Isn't standing still something Texas DPS just naturally does when they're near a school https://t.co/WI3y7LqD7F
— zeddy (@Zeddary) April 24, 2024
I guess Gov. Abbott couldn’t bear thinking that all the ‘MURIKA FVCK YEAH’ wingnut applause be garnered by sissy LEOs on elite coastal campuses, so he decided to Make A Show of sending out the Jackbooted TX Cowboy Thugs(tm) to clear out them pesky kids. Maybe he figured that state troopers bashing undergrads would somehow erase the memories of local law enforcement standing around while fourth-graders were slaughtered in Uvalde?
UT Austin right now. Protesters and DPS in a standoff on the main drag of campus pic.twitter.com/OipxvXDbWC
— Ryan Chandler (@RyanChandlerTV) April 24, 2024
Count on the students to act like… dumbarse college kids…
BREAKING: UT Austin students link arms as Texas State Troopers approach on horseback after making several arrests.
But the students are undeterred.
“APD, KKK, IDF they’re all the same!” pic.twitter.com/C3nk8LFWig
— BreakThrough News (@BTnewsroom) April 24, 2024
What an incredible video of Texas State Troopers forcefully arresting a local Fox News reporter at the Palestine protest at UT Austin. There's no reasonable justification for this. https://t.co/qwogj2jZRb
— steven monacelli (@stevanzetti) April 24, 2024
ut austin just sent out university wide pa announcements AND emails threatening arrest + stating protestors who don’t disperse are violating multiple penal codes. mind you it was 100% peaceful except for when state troopers started body slamming and borderline trampling students. pic.twitter.com/3pRKIPeOLX
— 🌧️ (@86twt) April 24, 2024
UT Austin protesters have returned to the South Lawn pic.twitter.com/hsjJbkyOht
— Phil Jankowski 🌟 (@PhilJankowski) April 24, 2024
Here’s the scene from the current focal point of the UT Austin protest off 22nd St. southwest of the Main Building pic.twitter.com/ElHijnCz26
— Phil Jankowski 🌟 (@PhilJankowski) April 24, 2024
This photo from UT Austin is pure art. Hang it in the Louvre. pic.twitter.com/dqFXIdsp8T
— Politics & Education (@PoliticsAndEd) April 24, 2024
Nash
How are they being “dumbass kids?”
SiubhanDuinne
My mind keeps flashing back to May 4, 1970.
It is not a good flash.
Dan B
@SiubhanDuinne: My brother’s ex girlfriend was there at Kent State at the National Guard shooting.
SiubhanDuinne
@DanB (ETA: don’t know how to “reply” in a comment I’ve already posted!)
Yup. One of my closest friends was a student at Kent State at the time.
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne: @Dan B:
Sad to ponder a majority of Americans polled believed those dead students “had it coming.”
The good old days.
SiubhanDuinne
@trollhattan:
It was during the Nixon years. Nothing surprises me less.
Kay
I love how media and conservatives went from “we must protect political speech on campus!” to “shut down all political speech on campus, by force if necessary!” in the space of two weeks. I mean, “hypocrisy” doesn’t begin to describe this wholesale capitulation to censorship.
Has a single signer of the ridiculous Harper’s Letter objected to students being arrested for expressing a political opinion?
Ksmiami
Abbott is one of the worst people
Scout211
Pastor Johnson was also posing for the cameras in his speech today at Columbia University demanding that the president resign. However, the students responded with boos.
Suzanne
@Kay: It is staggering how the “free speech absolutist” crowd whipped around on this. Remember how worried they were about being “canceled”?
Then I remember: they only give a shit about their own speech.
Then I remember: they’re terrible people.
Redshift
@Kay: It’s not hypocrisy if their “free speech” advocacy was all bad faith in the first place (though unfortunately that wasn’t widely recognized.)
Betty Cracker
Have y’all ever been in a honest-to-Christ riot, a melee where cops decide to bust heads en masse? I was once, at the first concert I was ever allowed to attend. I think I was 12 or so?
Friends and I went to see Led Zeppelin at the old Tampa Stadium. The band played for about 15 minutes and left because of a thunderstorm. One friend and I were near the front of the stage, and we held our ground, hoping LZ would come back.
But the crowd pressed forward, trapping us, and the mood turned ugly. People were throwing things at the cops ringing the stage behind a barricade. The objects thrown grew heavier — beer bottles gave way to entire trash cans thrown over the barricade.
Finally, the cops came out swinging nightsticks. I turned around and ran down that field faster than Ronde Barber or Warwick Dunn ever did. It was scary!
