How Powerful People Trick You Into Opposing Protest Movements
If you’re a college student or live near a university, there’s an excellent chance that an encampment has popped up near you in protest of the genocide in Gaza. If that’s the case, there’s also a high chance that your local universities are calling in cops, canceling graduations, or suspending students for exercising their right to speak out.
Hold on — we’ve seen this all before, haven’t we? Past protests (including on college campuses) have also resulted in police violence and academic/social sanctions for speaking out on just causes. While the issues and circumstances driving the suppression of protests are unique, they all follow a similar cycle.
Today, I’m going to break down how powerful people demonize protesters, so you (or your friends and family) are better able to see through it.
This starts with our first step, when…
POWERFUL INTERESTS THROW THEIR WEIGHT BEHIND MAINTAINING THE OPPRESSION
The US government is currently enabling a genocide of Palestinians because of their decades-long alliance with Israel and the way they can use Israel to advance their interests in the Middle East. Because both Democrats and Republicans have invested in this alliance for so long, it becomes nearly impossible for them to reconcile it with the idea that Palestinians deserve human rights. Thus, they use their political and economic influence to distract us in any way possible.
Since Columbia is the campus being covered the most right now, let’s dig deeper into their situation. A Congressional hearing in December that purported to fight on-campus antisemitism resulted in Claudine Gay and Liz Magill, the presidents of fellow Ivy League schools Harvard and Penn, respectively, being pushed to resign. Why? Because they didn’t condemn antisemitism (which pro-Palestine rhetoric gets wrongly, but routinely conflated with) forcefully enough. In April, a similar hearing was held with Columbia President Minouche Shafik, where she was under pressure to agree to Congress’ demands to punish faculty and students for voicing anti-Israel sentiment.
Before this point, billionaires who previously donated to Columbia (like Robert Kraft and Leon Cooperman) announced their plans to stop giving to the university for not suppressing Palestinian activism forcefully enough. Universities, like any business, need their endowment to survive and maintain their prestige. Given a choice between risking her job/the university’s endowment and disregarding the university’s stated values, it seems Shafik chose her job security by ordering the mass arrest of her students the next day.
It’s not just about cowardice, though. At Columbia and other campuses, students are demanding that their universities divest from companies that serve Israel’s government. As paying customers of their university, they’re asking for their tuition dollars not to be associated with genocide — sounds reasonable, right?
However, Israel’s economic ties to the US (including to top universities) run so deep that divestment would be quite complicated. The list of companies that actively serve Israel’s interests includes Google (which provides computing services to Israeli troops), Amazon (which has a joint contract with the Israeli government and military), Boeing, and Lockheed Martin to name a few. Most universities (and most wealthy Americans, for that matter) hold diversified investment portfolios and wouldn’t be able to identify offhand which investments they have that are tied to Israel in some way.
Note that I said divestment is difficult, but not impossible. Universities can raise money in other ways, and they have before — past student movements to make universities divest from fossil fuels, the tobacco industry, and the South African Apartheid regime eventually had great success. It’s just that, to divest from Israel, leaders like Shafik have to do enough work and risk enough backlash that they’re not willing to do it yet.
Rather than admitting to all of that, people who suppress protests have to justify their actions in other ways. This brings us to the next step in that process…
MEDIA FINDS BAD ACTORS AND PEOPLE ATTRIBUTE THOSE TO THE WHOLE MOVEMENT
Chances are, though, you’ve heard about protesters or people advocating progressive causes who just go too far. These examples aren’t hard to find — quick Google searches led me to find this story about alarming flyers at NYU and this one about online threats against Jewish students at Cornell (TW: antisemitism, threats of violence.)
It feels weird to have to say this explicitly, but to be clear — threatening violence against students because they are Jewish is wrong — period, end of story. Any criticism against Israel’s government and military (which has murdered over 35,000 civilians in the last seven months) has to be separated from that of Judaism as a religion or Jewish people. If you want to be more educated on how to distinguish antisemitism and criticism of Israel’s actions, here are a couple of resources.
It also should go without saying that fighting to protect Palestinian people is not the same thing as agreeing with Hamas’ actions, as they have also killed over a thousand Israeli citizens and taken hundreds hostage. Since Hamas’ attack on October 7th, there have been upticks in antisemitic, anti-Arab, and anti-Islamic violence, often perpetrated by white extremists rather than their counterparts on the opposing side of the Israel-Palestine conflict. That’s unacceptable and needs to be addressed too.
Many of the people who are quickest to condemn antisemitism are actually the student organizers of pro-Palestine protests. One of the student organizations suspended by Columbia for supposed antisemitism in the lead-up to the encampment was a Jewish group, Jewish Voice for Peace.
However, people are instead led to believe that all people advocating for a progressive cause hold all of the beliefs of bad actors, who may not even represent the cause. Two separate issues (antisemitism on campus and pro-Palestine protests on campus) are being treated as one and the same. We saw this with agitators escalating otherwise peaceful Black Lives Matter protests just a few years ago too.
