Republicans, Itching For Kent State Reenactment, Demand National Guard Bust Student Heads
Tom Cotton and Hawley comin', we're finally on our own.
As protests against Israel’s war in Gaza continue on college campuses, particularly a sit-in encampment at Columbia University in New York City, Republicans have seized on a favorite “solution” to ending the turmoil: Calling for the National Guard to go in and bust some heads.
Yesterday, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), the rightwing Bobblehead Twins of advocating political violence, demanded that Joe Biden send troops to campuses, especially to Columbia, out of performative concern for the safety of Jewish students. (Yes, some of the protesters are also Jewish. No, that doesn’t magically keep other Jewish students from feeling threatened, particularly since some protesters have made signs like “‘Al-Qassam's next targets,’ with an arrow pointing to counter-protesters waving Israeli and American flags.” For the record, we think that’s shitty!)
In a tweet yesterday, Hawley invoked Dwight D. Eisenhower’s actions to enforce the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, writing,
Eisenhower sent the 101st to Little Rock.
It’s time for Biden to call out the National Guard at our universities to protect Jewish Americans
Because apparently students calling for a cease-fire in Gaza are exactly like the white racists who wanted to lynch the Little Rock Nine. Isn’t that a cute trick he pulled there?
In a reminder that we are in fact living in Hell now, racist assholes with blue checkmarks posted photos of soldiers in 1957 confronting wonderful white people with bayonets, and called Hawley a race traitor who was just as bad as Ike.
For his part, Cotton — who infamously wanted Donald Trump to send troops to shoot rioters during the 2020 protests against police brutality — got on Twitter Monday to express his own pretended solidarity with Jewish people, because demonstrations against the war in Gaza are magically “nascent pogroms.” Yes, he really said that:
The nascent pogroms at Columbia have to stop TODAY, before our Jewish brethren sit for Passover Seder tonight. If Eric Adams won’t send the NYPD and Kathy Hochul won’t send the National Guard, Joe Biden has a duty to take charge and break up these mobs.
Yes, let’s take a moment to unpack that metaphor: Pogroms — a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently” — were organized mob violence, including murder and rape, perpetrated against Jewish communities by their gentile neighbors, often with the support of police or local leaders.
Also, let’s note this tweet from Jewish Currents Editor Arrielle Angel, showing protesters at Columbia holding their own seder with other protesters Monday, to call for peace. Obviously, those kids must be about to engage in a nascent pogrom against themselves.
Ms. Angel wrote, in a thread that’s worth reading,
Explaining the seder plate at the Columbia encampment. These students truly embody the meaning of Passover in their provisional seder and their commitment to liberation.
While the campus protests have been loud and disruptive, and yes, some have included both antisemitic rhetoric and expressions of support for Hamas, there hasn’t been any violence to speak of, and certainly none by organized mobs. Arrests have largely been on trespassing charges after crowds refused to disperse. Some of the Jewish students holding the seder at Columbia were arrested after it ended, too.
But there’s political hay to be made, so Republicans are pretending that if troops aren’t sent to the campuses immediately, well it’s just like Kristallnacht, only minus the organized murder, rape, arson, and looting. In fact, Cotton ventured, the real facsists are the Democrats who aren’t willing to send in the military to end these “nascent pogroms” that show no sign of turning into the real thing:
For nine years, many liberals have fantasized that Trump is Hitler and their brave “Resistance” proves how they would’ve acted in Germany in the 1930s. In reality, nascent pogroms have broken out across America’s campuses and these very same liberals sit silently or even defend the mobs. Which actually tells you how they would’ve acted in Germany in the 1930s.
Just to be clear: Antisemitism is evil. Calls for genocide are evil. Supporting terrorism is evil. And calling for an end to the bombing of civilians is none of those.
To get in on the publicity, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a far-Right Christian nationalist who loves Jews for the role they’ll play in bringing about the End Times and the return of Jesus (who will smite any who don’t convert), went to Columbia Wednesday too so he could also get in on the calls for military force against the protests, and for Columbia University President Minouche Shafik to resign even after she called in the NYPD. We suppose she was supposed to call the National Guard herself.
Johnson, joined by Republican members of Congress from New York, condemned the protests as protesters heckled him, saying, “This is dangerous. This is not the First Amendment, this is not free expression.” We would note that it was actually both.
He went on to call for troops as well, insisting, “If this is not contained quickly and if these threats and intimidation are not stopped, there is an appropriate time for the National Guard.” It’s also just possible that Johnson didn’t win any hearts and minds among the protesters when he added that “My message to the students inside the encampment is go back to class and stop the nonsense. Stop wasting your parents’ money.”
Across the continent, in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, taking another shot at personifying the Republican id, actually did send Texas state police to the University of Texas, Austin, where at least 20 people were arrested for demonstrating. While they were at it, city and state police knocked the crap out of a cameraman for Austin’s Fox-TV affiliate and dragged his ass off to jail, because journalists too are enemies of the people.
Abbott said that “protesters belong in jail” and made Very Concerned noises about antisemitism, although as Texas Observer correspondent Steven Monacelli pointed out in an excellent Twitter thread, Abbott’s insistence that “Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period” seemed at odds with the governor’s hands-off approach to some other antisemites in Texas. Monacelli wrote,
I've seen no credible reporting of actual antisemitic incidents at the UT Austin protest. What I can tell you is that I've reported on numerous neo-Nazi events and Greg Abbott never once tried to put any of them in jail.
He followed that with four specific instances when neo-Nazis openly marched in Texas, occasionally with swastika flags and everything. But then, none of the students arrested yesterday were going to vote for Abbott anyway.
Finally, for a crowning absurdity, this morning Donald Trump declared the nonviolent campus protests worse than the violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists carrying tiki torches chanted “Jews will not replace us” and a racist maniac plowed his car into a crowd of peaceful counter-demonstrators, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 40 others. As the New York Times explains (gift link), Trump, falsely calling the campus protests “riots,” said on his fake Twitter social media site,
“Joe Biden would say, constantly, that he ran because of Charlottesville,” he wrote of the 2020 election. “Well, if that’s the case, he’s done a really terrible job because Charlottesville is like a ‘peanut’ compared to the riots and anti-Israel protests that are happening all over our Country, RIGHT NOW.”
Mr. Trump also repeated an attack on President Biden, saying that he “HATES Israel and Hates the Jewish people,” while adding “the problem is that he HATES the Palestinians even more, and he just doesn’t know what to do!?!?”
So if you really want to see some peaceful Very Fine People who love Jews and Palestinians both, just drop by a Trump rally, we guess.
[The Hill / Politico / NYT (gift link)]
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I will be on a hair trigger to close these comments. Don't be shitty.
One thing I would mention -- and perhaps it's already been mentioned -- is that while the campus protests have generally been great, there are credible reports of non-students standing just off-campus being EXTREMELY shitty. And while the ones I heard about were anti-semitic, doubtless there are people being stupidly shitty towards pro-Palestinian protestors.
The best explanation or this is that they know the campus protests are getting coverage, and so they know they're more likely to get attention if they get on campus or even just near it.
Anyway, I'll defend the student protests for being peaceful and mostly thoughtful so far, but fuck this is a difficult situation when there really are threatening fuckfaces just off campus doing their best to get on camera being shitty.