The tangled logic of protest

Author note, this post:

A perennial human tendency in times of conflict is for outsiders to project their own viewpoints onto the parties involved. This is a post about a conflict between two groups of American students who are themselves projecting onto a foreign conflict. In it, I am going to try to avoid projecting my own viewpoints; as a result the reader may feel that what I am really doing is trying to hide what I think, particularly about Israel and Jews. As such, and to avoid didactic comments, here are my beliefs on those topics:

1. Just kidding. The reader will simply have to deal with an attempt to accurately portray ambiguous topics without secretly projecting my own moral judgements.

A confusing rebellion

The end of the school year has for whatever reason precipitated a wave of student “protests” against the ongoing Israeli proto-genocide in Palestine, followed last week by outbursts of “counter-protests.”

In subtle ways neither side is really “protesting,” in the astroturfed sense of nonviolent resistance, which has been artificially grafted into American culture since the civil rights revolution.

On that point: Besides the suffragists’ movement and their parades, I do not believe America ever really had a “peaceful protest” culture before 1950. Citizens routinely appealed in person to their local governments in “protest,” as a form of direct democracy on matters of taxation and public works; workers picketed but were besieged by police or hired troops for doing so up to 1932; and the rest of the time, American whites rioted to get matters their way, with either limited police resistance or outright passive approval. The canonical “peaceful protest” is, in this light, an invented tradition which was imported from far-away third-world colonies after 1950, a fabrication of the media to selectively legitimize progressive causes. Of course I am not making this argument with the rigor it requires — that would take a book — but it is what I theorize to be the case.

So what then, of the current tumult in the campuses? The behavior of student and faculty pro-Palestinian “protesters” recycles the millenarian shutting-down of social function of 2020’s encampment movement, but is also a manifestation of picketing — rather than a purely “peaceful” demonstration as normally understood, the goal is to impede physically, and through intimidation, and sometimes petty stoning, the participation of non-involved workers (students) in showing up to work (class).

In the workplace context, picketing has been illegal in the US since the Taft–Hartley Act, which was passed in 1947 in response to two years of widespread strikes throughout major industries. The logic of this law is that gathering together to block others from showing up to work is essentially an act of violence; this logic reappeared in President Biden’s condemnation of the protesters on Thursday:

Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations — none of this is a peaceful protest. 
 
Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest.  It’s against the law.
 
Dissent is essential to democracy.  But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education.

This is nonetheless damnation by technicality. I am no free speech zealot, but there is something hypocritical about maintaining the pretext that Free Speech™ is essential to American tradition, except if the American government believes that people have had to cancel plans or have become vaguely scared. This, much like the demonization of “disinformation” and “hate,” obviously allows apparatchiks to pick and choose which speech to suppress — a power which would be easier to acknowledge and manage if American society would come to terms with the fact that there really is no such thing as free speech.

If the pro-Palestinian side resembles picketers, the “counter-protesters” who appeared last week more resemble the classic, American white mob riot. At UCLA this resemblance is confused by the fact that the rioters who showed up to dismantle the encampment barricades wove the blue Star of David; and at UNC, frat boys who defended an American flag later went on Fox news to explain that they were motivated by Jewish pride, garnering half a million in donations for the fraternity.

But at the University of Mississippi, the resemblance was more overt, as white students decked in red, white, and blue mocked the protesters while they were dispersed by police (according to most accounts; I was not at any of these events and can only report what is generally claimed). At some point a Black woman, a graduate student in “mass communications and speech communications” who has given a TEDx talk in “Black women’s hair,” mass-wandered toward the crowd of jeerers, and was greeted by a generation of whites who have grown up under mysterious conditions which have produced a willingness to be overtly anti-Black on or off camera (could it be the understanding that they will be considered racist no matter how perfectly and perpetually they pretend, like Boomers have been trained to, to “not see color”? I can only speculate).

