Columbia University property, including Hamilton Hall, has been cleared two hours after officers entered the campus to remove people protesting Israel's war in Gaza. Follow for live updates.
I changed the link to be the updated CNN students protest page.
I think my favorite narrative I've been hearing regarding these protests, and you heard this a lot in 2020 too, is that all these protestors willing to engage in property violence and physically clash with the police are actually outside agitators. And in this case they're outside agitators occupying a privately owned building, which the media is happy to compare to a private single family home. That's right, protestors occupying a private university building is exactly the same as them occupying your home, you braindead TV consumer you.
Sometimes the 'outside agitator' narrative has merit. I imagine we've all seen videos of obvious police plants trying to rile up people in order to get them arrested. Maybe some of you have witnessed such things in person. I vaguely remember reading that the guy who started the fire that burned down that Minneapolis Police station was actually a chud trying to make things worse. That sort of thing, I guess, really does happen. But it's also such a convenient narrative. "Oh, it wasn't concerned student activists and professors and ordinary people trying to stand against a genocide. It was wild-eyed barbarians, outsiders from outside, and thus all the police violence wielded against these people protesting a genocide was wholly justified."
That talking point was really funny in 2020. Mass protests happening in every major american city, where are the "outside" agitators coming from? Was it just a bunch of rural people coming to the cities to start shit?
I think my favorite narrative I've been hearing regarding these protests, and you heard this a lot in 2020 too, is that all these protestors willing to engage in property violence and physically clash with the police are actually outside agitators. And in this case they're outside agitators occupying a privately owned building, which the media is happy to compare to a private single family home. That's right, protestors occupying a private university building is exactly the same as them occupying your home, you braindead TV consumer you.
Sometimes the 'outside agitator' narrative has merit. I imagine we've all seen videos of obvious police plants trying to rile up people in order to get them arrested. Maybe some of you have witnessed such things in person. I vaguely remember reading that the guy who started the fire that burned down that Minneapolis Police station was actually a chud trying to make things worse. That sort of thing, I guess, really does happen. But it's also such a convenient narrative. "Oh, it wasn't concerned student activists and professors and ordinary people trying to stand against a genocide. It was wild-eyed barbarians, outsiders from outside, and thus all the police violence wielded against these people protesting a genocide was wholly justified."
That talking point was really funny in 2020. Mass protests happening in every major american city, where are the "outside" agitators coming from? Was it just a bunch of rural people coming to the cities to start shit?