THE REVOLUTIONARY COSPLAY OF THE ENTITLED UNSERIOUS BOURGEOIS BOLSHEVIKS

Regarding the student protests around the country, one thing has become clear this week, as reported independently at several different campuses: despite local campus administrations attempting to devise solutions that allow protestors to continue making their case, while not disrupting the rest of campus life (the vast majority of the Class of 2024, who were all members of the high school class of 2020 who didn’t get a graduation ceremony due to the pandemic, really do want to have a commencement for college graduation), the protestors have met these proposals with rejection and escalation of their rhetoric and demands. Whether all the protestors want to create conditions for a violent resolution of the issue at their school or not, there is a dominant group among the so-called “leaders” whose goals are to be martyrs to “establishment violence.”

These people do not want a resolution. They are the same kind of unserious idiots I came to know too well back in the Sixties.

Back then, I knew many of the WeatherIdiots , particularly Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, who went on after their “revolutionary career” as urban terrorists to become Obama’s neighbors in Chicago, where they lived lives most convicted terrorists in other countries never achieve as respected members of Liberal Acadamania.

Over the years since, I’ve only met one Weatherman leader who had the intellectual courage to call out the bullshit as bullshit. That was Mark Rudd - one of the leaders of the Columbia “revolution” in 1968 - who not only talked the talk but walked the walk, dedicating his life to teaching children who really were the “oppressed of the earth” in rural New Mexico. Most of them, like David Hamilton in Austin, to this day proclaim the self-righteousness of their “revolutionary” cause. They’re still the entitled Socialite Socialists of their youth. Unserious people, no matter the seriousness with which they’ve argued their case.

I remember Mike Klonsky - now retired with professional respect from a long career as a Doctor of Education, who “back in the day” was the leader of the “Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Youth” faction of SDS, who I will never forget watching with bemusement when he tried to pick up a surf bunny on Zuma Beach in 1967 by telling her he was “organizing a violent revolution in America.” He didn’t get to home plate to swing the bat with that one; even surf bunnies know to roll their eyes at bullshit of that high grade.

Then of course there were the “revolutionary thought leaders” of SDS, jumping up and down in their chairs shouting “I stand firmly erect in my support of pussy power!” when Jane Adams and Marilyn Buck made the first public declaration on feminism and “the movement” at the SDS National Convention at Ann Arbor in 1967.

That last was the first moment I realized the alleged “leading revolutionaries”and I might not be on the same path.

It took me a whole two additional years of experiencing things like a meeting I organized in Austin to set up an organization where Texas defense lawyers would be able to defend movement people, that was hijacked by the local Progessive Labor Party “Maoist” morons over the extremely important issue of why didn’t Bernadine Dohrn use “Marxist-Leninist rhetoric” in her speech at the meeting. I distinctly remember the lawyer who - while walking out in disgust - told me, “These crazy idiots belong in jail!”

After all that, when I walked away from the burned-out ruins of “Sixties radicalism,” I took with me a strong dislike of True Believers. They’re the ones who looked at the history of the takeover of every “revolution” in the past 120 years and said “Marxist revolution - sounds good to me!”

Sadly, I wasn’t the only one who left. The “leading revolutionaries” managed to turn off the majority of a generation to the idea of serious social-political reform of the United States, a movement that had to be rebuilt while the Right moved to consolidate their win and give us what we have today.

Forty years ago, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas were the ideal for every American lefty of True Revolutionaries of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle. In 2020, Nicaraguan “President-for-Life” Daniel Ortega’s pet legislature declared that the 200 top political opponents of El Presidente in the country would forfeit their citizenship for their “counter-revolutionary” crimes. They were put on airplanes and sent to Miami.

I’m sure they considered themselves lucky they didn’t end up in Stalin’s Gulag in the 30s or Mao’s Re-Education Camps in the 60s. But that arc from True Revolutionary to Authoritarian Thug is the arc of every Marxist political revolution, and the personal arc of too many Marxists who stick around that world for any length of time.

Authoritarianism is Authoritarianism. They can switch from Left to Right in a heartbeat, because for them it’s all the same. Except for the Lefties, it’s a “Dennis Miller move” to find an audience stupid enough to think they’re as smart as they know they are. I’m reminded of leading far right influencer, Stalinist “red diaper baby” David Horowitz, who’s made quite a financial success for himself with that choice, after many years where we laughed at him behind his back over on the left.

I bring all this up as background to what I have to say about the Revolutionary Cosplay of the Entitled Collegiate Bourgeois Bolsheviks over the past six months, which now appears to be coming to a head.

You don’t need a fancy degree from the Ivy League to know that proclaiming the murderers of babies, the kidnappers of toddlers, and the rapists of their mothers “revolutionary heroes,” and then uploading snuff films the “heroes” made of executed grandmothers to Facebook, is in fact terrorism all on its own.

You do need a fancy degree from the Ivy League to come up with the intellectual contortions to convince yourself that it’s not.

NYU law student Ryna Workman - who wrote a widely distributed letter supporting the Hamas terror attack on October 7, in which she declared that “Israeli settler colonizers have no rights the oppressed must respect” - lost her offer of employment at a prestigious Wall Street law firm that rescinded the offer because of her letter. Within a week, she was photographed several times, busily tearing down posters around New York City with photos of children who were kidnapped in the attack and are among the hostages held in Gaza.

