You know the presidential election season is officially underway in the United States when mobs begin filling the streets of every major city, chanting genocidal slogans and attacking police officers. This is the norm during an election year in places like Lagos, and now we’ve imported the tradition here. You don’t need to check your calendar or wait for the national political conventions. When you see the mobs, the campaign has begun in earnest.
Three years ago, the catalyst for these mobs was the overdose of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This time around, the mobs have sprung into action in response to the war in Israel. At least on the surface, it’s hard to think of two grievances that have less in common with one another. You’d probably assume that they’re completely unrelated. And indeed, if you watch news coverage of these demonstrations, your assumptions would only be reinforced. Here for example was ABC’s coverage of the recent protests in New York:
Many of the demonstrators are marching for a ceasefire, says the reporter, as the footage shows signs calling for Israel to be wiped off the face of the map. Well, that’s a little confusing. That’s your first clue that you’re not getting the most honest assessment of what’s happening at these protests, and where they’re likely to lead. In any event, the gist of the ABC report is that New Yorkers are mainly concerned about the Middle East. They’re not using the conflict over there as a proxy for anything they want to inflict on Americans in this country.
Fortunately we don’t have to rely on ABC News and their version of events. Independent journalists have been documenting the demonstrations in New York as well. Brennan Stultz is one of them. And what his reporting makes clear is that, if you look closer at these protests, they’re hitting pretty much the same notes we saw three years ago with BLM. They also bear a striking resemblance, in some ways, to protests over the end of Roe v. Wade, and against parental rights laws. The other night, for example, Stultz shot this footage of a protest organized by “Gays 4 Gaza” and “Queers for Palestine” in various locations in New York, particularly in Manhattan. Watch:
Queers For Palestine march today in NYC. This footage is from this evening and taken by me. Feel free to share. Side note, what a shame what we’ve all become. Peace to all! pic.twitter.com/PfYUQPFoTS
— Brennan Stultz (@theinkbubble) October 24, 2023
“Palestinian liberation is black liberation,” says the guy with the megaphone. “Queer rights, trans rights,” they chant, in front of a banner reading “Queers for Liberated Palestine.” Another man held a sign reading, “Reproductive justice means free Palestine.” It’s worth emphasizing that slogan for a second. Here it is, in all its glory:
What the hell does this even mean? pic.twitter.com/uO3MA35UDO
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) October 24, 2023
I mean, just look at it. It’s not just one guy in Brooklyn who came up with that sign and decided to run with it. Several people are holding that banner. And behind them is a sign reading “Lesbians 4 Liberation.” This was a massive event. We’re not cherry-picking here. Leftists in New York really came out with a mishmash of every slogan we’ve heard from the Left over the past few years, only with “Palestine” tacked on at the end. They’re just changing the order of the words around a bit, and finding a new way to tie them all together. Nevermind that “reproductive justice” makes no sense conceptually, and then makes even less sense when you realize that, to them, reproductive justice means the execution of infants. Most confusing of all — on the surface — is what the hell abortion has to do with anything happening in the Middle East right now.
Of course, a lot of conservatives have pointed out the obvious contradictions in using these slogans. In Gaza, homosexuality is illegal. Show up in Gaza with any of these banners and you can look forward to being thrown off a rooftop, or if you’re lucky, getting jailed for a decade. There’s also no tolerance in Gaza for what these people are calling “reproductive justice,” otherwise known as killing your own child. So there is no ideological alignment between Hamas and “Gays 4 Gaza,” to put it mildly. Hamas is not a Left-wing organization. They also would not qualify as a Right-wing organization. They largely exist outside of the Western Left-Right paradigm. Yet the Left has found it useful to filter the conflict between Hamas and Israel through that paradigm, and they’ve done it in a way that is totally incoherent.
But pointing out these contradictions accomplishes nothing, because these protesters are aware of them, for the most part. They’re ignorant, but they’re not that ignorant. They know that they wouldn’t survive a day in Gaza. That’s why none of them are in Gaza right now. So why are they demonstrating for Hamas, especially after they just committed a series of brutal murders?
It begins to make sense when you realize that this phenomenon, as strange as it might seem, isn’t exactly new. Some of the most vocal proponents of BLM — like George Soros, Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris, who literally promoted a bail fund for the rioters — understood that they needed to live very far away from all the BLM foot soldiers they were promoting. There’s a reason Barack Obama lives on Martha’s Vineyard and not Larry Krasner’s Philadelphia, or downtown Kenosha. It’s the same reason why the vast majority of liberal women with BLM lawn signs live in the suburbs, instead of the inner cities.