“Ole Miss taking care of business,” stills from a video and caption by Georgia representative Mike Collins (twitter.com)

This scene is obviously not quite a revival of America’s forgotten legacy of de-facto legal political violence, since once again the state itself has decided to suppress the protests on the grounds that they themselves are an act of violence — a disorder of property. And state and media tolerance of these acts of rowdiness is still limited to the logic of Jewish and Zionist interests. The student making monkey sounds did not get invited to Fox news, and has been expelled by his fraternity (though he has gained thousands of followers on twitter overnight). Whereas after the pro-Zionist attack on the encampment at UCLA, it does not seem any of the assailants were arrested. If true, would render their riot a fait accompli, the return of tolerated riots — but still limit the phenomenon to pro-Zionist violence. From the Times of Israel:

The demonstrators arrived just before midnight on Tuesday night, many dressed in black clothing with white masks. Photographs and videos from the scene show numerous fights breaking out, objects being thrown into the camp, and at least one firework being set off. Security guards were present at the scene but did not intervene. Police eventually cleared the area around 3 a.m.

UCLA canceled classes on Wednesday. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass condemned the violence as “absolutely abhorrent and inexcusable” and called for an investigation. According to The Los Angeles Times, at least 15 people were injured, though it is unclear if anyone was arrested. As of Wednesday afternoon, the area remained restricted to law enforcement and credentialed media, while campus and LA police maintained a heavy presence. Police began clearing the encampment early Thursday morning, clashing with protesters and making arrests as they moved into the area.

Here we already have a wealth of interesting confusions; scenes spontaneously appearing which are inconsistent with prevailing narratives about how Americans express their differences, and how the state respects the varying sides in these conflicts — and yet inconsistent in a way that is reversed from the trend gradually established after the 1960s, and made especially pronounced in 2020, when the state has typically “deputized” anti-white sentiment and violence and treated pro-white behavior as de facto terrorism.

Perhaps this historical fiction, this invented tradition — the so-called ideal of “peaceful protest” — is finally on its last legs, as a story the American media and government can selectively deploy to bless progressive views. If so, this might help explain how the state has had little trouble crushing the campus protests and turning a blind eye to a pro-Zionist riot — this is the true American tradition, from before 1950.

It still would not shine much light on the extraordinarily confused motives of the pro-Palestinian and anti-pro-Palestinian factions, who both see themselves in opposition to the Biden administration.

@MavenNavarro1 (twitter.com)

The darkened motives of the combatants

So, what is it that the counter-protesters are counter-protesting?

The protesters, again, are seemingly more aligned with what modern media and cultural-political memes would envision as a righteous, progressive protest — the modern iteration of a supposed American tradition. They are only not “peaceful” on technicalities. And in siding with Palestine, they would obviously seem to be aligned with the American post-War cultural myth of “might does not make right.”

Hollywood morality, as produced after the reactionary ethos of the 1950s was replaced by (heavily Jewish) leftism, describes how Americans born after WWII see the world; and within this cultural universe no story is more dominant than Star Wars. Accordingly, in the Israel-Palestine conflict, Israel is the Empire and Palestine is the Rebels. Clearly, Palestine is the “good guys,” because they are weaker, and if the US is not siding with them, then the “bad guys” are at the helm and the ship must be stopped. In this way the student protests have essential continuity with Vietnam and Iraq War-era anti-war protests, and would seem to be a harbinger of more widespread and mainstream popular disapproval of Israel’s war.

Except, of course, for the fact that this is Israel’s war, not America’s. Only for this reason, perhaps, have the protests have been suppressed with such firm determination — but although this is a reasonable guess given the influence of Israel on American politicians, it would require the renewed example of an American war and hypothetical tolerance of antiwar demonstrations to validate. Another instinct which has been voiced on twitter — I have lost the screenshot — is that the crackdowns simply reflect the confidence our government tends to possess during Democratic administrations, and in fact it could be the case that the excesses of disorder of 2020 would have been impossible under a Biden regime.

But the “crime” of opposing Israel’s war wouldn’t seem to explain why mainstream, frat-boy-aligned white students would feel the need to “counter-protest" in Mississippi. And their presence calls into question whether the protests are really “about” Palestine or “something else,” and namely, anti-white-ism (one could also say “anti-Americanism,” but only with the understanding that it is the whiteness of “Americanism” which is being opposed).