Anyhoo, I digress. I hope the kids in Austin are safe. Fuck Abbott and his brown shirts.
SiubhanDuinne
@Suzanne:
I’m so good at this that by now I can pull off that entire exercise in < nanosecond.
Redshift
@Suzanne: Their “absolutism” was always “we absolutely have the right to say whatever we want to whoever we want, and you have absolutely no right to criticize us for it.”
Suzanne
@Redshift: Exactly right. They don’t have principles. They have a will to power for themselves, and that is all.
Kay
@Suzanne:
Absolute cowards.
They’re (now) watching ACTUAL state supression of political speech and none of them have the spine to say anything. What good are they? They’re of no practical use to anyone.
The students know people have protested on campus before. They know there were widespread protests against aparthied in South Africa and the Iraq War. They know this is an effort to supress the content of their speech, not the time, place or manner.
dr. bloor
The good news is that some really groovy songs came out between 1968 and 1970, so here’s hoping we can at least get that piece of the deal.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@SiubhanDuinne: Mine too
WaterGirl
Kay
Also, not to notice the obvious or anything, but this “arrest the students for speech we don’t like” is backfiring. There are many, many more demonstrating now than when the speech crime arrests started. This is stupid. It isn’t going to work.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: Hit reply on the comment you want to reply to. Copy the “@Dan B: ”
edit your comment, and paste in the @DanB
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Also May 15, 1970 at Jackson State.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Yikes, Betty! You have done it all.
Riot with police bashing heads, check.
Mass shooting, check.
I want to know if you told your mom what happened at the concert. Not sure I would have, for fear I could never go to a concert again.
karen marie
Motherfuckers.
Shana
@SiubhanDuinne: That was the first thing that came to my mind too. Granted I was only 11 at the time but it made a big impact even then.
stinger
@SiubhanDuinne: I knew I couldn’t be the only person thinking of that.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay:
What constitutes “working” here? Maybe the intention isn’t to stop the protests, but to turn up the heat, make everyone more afraid and divided and create a pretext to start shooting people?
Suzanne
@Kay:
Au contraire, they’re incredibly useful idiots for the Right. The whining about cancel culture was so coordinated.
Chet Murthy
@Matt McIrvin: I wondered about that, too. I remember reading that the police/protestor clashes caused a lot of normies to decide that things had gone too far (by the *protestors*) and hence they voted more right-wing. I’ve certainly read that that’s been the normie response to the large demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd (and many other Black people). Not that that’s justified: if anything, seeing the po-po wilding out in the summer of 2020 *should* have caused normies to get behind BLM, but …. well, …. heavy sigh.
RaflW
@Scout211:“’Enjoy your free speech,’ Johnson said tersely.”
For fuck’s sake, yes, that is how it works. He’s got zero credibility with young people. He didn’t go there to yell “Go back to class” because it would work. He did it to burnish his right wing-ness.
But even that comes off as weak, opportunist, and stupid. I’m clearly not his target audience, though.
Percysowner
@SiubhanDuinne: I worked with a guy who was shot in the hand at Kent State. Made his life’s mission to find out the truth about what happened that day. Finally ended up with some audio recordings of the orders going out to shoot the students.
My stepsister was on campus that day, but her classes were not near the protests. My stepmom’s reactions was that she knew stepsis was “too smart to be anywhere near those idiot kids”. Stepmom was a dyed in the wool Republican, although she hated Nixon, and was of the “they brought it on themselves” ilk. We had a fight about it. Admittedly 16 year old me was rude in my opinions. Stepmom then stopped talking to me for 6 months. I mean literally would not even say “good morning”. Never let anyone tell you the silent treatment isn’t abusive.
RaflW
@Kay: The right wants growing chaos. They’ll say “Biden can’t control these kids, you need us tough head-crackers.”
I’m not convinced that’ll work, mind you, but Johnson went to Columbia to make the situation worse, not better.
gwangung
@Chet Murthy: Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about. The campus unrest is a lever for Republicans to use to slide voters to their side.
@RaflW:
exactly,
Halteclere
I expect Abbot is hoping for some student to do something stupid and start a melee with a cop. It has to piss off the republican state leadership to have to spend time in Austin
lowtechcyclist
They think they’re going to make the protests go away by sending in the police and the National Guard? They’re monsters, and they are incredibly dumb.
Didn’t work 54 years ago. Ain’t gonna work now.
Tarragon
@WaterGirl:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PwQ6iJ8p08
Mark and Gerry of DEVO were at Kent State.