Soon after the October 7 attack, the Ethnic Studies Faculty Council at the University of California, Berkeley, released a statement condemning anyone who described what Hamas did as “terrorism,” which they found “offensive.”

Around the same time, the student leader of a Wellesley residential house wrote to the entire dorm she oversees: “We firmly believe that there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community.”

Who tears down posters of kidnapped children and says these awful things?

The answer is: Unserious People engaged in performative political assholery in response to other people's performative political assholery. Performative political assholery has become the usual mode of communication for the networks of social media influencers and their followers on both sides of the political aisle. Watching l20-nothing dingbat “student revolutionaries” wearing the black-and-white keffiyahs of assassins proclaim that they “will not surrender” leaves me undecided whether I want to laugh in their faces or puke all over them.

After a walkout of students at NYU, a video circulated on social media of students chanting “WE WANT ALL OF IT. WE DON’T WANT NO JEW STATE.”

Reading reports from people who are Paying Attention at these revolutionary soirees, it seems clear that non-students operating on the periphery of the campus have been responsible for the most egregious comments or incidents that almost no one would deny are anti-Semitic. These are the “left overs” of previous “revolutions,” the people who prove by their existence that George Bernard Shaw was right when he observed that “A man who is not a communist at 20 has no heart; a man who is a communist at 30 has no head.”

When the Columbia University chapter of Bourgeois Bolsheviks Inc. followed the example of their revolutionary forebears from 1968 and occupied Hamilton Hall it was the entirely unsurprising when they were cleared out last night. As someone who remembers the events at Columbia back in 1968 - who had friends there - I had to agree with Lawrence O’Donnell when he observed this generation of revolutionary heroes got off easy. Fifty-six years ago, 700 students got the shit beat out of them by a gleeful NYPD who knew the majority of the country was supporting them. The events last night, where no one got clubbed, with the officers quietly bringing out compliant arrestees was a universe apart from “back in the day.”

To me, this celebration of revolutionary cosplay obscures a deeper issue: The groups spearheading most of these protests - specifically, Students for Justice in Palestine - support the overthrow of the current Israeli state and the expulsion of at least some substantial percentage of the current Jewish population. The “revolutionaries” talk about this as if there will be no people actually being killed at a mass scale, or with the assumption the Israelis have other “home countries” they can relocate to.

And then of course there are the “real” revolutionary True Believers whose blood-thirstiness leads them to rhetorically look forward to such a bloodbath. They valorize Hamas and the October 7th massacres. The valorization is mainly the kind of pseudo-revolutionary cosplay that is often part and parcel of college activism. That bunch must be mighty frustrated today, that they didn’t get their martyrdom last night. Actually - like Hamas in Gaza - they were willing to have that “martyrdom” conferred on those who followed them into the building on Tuesday afternoon.

On October 10 in Los Angeles - three days after the terrorist assault - an individual shouted "I am Hamas" and made death threats to people standing outside Cantor’s, a Jewish restaurant everyone I know in the city has dined at many times - as have I.

I’m sure he - just like all the other Bourgeois Bolsheviks across the country this past six months - made a lot of friends and influenced many people with that action.

Malcolm Nance recently pointed out, “… the leader of the Columbia University #FreePalestine group was discovered to have advocated the murder and death of Jews. His name is Khymani James. He is an African-American gay man who goes by the pronouns he/she/they who organized the occupation of Columbia’s campus for the #Freepalestine movement. James has openly led protests that used intimidating tactics to prevent Jews and others not aligned with them from feeling safe on Columbia’s campus. When journalists or Jews near their encampment, the protesters link arms, encircle outsiders, and shout slogans at them until they are pushed away. They also use the cult-like tactic of not allowing protesters to speak to outsiders. Only vetted and approved #FreePalestine media teams can explain what is happening. Anyone breaking the rules is considered an infiltrator and is put out of the encampments.”

The actions of Khymani James not only turn away potential allies, he gives cover to the people who would be happy to see people like him dead. This is the definition of Unserious Moron.

Since they cannot get their way, the college youth activists are willing to unleash the hell that is Donald Trump to punish Joe Biden. According to their “revolutionary reasoning,” if Trump snuffs out American democracy, then apparently, we deserve to lose all of our rights because the children of Gaza are suffering. This is what social media, particularly TikTok, has wrought: self-serving unserious performative bullshit to look good in a video without a care in the world for the consequences. This is right up there with the idiots of the German Communist Party, who in 1933 proclaimed that a Nazi electoral victory would “speed the revolution.” We all know how that turned out.

The fact this generation of “revolutionaries” has acted in ways that have turned potential supporters into dedicated opponents while giving opportunities for performative bullshi by the Tom Cottons, Marjorie Traitor Goons, MAGA Mikes and the rest of the Republican Shithead Caucus, that they have answered reasonable proposals that would allow them to claim political victory with an increase in their extremism, demonstrates they are among the most Unserious People in this Unserious Country.

Each generation has its moments, whether good or bad. This generation seems to be having a very bad moment.

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