If Biden Wants A 2nd Term, He Can't Let The Race's Trajectory Go The Way Of A Debate Over Protests

Trump— King Of Chaos & Projection— Blames Biden For Campus Chaos

The lesser-of-two-evils strategy is immutable; nothing has changed. The Biden campaign is counting on the young people (and old people) who are angry at him because of U.S. connivance in Israeli genocide in Gaza, to vote for him anyway because… Trump. If the election were today, that would probably happen in most cases. But a lot can go wrong in this volatile, toxic mix between now and November. Take it from a former kid and former protester, kids and protesters don’t like police brutality, especially not when it’s directed at them. Cops may relish getting a chance to crack the skulls of the smarty pants’ who went to college, but the smarty pants’ reaction isn’t going to be what the Biden campaign wants. They won’t vote for Trump; they just won’t vote. And that’s not just going to be deadly for Biden. It’s going to hurt Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Bob Casey (D-PA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Ruben Gallego (R-AZ), Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and whomever wins the Democratic Senate nominations in Michigan, Florida and Maryland. House candidates who are most vulnerable to this kind of boycott include DCCC priority candidates like Sue Altman (NJ), Mondaire Jones (NY), Rudy Salas (CA), George Whitesides (CA), Will Collins (CA), Derek Tran (CA), Dave Min (CA)…

The mainstream media has inflamed the situation by referring to the demonstrations as “pro-Palestinian” and even “pro-Hamas” instead of pro-peace and by insinuating that the demonstrators are anti-Semitic or even violently anti-Semitic, playing right into the hands of the pro-genocide lobby and their supporters. Arrests are one thing… and a badge of honor for the students who get arrested. The ones who don’t get arrested will have to live with that shame for the rest of their lives. Close to 1,000 students and their supporters nationwide have been arrested so far— starting with the original 100 at Columbia. That needs to go up exponentially— at least 34,000, one for every Gazan killed. 100,000 would be a good target, though not as good as 500,000. Students have been arrested at UT, Northeastern, USC, NYU, Virginia Tech, Emory, Emerson, Indiana, Arizona State, Yale, Tulane…

University administrators are overwhelmingly establishment dicks on the side of no one but the big donor class. CNN reported that they’ve been calling the cops in to breakup the peaceful protests. Dakin Andone wrote that “Amid US students’ broad insistence their tactics are peaceful, administrators often have decried campus protests as disruptive, with some— including at Indiana University, George Washington University and California State Polytechnic University’s Humboldt campus— employing school rules governing use of public spaces to threaten or enact discipline or call for police backup. Administrators calling in the cops— almost always for no good reason— “threatens to erode the trust between universities and students, who may see police officers in riot gear arresting their classmates, maybe their professors.”

College officials’ responses to Israel-Hamas war protests also have unfolded against a global debate over the US role in the conflict, as well as an intensifying race for the White House and control of Congress that’s seen elite college presidents hauled to Capitol Hill and even forced out of their jobs as the major parties jockey for moral and political ground.

To some, the surge in universities’ reliance on police to break up the protests illustrates an unwillingness by officials to truly engage with students and their demands, which usually include pulling institutional investments from companies whose work directly or indirectly supports Israel or its military apparatus, or profits from the war.

Serge Schmemann, a Columbia student during the 1968 Vietnam War protests who went on to become the NY Times bureau chief in Moscow and is now on their editorial board, wrote that protest isn’t just good for students, but an essential part of education. He knows full well that “the protests [are already] squarely into the polarized politics of the land, with politicians and pundits on the right portraying the encampments as dangerous manifestations of antisemitism and wokeness and demanding that they be razed— and many university administrations calling in the police to do just that. The transformation of the protests into a national political football is perhaps inevitable— everyone up to President Richard Nixon sounded off about students in ’68— but it is still a shame. Because student protests, even at their most disruptive, are at their core an extension of education by other means, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz’s famous definition of war. The hallowed notion of a university as a bastion of discourse and learning does not and cannot exclude participation in contemporary debates, which is what students are being prepared to lead. From Vietnam to apartheid to the murder of George Floyd, universities have long been places for open and sometimes fiery debate and inquiry. And whenever universities themselves have been perceived by students to be complicit or wrong in their stances, they have been challenged by their communities of students and teachers. If the university cannot tolerate the heat, it cannot serve its primary mission.”