Jeffro
these psychos just want to beat on left-leaning (or really, ANY) protestors
it’s all performative fascist shit
Thank god there wasn’t anyone out there on J6 for the trump mob to fight with…it helped make this whole dynamic that much clearer: they are ALWAYS itching for violence
Jeffro
WE’RE SORRY YOUR ORANGE GOD-KING IS FLAMING OUT, FASCISTS, BUT YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT IN THIS NEW AGE…JUST WADING INTO CROWDS OF PEACEFUL PROTESTORS AND CLAIMING YOU WERE ‘KEEPING THE VIOLENCE DOWN’ WON’T CUT IT
sorry…it just seemed right
RaflW
Don’t know how widespread it’ll be, but there’s a UT Austin Faculty statement that’s been posted by a current prof at UT (sorry it’s a Xit), saying they’re calling a faculty strike tomorrow, and that the plan for today was to have been a peaceful teach-in. It clearly lays the blame at UT admin leaders and public officials who authorized off-campus LEOs to come with riot gear.
Kay
I think its particularly important to shut them down because they’re right about Gaza, and, well, we can’t have 19 year olds being right about something. Everyone would much prefer not to think about it at all.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: It worked back then. The people said the victims had it coming and Nixon won in a landslide in 1972.
Kay
@Jeffro:
These are the covid “I missed high school” kids, the school shooter drills every 5 minutes kids, the kids who got every bad break.
Can’t they just leave them alone? This group have suffered enough. Just get away from them.
raven
@Betty Cracker: yes
Harrison Wesley
Last protest I was at was anti-Gulf War II. Bush still had the 9/11 high going and US hadn’t gone into Iraq yet, so there weren’t a whole lot of us (maybe 1-200?). We wandered around the Philly city hall, speeches, signs, no trouble from anybody. Of course, we were pretty subdued – it wasn’t like the City of Philadelphia was about to strike the Middle East. Sufficiently laid back that (IIRC) we didn’t even get a write-up in the Inquirer, whose offices at the time were only a couple blocks north of City Hall. Oh, well, c’est la vie.
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
Thanks!
steve g
I don’t understand. I thought all law enforcement and militia in Texas wore cowboy hats. Also that at least half the students at universities did. Instead they all look like ordinary people and nothing is any bigger in Texas than anywhere else after all.
Why are these protests getting the administrators so wound up?
Harrison Wesley
I’m on Jim Hightower’s email list. Wonder what he’s saying about this (probably already sent something out).
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
You’re quite right, and it’s a travesty that many of us overlook that. Kent State was such an enormity, it didn’t seem to leave much room for anything else. Thank you for the reminder.
Nukular Biskits
@steve g:
Because “conservative” politicians would threaten to pull state funding unless the admins cracked down, is my guess.
Anonymous At Work
Ratfvckers in Arizona charged for election fraud: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/24/arizona-2020-election-charges-meadows-giuliani-ellis/
cain
@Kay:
I think Palestine is representing a lot of other stuff they are pissed off I am thinking.
I don’t think it is appropriate though for raging white men to wear the keffiyeh.
prostratedragon
Neil Lewis, Jr. (bsky) is aggregating a lot of related stories. The Columbia Spectator, the main student newspaper, is pretty up-to-date on that campus.
lowtechcyclist
@Chet Murthy:
The RW did a good job of spreading the propaganda that downtown Portland and Seattle had been turned into charred hellholes, and I really think that’s what it took to get normies to believe the protests had gone too far.
It’s hard to see that working with these campus protests unless someone actually does set a building on fire. People are much more okay with nonviolent protests now than they were in the 1960s; you have to remember how orderly American suburban life was in that period, and just the protests being more disorderly than everyone going to class as usual was a BFD.
An even bigger factor then was that everybody ~45 or older had been involved in WWII in some way, shape, or form. To them, it was, “we went off to war to fight Hitler, now it’s your turn to fight the commies.” By and large, normies back then believed the Vietnam war was, to quote Doonesbury‘s B.D., “right, honorable, and a credit to America,”* and the protests themselves were almost beyond their understanding.
Also, there was an element of mixed intergenerational/class resentment. Most people in their 50s and up never had had the opportunity to go to college; college was much more of an elite thing before WWII. There was a strong undercurrent of “these kids are having this opportunity we never did, and they’re crapping all over it.”
All that’s pretty much gone away now, and that’s far more than the RW propagandists can re-create among normies. The raw materials just aren’t there.
ETA:
*If you were old enough to be reading Doonesbury then, you should definitely click through.
delphinium
Yup pretty much anything to pretend being a “tough guy” when he’s a cowardly piece of shit who hasn’t done anything actually useful for Texas.