So, this desire to promote a murderous ideology — one that, if unleashed worldwide, would kill a lot of leftists — is not unique to the current war in the Middle East. It tells us something fundamental about how leftists think. Specifically, it exposes how heavily they rely on abstraction, rather than practical thinking informed by real-life consequences.
As Chris Rufo pointed out the other day, leftists have long been enamored with the idea of the “noble savage” who resists the tyranny of the white oppressor. They see Hamas fighters, like BLM rioters, as a physical manifestation of the many anti-American concepts they’ve been taught in school. These barbarians are the “de-colonizers” and the “anti-oppressors.” They are the answer to “whiteness” in all its forms. The Left will humanize its allies, like George Floyd. But they will abstract their enemies as “oppressors” and “agents of white supremacy,” and then celebrate their destruction and murder.
The precise vehicle for this destruction isn’t what matters. That’s why many of the same organizations and politicians who fervently supported the BLM riots a few years ago, are backing Hamas now, using pretty much the same lingo. Take the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, for example. After Hamas launched its attack on Israel, the DSA held a rally in New York City to show, “solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist.” Attendees at the rally chanted, “Resistance is justified when people are occupied.” The DSA also said the Hamas attack was “not unprovoked.” Here’s what their rally looked like:
We’ve seen all this before. Coincidentally enough, the DSA used similar language three years ago. They claimed that “corporations, landlords, and billionaires” were looting and repressing black neighborhoods. They said they would “fight” for a , “liberated future.” Several of the politicians backed by the DSA have made public statements along these lines. Rashida Tlaib, for example, called for resistance against law enforcement, including immigration officers and local police. “We will resist & win,” she wrote. “We must resist police brutality.”
Many other Left-wing organizations follow this pattern. They supported BLM, and they support Hamas for the same reasons. Take the Palestine Solidarity Committee or PSC, for example. That’s the Harvard student group that wrote the letter saying Israel was “entirely responsible” for the attack on its own civilians. If you go to the PSC’s website now, you’ll find that they’ve basically shut the whole thing down. They’ve prevented the public from viewing it. But archived versions of the PSC’s website show, predictably enough, that they saw direct parallels between BLM and the Middle East. One blog post on the PSC’s website from 2020 was entitled, “Moral Consistency: From Minneapolis to Jerusalem.” Here’s how it begins: “We must abolish these racist regimes. In the US, as in Israel, attempts to reform these systems have proven futile.”
Again and again, Left-wing groups have drawn this parallel. At the height of the BLM riots, a representative for the Labor for Palestine party in New York put it this way: “So there’s the intifada in Palestine and what is essentially a domestic intifada in this country now, though it’s usually not called by that name; and there’s a growing understanding that these resistances are connected, and that the right to resist is connected.”
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So whether you listen to politicians, or socialist groups, or student organizations, or protesters in New York, the message is pretty clear: The pro-Hamas movement in America — that’s taking over major cities as we speak — is effectively BLM reincarnate. Hamas itself is not BLM reincarnate. As established, Hamas would very much object to many of the stated goals of the BLM organization, such as dismantling “heteronormativity.” But in this country, it’s a different story. And the activists have admitted that the two things are sides of the same coin, extensions of the same idea. It’s a “connected” resistance movement. The same people are supporting both movements because they perceive the enemy to be the same in both cases. For Leftists in America, for all of their talk about moral ambiguity and various forms of fluidity, everything really is black and white. In a very literal sense. They see every social conflict in terms of white people oppressing non-white people. In the Middle East they simply side with the group that is less white, for no other reason than the fact that they are less white.
As a get-out-the-vote effort for Joe Biden’s party, this latest “resistance movement” might not work as well as BLM did. That’s because, in recent days, a lot of liberals have been shocked to discover that their so-called allies actually want them dead. Wealthy donors have pulled funding from universities like UPenn and Harvard, where students are embracing Hamas. Democrats are issuing statements denouncing members of their own party, which almost never happens.
What they haven’t done — what they probably will never do — is recognize that we all saw something very similar unfold three years ago. Political leaders and corporate media outlets don’t want you to see that connection, but it’s impossible to deny. And if this “Free Palestine” stuff doesn’t play in America the way BLM did initially — and, so far, it certainly isn’t — then you should expect to see a pivot in the not-too-distant future.
We’re primed for another round of rioting. But they may have to search for a different catalyst.
Ultimately they’ll probably cycle back to “police brutality” as the pretense. Either way, from the looks of things, we’re in for a very violent and deadly election year ahead.