By doing this, people who are actively subverting values of “liberal democracy” (such as freedom of speech and assembly or respect for diverse opinions) get to justify their choice to do so by appealing to those same values. If you support those radical protesters, that means you’re an antisemite/reverse racist/anti-patriot/communist and we’re the reasonable ones here, the implication goes. Check out this statement from Shafik as an example:
This gets dangerous fast because instead of being concerned with the oppression that protesters are calling out, many Americans see the protesters themselves as the bigger threat.
Instead of thinking:
“Wow, these protests make me uncomfortable, but genocide/police brutality/war needs to be stopped.”
They trick you into reversing these and thinking:
“Wow, genocide/police brutality/war is bad, but protests on college campuses need to be stopped.”
Hear the difference?
If you think I’m exaggerating, let’s look at an example from history. In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration justified its choice to enter the Vietnam War with a scare campaign about the apparent threat of communism. When college students protested against the war, in which many of them were being sent to die, public sentiment was against them to a disturbing degree.
Not only did 78% of those polled in 1969 oppose the protests, they also supported violence against the protesters: fewer than half of those polled agreed that “police are wrong to beat up unarmed protesters, even when these people are rude and call them names.” Only 10% blamed the National Guard for murdering four students at Kent State in 1970, with 50% blaming the students for their own deaths. It’s no wonder more people said they supported cracking down on the protests than said they supported getting troops out of Vietnam.
Once public opinion is turned against protesters, that enables the next step…
POWERFUL PEOPLE UTILIZE MASS OUTRAGE TO FURTHER THEIR PERSONAL AGENDAS
Wherever eyeballs, clicks, dollars, and attention go, so do ambitious people who want to cash in. I chose to cover this topic now while it’s fresh in everyone’s mind, after all.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who reaaaaaally wants to be chosen as Donald Trump’s VP, has taken those Congressional hearings we talked about earlier as an opportunity to build her national brand. In the hearings, Stefanik asked Magill and Gay whether calls for genocide against Jews (which again, support of the Palestinian people is widely and wrongly treated as) would violate university policy. When Magill and Gay both gave noncommittal answers to what seemed like a simple question, their fates were sealed. Stefanik got to out-MAGA her colleagues in the national spotlight and pretend to care about Jewish students all at the same time — what a win for her!
Eventual POTUS Ronald Reagan won his first campaign for governor of California by promising to crack down on free speech and anti-war protests at UC Berkeley. Trump called for criminal prosecution and state-sponsored violence against Black Lives Matter protesters (who were protesting…state-sponsored violence) while running for president last election. Even expelled Congressman George Santos got in on the action last week by showing up to Columbia’s campus for…15 more minutes of fame, I guess.
This has happened enough times that you’d think we’d start seeing through it, right? Unfortunately…
POWERFUL PEOPLE CO-OPT HISTORY TO SERVE THEIR REGRESSIVE AGENDA IN THE PRESENT
Let’s take Martin Luther King Jr. as an example. Today, he is revered as the man who dreamed that people would be judged based on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin. We’re taught in schools today about his peaceful tactics and how they inspired America to stop being racist, hold hands, sing kumbaya, and…nah, I can’t keep typing this with a straight face.
While 90% of Americans approve of Dr. King today, only 30% did in the 1960s when he was alive. Like many other past (and present) activists, he was arrested over 20 times and told by the FBI to die by suicide. Rather than the color-blind, milquetoast figure mainstream politicians portray him as, King was a fierce advocate for economic and social equality, not just economic and social opportunity. MLK held views in line with democratic socialism and reserved some of his harshest criticism for white moderates. If you want to learn more about his actual beliefs, these videos go more in-depth.
Instead, outlets like Fox News will reference MLK’s legacy to condemn modern-day movements, ignoring that conservatives of King’s day accused him of the same things. In some states, his words are being used to justify censorship of progressive ideas by “leaders” like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
However, there is one group that’s actively learning from past protest movements and applying their teachings to the modern day, and that’s the students. Protesters at Columbia used very similar language and imagery to Vietnam War protesters in the 1960s. Groups like FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) actively educate protesters on this history.
These students know what they’re up against, and are engaging in a mass movement because they know that is required to make change. They have clear demands about what they expect from campus leaders, and on some campuses, administrators made reasonable concessions that allowed students to end their encampments. They know that powerful people have turned public opinion against them, and they see through their playbook. I hope, if you didn’t before, you now will too.
WHERE WE GO FROM HERE
Personally, I don’t expect pro-Palestine protests (including on campuses) to go anywhere. While the school year is nearly at an end for most colleges and universities, the conditions that led to the protests are not. While colleges and universities have gone to suppressive tactics more quickly than ever, these typically backfire. Student protesters know that what they are sacrificing is minuscule in comparison to what those they are fighting for (in this case, everyday people in Gaza) are going through.
By calling out the tricks politicians and media outlets pull for what they are, I hope you can have more productive conversations with friends, family, or any other space where politics comes up. If you ever find yourself opposing a mass movement of student protesters…ask yourself why, and look for these manipulative tactics. They will only work until enough people see through them.
Our hearts go out to all everyday citizens who have lost loved ones as a result of the ongoing war in Gaza, regardless of nationality.
Stay tuned for another piece next Tuesday morning — to get notified when it drops, follow me or this publication on Medium or subscribe to email updates. In the meantime, please “applaud” this piece and leave a comment with your takeaways or a future topic you’d like me to cover.
