On the surface, the wave of anti-Israel protests washing over college campuses across the country looks a lot like left-wing student activism dating back to at least the Vietnam War. Protesters chant radical, often rhyming, slogans accusing American and other Western governments of crimes against humanity with little to no scrutiny of the other side's

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The Ivy League youth of today have demands.

Very. Serious. Demands.

They want freedom. For Hamas, natch. From the river to the sea, and who knows where after that? Maybe Paris, Paris is nice in the spring, as long as you don’t publish cartoons of the Prophet that the faithful don’t like. Then they kill you.

They also want Doordash. The Doordash is more for themselves.

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These two demands came together this week in the person of Johannah King-Slutzky. Yes, even her name is a parody of itself, a Joseph Heller novel in three words. King-Slutzky is a Columbia University graduate student writing a dissertation on “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860.”

In other words, King-Slutzky is on her way to a long and full life of unemployment, broken for short stretches of jobs supported by compulsory deductions - taxes and union dues. (Per her now-deleted Columbia Web page, she worked as a “a political strategist for leftist and progressive causes and remain[s] active in the higher education labor movement.”)

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(They all look like this. Why do they all look like this?

ALT: I haven’t been so disappointed in a Slutzky since Caroline Ellison!

ALT ALT: She is ROCKING that keffiyeh scarf! Or should that be kaffiyeh? It’s like Hanukkah, a holiday I’m guessing King-Slutzky celebrated growing up, you can never tell exactly how to spell it!)

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Where was I before King-Slutzky’s flowing locks distracted me?

Oh yes, the Columbia protests. Speaking on behalf of the nitwits who had occupied a central building, King-Slutzky demanded the school provision the protestors with water and food.

“Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation,” she said, in all apparent seriousness. “This is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for.”

By then, the protestors had been inside for the building for hours. Hours!

This high-pitched whine was too much even for the assembled reporters. One responded, "It seems like you're saying, “We want to be revolutionaries, we want to take over this building, now would you please bring us some food.”"

To which King-Slutzky responded that food was a capitalist construct and food delivery the opium of the masses, and by the way there’s this really great Chinese place on 108th and Amsterdam and could somebody please pick her up a double order of the pork and crab soup dumplings, because all this protesting made her hunnnngry?

Nah, she didn’t, but she might as well have. She had humiliated herself so thoroughly that the arrival of the New York City Police to end the protest a few hours later must have come as a relief.

Like basic humanitarian aid, I tell ya!

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But it isn’t just Columbia.

All over this great land, students at America’s finest universities are cutting their last weeks of class and getting high in tents protesting the very existence of Jews Israel.

Because colonialism and occupation and genocide. That last one is a particular kick in the teeth, given that Jews faced an actual genocide which some of the real alter kockers* are still alive to remember.

(*Yiddish for oldster.)

Really, what this is all about is being naughty and sticking it to the man.

Defund the police worked out about as well as could be expected, and climate change is so boring. Who wants to protest the weather, anyway? Besides, the California snowpack came roaring back this spring. Atmospheric rivers or whatnot.

So Hamas it is. Let a thousand Palestinian flags fly.

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(I pahked my cahh-bomb in Haahvahd Yahd!)

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The protestors, and a few of their media compadres, are trying to wrap this spring’s nonsense in the mantle of the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War.

The analogy makes total sense, except in every way.

It’s not just that the United States isn’t fighting in Gaza and no American soldiers are dying there. By the spring of 1968, the United States had largely turned against Vietnam - a war killing up to 500 Americans a week in a country that could not be considered a vital American interest no matter how hard the White House pretended it was.

Famously, on Feb. 27, 1968, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, who had just traveled to Vietnam, said that the United States could not win the war. The broadcast supposedly led President Lyndon B. Johnson to say if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost Middle America.

A month later, Johnson said he would not run for reelection. He had won in 1964 in a landslide, but the war and its unpopularity doomed his Presidency, a tragedy that has been well-documented.

So the students in 1968 were genuinely speaking on behalf of a huge swath of Americans who hated the Vietnam War. (Even so, many older Americans turned against the protests when they turned violent over the summer.)

The current protests, on the other hand, feel like a particularly ugly roleplay.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza has bogged down and killed too many civilians, but it comes in response to an awful and unprovoked attack on Israeli civilians on Israeli soil. And do these protestors really understand what it means for them to support Hamas - an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group that is about half-a-degree removed from the butchery of the Islamic State?

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(Word salad, word salad.)

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Meanwhile the protestors themselves come across as weirdly entitled and weak. If they’re so certain of their own righteousness, why do they insist on wearing masks? Why do they whine so whenever anyone challenges them?

As the University of Florida said in a statement after Florida Highway Patrol troopers made several arrests:

The University of Florida is not a daycare and we do not protesters like children — they knew the rules, they broke the rules, and they’ll face the consequences.

These protestors aren’t the vanguard of a broader social movement. They do not speak for many - much less most - Americans. They represent only themselves.

