On the Violent Left, Eternal Recurrence

Have we learned nothing from the past? It’s not as though we need to explore antiquity for lessons in how to confront today’s issues. While such an exploration would no doubt be helpful, any effort in that direction is beyond – far, far beyond – the stunted intellectual capacities of our current crop of ruling elites, certainly to include our degreed betters running our so-called institutions of higher learning.

But is 2020 so shrouded in the mists of history as to be inaccessible to the people who hold themselves out as arbiters of all that is good and just? Apparently so. Consider: it was a mere four years ago that every major city in America was convulsed in the paroxysms of violence that followed the death of George Floyd. We must, said these lettered sophisticates, allow the oppressed to vent their outrage at the death of one of their own at the hands of state oppressors. To deter them in any way would only deepen their pain. And never mind that our hero of the moment had lived a life of depredation and was found to have consumed a fatal dose of fentanyl. Such trivial details need not dim the luster of the man’s memory.

A result of the ensuing anti-police hysteria, one that was easily foreseeable in nature if not necessarily in its horrifying scale, was that the number of homicides in the U.S. rose by nearly 5,000 from 2019 to 2020, and that nearly 3,400 of these added victims, 68 percent, were black. But there must be martyrs to the cause, after all, and who is to say how many of those 5,000 people wouldn’t willingly have sacrificed themselves in the name of a more just society? Eggs and omelets, right, comrades?

Still, one prays for more wisdom in those we’ve entrusted with authority. For the most part, we pray in vain. Witness the chaos this week on display on college campuses across the country, where we find that the protesters who brought so much death and disorder in 2020 have swapped their BLM T-shirts for kaffiyehs and adopted the Gazans as their Cause of the Season. Same clowns, different circus.

In the small hours of yesterday morning, police officers at last routed the motley rabble of such people who had been occupying the main quad on the campus at UCLA, arresting more than 200 of them and scattering the rest. Left behind were tons of assorted garbage and graffiti covering some of the school’s most iconic buildings.

UCLA administrators had taken a hands-off approach to the encampment for days, this despite the fact that some of the occupiers had taken it upon themselves to limit access to one of the school’s main libraries as final exams were drawing near. A request sent out days earlier to other University of California campuses for additional police officers was withdrawn, leaving the 65-man UCLA P.D. to cope with what was clearly an escalating problem.

First time tragedy, second time farce. (Wikipedia)

Late on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, counter-protesters arrived on campus, apparently compelled to action in the absence of legitimate authority. They brawled with the occupiers for hours until a sufficient number of officers from the LAPD, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and the California Highway Patrol could be assembled and restore order.

It need not have come to this. UCLA officials didn’t even have to recall the events of 2020 for instruction. All they had to do was look at how other schools had responded to similar protests over the previous month. On April 5 at Pomona College, about 40 miles east of UCLA, pro-Hamas protesters invaded and occupied the office of the school’s president, who promptly announced that any who failed to leave the building would be arrested and suspended from school. Police from several agencies were called in and made 19 arrests. We’ve heard nary a peep from Pomona College since.

Officials at the University of Florida issued a statement welcoming peaceful expressions of dissent, but warning that the school “is not a daycare, and we do not treat protesters like children.” Last Monday, nine protesters were arrested at the school’s Gainesville campus, which has since been calm.

But UCLA Chancellor Gene Block chose the cowardly path of least resistance, allowing the placement of tents and barricades on the quad and watching idly as lowlifes from across Southern California and beyond descended on the campus and began dictating the movements of anyone not sympathetic the plight of the Palestinians.

Is a repeat of Chicago '68 coming in August?

What was it that prevented him from adopting the Florida approach? Why not announce that protesters were free to espouse all the vitriol they liked as long as they didn’t interfere with others’ pursuit of an education? Praise Hamas until you’re blue in the face, but don’t put up any tents and don’t block access to classrooms and libraries. Simple enough, it would seem, but too lacking in nuance for Mr. Block.

He has now reaped what he sowed, with a portion of his campus a shambles that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair, to say nothing of the coming bill for police overtime from the departments he had to enlist in his rescue. The UCLA endowment is about to take a hit.

And where will these itinerant bands of Hamas admirers go next? Unburdened by such mundane obligations as family or employment, they are free to roam the land and encamp anywhere the siren call summons them in the name of bringing down capitalism, ending colonialism, freeing violent criminals from confinement, or, as in the current fashion, shouting support for Mohammedan savagery. Put a few extra scoops of kibble in the bowl and Che the cat will be just fine while you’re away, and if the litter box is overflowing when you return, isn’t that a small price to pay for global justice?

I’m old enough to remember the mayhem on the streets during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, which will again host the event this coming August. The mayor of Chicago is Brandon Johnson, as dim a man as ever crossed the threshold at City Hall. I’m sure the Hamasniks, for whom the convention will be their Super Bowl, have already made their travel plans.