It's worth remembering that people over 40 have not approved of almost any student/young person-dominated protest movement since 1950. We tend to falsely remember that there was a wide moral embrace of MLK and the civil rights movement, when in fact he was disliked by a majority of Americans (even more disproportionately so by older white Americans) until well after his death, and the same for the civil rights movement in general. The early SDS of the Free Speech movement and the Port Huron statement was seen as a fringe group of weirdo leftists by older Americans, and later antiwar campus protests were what enabled Reagan's political acension in California. Protests for feminism and women's rights and for gay rights were persistently mocked and disdained by the conventional wisdom of older Americans throughout the 1970s. The anti-apartheid movement on campuses was seen as useless and uninformed. Occupy was widely derided by tribunes of the mainstream.
So I'm not sure this is a new situation. Considering that some of those movements in retrospect seem incredibly important and others not so much, I don't think conventional disdain for protestors is a good guide to whether they have philosophically coherent goals, reasonable political objectives, or will have a meaningful impact or not. The disdain seems structurally hard-wired even when the causes change and the organizational clarity or lack thereof is different.
Michael Powell - antisemitism is flaring, all governing. Students are conflicted. Few Jews feel they belong. Sadly, a self-loathing is real. Among Jews and others. Hamas is pleasing and abusing the Palestinians that elected them. Hamas and Hezbollah, is Iran Inc. Antisemitism is the constant. Campus protests are simply a function of classic antisemitism and the confused identity of Jews that have not assimilated. Jesus isn’t selling. Love isn’t selling. Hatred is selling, marketed by a self absorbed cowardly self-loathing liar - The Orange Man. Republican are fascist.. that started long ago. The reformation did not work. Lincoln was dead. And the Negro was not emancipated. The Negro was crushed. Separate but equal was another lie. And American ambivalence is terminal.
It's worth remembering that people over 40 have not approved of almost any student/young person-dominated protest movement since 1950. We tend to falsely remember that there was a wide moral embrace of MLK and the civil rights movement, when in fact he was disliked by a majority of Americans (even more disproportionately so by older white Americans) until well after his death, and the same for the civil rights movement in general. The early SDS of the Free Speech movement and the Port Huron statement was seen as a fringe group of weirdo leftists by older Americans, and later antiwar campus protests were what enabled Reagan's political acension in California. Protests for feminism and women's rights and for gay rights were persistently mocked and disdained by the conventional wisdom of older Americans throughout the 1970s. The anti-apartheid movement on campuses was seen as useless and uninformed. Occupy was widely derided by tribunes of the mainstream.
So I'm not sure this is a new situation. Considering that some of those movements in retrospect seem incredibly important and others not so much, I don't think conventional disdain for protestors is a good guide to whether they have philosophically coherent goals, reasonable political objectives, or will have a meaningful impact or not. The disdain seems structurally hard-wired even when the causes change and the organizational clarity or lack thereof is different.
Michael Powell - antisemitism is flaring, all governing. Students are conflicted. Few Jews feel they belong. Sadly, a self-loathing is real. Among Jews and others. Hamas is pleasing and abusing the Palestinians that elected them. Hamas and Hezbollah, is Iran Inc. Antisemitism is the constant. Campus protests are simply a function of classic antisemitism and the confused identity of Jews that have not assimilated. Jesus isn’t selling. Love isn’t selling. Hatred is selling, marketed by a self absorbed cowardly self-loathing liar - The Orange Man. Republican are fascist.. that started long ago. The reformation did not work. Lincoln was dead. And the Negro was not emancipated. The Negro was crushed. Separate but equal was another lie. And American ambivalence is terminal.