrich was saying: “moments before redemption, we must not hesitate. We must destroy Rafah, Nusseirat, & Dir al-Balah, wipe out the memory of Amalek! […] There's no half- measure. Rafah, Dir al-Balah Nusseirat absolute destruction!”
Combined with Bibi’s insistence that Israel will proceed with an offensive on Rafah even if internationally brokered talks with Hamas result in the release of hostages and a ceasefire and Israel’s plans of checkpoints to prevent “military age” men from fleeing Rafah, especially in lieu of Israeli Ambassador to Serbia recently stating that Srebrenica was not a genocide (!!!) makes Smotrich’s statement full of unquestionably genocidal language.
Professor Waitman Wade Beorn writes, “What if we retire the term "Zionist," leaving it with the 19th and early 20th century meaning of "people who wanted to create a Jewish state?” He is not alone in contemplating this. If you think this is a “woke” response to current affairs, here’s Hannah Arendt’s personal narrative, circa 1963, where she mentions her relationship to Zionism.
Is Hannah Arendt now is a self-hating Jew? Asking for a friend.
I am not holding my breath getting an answer.
Pretty much all of the rhetoric against the students and the protests is either outright dumb, weaponized propaganda, bad faith arguments or cherry picking to drive the agenda.
I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that roughly one third of argumentation now is, "Yeah? Well...you're ugly."
Asking the important questions here, like “why isn’t every student at a top school a money-hungry sociopath?
Perhaps the worst example of the misleading ways that antisemitism is often reported is this thread.
The university, even when presented with undisputed evidence, still went ahead and suspended the protesters even though it was the pro-Israeli counter-protesters with the antisemitic verbiage.
James Surowiecki is absolutely right when he says that:
“The contrast between cops' rapid and violent dispersal of left-wing anti-Israel protests on public university campuses over the last two weeks and the leisurely, peaceful way cops dealt with neo-Nazis marching through a public university campus in Charlottesville in 2017 is pretty striking.”
Last week I was horrified at the comparisons between Columbia University and Charlottesville. I’ve said that it’s beyond unacceptable to compare the two. I was wrong. There is a clear parallel - just that the dudes who were marching with the tiki torches in Virginia seven years ago, likely are the guys wearing riot gear cheerfully kicking an unconscious kid on the steps or watching as counter-protesters at UCLA fire fireworks directly at the pro-Palestinian camp, beaten several people, hit people with sticks, fired pepper spray into the camp. All of it on video. Where are the police?
Oh right, they were likely marching through the streets of Charleston, WV. Not only are they not local, their leader had to get permission from a judge to travel there because he’s out on bond. Contrast this picture, masked fascists smugly strolling through a public street with no police presence whatsoever, with that of the hundreds of students being brutalized by riot cops on college campuses around the country for sitting on the grass to protest a genocide.
I have been at Palestinian protest encampments in the West Bank that were attacked by settler mobs as soldiers watched (and then joined in) so what’s happening at UCLA is all kinda familiar. Ben Ehrenreich
However, by far the most vile narrative is based on how spoiled and bored the students and Gen Z in general are and that the protests is just a narcissistic cry for help and attention. Here, Eve Barlow goes all out to paint the entirety of student protesters are “Gen Z kids who are the most “privileged” brats to ever roam the earth have been filmed blocking Jewish students from entering their own universities, attacking them with tazers, and being verbally and physically abusive to a degree that would be horrifying to anyone if their victims were Black or gay or truly anything else. In America in the last ten days, a domestic war is being conducted against Jewish people.”
I mean, if we are okay with comparing these kids to neo-Nazis at Charlottesville, why not compare them to the January 6th “hostages.” The irony that to these people, Jan6 terrorists are freedom fighters who are being unjustly persecuted is completely lost.
They can’t even fathom that the kids we have raised and taught are actually capable of logical reasoning and some basic organizational skills. Never mind that back in my own college days I remember that it really did not take all that much to organize a sit in or take over of a Provost office by chaining ourselves to the radiators.
It gets worse.
The vile and absolutely apeshit crazy bullshit from the fringe like this
enables the elected officials to quickly jump to this:
and this:
Make no mistake: This is fascism and if you are still supporting the administration of the universities, mayors, governors, and all others who are desperately trying to cling to the past, you are no different than they are:
Your support and enable fascism and if you happen to be Jewish, whatever definition of that word suits you best, you’d be one of the first in line to be cleansed and you will have no one to blame by yourself.
It’s not like it's only the crazies. Here’s a reasonable never trump conservative Tom Nichols essentially repeating the same bullshit premise as Eve Barlow.
Abraham Lincoln once said:
When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
Perhaps I’ve lived in some sort of an alternative reality, but even if I slightly stretch the timeline, the first 25 years of my life on this planet included the fall of the Soviet Union, Screbrenica and Rwanda genocides and 9/11. I am sorry, it should not be a competition but if these fucks wants to ignore Mr. Wolf’s apt advice and start a dick measuring contest, Gen Z kids will win by a mile:
9/11
Forever War
Great Recession
Ferguson
Trump
COVID
BLM
January 6th
Ukraine
Gaza
If that’s not enough of a lifetime trauma, these children grew up learning active shooter drills at the same time as they were being potty trained (yes, I know I am exaggerating) and were forced to hide under their desk and be shot way, way, way too many fucking times, over and over and over, while we stood by, speaking in platitudes and doing nothing.
The only liberation is a shared liberation.
As protests against Israel's genocidal war in Gaza spread across college campuses, I'm thinking a lot about what Harvey Milk said:
Hope will never be silent.
I have hope. I have hope because these children give me hope. Because one person in a wheelchair holds off 50 riot cops at City College, which the NYPD has barricaded.
US Congressman Greg Casar joining the protest said, “My message to the university is clear: students and faculty are not the enemy. Students and faculty are the university.”
The faculty and students clearly understands it and this earns the faculty at Columbia tons of respect points, because your number one duty as a faculty member is to your students.
The lesson of Columbia and other protests is that nearly every college student should be prepared this fall to march on their President's office over the fees that will be used to pay for echelons of admins and campus rent a cops who'll only ever be used against them.
Were they wrong on Vietnam?
No.
Were they wrong on South Africa?
No.
Were they wrong on Iraq?
No.
They won’t be wrong on Israel, either.
Signed, a former historian.
“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
