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Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
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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(From the rivvvvver! To the seaaaaa! Unreported Truths will be freeeee! Unless you pay for it, so please do. 20 cents a day.)
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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.
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Four years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan, what do we know about the origin of the SARSCOV2 virus?We were presented at the outset with two competing theories
The university now has at least 177 bureaucrats dedicated to left-wing racialism.
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
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.
To support more of our independent journalism, become a Free Press subscriber today:
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
In September 2020, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbase, did something unthinkable in Silicon Valley: he said there would be no politics at his company.
This was right after the summer of George Floyd and Covid lockdowns and microaggressions in the workplace—when companies as conventional as Nordstrom and IBM were all of a sudden issuing official statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and established financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase were committing billions of dollars toward investing in minority-owned businesses. Even Viacom-owned Paramount Network, the cable TV channel known for series like Battle of the Fittest Couple—not exactly a brand we look to for moral clarity—felt they had to take a stand, canceling production of its long-running show Cops, as protests against incidents of police brutality spread nationwide. In short, corporate statements (and cancellations) in the name of social justice causes became almost as commonplace as having an HR department.
The pressure was intense for Coinbase to follow suit—including from inside the house.
In early June, reportedly hundreds of employees had staged a virtual walkout to protest the fact that Armstrong hadn’t moved quickly to make a public statement in support of BLM, even though the CEO had sent out a companywide email a week after George Floyd was killed, saying he knew many employees were “hurting” and that Coinbase was there to support them.
Armstrong capitulated, voicing his support for BLM and apologizing to employees for his handling of a meeting on the topic, at which some workers reportedly became upset. But, though pressured to speak out, the press-shy CEO still felt that publishing a public statement in support of social causes was not the right move for every company, including his.
Armstrong’s stance was that there was a time and place for activism, but that, in the future, he wanted Coinbase to be “laser focused” on its fundamental mission—to build a platform for users to buy and sell cryptocurrencies.
That’s why, several months after the controversy, on September 27, 2020, he published a blog post stating that Coinbase would no longer engage in “broader societal issues.”
It’s worth reading his statement in full, but the key takeaways were plain:
At Coinbase, he said, we don’t:
Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
Expect the company to represent our personal beliefs externally
Assume negative intent, or not have each other’s back
Take on activism outside of our core mission at work
The company even went so far as to offer severance packages to the small percentage of employees who opted to leave because of the new policy. (Some 5 percent of employees, or about 60 people, took them up on the offer.)
In the meantime, the reaction to Armstrong’s new corporate policy was swift and severe. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was especially fired up: “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution,” he posted. (Costolo could not be reached for comment on this story.) The social media company’s co-founder, and another of its former CEOs, Jack Dorsey, also chimed in, implying that by not acknowledging the “related societal issues” faced by Coinbase’s customers, the company and its leader were leaving “people behind.”
Another tech insider, entrepreneur Aaron White, tweeted that Armstrong’s statement struck him as “isolationist fantasy” and that by taking an apolitical stance, the CEO was “effectively guaranteeing” he would land on the wrong side of history on “absolutely every issue.”
As Shaun Maguire—who was a partner at GV, Google’s investment wing, from 2016 until 2019—explains: “The culture of Silicon Valley when Brian did that was dominated by Big Tech, and if you go and look at the political donations they were making, it was skewed far left. Even people in the center were afraid to talk four years ago.”
Four years later, though, Brian Armstrong looks more prophetic than blasphemous.
That became crystal clear earlier this month, when pro-Palestine protesters barged into two of Google’s offices—one in New York City and one in Sunnyvale, California—and refused to leave until the search giant agreed to back out of a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the government of Israel. The company didn’t give in to their demands. Instead, it called the police. Ten hours after the sit-in began, the protesters were arrested on trespassing charges, and a couple of days later at least 28 staffers involved with the incident were fired. In a note to employees, CEO Sundar Pichai stated that while Google has a “culture of vibrant, open discussion,” it is also a place of work.
“This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Pichai said in the memo to staff. “This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted.”
The new policy was a striking reversal for Google, which historically has been better known for capitulating to employee demands than quelling them. Back in 2018, for instance, Google said it would not renew a contract with the Pentagon after several thousand employees signed a petition protesting the company’s involvement with an AI project aimed at improving drone strikes.
Last month, Shaun Maguire—the former GV employee—told The Free Press that working for the company in this era was “like being in an authoritarian country where only certain views and people were accepted.”
But apparently, even Google’s leadership has reached a breaking point.
“I think the reason it’s less controversial now is that more people have seen how activism went too far in these companies,” says Armstrong.
Most obviously, the release of Google’s flagship AI product, Gemini, made headlines earlier this year because of its extreme ideological bias. As The Free Press reported in March, if you asked Gemini whether Hitler or Elon Musk is more dangerous, “the AI chatbot says that it is ‘complex and requires careful consideration.’ Ask it the same question about Obama and Hitler and it will tell you the question is ‘inappropriate and misleading.’ ” It also refused to condemn pedophilia. In the wake of this embarrassment, the market value of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, fell more than $90 billion.
There are other reasons for the shift in policy, according to Armstrong. “I think [Elon] Musk buying Twitter also helped shape culture to a degree people haven’t fully internalized yet.”
