This week, the Atlantic published an account written by a student journalist at Stanford outlining the extremism that has become commonplace on campus. David wrote about it yesterday so I’m not going to rehash it but the gist is that pro-Palestinian activists on campus are endorsing violence against Israel and seem to be hovering just shy of calling for violence against Jews who happen to be in their immediate vicinity.
Chait’s piece today isn’t about the article itself so much as it is about the response to the article from the left.
This has predictably set off the same progressive eye-rolling that occurs any time the mainstream media reports on crazy things happening on the left. “Incredibly brave for the son of the NYT White House correspondent to put out a piece narcing on his fellow students and teachers,” snarked Daniel Boguslaw, a reporter at the Intercept, a staunchly anti-Israel publication. (Baker is the son of two successful journalists, though he made his reputation breaking a scandal that toppled Stanford’s president.) Numerous complaints described Baker as a “snitch” picking on unimportant targets…
There are two popular notions on the progressive left that seem intellectually irreconcilable. The first is that the media should stop scrutinizing radical left-wing ideas by progressive college students and political activists. The second is that the Democratic Party must heed the demands of progressive college students and political activists…
…the exasperated pose of dismissing criticism of young radical activists has not gone away. It is irresistible as a way to smooth over tensions within the progressive coalition, or any coalition. When your allies say or do something you can’t defend, but you don’t want to cause a rupture, the path of least resistance is to insist their actions are unimportant and don’t require scrutiny…
On the left, progressive-coalition managers spent years denying the campus left was worthy of attention before declaring their anger an emergency that Joe Biden had to attend to. The left went from too powerless to merit scrutiny to too powerful to be ignored overnight, without even a day in between when it was fair game for criticism.
I completely agree with Chait on this last point. I’ve literally spent close to a decade now writing about the topic of campus extremism and for the first several years the response from leftist columnists to all of it could be boiled down to two words: So what? If they noticed it at all it was probably only to downplay it as a tempest in a teapot. When radicals shouted down speakers and even took over campuses…so what? It was never taken seriously. It was never deemed worthy of anyone’s time or criticism. It was a strange fixation of the right.
But here we are a few years later and now people are warning that the fate of the Joe Biden’s reelection effort could turn on whether Biden signals compliance with these same radicals making demands in exactly the same ways campus extremists have been making demands for a decade. Suddenly they matter quite a lot.
And yet, the left is still downplaying the problem. Campus anti-Semitism is just one more thing they’d rather not talk about, another fixation of the right which is being over-hyped (they claim). It wasn’t until two college presidents lost their jobs that the left started taking it seriously. And even now, it gets a fraction of the attention the left has devoted to “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”
Chait concludes, “To insist these activists only matter when you are touting their influence, and then to deny their power when they receive scrutiny, is a tactic posing as an ideal.” In other words, you can’t have it both ways. Many of us on the right have been trying to say this for years at this point. It would be nice if the left-leaning media would just admit it. Stop treating campus extremists as an irrelevant sideshow and start treating them as what they are, leftists with enough power ability to shape the Democratic party and possibly the course of this year’s election.
Read the full article here