Speaking of cowards, who invited Johnson to Columbia? Of course he got booed, the students know a bootlicker when they see one.
SiubhanDuinne
@Percysowner:
I’ve experienced it. You are right.
wjca
Everyone who says “it didn’t work then” has totally missed what the whole point of the exercuse was.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t to permanently suppress protests on whatever the topic was.
WendyBinFL
One of my childhood friends and classmates, Jeff Miller, was killed at Kent State on May 4, 1970. Remember the iconic photo of a girl wailing over the body of a guy prone on the pavement? That guy was Jeff. This power play in Austin is sickening. Literally.
Citizen_X
Y’all catch that last chant (at the Dept. of Public Safety/DPS officers)? “Who killed Uvalde? D-P-S!”
@Betty Cracker: Holy shit, that’s a *legendary* Led Zeppelin concert/riot!
citizen dave
@WaterGirl:In the liner notes for the song, Young said the Kent State murders were “probably the biggest lesson ever learned at an American place of learning”
Neil Young & Crazy Horse (now with Micah Nelson–Willie’s kid–on 2nd guitar) begin their first tour since pre-covid tonight in San Diego. Would not be surprised if Ohio is an addition to the setlist.
Jackie
OT My post keeps getting eated, so long story short: TIFG’s administration staff spilled lots of info to Jack Smith re his distain for protecting Top Secret info. Remember the satellite image he posted on the former twitter of a highly classified rocket explosion at an Iranian launch site?
https://abcnews.go.com/US/appalled-witnesses-told-special-counsel-trumps-handling-classified/story
Kay
@cain:
Disagree on “raging”.
In every instance they’ve been peaceful until the police show up and start instigating. The Texas state police actually advanced on them. I watched it.
wjca
Threat to their job security. Especially in a state like Texas.
Melancholy Jaques
Republicans and right-wing media (but I repeat myself) are working feverishly to convince the world that the student protestors are Biden-loving Democrats. Tom Cotton said they are Biden’s base. Guess they haven’t seen all the Genocide Joe memes.
Fake Irishman
@Matt McIrvin:
or a pretext for Trump to invoke the insurrection act.
it really frosts my shorts that these goons are also the ones that insist that abortion clinic protesters have to be allowed to protest within 10 feet of abortion clinics for 1st amendment reasons.
WaterGirl
@citizen dave: Neil Young was probably right about that.
Still touring? That’s great. I would not be surprised, either, at Ohio.
WaterGirl
@Jackie: I looked and there’s nothing in SPAM or Pending or Trash.
Can you send me an email with the text of what you were trying to post?
Chet Murthy
@wjca: After the way the first round of uni presidents got defenestrated for trying to do right by their students, nobody else is gonna take that risk. When the trustees call for busting heads, they’re gonna bust heads.
RaflW
@Anonymous At Work: Wow. “Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers (R) … speaking in 2022 before the House committee, said he remembered Giuliani saying during that meeting, ‘We’ve got lots of theories — we just don’t have the evidence.’”
Keep indicting these criminals. They’re all such pieces of trash.
Martin
I will keep noting that my former employer that had non-stop student-led Israeli/Palestinian protests from the mid-2000s until now – about 20 years straight – hasn’t hit the news. No arrests. It’s not that we never had arrests – we did a decade+ ago – but we learned a lot about what to do and not do during those experiences.
The GOP has been particularly at war with higher education for the last 6+ years. This is a perfect opportunity for them – a situation where the public doesn’t get to hear the students, but where they can march in with cops and national guard and showboat during congressional meetings, and demand presidents step down, proclaim universities aren’t safe, and all that. We’ll have more faculty firings after this. Funding cuts. The situation at UT will be a pretense for replacing any non-Abbot bootlickers on the board of regents.
I’ve made a whole bunch of posts on previous days about these situations, but I want to clarify one point. There will be talks about freedom of expression. There are equivalencies between these events and allowing conservative speakers. There will be comparisons between the first amendment and campus policies. But there’s a different view here:
You extend freedom of speech rights to students that you do not extend to outside speakers, to the public at the university, to the faculty of the university, to the administration of the university. Students are the customers of universities. They are also there to learn. Learning requires the space to make mistakes with minimal consequences provided that they don’t harm others. That’s the whole fucking point of the exercise. If you can’t do that at universities, then just shut them down, because there’s no use for them. Faculty have a similar set of rights in academic freedom. It’s a little different form the students rights but similar in intent – faculty need to be able to escape conformity, because that’s how scholarship works. Radical ideas often become conventional ones. Students want attention, but a certain kind of attention. With the wrong attention, things get out of hand really quickly, and they aren’t experienced in handling that.
