Stop Letting Histrionic Children Drive Our Politics

The sensitive young LARPers on college campuses are not representative of young people broadly, or of the young voters who are falling away from Joe Biden's coalition.

Dear readers,

As Dave Weigel has reported, the student protesters camping out for Gaza will tell you they wear face masks outside because of COVID: they’re showing solidarity with the immunocompromised and protesting Joe Biden’s policy of moving on from the pandemic. Of course, concealing your face also reduces your odds of facing university discipline or being exposed on the Internet by counter-activists who want to blackball you from jobs. But if you’re a student protester, there’s a third reason to hide your face: If the public learns who you are, they might discover that you are a silly and immature and emotionally unstable person who has barely reached the age of maturity, and that may make them less likely to take you seriously as a political force.

I note this because The New York Times reports that Columbia University has placed protest leader Khymani James, a 20-year-old junior, on “interim suspension” after wide circulation of an Instagram Live video in which he/she/they¹ declared that Zionists don’t deserve to live and that we should be grateful he hasn’t murdered any of them. The video, live-streamed in January, included James’s comments in a virtual disciplinary hearing with Columbia’s “Center for Student Success and Intervention,”² in which he was asked to account for his prior comment about Zionists that “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser; I fight to kill.” When a Success-and-Intervention officer asked him “Do you see why that is problematic in any way?” James responded “No.”

Obviously, you should not repeatedly threaten to kill people who disagree with you, and Columbia is right to discipline James for doing so. But if you watch the video, you will see that James is simultaneously offensive and impossible to take seriously. He goes from bullshitting his way through the disciplinary meeting as if it were a discussion section (“I think there is a serious weight in taking someone’s life, and at the same time, I think that taking someone’s life in certain case scenarios is necessary and better for the overall world…when Hitler died, the world rejoiced. Everyone looks back at that time period and said that Hitler needed to die because he was exacting an immense amount of harm against the world”) to winding himself up as the most nelly, high-pitched eliminationist in history (“if we can agree as a society, as a collective, that…some persons need to die if they have an ideology that results in the death of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions — if there are people like that who exist, shouldn’t they die?”) to making trivial asides while applying lip gloss (“I actually hope they do kick me out, because I’ve been meaning to travel to South America”). I do not find his “I fight to kill” claim to be credible.

And I cannot believe this emotionally incontinent young person and his friends are driving a national news cycle. Perhaps I am just especially used to people saying nasty things to me online,³ but I can’t even believe they were able to drive a shift to virtual classes at Columbia. I think these protests could have been 90% less disruptive if the protesters’ detractors had reacted with less fear and more disdain, working harder to ignore these people as they preen about their “liberated zones,” which aren’t even very large. These protesters are the sort of people who are terrified of bananas and banana vapor, and some of them aren’t even lying when they say the reason they wear masks outside is that they’re afraid of COVID. Letting them scare you away gives them too much credit; brushing them off is a sign of maturity and should be encouraged.⁴

Demonstrators at Columbia University picket around the encampment established in support of Palestinians in Gaza on April 29, 2024 in New York City. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched as a 2 p.m. deadline to clear the encampment given to students by the university came and went. The students were given a suspension warning if they did not meet the deadline. (Photo by Alex Kent/Getty Images)

Instead, these protesters, who have somehow arrived at the misimpression that the colleges they attend are actors in the Israel-Palestine conflict, are being treated as a threat not just to their communities but to the republic and the Democratic Party — avatars of a young generation that is supposedly disillusioned with Joe Biden for being insufficiently progressive. In reality, the Gaza War rates far lower in US political consciousness than the news coverage would have you believe, even among the young people who are supposedly in open revolt over it. The recent Harvard Youth Poll found that Israel/Palestine ranks 15th out of 16 policy issues in their importance to American young adults; only student debt, another vastly overhyped concern of young left-wing activists, rates lower.⁵ The disconnect between the activists and the polling data makes sense when you remember that most young people aren’t in college, most college students don’t attend selective institutions, and most students at selective institutions aren’t camping on the quad for Gaza. These protesters — like Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement and those weirdos who throw paint at art because of fossil fuels — are all Shiny Youth Objects who cause Democratic politicians to misunderstand what a normal young voter is actually like.

When it comes to young people, Democrats’ real challenge entails enhancing Biden’s appeal to marginal voters who tend to be less engaged, less politically progressive, and much less interested in hopeless regional conflicts halfway around the world than the typical campus activist. (What do young people at large actually care about? The things older people also care about — most of all inflation, health care, and housing.) So while the turmoil at college campuses can be interesting in its own right — these schools are coming to face the incompatibility of their extreme social-justice messaging and their purpose as job trainers for corporate America — I’m worried about Democratic politicians fixating on the protests as a manifestation of their problem with the “youth vote.” Not only is trying to woo back the sort of people who think the president is “Genocide Joe” unlikely to work, it distracts the party from winning back less ideologically rigid young voters who are flirting with supporting Trump.

What should be done to win back those normal young voters? More on that is coming next.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. James uses all of these pronouns.

2. “Center for Student Success and Intervention” is, of course, the new name Columbia adopted for its student disciplinary office in 2022, in order to reflect the office’s new focus on “addressing the underlying reasons students violate institutional policies.”

3. For example, a few months ago, a one-time subscriber who was upset after Substack contested his chargeback (which he filed after I comment-banned him for being annoying) wrote in to say I was a “thieving fag,” adding, “If I ever see you in the street, I'm gonna kick the shit out of you and leave you for dead.” We sent him a refund. Incidentally, if any of you ever have billing issues, we encourage you to take them up with us directly at mayo@joshbarro.com before involving your bank. Slurs and death threats are discouraged, but will not necessarily result in you not getting a refund.

4. I don’t doubt that some Jewish students feel unsafe on their college campuses lately, though I am also sure that many of the claims of feeling unsafe — and many of the actual feelings of unsafety — are fostered by a campus culture that rewards students for feeling unsafe and declaring how unsafe they feel. That culture is bad, and this episode offers us a good opportunity to move past the idea that encouraging young people to develop a thick skin constitutes “victim-blaming.”

5. If the Gaza War is itself overrated as a political issue, then universities’ handling of protests about the Gaza War is really overrated as a political issue.