And credit to Elias Isquith for the wonderful, snarky phrase “lived secondhand experience.” Regardless what one might think of some of the political stances held by the protestors, on most campuses, especially the ones where the administration hasn’t sicced the cops on them and where they haven’t engaged in administrative retaliation, the protests have become ‘2020-ed’ (boldface mine):
Around the nation, college students are protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, but if you don’t live within a few blocks of one of those campuses — especially the ones where the administration has been so impossibly dumb as to think the way to make protests go away is to call in the cops — this fact has almost certainly had no practical effect on your life. Your personal safety has not been threatened, your commute to work has not been disrupted, and your access to shopping, parks, or other life amenities has not been curtailed.
Yet Republicans would have you believe that these protests are causing “chaos” from sea to shining sea, that the nation is on the verge of a complete breakdown of law and order that threatens every American. The solution to the protests is for the kids saying things conservatives don’t like to shut up, and if they won’t, some good old-fashioned skull-cracking is necessary to protect the rest of us from their anarchic criminality…
Not where you live, of course, but everywhere else. This is the trick: convincing people that even as their own days proceed in an ordinarily mundane fashion, chaos awaits just a few miles away, particularly in American cities, which liberals and their permissive policies have turned into hellholes of crime. This is a regular feature of conservative rhetoric, whether it’s from politicians or Fox News hosts or “bro country” singers…
While the campus protests will quiet when students return home for the summer, Republicans will continue to talk about them for as long as they can, spinning out a tale in which every college in America became the scene of berserker rioting that left half the country aflame. That’s the way they still talk about the summer of 2020; if you asked the average Fox News viewer, they’d tell you that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, cities like Portland were literally burned to the ground, leaving nothing more than a pile of rubble. The fact that it’s not true is meaningless; those viewers will never visit the cities they’ve been convinced are something out of Mad Max, just as they’ll have no firsthand experience with the current atmosphere at the nation’s universities.
What’s remarkable is how wimpy conservatives are. On the one hand, college students, the protesting ones anyway, are effete liberals, but on the other hand, those same effete liberals are capable of rampaging through our cities and towns. The only way we stop this is when conservatives are challenged on their inanity–when we call them wimps and ninnies.