Our goal with the protesting students was to make sure they understood the ‘don’t harm others’ part and to give them a nudge when they got close to that line, and to encourage them to explore ideas when they do it collaboratively (yelling doesn’t help that). And in that process to shield the students from consequences beyond the minimum – reminding the cops this was an administrative matter – and we would let them know when it no longer is because we were present and engaged. That meant stepping in front of the cops. It meant telling the DA that charges were counterproductive. There were lessons there for the students in the interaction with other students, there were lessons in the meta around the whole event – how power has its own agenda that you will become a part of against your will, and so on.
This is going to leave a lot of damage. Again, I don’t feel particularly bad for the Ivies. They have a few billion in endowments they can dip into to fix their problems. They create a lot of their own problems. But it’s bad for higher ed overall. The damage at UT will be much more lasting. Politicians will tear it apart.
But a good rule of thumb – don’t turn your customers into your enemy.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
See my response to Chet Murthy @53.
Steve in the ATL
@SiubhanDuinne: @Percysowner: I have a wife and two daughters. I’m unfamiliar with the concept of “silent”.
topclimber
@delphinium: I thought Columbia wanted to keep outside agitators off campus.
NobodySpecial
I’m reminded a lot of protests I’ve seen in foreign countries where the first ones to assemble were the college kids and the first things the fascists did was jail the students and close the schools. Tinpot dictator wannabes, all of them.
WaterGirl
@Steve in the ATL: I recall reading a study about how many words women have a day to “spend”. To the surprise of no one, most women spend way more words in a day than men do.
Jackie
@WaterGirl: I posted the link up above that tells the tale.
Or, you can click my name to get there directly 😊 @Jackie:
Percysowner
@Steve in the ATL: Be grateful, really.
Scout211
@Jackie: Your link doesn’t work. Try this one.
ETA:
It’s a long read but very good article with so many examples of Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, throughout his presidency and beyond.
WaterGirl
@Jackie: thanks. I was looking more for the exact words you were trying to post so I could figure out what might have been triggering your comments to totally disappear. :-)
Kristine
@Martin: Thank you for this.
Another Scott
@Martin: That’s a wise comment.
It would be good if readers other than at a nearly top 10,000 blog could see it.
Maybe https://www.chronicle.com/ ??
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jackie
@Steve in the ATL: Three females in your household, and you’ve NEVER been given THE. SILENT. TREATMENT???
I say you either time your travels well, or the wine has rendered you oblivious!
Martin
@Chet Murthy: The problem is even after they do that, they will suffer the same fate. In the moment it might seem like the prudent move to be the enforcer for the fascists, but the fascists always kill the enforcers.
The only thing you can do is stand up to them for as long as you can and take the consequences. There are worse things than losing your job.
Jackie
@Scout211: Thank you! Added insult to my attempts at posting AND the link doesn’t work… Thank you, again! It is a great article – showcasing all the cooperation SC Smith is getting from TIFG’s staff.
Dan B
@WendyBinFL: Awould to hear about your friend. Almost half the kids in my high school who went to college went to Kent State. There must have been more people I knew who were there.
Plus Jackson State which resulted in more deaths but not much footage.
Kay
@Martin:
It’s the preemptive surrender that gets me. For God’s sake don’t volunteer.
They do this BEFORE anyone orders them to. It’s as if the slightest bit of conflict just has them so rattled they’re throwing their students up as human shields.
Jackie
@WaterGirl: I think due to the length of the article, my back and forth copying and pasting caused me to hit the wrong button – more than once. 🤷🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️
Harrison Wesley
@Kay: They’ve just adopted the motto of the Uvalde SWAT team: “Hey, a man could get hurt….”
stinger
@WendyBinFL: How awful the current events must be for you. My sympathies.
Ksmiami
@Chet Murthy: it was a very different electorate
@Matt McIrvin:
Ksmiami
@Chet Murthy: it was a very different electorate and everyone has video phones etc
Dan B
@Dan B: Autocorrect, sigh.
Awful to hear about your friend Jeff.
WendyBinFL
@Dan B: Jeff Miller was brilliant, sweet and funny. His death was devastating. Grateful for your empathy.
WendyBinFL
@stinger: I appreciate your kind thoughts.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Martin:
There has to be a way to prevent this from happening
Ksmiami
@Kay: I don’t think they are entirely right about the Gaza situation- I mean Bibi’s approach is horrible, but Hamas are not heroes.
citizen dave
@Martin: Like Another Scott, I also say your post/you are a wise man, Martin. I second widening your audience. I really noticed this thought: “Radical ideas often become conventional ones.”
