College protests across America have become a PR nightmare for the Democrats – and especially for Joe Biden’s administration. By the same token, one could reasonably argue that they represent a political gift to former President Donald Trump. Students and outside agitators* claimed to have been spurred into action by Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip. It has since become very clear, however, that the mob’s hatred and bigotry extend beyond Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet to all Jews. The rhetoric coming out of these destructive protests leaves little room for doubt on that front. But beyond the sinister agenda, several grim ironies can be noted when one puts all of this in the context of certain events experienced by the American people in recent years.
Trump has had plenty to say about the college protests. “The Biden protests that are going on are horrible. It's all caused by him because he doesn't know how to speak – he can't put two sentences together,” Trump told reporters outside the Manhattan courthouse where his so-called “hush-money” trial is taking place. “He's got to get out and make a statement because the colleges are being overrun.”
Who can forget the summer of 2020? Rampaging mobs, stores and businesses ransacked and set ablaze, police officers injured, and people killed, in a few instances. Good times – at least if you are a left-wing extremist hellbent on smashing the system so that you can rebuild it as a Marxist utopia.
College Protests and Mixed Messaging
Back then, all that chaos was perhaps seen as an opportune crisis by those who were desperate to see Trump gone from the White House. Fast forward to 2024 – with an election just months away and an already less-than-popular Democrat incumbent campaigning for re-election – and the increasingly destructive college protests are not so convenient. The problem is compounded by a wave of rabid anti-Semitism to which the White House has been unwilling or unable, for whatever reason, to respond with unequivocal condemnation.
Plenty of Democrats, both elected officeholders and political operatives, have made it very clear that they condemn the protesters’ motives. But, as Liberty Nation has already noted, Biden, when given the opportunity, was incapable of condemning the mob without hastily adding that he also condemned “those who don't know what's going on with the Palestinians.”
When the supposed leader of the free world can’t bring himself to condemn Jew-hating terrorist sympathizers without also criticizing the people opposing them, he is on very questionable moral ground indeed.
As Tim Donner, Liberty Nation’s senior political analyst, recently pointed out, this was Biden's Charlottesville moment. Back in 2017, Trump was roundly condemned after the unrest in Charlottesville, VA, which left one person dead. Speaking about the contentious issue of removing Confederate monuments, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.” His critics and political opponents took his words out of context to make it appear that he was saying some of the White Nationalist demonstrators at Charlottesville were “very fine people.”
Trump noted that Biden still invokes Charlottesville as his inspiration to run for president. "[Biden] said he ran because of Charlottesville," he asserted. “Well, if the people that know Charlottesville – when you extend the statement, it’s a big hoax, what they said was said, and they understand that – and Charlottesville is peanuts compared to what you’re looking at now. This whole country is up in arms.”
The former president also wanted to know whether the campus agitators would be dealt with by the Department of Justice in the same way demonstrators who were on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, were dealt with:
“I wonder if what's going to happen to [the protesters] will be anything comparable to what happened to J six, because they're doing a lot of destruction, a lot of damages [sic], a lot of people getting hurt very badly. I wonder if that's going to be the same kind of treatment they gave J six. Let's see how that all works out. I think I can give you the answer right now – and that's why people have lost faith in our court system.”
Most of the affected universities have largely capitulated to the protesters, so far. However, pro-Hamas demonstrators at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Monroe Park campus were dispersed by police in riot gear on April 30, as was Columbia University where protestors had barricaded themselves in the Hamilton Hall building. Other institutions have warned students that similar protest actions will not be tolerated.
The question is, how long will these college protests continue? Is America in for another “summer of love” like 2020? Will normality return to college campuses before the November election, and, if not, what effect – if any – will that have on the outcome? Biden and other elected Democrats, along with their media allies, often bemoaned the “chaos” of the Trump presidency and promised that Biden would restore order and decency to the White House – and to the country. In hindsight, that narrative does not appear to have aged well.
*Since yesterday, Tuesday April 30, law enforcement has begun removing protestors and their encampments at several university campuses. Columbia University saw demonstrators arrested in the early hours of Wednesday. Also, at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), police were brought in to quell violent eruptions between protestors
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