This complicates matters since, again, to good measure, the campus picketers are reanimating elements of the hyper-feminized moral logic that defines post-60s American “culture.” On their side, white boys are there to pursue sexual rewards, and white girls are there because they have correctly discerned that “Americanism” is in violation of what are nominally the ideas that define the “nation of ideas” of America; it is all once again consistent with the fairy tale in Star Wars, wherein Luke sets off in gallant pursuit of a woman who is complaining that a techno-authoritarian army is being mean to her; salvation nevertheless perversely relies on the elevation of an ancient patriarchal cult (Islamic Palestine).

These twin pursuits are quite different from the feud of hatred against Jews and resentment against white natives that likely drive Blacks and immigrant and first-generation Arab students to the picketing, and this perhaps explains why whites seem to feature less frequently in the fixed encampments than at standing demonstrations (though it is difficult to tell, with all the face masks and neon hair). The tone more clearly expressed by the encampments and sit-ins is beyond the pale of “government being mean,” and reverts to the logic of 2020’s protests in which the symbolism and theatrics of university life are being attacked as intrinsically alien and hostile to “non-white bodies,” as part and parcel with the government and with the Israeli bombs bringing buildings down on children. This is the perceived attack which is understood by elites as anti-elite, by Jews as anti-Jewish, and by whites as “anti-American.”

Video purporting to show a prayer break at the UCLA demonstrations, which saw women placed behind men, with no apparent objection on the part of protesters. From @AnthonyCabassa_ (twitter.com)

In the end, both sides are largely talking past each other. For the “protesters,” Israel is only a proxy for other things, and for the “counter-protesters,” the protesters are a proxy for the same media and political elite that is suddenly reversing trend to suppress them. It is this conceptual short-circuiting which explains why at one dual demonstration, both sides at one point were simultaneously chanting against the Biden regime. Biden is anti-white, but in name only. He appears at Howard University to call “white supremacy […] the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland;” but deigns to condone 2020-style revolts against white institutions on his watch.

The “left” at war with itself

We seem to find that Democratic administrations are able to police “the left” when it has the audacity to ask the government to adhere to the left’s own ideals (whereas “the left” can seemingly run amok when Republicans are at the helm). If this ability stems from increased confidence, and increased latitude to exercise power, it is certainly plausible that the default mainstream media approval of the Democrat party has a role in conferring the same power. And yet this approval stems from the same party’s ability to represent those ideals, with increasingly credibility over time.

I typically scare-quote “the left,” because I do not want to invoke it as a bogeyman to explain why the secular, liberal West has embraced utopian notions of racial equality-in-outcome. In this case however, the term is apt — for it is specifically our elite, PMC-producing institutions, as well as the Jewish community, which are now under threat for the ideas that have become hegemonic within those same forums. The critiques they have leveled at local governments, businesses, and whites as a whole are now being reflected on them. In part, this also further reflects the declining salience of the Holocaust as the cultural narrative which conferred protected status to Jews and accordingly absolved America and American institutions of prior racism.

Transed and Nationless: The Post-Hitler West: 1

It also reflects the awkward position faced by gays, whose symbols and culture are difficult to insulate from the trans (why can’t the trans just stick to invading public school libraries). In the logic of the left, where the “next class” of oppressed people is always immediately replaced by a new “next class,” this implosion has only awaited the exhaustion of intolerant cultural inertia, which previously had been maintained by the existence of “adult fraternities” in the form of male-dominant industries.

This all might seem like a minor crisis from the perspective of the left’s “next class” on its march toward the deconstruction of the West — I don’t know. Perhaps the Jews, gays, and even trans will be expelled from the left because they cannot really bring any votes, but the left will still march on as the ideology of power. Perhaps the universities will fail; the Federal government will become an embezzlement farm for a rotating cast of minority demagogues; and the union will dissolve, leaving some states to go the way of South Africa. This is ultimately what this same “next class” prefers — whether the West is irredeemably evil or the West is just a warehouse of goods which has appeared for no particular reason and should be raided for stuff.

All of this seems silly, but it’s worth noting that if any such thing were to happen, the real power of the media and state, and the left’s ideas in kind, would drastically decline along the way, especially among younger whites. Last week was a demonstration that such shifts may already be under way.

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