I remember reading once years and years ago how the U.S. Socialist Party didn’t do much in the way of electoral wins, but many of its platform policies were subsequently adopted. Not sure if it was this year in particular, but just found this by googling (and am dumbfounded that their convention took place in my adult city on Indianapolis although maybe Eugene Debs was involved–from Terre Haute). The Socialist Party Platform of 1912. https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-socialist-party-platform-socialist-party-national-convention-indianapolis-indiana/
Kay
@Ksmiami:
35k dead civilians and half a million approaching famine conditions is indefensible, and people in power in the US know it. We’re not even complying with OUR OWN laws on human rights violations. What they want is to shut the students up completely because they don’t want this ongoing human rights catastrophe mentioned. At all.
YY_Sima Qian
It’s not just UT Austin. UMN has also cleared student encampments & made arrests, although w/ campus police rather than from the outside. The mass arrests at Columbia last week is causing ripples all around the country. The reactions from university administrators & local/federal government will probably inflame the situation further. The way malevolent interests are looking to suppress student protests on college campuses & voices critical to Israeli conduct in Gaza is pretty disgusting. Donors & politicians threatening university admins. Tarring peaceful protests w/ Antisemitic extremists outside of campuses that are looking to take advantage of events to further their own agenda. Forcing student organizations to self censor by withholding employment prospects at top law firms or financial institutions after graduation. All rather reminiscent of the tactics that Hong Kong government & the CPC regime propaganda department employed against the then relatively peaceful protest movement there in mid-2019.
There is immense pent up frustration among the younger generations in the US (& all across the world), due to rapidly rising cost of education, rapidly rising cost of housing, being among the hardest hit by pandemic induced inflation, gloomy & uncertain prospects for material improvement, & a feeling of having their voices & interests ignored by those in power (such as lack of urgency in responding to AGW, & making responding to AGW subservient to natsec). Advocating for Palestinians & criticizing Israel is an outlet to rebel & vent their frustrations. I am afraid the reactions, & not just by the reactionary R state governments, will only reinforce their cynicism & intensify their rebelliousness.
Relegated to the footnote of the welcome passage of the aid package to Ukraine (& Israel + Taiwan) is the fast tracked legislation (w/o much debate) to force the divestment of TikTok from its Chinese parent company (ByteDance) w/in 270 days, or face being banned. TikTok is the most popular & most relevant social media platform for the younger generations, & it has been the most friendly platform for pro-Palestinian voices, when many felt such voices have been suppressed (to an extent) on Facebook & Instagram. ByteDance will surely fight the legislation in the courts, & the PRC has export control laws that would forbid ByteDance from selling the source codes to the algorithms (where the value is) to a foreign entity, which would render divestment unviable. This drama will play out throughout the campaign season, & become intertwined w/ the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protest movement, & w/ other illiberal forces all looking to take advantage from the chaos, be their Antisemites, Islamophobes, Sinophobes, Cold Warrior militarist/primacists, or Herrenvolk authoritarians, or foreign governments (Russia, Israel, the Gulf States, the PRC, etc.). Young people will also be confused by the contradictory messaging that TikTok represents an emergency threat to natsec, & the Biden campaign staying on TikTok through the election campaign to reach out to young voters.
If you dig a bit deeper into the reporting, it seems that the effort to ban TikTok was floundering as late as early Oct. 2023. What gave it renewed & immense momentum was the prevalence of voices critical of Israeli conduct in Gaza & supportive of Palestinian rights (& yes, Antisemitic voices mixed in, just like on the other platforms) on the platform post-10/7, in sharp contrast other social media platforms, which then put pressure on the Israeli government as well as all actors in the US government (legislative & executive). Instead of appreciating the generational gap in sentiments toward Israel, due to decades of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, the politicians & think tankers (& it is bipartisan) decided that America’s young were being brainwashed by a CPC influence campaign.
If all it took to brainwash America’s young people was Bytedance engineers tweaking the algorithms in TikTok a bit, then individual human agency is not what it cracks up to be, & liberal democracy is unviable because the its foundational assumptions/assertions are invalid.
Kay
@Harrison Wesley:
oh it hadn’t escaped my attention that this is the school shooter drill cohort of students!
No one can keep them safe in 2nd grade but this whole elaborately costumed police force shows up when they grow up and express a political opinion.
kalakal
Mrs kalakal went to Kent State a year or so after. She’s still friends with Dean Kahler who was paralysed from the chest down. She knew a lot of the Kent 25, she’s never forgotten it.
prostratedragon
@Martin: To part of your point, it was after the Columbia crackdown that Stefanik called for the resignation of Shafik.
