“Nicely, Home Speaker Mike Johnson crashed Hamas’s spring break at Columbia as we speak.”
That quip got here from the Fox Information host Jesse Watters, who was interviewing Mr. Johnson on his prime time present Wednesday.
In response to a standoff between pupil protesters and the college’s president, Mr. Johnson had visited Columbia College’s campus, the place college students had arrange encampments in solidarity with Palestinians. He was booed throughout a short information convention on the steps of a college library.
“So lots of them, Jesse, don’t know what the heck they’re speaking about,” Mr. Johnson mentioned.
Mr. Johnson’s look on “Jesse Watters Primetime” embodied the chiding and sometimes adversarial tone of conservative media towards the newest wave of protests on school campuses over Israel’s marketing campaign in Gaza. Within the conservative media sphere, the protests are contemporary proof of the dysfunction and unrest which have lengthy gripped liberal establishments — notably at Ivy League colleges — as social actions like Black Lives Matter, and now pro-Palestinian activism, develop affect.
“There’s a distinction between educated individuals and sensible individuals,” Mike Huckabee, the previous governor of Arkansas and Fox Information host, mentioned on the community Tuesday. “A number of these school youngsters are educated, however they’re not actual sensible.”
It’s an previous line that has met a brand new second.
For years, conservative commentators have routinely pointed to incidents on campuses as illustrative of elite, liberal hypocrisy. Cases of conservative audio system being shouted down by college students throughout occasions had been grist for the concept college directors had been illiberal of dissenting views, whereas coddling college students.
In 2016, the Fox Information host Todd Starnes pointed to a Black Lives Matter protest inside a Dartmouth School library as proof of white college students being “verbally assaulted.” Two years later, Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, mentioned on Fox: “I discover on school campuses, probably the most illiberal individuals are these folks that preach tolerance.”
This type of commentary has taken on a brand new valence previously week, as pupil encampments and protests have roiled campuses. Many Jewish college students have reported feeling unsafe due to the protests, one thing conservative shops have emphasised of their protection. In a latest column, Rikki Schlott of The New York Publish wrote that the encampments had been a “betrayal” to Jewish college students at Columbia.
Antisemitism is “exploding right here in america,” Katrina Szish of Newsmax, a smaller conservative community, mentioned on Thursday when she interviewed Tal Heinrich, the spokeswoman for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The coed protesters, lots of whom are Jewish, say they’re being intentionally mislabeled as violent and antisemitic to distract from their aims, which embody forcing their universities to divest from Israel. Protest leaders insist they’re merely making an attempt to help Palestinians and converse out in opposition to the struggle in Gaza.
However there have been a number of situations of hate speech and threats of violence particularly directed at Jewish college students.
“We’re Hamas, we’re all Hamas” and “all you do is colonize” are among the many uglier assaults directed at Jewish college students inside and outdoors Columbia’s campus throughout the latest protests. On Friday, a pupil chief of the protests on the college apologized for feedback he made in a January video, through which he mentioned “Zionists don’t need to dwell.”
Fox Information, Newsmax, The Wall Road Journal and The New York Publish didn’t reply to requests for remark.
The protests have jumped removed from the elite universities within the Northeast which are a favourite punching bag for conservative commentators, to colleges throughout the nation. That features the College of Texas, the place state troopers have arrested greater than 50 protesters, and the College of Minnesota, the place 9 protesters had been arrested after erecting an encampment.
However the criticism of how universities are dealing with the scenario dovetails with some political beliefs about school campuses. Polls present that conservatives have misplaced religion in larger training lately, and conservative media shops have continuously lined campuses as incubators for left-wing ideologies and as hostile to conservatives.
“This is likely one of the outcomes of a campus tradition that has been rising more and more problematic for years, largely as a result of college directors have been tolerating identification and left-wing politics and protests,” Kimberley Strassel, a columnist for The Wall Road Journal’s conservative editorial web page, mentioned on the “Potomac Watch” podcast on Tuesday.
