Elizabeth Spiers spurns Hillary Clinton’s criticism of the students protesting the Israeli Gaza Operation. It’s just a moral panic, Spiers says, describing not the students hysteria at the drop of a “genocide!”, but rather their critics who are stunned by both their ideological stance and their behavior. Remarkably, the entire essay never once discusses what the students are protesting and whom they’re supporting. Instead, she presents them as honest and idealistic young people who “stand up for their values.”
It’s a good example of a certain competence in putting together a coherent essay that systematically passes over the key issue (something AI is probably very talented at producing). Instead, without a word about Hamas, or 7/10’s abominations, she portrays the protesters as information-savvy, idealistic, energetic actors asserting their right to protest based on “well-thought out principles.” If this essay offers a good reflection of the kind of advocacy journalism now current at places like NYU Journalism School, whose students she brings forward as evidence for her favorable assessment, circles where suppressing the alternative narrative is legitimate, we are indeed in trouble.
The first time I remember running across this kind of crucial omission was when William Orme of the NYT did a piece on the role of incitement in fomenting the violence of the intifada in 2000. In his only substantive example of incitement, he quoted some anodine comments at the beginning of a sermon preached by a PA appointed cleric, and left out the genocidal core of the message! I remember thinking, ‘What undergraduate would be so dismissive of key evidence as to leave it out his or her paper?’
Apparently, now, it’s a thing. And the NYT likes it.
Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.
Appearing last week on “Morning Joe,” Hillary Clinton lamented what she views as the ignorance of students protesting the war in Gaza. The host, Joe Scarborough, asked her about “the sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or from the Chinese Communist government through TikTok.” Ms. Clinton was happy to oblige. “I have had many conversations, as you have had, with a lot of young people over the last many months,” she said. “They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East or frankly about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country.”
I’ve taught students at the college level for 12 years, most recently at New York University’s journalism school. I’ve also seen and heard the assumptions made about them by some of their elders — administrators, parents and others. So it’s no surprise now to hear protesters described as “spoiled and entitled kids” or delicate “snowflakes” who cower in their safe spaces and don’t believe in free speech. Billionaires like Ken Griffin, Bill Ackman and, of course, Donald Trump — as entitled as anyone — have been particularly vocal in their disdain, calling the students in one instance “whiny” and demanding that they be punished for protesting. Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican from New York, even suggested that TikTok should be banned in part because “you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.”
Whether they realize it or not, Ms. Clinton, Mr. Lawler and the rest are engaging in a moral panic about America’s youth that is part of a larger effort to discredit higher education in general.
That effort includes fear-mongering about diversity programs and critical race theory. But it starts with students.
This is a common theme among those who would rather not think about criticism: “you’re just fear-mongering and there’s nothing to worry about.” And this, from people who rely heavily on fear-mongering about Islamophobia, public health, critical race theory, identity politics, (imagined) hate speech, etc., etc.
In the current panic, the protesters are described as somehow both terribly fragile and such a threat to public safety that they need to be confronted by police officers in riot gear. To justify the police department’s excessive response at Columbia University, Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry showed Newsmax viewers a large chain and a book with the title “Terrorism” that had been recovered from one site of protest. The former was a common bike chain Columbia sells to students and the latter was part of Oxford University Press’s lovely “Very Short Introductions” series, which covers topics from animal behavior to Rousseau and black holes.
There are some obvious partisan factors at work here: Staunch support for Israel among Republicans, for instance, and the long-running right-wing insistence that elite universities are liberal indoctrination camps. But recent research reveals a significant generational divide as well. A recent YouGov poll found that 45 percent of people ages 45 to 64 strongly opposed the protests, as did 56 percent of people 65 and older. By comparison, only 12 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds strongly opposed them, and 21 percent of people ages 30 to 44.
It’s not just about Gaza; similar age gaps emerged in response to protests after the murder of George Floyd, too.
And George Floyd, like Michael Brown before him, were wildly successful major media- and activist- manipulated moral panics. As a result of the spectacular and angry coverage of specific cases, the public was whipped into a fury over police brutality to unarmed black, creating the impression especially among “liberals” that police violence against unarmed blacks is ten even a hundred times greater than the statistics indicate:
(29 unarmed blacks killed in 2019, the actual statistic)
Eighty-seven percent of adults ages 18z to 34 supported the protests in June 2020, according to Gallup, while only 54 percent of adults 65 and older did. And just 3 percent of the older group had participated in the protests, while 26 percent of the younger group had.