Kay
@Martin:
They have to have noticed Republicans called for the Columbia president to step down AFTER she preemptively caved. It didn’t matter at all that she set police on students – they still want her fired.
Because of course they do. When has trying to placate the Right ever worked?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@YY_Sima Qian:
How could you possibly know this is how things will play out? No one can predict the future
YY_Sima Qian
@Kay: I think Shafik was caving to the rightwing donors. We should harbor no illusions about the kind of political-economic interests that these institutions (private universities, MSM) are ultimately beholden to, even if they can serve as havens for permissive social values.
YY_Sima Qian
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t know how long the TikTok drama will play out (probably longer than 270 days), but there will be drama during the election campaign, because there will be court proceedings and possibly court decisions.
At least the legislation timed the potential ban to be after the election at the earliest.
& even if the Dems & the Biden Administration want to keep TikTok low profile, you can bet the Rs will continue to demagogue it for electoral gain, the passage of the legislation notwithstanding.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: Greatly appreciate your post!
Kay
@YY_Sima Qian:
Oh, probably. I never bought that these places were bastions of liberalism – I knew they were rich people projects. Still, it’s just so CLEARLY content suppression – one would think a university head would be less ham-handed about it.
They simply don’t want these opinions expressed, so they’re….calling the police. If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny.
Jackie
Mike Johnson shouted at the protesters at Columbia to “Go back to class and stop protesting.”
https://pix11.com/news/local-news/manhattan/gop-leaders-booed-as-they-visit-ongoing-columbia-protests/
As a parent to teens/young adults, NOT effective, Mike.
Will
This all a bunch of fucking cosplay by the same performers on all sides. Happens every election season. I’m honestly tired of it. I could really give two shits about a bunch of rich kids that think changing the world means sitting on some grass and putting watermelon emojis in their Twitter or the right wing nut jobs that always come out screaming a bunch of kids being dumb means the break down in law and order and that society is being taken over by “others.”
YY_Sima Qian
This seems relevant to the discussion:
TL:DR The American public at the time was decidedly unsympathetic to the protesting students.
Cacti
I’m more than a little disturbed that US law enforcement is being used to squelch criticism of a fucking foreign country.
Barbara
@YY_Sima Qian: A relevant point is that during the Vietnam War American troops were in harm’s way and students were seen as undermining or traitorous. That dynamic is missing now.
Poe Larity
Kudos to the Fox reporter. During the Iraq War runup protests in Austin, Fox was the only network really on the ground. The other networks just had distant out the window shots and short sound bites on the “crowd” (25K of them) marching on the drag to Congress Avenue.
Of course, the Fox reporter would just have two interviews, the craziest looking hippie and the sole business guy counter-protestor. It really was 24,999 to 1.
dexwood
A not very well known May, 1970 event at the University of New Mexico. Anti-war protest, the National Guard with fixed bayonets, what could go wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_New_Mexico_bayoneting_incident
YY_Sima Qian
@Barbara: I expect the dynamic to be different now, not the least because close & uncritical embrace of Israel is very unpopular w/ the Dem coalition, & the majority of independents, too.
Jackie
When you’ve dropped Boris Epshteyn…
Too delicious!😁
Martin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Just stand up to them. Reject their narrative at every turn. Radically so.
AlaskaReader
The killing and more on Bloody Thursday in Berkeley was a year before Kent State or Jackson State.
Police shooting shotguns at people, one person murdered, well over a hundred residents were admitted to local hospitals for head trauma, shotgun wounds, and other serious injuries inflicted by police, California State Patrol, and National Guard.
Watching people being shot up while running away on the street, other people being shot who were up on rooftops watching law enforcement fill the streets, left a lasting impression.
It was ‘Ronnie Raygun’ who set the bar back then. No surprise.
Ksmiami
@Kay: there are no moderates with power in Israel or Palestine. That has to change. And fast.
Sister Golden Bear
@Betty Cracker: I’ve been through a full-on riot during the anti-apartheid protests at UC Berkeley during the ’80s. Ain’t as fun in real-life.
Which I have nothing but distain for the self-styled anarchists who infiltrated those protests (and any large protest in the area for the past four decades) trying to provoke a police riot. Because that’ll trigger the revolution or sumthin’. ‘Course they’re never to be found when the batons start swinging.
Note: These assholes are separate from the Black Bloc folks, who while you may debate their tactics, usually take a defensive approach (at least in the SF Bay Area). The Black Bloc folks hate the “anarchists” at least as much as the rest of us. In part because the latter often try to impersonate the former.
wjca
It really seems like other schools ought to be looking around and copying Best Practices. Which it sounds like yours ought to at least be in the running for.