In the last few days, dozens of GOP candidates have sent this out

OK, so let’s get to the partisan politics here, starting with how the GOP will use— are using— the protests to their advantage. Hearing Trump and congressional Republicans speak, you’d think Biden and Chuck Schumer are leading the protests. Using the protests as “a political cudgel against the Democrats… Republicans are seizing on the eruption of campus protests across the country to depict the United States as out of control under President Biden… Trump has cited the protests to accuse Biden and Democrats of being unable to maintain order or quash lawlessness, an accusation he has leveled at the president on other hot-button political issues… As the protests have mushroomed in recent days, numerous Republicans have sought ways to highlight them as an example of the country’s slide into chaos. Several Republican lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have visited the campus of Columbia University,  the site of some of the most sweeping protests, to call for its president to resign for purportedly failing to contain the demonstrations.” Too bad no one called the clips on them!

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, dispatched more than 100 [bloodthirsty] state troopers to the University of Texas at Austin to clear out pro-Palestinian protesters, resulting in dozens of arrests. All of the charges against the protesters were later dropped for lack of probable cause.

The campus protests present conservatives with some of their favorite targets: elite universities, progressive activists, “woke” culture and civil rights leaders. In addition, attacking the protests allows Republicans to change the subject from less friendly political terrain, such as abortion rights and the war in Ukraine.

Their rhetoric is harsh in many cases. Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) have demanded that Biden mobilize the National Guard to protect Jewish Americans on campus. Hawley compared the standoff to the battle over segregation in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower summoned the National Guard to force the integration of Central High School in Little Rock.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) suggested that the college protesters were mentally unstable. “You don’t get to turn our public places into a garbage dump. No civilization should tolerate these encampments. Get rid of them,” Vance posted on Twitter. “If you want to protest peacefully fine. It’s your right. But go home and take a shower at the end of the day. These encampments are just gross. Wanting to participate in this is a mental illness.”

The GOP rhetoric has not been limited to campus protests, sometimes covering pro-Palestinian actions more broadly, including those that have shut down roads and bridges in some cities. Cotton, in a post on Twitter, urged those who get stuck behind “pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic” to “take matters into your own hands.” Following criticism that some might read that as a call to violence, Cotton amended his post to say “take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.”

Supporters of the campus protests say they are peaceful, and that accusations of antisemitism are often a pretext to shut down dissenting voices. Many of the Republicans criticizing the protests, they say, condoned or excused the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which was far more violent.

…The students are “peacefully protesting for an end of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” the group Jewish Voices for Peace, which supports a cease-fire in Gaza, said of the Columbia protests. “ … We condemn any and all hateful or violent comments targeting Jewish students; however, in shutting down public protest and suspending students, the actions of the University of Columbia are not ensuring safety for Jewish students— or any students— on campus.”

The Israel-Gaza war has deeply fractured the Democratic Party, posing significant political challenges to Biden months ahead of November’s presidential contest… Democrats have voiced a range of views on the legitimacy of the protests, and Biden has sought a balance between condemning antisemitism and supporting students’ right to protest. Republicans, in contrast, are largely unified in casting the demonstrations as a disgrace, echoing conservative denunciations of the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.

On Sunday, Katie Glueck wrote about the intraparty Democratic divisions. “Most Democrats,” she wrote, “say they both support free speech and condemn antisemitism, and consider criticism of the Israeli government to be fair game. But in seeking to address an intractable conflict marked by competing historical narratives, debates over how to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitic speech are fraught and reaching a fever pitch on campus.” And pro-genocide Democrats like Josh Gottheimer, Jared Moskowitz and Ritchie Torres— all major AIPAC whores— are as toxic to the situation as any Republican, hoping to use antipathy towards the protesters to further their own careers.

A Steve Scalise-related SuperPAC, using Elise Stefank’s name, with her permission, sent out a fundraising e-mail that shows exactly how Republicans are exploiting the demonstrations:

One of my biggest worry here, after the genocide itself, is that craven politicians— basically 100% of Republicans and the pro-genocide conservative Democrats— plus corporate media, will capitalize on the protesters so “effectively” that it drives swing voters towards not-Biden (and you know who that is).

This morning I was discussing how to message this with a candidate who wants to release a statement in support of the students. I reminded him that neither side is open to hearing a “moderate” message and that they are rapidly moving towards absolutist positions… with, alas, God on their side.