Back in late April of 2015, almost exactly nine years ago, riots erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, over the demise of a career criminal named Freddie Gray, who died while in police custody.
Few people remember his name today, but at the time he was the most recently canonized BLM saint, and the guy whose death everyone was pretending to mourn. The most memorable thing about that moment in history isn’t Freddie Gray himself, or even the riots, but what the then-mayor of the city said the day after, as the media put it, “peaceful protests took a violent turn.” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake stood in front of news cameras and told the world that she had decided to give “those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”
By her own testimony, she had instructed law enforcement to stand by and give rioters space to destroy their community. To let off some steam and vent their frustrations by committing crimes.
At the time it was shocking that a political leader would openly allow that kind of behavior — and even admit that she was allowing it. It also cast the riots in an even more bizarrely childish light. The rioters were like children having a temper tantrum in the grocery store, and the mayor was the overly lenient, push-over parent allowing the scene to continue. But as Mayor Rawlings-Blake discovered, the problem with giving space to destroy is that eventually you’ll want them to stop destroying, and then at that point you’ll have to do exactly the thing that you could have and should have done the moment that the lawlessness started. The rioters will not at that point thank you for having given them more time and space than they ever deserved.
Whenever you decide to finally enforce the law, they will claim to be oppressed — just as they would have if you had enforced the law from the beginning. This is one of the many problems with the “space to destroy” strategy, and yet city leaders all across the country in the years since have adopted the same strategy.
In recent weeks, as you’ve heard, university officials have embraced the “space to destroy” approach as well. And last night that decision — as it always does — came to a head.
After allowing leftist pro-Hamas demonstrators to maintain an illegal encampment for many days, Columbia University finally brought in the NYPD to arrest the criminals — a decision that was only made after they broke into and occupied a building on campus. The police arrived in full force with riot shields and zip ties and busses to arrest and detain the demonstrators. It didn’t take very long before the situation was brought under control and the authorities had wrestled back the property that had been illegally seized.
There were many videos of this operation as it unfolded, often posted by leftist groups who expected the public to be shocked and horrified by the images.
Here’s one video posted by a group called National Students for Justice in Palestine:
SWAT AND SRG HAVE INVADED COLUMBIA’S CAMPUS AND ARE ENTERING HIND’S HALL. THEY HAVE FORCED OUT ALL PRESS TO PREVENT RECORDINGS OF THEIR BRUTALITY. pic.twitter.com/LJJ5nKrUWe
— National Students for Justice in Palestine (@NationalSJP) May 1, 2024
They posted that along with this caption:
SWAT AND SRG HAVE INVADED COLUMBIA’S CAMPUS AND ARE ENTERING HIND’S HALL. THEY HAVE FORCED OUT ALL PRESS TO PREVENT RECORDINGS OF THEIR BRUTALITY.
But there was no brutality. Simply the police enforcing the law. And they weren’t invading anything. It’s the pro-Hamas protesters that had illegally invaded a building. A building that isn’t called Hind’s Hall, but rather Hamilton Hall. The protesters had not only burglarized and occupied the building, but also attempted to rename it. They expect us to be deeply disturbed and outraged on their behalf that their act of organized burglary and trespassing is no longer allowed to continue.
Indeed, many on the Left — including prominent politicians who spoke out — did express outrage. According to them, these protesters should be allowed to do whatever they want, indefinitely, and break whatever laws they want to break, for as long as they want to break them, without facing any consequences whatsoever. That is their actual position. Nonetheless, dozens of the criminals were arrested, and now they all face not only criminal charges but expulsion. They will be thousands of dollars in debt with no college degree. Which means they’ll be in only slightly worse shape than people who are thousands of dollars in debt with a college degree.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the illegal encampment on UCLA’s campus was also invaded. But not by police. Here’s the report from Breitbart:
Roughly 100 pro-Israel vigilantes stormed the “Palestine Solidarity Encampment” at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, sparking battles with activists. The raid occurred after nearly a week in which UCLA not only allowed the encampment to occupy the main plaza on campus, but also allowed pro-Palestinian activists to run their own security, barring access to students and the public.
Here’s what that looked like:
This is what happens when you grant one group special privileges to break the law and all of the rules. Not only break the rules — but come up with their own rules. That sort of wildly unjust, disproportionate situation can only continue for so long before everyone else — the people expected to abide by the law — have simply had enough of the double standard and decide to take matters into their own hands. If you don’t want that to happen — and you definitely shouldn’t want it to happen — then enforce the rules equally and hold everyone to the same standard. Which means that nobody should be allowed to maintain an encampment of any kind.
Keep this in mind. When pro-life protesters sat peacefully outside of an abortion clinic for a few hours on one single morning, the Biden Administration sent armed federal agents to their homes to drag them away in handcuffs, convicted them of felonies, and now wants to send them to prison for ten years.