I wonder how much sheer NIH (Not Invented Here) might be keeping that from happening.
wjca
There was a way. But at this point we’re looking at damage mitigation, rather than damage prevention.
wjca
FTFY
(I realize you may not have been around to see them doing the same in the late 60s. But they were.)
Martin
@wjca: Oh god, you have no idea how bad that is in academia. I mean, you’d think the UC system would do best practices between campuses but we would often avoid approaches precisely because some other campus was doing it. And a good idea out of a Cal State? Well… we’re not about to take a lesson from them. <groan>
There are a lot of differences in state laws, in interpretations of things. I remember talking to colleagues about parent access to financial aid information, and we were ‘no, FERPA protected’ and they were ‘oh, yeah, they’re paying, they deserve to see it’. Uh, federal law? 9/11 was a shitshow on that front. Every campus handled student visa issues differently. The feds jumped up everyone’s ass pretty goddamn far there (understandably and deservedly).
But this also goes back to some of the things I talked about a few days ago. We’re a public suburban, residential campus full of low income/first gen students. Totally different slate of problems and ways of handling them than Columbia private, urban, semi-residential campus full of entitled parents (entitled students are few and far between in my experience, but parents, woof). Our best practices might actually completely backfire there.
Cultures are hard. I went to a small private college in the 80s. Got there and learned in the first couple of weeks that about half the campus was queer. It was considered a safe school for queer students at a time when it wasn’t safe to be queer. Looking from the outside you wouldn’t have known that – I didn’t know. But inside the community it was well known. And there were a ton of dynamics on the campus as a result. The administration and faculty were protective of the students in very different ways than other campuses, because these students were facing very different risks. But the campus culture as you can imagine was radically different from many other campuses. Policies were radically different, protests were different, you name it.
And that’s why it’s important to be kind, and open minded to these kinds of events because you and I don’t know what’s actually happening there. And to a certain degree, the students don’t either. We’d have 100 students in a pro-palestine protest. What were their viewpoints? Well, there was maybe 20 different ones you could maybe group together. 1 state. 2 state. I don’t know, I just want them to be treated better. How about we eliminate the concept of state. Some grew up in the region, some had never been. They’d disagree amongst themselves. Like, they’re trying to figure this stuff out. Same deal with the Jewish students. Maybe a bit less all over the place, but just a bit. Some were more unhappy at how they were being treated in a completely different context, but this was an outlet for them. The encampments were one of the better ways for us to identify the homeless students and try and get them resources. Sometimes they didn’t care all that much about the issue, but it was a chance to hang out with other students without revealing they were homeless. Probably less of a problem at Columbia than our campus, but probably more of a problem at Columbia than you realize.
Like I’ve been saying – it takes a LOT of work.
Martin
Oh, should throw in – Texas State Troopers sure look brave when they’re called in for a peaceful student protest unlike a single guy with an AR-15 summarily executing students in an elementary school – couldn’t be bothered with that one, eh?
SFAW
@Matt McIrvin:
I’d be interested to see the chain of “logic”/causality which led you to that (apparent) if-then statement. Because the second occurrence was not really due to the first. Post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that.
Jay
@Martin:
Thank you, Martin.
lurker
@Jackie: think this is the story that was supposed to be at the link – the last part of the link was cut off
https://abcnews.go.com/US/appalled-witnesses-told-special-counsel-trumps-handling-classified/story?id=109362691
Matt McIrvin
@Tarragon: Yeah, Devo basically existed as a band because of the Kent State massacre–their sort of pseudo-nihilistic ethos (really the anger of a sincere, wounded idealism) was most directly a reaction to that.
Matt McIrvin
@SFAW: It wasn’t just that. Nixon was really the first President to sign on to the culture war as a political tool–his whole governing strategy was like an old “propaganda of the deed” terrorist group: turn up the heat, do scary things, provoke the other side to angry reactions that scare people more and eventually the freaked-out normies will support you.
It was Pat Buchanan’s calculation that they could split the country in two and they would get the larger half. He was talking about race but it was wider than that.
This is how Trump operates too, and how Abbott and DeSantis operate. Everything they do is to ratchet up division and fear and make people freak out, and the hope is that once everyone is forced to take sides, they’ll have the bigger side and they’ll win. It worked for Trump in 2016, didn’t work in 2020. But student demonstrators for some reason seem to freak a lot of people out hard. They imagine mad hippies raiding in the street or something.
JustRuss
@citizen dave: I saw Neil solo last summer, and he played Ohio. I’m betting it will be at every show this summer.