But perhaps more importantly, since then we have gone, as Armstrong explains, “from a zero-interest rate environment to an economic crash where most companies did layoffs, so the balance of power shifted between employees and leadership.” Employers didn’t have to bend over backward to keep talent anymore.
It’s not just Google’s atmosphere that has changed—it’s the entire industry. “It used to be all about sitting on bean bags, drinking lattes,” says David Heinemeier Hansson, co-owner and chief technology officer of 37signals, a software company based in Chicago. “But that whole vibe has changed.”
37signals is the parent company of Basecamp, the project management software designer, which was a rare early adopter of Coinbase’s approach to a politics-free workplace. Like Coinbase, Basecamp’s decision, made in April 2021, was a reaction to the politically charged debates that its leaders felt were spinning out of control—and becoming an unacceptable distraction.
“It had become insufferable,” says Heinemeier Hansson. “It consumed more and more of the business, and there were efforts to force us to do things that weren’t right. There were employees at the time, inside the company, who were interested in running ideological background checks on customers.”
Another tipping point was when a list of “funny” customer names that had been circulating internally for years began causing a lot of disagreement about the company’s culture and how it should address diversity issues. (Basecamp hasn’t shared specific examples from the list, but it’s been reported that the controversy arose because some of them were of Asian or African origin.)
Jason Fried, Basecamp’s CEO, says he and Heinemeier Hansson didn’t create the list, and that it should have never existed. “I don’t feel good about that list,” says Fried. “You shouldn’t talk about your customers that way.”
Ultimately, though, what started as an unprofessional joke created lots of unintended rifts between employees, and of course with management, who some workers felt should take a stronger stand—not just against the list, but on broader social issues.
So when, in April 2021, Fried introduced the new policy to Basecamp’s staff—stating clearly, “We are not a social impact company”—he and Heinemeier Hansson were berated by many for their position, which one employee labeled as “oppressive.” Hours after the announcement, several employees quit their jobs. And over the next couple of weeks, about a third of the company’s workers took severance packages—which, like Coinbase, Basecamp offered to anyone who wasn’t on board with the new rules. Some of those who stayed, like the company’s head of human resources, Andrea LaRowe, had to contend with accusations that they were working for “Nazis.”
Looking back, Heinemeier Hansson and Fried say they knew that their decision could tarnish their reputations in the eyes of many in the tech industry, but they didn’t realize just how much it could impact other employees who stayed in the company. That doesn’t mean that they regret the policy change. Far from it. Both leaders say that Basecamp has been more productive than ever in the ensuing years. And even in the face of the backlash, they felt that they had stayed true to what they believe. As Heinemeier Hansson so elegantly puts it: “What’s the point of having ‘fuck you’ money if you don’t ever say fuck you?”
What seemed like a great idea at the dawn of the internet—that tech companies could serve a bigger, better purpose in the world—has become fraught and untenable. Google’s original motto, “Don’t be evil,” was an admirable mantra for a company building the world’s biggest search engine. (It was changed to “Do the right thing” after Google went through a restructuring in 2015, reorganizing under Alphabet.) But as it turns out, people have very different definitions of what is evil, and what is right. And in the case of Google, some of its employees seem to have put ideas like Zionism, or even capitalism, in that first bucket.
A few years ago, those employees might have had the power to push their particular agenda forward. “Google was known for coddling its employees, and it took feedback from them very seriously,” particularly around the time Google backed out of its contract with the Pentagon, says a former employee who worked in internal communications.
Back then, competition was high for tech employees. Fast-forward a few years, though, and that’s no longer the case. More than a quarter of a million tech workers were laid off from their companies in 2023. “Employers don’t have to tolerate that kind of behavior anymore,” says the former Google employee, who asked to remain anonymous. “The idea of bringing your whole self to work has turned into bringing your professional self to work.”
That’s exactly the shift both Coinbase and Basecamp were aiming for in the early 2020s.
“It was a very difficult decision for us to make in the moment, but probably one of the best decisions we’ve ever made,” says Fried. “To be able to avoid the continuous distraction of politics today, to be able to sidestep all of it now when it’s only gotten worse, is just a huge relief.”
Both Fried and Heinemeier Hansson also use the word relief to describe their reaction to the recent developments at Google. There’s a sense of vindication too—at least one friend who Fried says had “turned his back” on them in 2021 has reached out to apologize in recent days.
“People have started to think back on their reaction from a few years ago,” says Fried. “It reentered their consciousness.”
As for Coinbase’s Armstrong, he’s cautiously optimistic that companies can return to focusing on technology without incurring the wrath he did in 2020.
But undoing years of inertia in the other direction won’t be easy: “Mostly I’m just hopeful that Google turns a corner and is able to get back on track,” says Armstrong. “I seriously doubt it will happen unless they exit a large number of employees who are pursuing their own agenda rather than the company’s mission.”
Michal Lev-Ram is a Silicon Valley–based tech journalist and editor-at-large at Fortune. Follow her @mlevram.
For more on this subject, read The Free Press report on the Gemini fiasco: “Google’s Woke AI Wasn’t a Mistake. We Know. We Were There.” And subscribe today for more detailed reporting from the tech world:
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