When January 6th protesters trespassed in the capital, the federal government responded by spending the next three years hunting them down one by one and tossing them in prison.
When the Left objects to how these pro-Hamas protesters are being treated, it’s not because these protesters are being handled harshly. It’s because the Left believes that their protesters — the ones on their side — should be given free rein to do whatever they want.
This is a sense of entitlement obviously shared by the protesters themselves, which is what led to this unintentionally hilarious moment at Columbia University yesterday afternoon, a few hours before the police raid. An unofficial spokeswoman for the demonstrators gave a press conference where she made a number of demands. According to reporting from Noah Pollack, a contributor to the Free Beacon, this woman’s name is Johannah King-Slutzky. According to her bio, Johannah is working on a dissertation on “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860.” Her goal, she explains, is to “write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism.”
It’s a shame to think that the world will never get to read this full dissertation, now that Johannah is probably going to be expelled. We will have to continue on, somehow, without the vital information that she was going to provide us about the fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination.
In any case, now that you know what sort of person we’re dealing with, you won’t be surprised by the demands she made during the press conference:
Those are their demands. They say they are willing to enter into negotiations, but only if Columbia University follows the rules that the burglars and trespassers have set out. Of course the problem for the group is that they have absolutely no leverage whatsoever. They can simply be removed from the building and arrested at any time. They have no leverage, no power, nothing but the privilege they’ve been granted to cosplay as revolutionaries. It can be revoked at any moment, and it was, shortly after these demands were made.
But the most striking and hilarious part of this bizarre press conference was when she made a plea for — and I quote — humanitarian aid:
Reporter grills Columbia student after she demands the university help feed protestors occupying Hamilton Hall:
"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'." pic.twitter.com/vNczSAM4T1
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 30, 2024
Just to be completely clear here, the “humanitarian aid” they’re requesting is Chipotle deliveries. The next time you order a burrito bowl on Door Dash, remember that you’re not ordering lunch. You are requesting humanitarian aid.
So these protesters committed burglary and trespassing, holed themselves up in a building where they didn’t belong and had no right be, barricaded the doors and refused to come out, and then demanded that free food be delivered to them so that they don’t, as they claim they are on the verge of doing, starve to death. This is the level of pathological, insane, delusional narcissistic entitlement that we’re dealing with here. It’s exactly the mentally that these college campuses intentionally instill, and which is now being wielded against them.
But most of all this goes to show just how fake all of this is. You can say that these kids are radical leftists, and that’s certainly true. You can say that they’re anti-American, and that’s true too, which is why they’ve taken down American flags and replaced them with Palestinian flags, shouted Death to America, and so on. You can say that they’re anti-white and they see Israel as a vehicle of whiteness, and that’s true. You can say that some of these protesters are actually anti-semites who hate Jews as a group. And that’s obviously true.
But before any of that, what we must say about these protesters and their protest, is that it’s all fake. Phony. Pretend. It’s all one big performance.
The average American today lives a life of such comfort and luxury that the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt would look at them with envy. Ivy League students have lives significantly more luxurious and comfortable than that.
It’s estimated that about 100 billion humans have lived on Earth since the dawn of the species. Those kids setting up encampments and demanding free Panera Bread have more wealth and privilege than almost all of them. They quite easily have it better than 99.9% of all humans who have ever existed. These kids have never experienced hardship, persecution, suffering or sacrifice. Most of them haven’t even experienced being told no. This has made them not only entitled beyond all imagining, but also bored, dull, and desperate to find meaning in pretended oppression.
They have no religion, most of them. No belief in God. No source of meaning in their lives. And they subscribe to an ideology that paints all the world and all of history as a struggle between persecutor and persecuted. They want to be in the latter group, if only so that they can feel better about themselves, and experience some excitement in a life that otherwise consists of sitting around and staring at screens while all of their needs are met at the snap of a finger.
Their whole worldview is a part of this game of pretend. They walk around every day in a fantasy world, one where they are the revolutionaries fighting back against a racist white supremacist “Handmaid’s Tale” system that seeks to annihilate and enslave them. They maintain this fantasy, and double down on it, even as the system affords them every privilege it possibly can. In fact, the more privileges they are given, the deeper they must immerse themselves into the fantasy role playing game so that they can maintain the fiction.
Of course, if they really desired oppression and suffering, they could go find it. There is always the option to actually forgo their comfortable lives and move to a part of the world where they will experience the sort of deprivation and persecution that they spend their whole lives pretending to struggle against. But they don’t want the fantasy to become real, anymore than someone fighting zombies in an arcade game wants to look over and find himself surrounded by the monsters in real life. They want to keep it all inside the game. Inside the virtual reality fantasy.
Until eventually a piece of reality breaks through the barrier and imposes itself on them — and in this case they find themselves arrested and expelled from school.
The good news is that now they have a real misfortune to complain about. The bad news is they brought it on themselves. And the worst news of all is that they will almost certainly learn nothing from the experience.