Spiers apparently thinks this reflects “partisan factors” when it’s much more about naive youthful “revolutionary enthusiasm” amplified by exposure to tenured radicals who never grew up who then passed on the torch to even more activist, less historically literate, “scholars.” One could perhaps more readily view the statistics as an indicator of susceptibility to being duped by media-conveyed war propaganda… for the enemy.
We know from research that adults under 40 are more likely to participate in a protest than adults over 40, and generally prefer informal political participation more than their older cohorts, who are more likely to participate by voting. But that doesn’t fully explain the outright hostility some have leveled at campus protesters.
It certainly doesn’t explain it. Many of us chair-jockeys would be quite sympathetic if it weren’t for their “cause.”
High-profile public figures of all ideological stripes have varyingly called for the students to be kicked out of their institutions, made unemployable or sent to prison. They’ve floated implausible scenarios in which the protests turn deadly. Students brave enough to risk their financial aid and scholarships are derided as childish rather than principled.
If you are stupid enough to buy in to a war-propaganda narrative so much that you’ll go out and support your enemies in their war on the Jews (and on your world of universities and freedom to protest), then you’ve shown serious lack of seriousness… a kind of self-disqualification… If that self-disqualification had been observed much earlier, and then we wouldn’t have to deal with “journalists” who write with obfuscating clarity about exactly what’s not relevant.
And though they are educated to participate in civic life, as soon as these students exercise their First Amendment rights, they are told that protecting private property is a more pressing public concern.
Exercising first amendment rights, and disruptive protests are not the same thing.
The sequence begins with their open, sometimes violent, hostility to Jews, their Hamas chants, their contempt for property and those who maintain it… all of which played a significant role in the opposition to their behavior and their cause.
It’s as though some older adults simply can’t wrap their heads around the idea that college students, who are old enough to marry, have families and risk their lives for their country, are capable of having well thought-out principles.
It’s as though some still hip adults can’t wrap their heads around the idea that older people, whose brains were not shaped by social media, might have something to tell the Memento Generation.
“They basically want students to shut up and study,” is how Robert Cohen, a scholar of 20th-century social protest, put it when I spoke to him this week. It doesn’t matter how virtuous the cause, he explained; older generations start with a bias against students.
It’s not clear from the context whether this is Cohen’s way of saying “their cause is virtuous” or “even if it were virtuous, despite it not being the case here…” - in both cases his claim is based on an unsupported, counter-indicated premise, i.e., they would be opposed even if their cause were virtuous. In any case, Cohen reflects the same reading as Spears, these youth are fighting the good fight, and certainly not in need of doing more study.
But protest is often the only way students have any voice at all in university matters.
Actually, students have much voice in the university, all over the place, including in classes where they can openly question their professors, as well as behind the scenes where they can bring down careers with accusations. The “voice” they demand - to bring everything to a halt until they get their (Hamas’) way - is way above and beyond the “don’t have any voice” category.
“People do not understand that university governance is fundamentally undemocratic,” Mr. Cohen said, noting that even students who have convinced universities to consider divestment have won, at best, the right to make their case to the board.
And since when are universities supposed to be “democratic” - which apparently means giving the students the majority? They’re renters, not owners.
In my experience, the stereotypes about today’s students are often ludicrously far from reality.
College students of this generation have far more knowledge about complex world events than mine or Ms. Clinton’s did, thanks to the availability of the internet and a 24/7 news cycle fire-hosed directly into their phones.
An interesting misread of both the state of knowledge of the college students of this generation, who are profoundly ignorant of the very things they are so passionate about, and of the impact of our information abundance. Didn’t 44% of respondents in the “youth” category (18-26) think that one could live an openly gay life in Gaza, many of whom also felt that what Hamas did on 7/10 was legitimate resistance?