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(Just do it or I’ll come to your house with a bullhorn!)

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Even the White House appears aware of the risks their antics run to the Democratic Party.

President Biden gave a three-minute speechette this morning to say that “the rule of law must be upheld” and that “order must prevail... it’s against the law when violence occurs, destroying property is not a peaceful protest... dissent must never lead to disorder.” (Imagine the screaming and gnashing of teeth if Donald Trump had made that simple statement of fact.)

I doubt the younguns care what Grandpa Joe says at this point, though. They’re having too good a time.

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The university now has at least 177 bureaucrats dedicated to left-wing racialism.

Last night around 9 p.m., NYPD cops in riot gear descended on Columbia to, depending on your view of the matter, clear—or liberate?—Hamilton Hall, which had been occupied by protesters some 20 hours prior. 

The cops made quick work of the blockaded building: within two hours dozens of people were arrested. 

“For the individuals that are inside the Hamilton Hall building,” said the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry at a press conference, they’ll be “charged with burglary in the third degree, criminal mischief, and trespassing.” As for the protesters in outdoor encampment, he suggested they would be charged with “trespassing and disorderly conduct.”

Last night’s raid comes after a nearly two-week-long encampment, in which Columbia students and assorted others have chanted vigorously and danced interpretatively. They also painted their nails, made friendship bracelets, and made sure to have sufficient supplies of gluten-free bread. (Read Olivia Reingold’s report, “Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella.”)

Save some pesky details—like, say, the chants for globalizing the intifada (a call for globalizing a campaign of terror aimed at killing Jews); telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland; and, in at least one case, assaulting a student—the encampment was just kids being kids. Indeed, if you asked the likes of Ilhan Omar and AOC, both of whom made pilgrimages, these students explicitly cheering for Hamas weren’t pro-war at all—they were standing against genocide and for liberation.

That position became less tenable after protesters smashed windows with a hammer, occupied Hamilton Hall, and started fighting with Columbia employees.

A now-viral photograph (above) shows one of the college’s lowest paid workers—a janitor making around $19 an hour—fighting back against a member of the mob. Contrast that with this video, in which one of the protest leaders demands “humanitarian aid”—i.e., snacks—for those who’ve laid siege to the building.

It was a tale of two Columbias.

The janitor captured in the photograph on Monday night still has not been identified. But yesterday, two members of Columbia’s maintenance crew said the man should sue the college.

“Half these kids don’t even know what they’re protesting for, they just want to be part of the fad,” one janitor, who did not want to be identified, told The Free Press. “I would fucking sue if I was him.”

Another maintenance worker with a 19-year-old daughter in college said, “If I were a parent of one of the graduating seniors, I would say fuck this, I want my money back.” Columbia’s tuition ranges from $50,000 a year for graduate students to $90,000 a year for undergrads. 

Meanwhile, a PhD student named Johannah King-Slutzky spoke to the press about students’ demands, which included catering. When a reporter asked her, “Why should the university be obligated to provide food to people who have taken over a building?” King-Slutzky replied, “First of all, we’re saying they are obligated to provide food to students who pay for a meal plan here.” Which is sort of like saying that if a restaurant can’t deny you service, the chef is obliged to come cook in your apartment—except you’ve stormed the chef’s apartment, and now you want him to cook you dinner there. 

“I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of a community and obligation Columbia has to its students,” King-Slutzky reflects. “Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill even if they disagree with you?” So like, is it possible that they could get just a simple glass of water? With three lemons? And a Caesar salad with dressing on the side? Thankssomuch! 

King-Slutzky, whose thesis is on “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens” and the “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760–1860,” and whose fantasies are indeed limitless, goes on: “It’s crazy to say because we’re on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for.” In another video, she calls on members of the public to “hold Columbia accountable for any disproportionate response to students’ actions.” 

You’d think with all this talk of proportionality and humanitarian aid that she’d be discussing the war in Gaza. But she means the war in Hamilton Hall. In Manhattan. 

Meanwhile, two Columbia students captured footage of the late-night break-in for The Free Press, which you can watch here:

Their video captured professional protester Lisa Fithian, 63—a later-in-life learner?—directing the barricade. Fithian, it turns out, is a “protest consultant” paid by union and activist groups to teach their members tactics for taking over the streets. Known as “Professor Occupy,” she’s been arrested between 80–100 times and was seen on Monday instructing protesters how to block doors and also calling two Jewish students, who tried to intervene, “assholes.” 

While the mob that broke in were masked, a number of them were visibly older than the students. Perhaps some of these more experienced activists smuggled in some wraps before the paddy wagon arrived. 

Additional reporting from Francesca Block. 

For further reading:

Where does free speech end and law-breaking begin? Constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro explains. 

We also found University of Chicago president Paul Alivisatos’s letter on protests and encampments at his school to be an excellent example of that distinction in action.

Suzy Weiss is a reporter at The Free Press. Follow her on X @SnoozyWeiss.

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