Springtime in New York! This season always makes for extra excitement. This year it feels more like a powder keg. You don't even have to be in the city to experience the drama.
Mayor Eric Adams heard from a constituent far from home, way up in the not-so-friendly skies. It's about time: campuses in NYC are quickly turning into no-go zones for Jewish citizens. Classes are being moved online. Professors are joining the anti-Israel mob.
On top of that, and outside of Adams' purview, the infamously unfair trial of the century fumbles forward in week two. Judge Juan Merchan is struggling to keep a lid on the proceedings, and Donald Trump is using the chaos in New York to his advantage. That's a lot of tension for any city, even the Big Apple.
Protests at Columbia University and New York University swelled today during the Jewish Passover holiday. Thousands turned out at both locations to voice their anger over the ongoing war in Gaza.
Please follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Truth Social, Gettr, Twitter
Columbia has chosen to transition, mid-semester, to offer a virtual class structure for students who feel threatened on campus. Students were only recently returning to sense of normalcy after Covid lockdowns. Silver lining: it's a great time to be a talk therapist in New York.
Some faculty members have joined the protesters at NYU. This move raises a host of questions: will faculty be arrested as well as protesters? Will NYU choose to suspend any faculty members? Aren't these the same people with Ukraine flags in bio?
Not to be outdone, some of the faculty at Columbia staged a walkout today. This raises the same battery of questions. Are our educational institutions really so fragile?
The left appears to be eating itself. Bloated educational institutions splitting at the seams should be, on paper, good news for conservatives. A lot of young people are waking up to how information is controlled, even at, or especially at, the university level.
So why doesn't this feel like a win? Because when one looks at the forces at play, it isn't solely organic. The left isn't really the "left" in this battle. There's anti-Americanism in the Hamas corner, with its de facto leaders in the distant, cloaked background: Obama, Soros, and their university administration deep state. On the other side, a sneakier strain of anti-Americanism: neo-cons and Zionists, those narrative-makers who choose profitable war over peace.
A populist conservative doesn't really have a dog in this fight. "Arrest all the protesters" flies in the face of free speech. "Let them protest" means you're okay with mob rule and anti-Semitism. There are no easy answers. What have we learned? Supporting two sides of a war is bad policy.
Meanwhile at the University of Minnesota, a tent city went up on the campus quad...and all the protesters were arrested, banned for a year from campus, and their tents were folded up and confiscated. Minnesota Not-So-Nice!
