Campus antics accelerate colleges’ downward spiral

The liberal islands of college campuses continue to disappoint us. The handling of the “Arab Spring Break” protests on elite campuses around the country tells you all you need to know. 

This did not happen at my alma mater (or most state colleges), as kids had to get to their jobs after school. But the supposed “elite colleges” have been on a downward spiral since the looney left got full control of them years ago. The protests are ridiculous, but what would you expect from the first college class that ate Tide Pods as teenagers? 

These dopey protesters are really “speaking truth to power” when what they are trying to say totally agrees with corporate legacy media, Hollywood, and their university-tenured professors. It’s quite the intrepid resistance movement!

When our federal government gives a private school like Columbia, which has a $14 billion endowment, over $1 billion a year, we know it is buying something. In this case, 31,455 students attend Columbia and 13,000 of them are foreign students. It crept up on the university; they did not realize how bad it had gotten until the student body elected a goat as Homecoming Queen. 

The violent occupations on Columbia’s campus spread to other Ivy League schools. Prompted by tenured, leftist professors, students took to the quad to protest. When asked, few knew what they were protesting, but by God, they were out there being cool! At least we got some good folk music out of the protests of the ‘60s. I fear these current protests might spark another song by Lizzo. 

So what’s the answer? I suggest a two-campus solution. One campus could be for “students” who like to demonstrate against everything, and one campus for students there to learn, get a job one day, and become productive parts of society. Another solution: Perhaps when our $90 billion checks clear, Ukraine or Israel might send peacekeeping forces to our campuses. 

The only way I thought to end the protests and disperse the crowds is to tell the kids antisemitism has gluten in it.

The “demonstrators” were given pamphlets on how to protest. If you know anything about 18- to 25-year-olds today, they couldn’t organize a one-car funeral. They are lemmings, woke and entitled. Soros-type organizers tell them what to do. 

Lefties fell for Hamas. I thought the 9/11 attacks taught us all we needed to know about radical Islam. 

Hamas is a particularly rape-y form of religion, as we saw on October 7 last year when it invaded Israel. Yet the “MeToo” progressive women’s movements remain eerily quiet. Hamas is fortunate that it is not a Christmas song, Founding Father statue, syrup bottle, or a male candidate for the Supreme Court. 

Slow to the game, Biden has mumbled nuanced word salads in response to all of this. He knows that there are a lot more Muslims than Jews. And Jews vote 80 percent Democrat anyway, so he has made a political calculation in his tepid responses. Biden did fly to Israel and asked Netanyahu two perpetually (for him) perplexing questions: “Who am I and why am I here?”

When initially asked about Hamas, Biden said he always favored guacamole. Then he was briefed on it, likely using puppets. He decided he did not want to lose Michigan, which has a large Muslim population, so he squinted into his teleprompter and forcefully gave a speech that neither side nor observers could understand. 

Biden could not respond to Israel having its southern border overrun like he did ours, by giving the invaders EBT cards, hotel rooms, plane trips and mail-in-ballots. So he looked to do what Democrats always do with a problem: blame it on Republicans and write a check from the U.S. Treasury. 

One important point here: if you think Israel has been heavy-handed in Gaza, it does not make you an anti-Semite. Chanting “Death to Jews” does. Debate is important on this. 

This is once more a religious war. I have warned that we should stay out of religious wars since 2000 and Bush’s Middle East follies. It is complex. As we should have learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, we do not help, we just inflame tensions. 

It is funny to watch people opine on the Middle East when conflicts bubble up. Everyone becomes an expert on the region. Yet if you ask them where Jordan is, they will say: retired, smoking cigars and playing a lot of golf. 

Ron Hart is a libertarian op-ed humorist, an award-winning author, and a frequent guest on TV and radio. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.