Good news: The nature of the riots this election year suggest the leftist rioters are losing steam
Amid the illegal protests by pro-Hamas anti-Semitic new Nazis on college campuses, a wider looks suggests some encouraging trends, though hard to spot amid the chaos promoted by these genocidal rioters, most of whom are students but led it appears by many outside agitators.
There is no question these college rioters are causing havoc as they spread fear and hatred on numerous college campuses, including Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, NYU, Cal Poly Humboldt, USC, and UT-Austin, to name jsut a few.
In every case the protesters arrived with tents and a definitive plan to illegally occupy part of the campus, using almost identical tactics of the Occupy Wall Street crowd in 2011. Very clearly they wanted to establish themselves in a prominent position on each campus, where they could daily interfere with campus life while harassing anyone they saw as either Jewish or a potential enemy. Their tactics also mimicked the actions of the 2020 BLM and Antifa rioters, not only acting to keep out Jewish students from campuses, but working together violently to exclude anyone they wanted excluded. Reporters were routinely blocked with banners, umbrellas, and their bodies. In at least one case these terrorists even attacked one reporter, stabbing her in the eye with the pole of a Palestinian flag.
There is also no question that these riots have the same ulterior motives that existed in 2020, to disrupt the upcoming November election so that the Democrats could win. Many of the 2020 riots were specifically aimed at Trump election rallies, often causing their cancellation. The riots also provided Democratic Party officials in many key swing states reasons to justify the arbitrary changing of election laws — done also in conjuntion with the COVID panic — to allow the illegal use of very insecure ballot measures, such as unsupervised drop boxes and the misuse of mail-in ballots.
The differences today from 2020 and 2011 however are quite significant, and suggest these violent tactics are no longer working, that the country is beginning to push back hard against such insurrectionist behavior.
The pushback
The first difference is the most obvious. In 2011 and 2020, the rioters and looters and illegal tent cities were generaly allowed to do whatever they wanted, with little push back from the authorities. Few rioters or looters were arrested. Almost no illegal tent cities were removed. The authorities simply let these terrorists have their tantrum, simply waiting it out.
Now however college officials and state governments have been much more aggressive in arresting and punishing these pro-Hamas terrorists. Many have been arrested. Many of the occupations have been shut down.
We should not be deceived into thinking this aggressive action is because college authorities disagree with these protesters. On the contrary, most of the administrators at these formerly elite universities are radical leftists and entirely pro-Hamas themselves, and are only taking action now because these protests are making their schools look very bad while revealing the anti-Semitic nature of these people. You can see this by the general weak effort of these officials to stop the protests, even when they do pushback.
Nonetheless the pushback is happening, which was entirely lacking in 2011 and 2020. In colleges in states like Texas and Florida, the government has not allowed university officials to decide what to do. In these states the government has moved in and shut these rioters down entirely.
The localized nature of the Hamas protests
This difference might be the most important of all. In 2011 and 2020, the riots were widespread in almost all urban areas, lasting weeks and largely destroying whole blocks of businesses and homes. The protests and occupations lasted anywhere from weeks to months to even a year, during which it was entirely unsafe to go into these inner city neighborhoods, as the rioters had taken over completely, and were allowed free reign to attack anyone they deemed an invader to their occupied territory.
That today’s protest riots have been almost exclusively limited to college campuses is another good sign. The number of rioters appears down, and they also don’t seem to have the resources necessary to occupy and loot many inner cities. Instead, they are mostly targeting these leftist college campuses, where they know they are generally supported and have had up until now been greeted by a friendly supportive atmosphere.
To their surprise however that atmosphere has not been as supportive as expected.
The ugly nature of the cause
A 1930s Nazi youth rally, little different than
today’s pro-Hamas demonstrations
Finally, the ineffectiveness and much more limited nature of the protests now could be attributed to a recognition that the goals now are obviously very ugly, bigoted, and have no redeeming purpose. In 2020 many of the riots were instigated by mindless mobs reacting emotionally to what they perceived as the injustice of George Floyd’s death. Their understanding of what happened might have been wrong (he was not killed by the policeman but by an overdose of drugs), but the sense of injustice seemed real, and therefore to some justified the violent response.
Today’s protesters are protesting in favor of a terrorist organization, Hamas, that gleefully raped, tortured, and then murdered more than a thousand men, women, and children on October 7th. It is also an organization that proudly wants to do the same first to every Jew living in Israel, then spread that genocide across the whole globe. The protesters themselves have proudly declared their support for such genocide, repeatedly calling for the murder of Jews while declaring “We are Hamas,” “We’re all Hamas, pig!” and “Long live Hamas!”
Even the most radical leftists find these goals quite distasteful. The public meanwhile is horrified. The goals of these protests is ugly and evil on its face, and it also stains the entire left with a stink that cannot be easily washed away.
Thus, there is no groundswell of support, demanding action. Instead the public is not making any excuses for these riots, and are in fact opposing them with great force.
These signs provide us a hint that maybe our society is finally begin to come to its senses, and is no longer willing to bow meekly to every violent protest. Instead, it is beginning to demand that people act more civilized, and is more determined to shut down barbarism when it rears its ugly head.
We can only hope.
