Campus unrest, free speech out of control? ‘These damn kids think they can say whatever they want’

Pro-Palestine protesters at Florida State University move away from a sprinkler during a protest on the Tallahassee campus on April 25, 2024. (Photo by Jackie Llanos)Quality Journalism for Critical Times

Kids today, I swear.

Standing around on college lawns, protesting against genocide, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to arms shipments — what are they thinking? These students should be shopping, getting wasted at end-of-semester parties, and engaging in meaningless sex.

Instead, they’re going around acting like citizens, engaging in civil disobedience, exercising their right to free speech, telling university administrations to get rid of all investments in Israel, and demanding humanitarian aid for Palestinians.

Don’t they know protests are unnecessary pointless, and annoying?

Look at the civil rights nonsense in the 1950s and 1960s: Sure, the March on Washington, the Freedom Rides, and that business in Selma bullied the federal government into letting Black people sit in the front of the bus and even vote, but was it really worth all the discomfort it caused the nice White People Who Built America?

If only that Martin Luther King fellow hadn’t been so impatient. I’m sure we would have gotten around to giving minorities some rights. Eventually.

Columbia University’s Butler Library at nighttime. Author Andrew Chen. Wikimedia Commons.

Some of these smart-mouthed campus wokesters will argue that it was their protests that pushed Columbia and other schools to dump perfectly good stocks in the private prison industry.

Back in 1985, students at that same, now-notorious New York alleged institution of higher learning, blockaded Hamilton Hall and threw such a tantrum the university had no choice but to divest from funds involved in South Africa, just because they didn’t approve of apartheid.

They are actually proud of this.

But think about it: Where would the United States of America be if we allowed people to buck authority, say what they like, and make a big noise over injustice and inequality?

(OK, we might still be a colony of Great Britain, but would that be so bad?)

Cops arrest pro-Palestinian protestors

Just look at what’s going on at these so-called colleges: at UCLA protestors built a tent city — most unsightly — and full of youth wearing those Yasser Arafat scarves.

The Radical Youth say the whole thing was pretty peaceful, at least until a bunch of masked pro-Israel folks began shooting fireworks into their encampment.

The pro-Palestinian students claim they called for help, but the cops probably had the evening off.

The cops did show up the next morning and arrested 132 pro-Palestinian protestors but left the firework-throwers alone.

Surely they were simply celebrating the end of classes.

But seriously, these demonstrations and occupations and whatnot are getting out of hand.

Students march outside the administration building on Emory University’s campus Thursday in late April. Photo contributed by Nora Xu

Things got a little nasty at Emory when this uppity woman, chair of the Philosophy Department, objected to a cop clubbing a student, pointing out that perhaps he was using excessive force.

Well, the cops showed her! They knocked her down and cuffed her — just as she deserved.

The situation at Washington University in St. Louis was equally terrifying. The police, terrified by what observers called the “festive” atmosphere complete with peace-demanding chants, were forced to go in hot, hitting demonstrators, zip-tying them, and beating up this 65 year-old history professor.

Not that they wanted to, but the guy was standing right there, you know, filming the police whomping on everybody.

The professor— obviously — a whiner–is currently in the hospital with broken ribs and a broken arm.

Undergrad radicals

Those Columbia students are still the worst, though. They’ve been talking back to adults since at least 1968 when undergraduate radicals took over five buildings. Seems they were bummed over a lot of stuff including the university’s determination to destroy a park in Harlem for a nice new gym plus the university’s ties to the military industrial complex fueling the Vietnam War.

Colleges back in the day were hotbeds of irrational unrest over Vietnam.

I mean, just because you or your brother or your son was going to get drafted and shipped off to Long Binh to fight against an imaginary communist threat was no reason to pitch a fit.

The First Amendment has clearly gotten out of hand when a bunch of snot-nosed college kids can go around demanding social justice when they should be training to become worthy cogs in our beautiful capitalist machine.

Shut ‘em up and shut ‘em down!

Demonstrators gathered in Tallahassee near the Florida Capitol on May 31, 2020, to protest the police killing of George Floyd. Credit: Peter T. Reinwald

That Columbia student who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live”? Sure, he apologized and took it back, but the guy wears a “Black Lives Matter” t-shirt which, as you know, shows he’s clearly a “terrorist.”

It’s obvious these protestors are all antisemitic, even the Jewish ones.

Maybe especially the Jewish ones: don’t they like being God’s Chosen People?

Don’t these brats realize there are some things more important than principles? Commencement ceremonies at which some banker tells the graduates to go forth and create value, for one.

Being able to lie around on expensively maintained campus grass without having to see “Free Palestine” signs or hear about starving children in Gaza.

Or keeping right-wing donors happy.

Sadly, some colleges have gone the way of appeasement. Northwestern and Brown and a few others have sat down with protestors and agreed to talk about divestment.

Wimps.

Shutting down

Well, university administrations have had enough: they’re shutting down all that free inquiry stuff.

Students at the University of Georgia have been arrested for trespassing on their own campus.

Other colleges are suspending students, kicking them out of their dorms.

Hell, kick them out of school.

That’ll teach these kids to go around expressing opinions contrary to the wisdom of politicians from the President of the United States on down.

U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton rightly calls the campus protests “little Gazas” (obviously those kids are building bombs and taking hostages out there on the quad!). He wants Joe Biden to send in the 101st Airborne or at least the National Guard.

Mary Ann Vecchio, photographed by photojournalism student John Filo kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller. May 4, 1970. In this widely circulated version of the photo, a fencepost behind Vecchio has been airbrushed out. Author John Filo. Wikimedia Commons.

You will remember the National Guard did a bang-up job in 1970 showing those Kent State punks who’s boss.

Here in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis agrees. These troublemakers need to be taught a sharp lesson.

Our governor insists we’re a “law-and-order state,” an Israel-loving state. Bibi Netanyahu is our cool fascist-adjacent friend.

We are not a let’s-help-the-desperate-people-of-Gaza state. So when an unwashed bunch of students at UF, FSU, USF, and UNF had the gall to set up their little “camps” where nice normal students might want to have picnics or do a bit of tanning — important, much-cherished college experiences — DeSantis got tough.

Deploying syntax which admirably demonstrates how he remains untainted by his fancy Ivy League education, the governor said, “what they did at Florida State and the University of Florida, they turn the sprinklers on. So that’s how it’s gonna be, but it’s about conduct and about making sure you’re doing the code of conduct.”

Maybe they should be expelled. And deported.

Free speech

There are two big problems with this pro-Palestinian student political engagement thing.

One is “free speech.” It’s out of control. These damn kids think they can say whatever they want, demanding human rights and condemning our righteous friends in the Netanyahu government.

Don’t they know the whole purpose of college is training to become worthy cogs in our beautiful capitalist machine?

The ACLU says, “Sudden and harsh punishment, whether it be suspension or banishment, should not apply to this protest movement because that message is unpopular with university officials and political leaders.”

Come on: what’s more American than sudden and harsh punishment?

The other problem is education itself.

The New York Times. Photo by Diane Rado.

These students are being ruined by universities where they’re being taught crap about settler colonialism, the excesses of the IDF and encouraged by their pointy-headed leftist profs to read books about the complicated history of Israel and Palestine.

Some even read newspapers.

Our Youth are being corrupted into thinking for themselves.

Truly the End Times are upon us.

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