The image of the news cycle fire-hosed directly into their phones is quite apt, except for the term “news cycle.” That’s not news they’re getting hosed with, it’s the Caliphator script for infidels, in which a Jihadi death squad is Westsplained as resistance to tyranny, and resistance to death squads that have taken a whole people hostage is “war crimes” and “genocide.” Even NPR had to warn its audience about the damage that focusing on the suffering in Gaza can do to your health. The West is now, via its legacy media and a wave of social media, flooding the public sphere with the kind of “news coverage” the PA bombarded its public with in 2000 - death, destruction, suffering, angry compassion.
Representative Lawler may be correct that some portion of that information comes from clips on TikTok, and social media can be misleading, but there’s no evidence that college students are more likely to be misled by TikTok than people Mr. Lawler’s age and older are likely to be misled by Facebook. In fact, research indicates that younger people are more savvy and skeptical about media, and more likely to triangulate among different sources to see if something is true.
They may also be more sensitive to the horrors of children being killed here and elsewhere because they grew up participating in active shooter drills and watching the aftermath of mass shootings on the news.
So why not an interest in, and support for, the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression? Why the exclusive obsession with Gaza? Could it have to do with the media’s fire-hose obsession with Palestinian suffering?
They are less financially secure than generations prior, and less likely to believe that institutions will save them or reward them for loyalty and hard work.
They also participate in a movement that considers merit a (particularly odious) form of privilege. Your plaint is about a decade behind the times.
But they are not babies, and they are not oblivious or naïve.
This would be a good time to discuss what they believe and whom they support to show us that they’re not inexcusably oblivious or aggressively naive.
And their ideas and actions cannot be dismissed just because some bad actor — no mass movement is without them — does or says something stupid.
“Never forget the 7th of October. That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 … 100 … 1,000 … 10,000 … The 7th of October is going to be every day for you.”
I think one of many of the major distinctions between the peace movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s and those of today, is that the radical and violent side of the former came late and alienated most people in the movement (me). By the time “Uncle Ho” had killed over 2 million of his own people, few were still singing his praises outloud (lots of sulkers, though). Here, however, the violent side showed up immediately after 7/10, shouting their enthusiastic approval of the abominations of Hamas, long before Israel’s retaliation. The encampments, no matter how jolly and peaceful these days, take their cues from outside semipro activists who espouse precisely what this radical violent pro-Jihadi core demands.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to those who find protests uncomfortable. They’re always disruptive, as they’re supposed to be. And big loud crowds make me nervous now in a way that they didn’t when I was 22 and a big loud crowd was fun and meant I was at a club with oontz-oontz-oontz music and 73 of my closest friends. I now prefer political participation that is less hard on the knees. But I am exhilarated to see students using protest for exactly the reasons it’s protected by the First Amendment. It allows them to stand up for their values, invest in what’s happening in the world and hold decision makers accountable, even if it means putting themselves at risk. And most compellingly, it’s getting the attention of the president and other lawmakers who can effect change far beyond the walls of any university campus.
The ability to write a coherent essay that passes over the key issue, in the process of supporting a movement that views the most brutal killers of dissent on the planet as heroes, belongs in the annals of the 21st century century’s failure of the information professionals. A simple-minded narrative that systematically removes reference to key issues - like Hamas’ genocidal ideology. their aspirations, and their deeds - and calms the good liberal down from his moral panic at the realization that the alleged adults in his culture have lost their moral and empirical compass and, along with a jacked-up, brainwashed youth, do the bidding of their (our) enemies.
Speier's' whitewashing of the campus dysfunction seems part of a broader progressive approach to societal ills. Thus, disturbed by the racial impact of law enforcement, we decriminalize or overlook certain criminal conduct. Unable to deal effectively with addiction to illicit and often deadly drugs, we legalize it or just turn our heads. Speier follows suit, finding rationalizations for abandoning the most basic norms of civility, discourse and respect that are essential to functioning universities.
Speier's' whitewashing of the campus dysfunction seems part of a broader progressive approach to societal ills. Thus, disturbed by the racial impact of law enforcement, we decriminalize or overlook certain criminal conduct. Unable to deal effectively with addiction to illicit and often deadly drugs, we legalize it or just turn our heads. Speier follows suit, finding rationalizations for abandoning the most basic norms of civility, discourse and respect that are essential to functioning universities.