The mainstream media frenzy over the Israel-Hamas war campus protests can only be properly construed under the category of Establishmentarian panties-in-a-twist. Editors are oscillating wildly; writers are in severe conniptions. Also, quite frankly, there is here quite a bit of bi-coastal elitism going on. No privileged teenagers, so far as I can tell, have been killed in the process of these healthy, if contentious, airings of dissent, despite the incendiary descriptions in the press. Further, the breathy atmospherics (Averted Gaze). I’ll admit here at the outset that I have never understood the creepy media obsession with the behavior of teenagers at elite schools and why they merit so much coverage. Most of these kids — yes, kids, dear reader — are making their first forays into the arena of political action and are bound to make mistakes. Why politicize their excesses but ignore what they get right?
I have argued here, on October 24th, that Biden’s hugging-it-out with Bibi Netanyahu cleft his own political coalition in twain:
What effect will the “Netanyahu hug” have on President Biden’s own Progressive coalition? Many Progressives within the Democrat Party — including former President Jimmy Carter — equate Israel’s position in the Gaza Strip and West Bank to tantamount to apartheid. From 1948 to the early 1990s, the minority white government in South Africa subjected the indigenous majority to a life nasty, brutish and short. College-educated Progressives largely equate South African apartheid with the Palestinian situation in Israel, at rallies and in letters of solidarity. The far-left, by the way, has always advocated this position, entirely complicating matters in this war, after the murders and the kidnapping. "End All Aid to Zionist, Colonial, Apartheid Israel!," exclaims, breathlessly, the LA Progressive. It is, of course, not quite that simple.
In that context — of viewing Israel as an apartheid state — some Progressives refuse to see what Hamas has done on October 7 as an act of pure and simple terrorism. They either reject the word altogether or quibble with the usage in this case. Even the Anglican Church of South Africa, which directly struggled against apartheid, now characterizes Israel an apartheid state, further complicating life for the defenders of the innocent Israeli civilians killed and kidnapped. Apartheid as a descriptor conjures images of extreme inequality, a state of being under which no government can hope for political stability and peace.
34,183 Palestinians have been slaughtered since October 7th. How many of these Palestinians had anything to do with the kidnapping, murder spree of Hamas? And what of the homes and Palestinian wealth that has been rendered into dust? Prime Minister Netanyahu’s hysterical (over)reaction — part survival mode, part racist — to the October 7 attack has only strengthened the Zionism-is-racism argument. Which is what the student protests are expressing, however, sometimes, poorly. There is a reason why Representative Virginia Foxx, a laughable populist buffoon at best, is gathering so much traction hammering “the most expensive colleges” in the Education and Workforce Committee which she Chairs. The expulsions at the overly-covered Columbia are not without her fingerprints. Why, Tucker Carlson, who knows which side his bread is buttered, has been whipping up anti-college sentiment among working class whites for some time.
There is indeed a brutalist logic to tying college loan forgiveness, for example, to the perceived excesses of the campus protests. And those gray, oblique and cynical arguments prove even more compelling a construction when the collegiate scapegoats are women or, better, “uppity” women of color. The Other, to be frank, who will soon be in a higher tax bracket than the plumber. Why should an older white, non-college voter struggling with the rising price of groceries and gas give a damn about teenagers with their room and board and activities taken care of, spreading their wings for the first time in their young and promising lives? And when you add in the Evangelical component to this aggrieved equation and their eschatological fantasyland interpretation of the Book of Revelations, it becomes obvious why this is a unifying issue for the right. Offhand, it is difficult to imagine a better way to whip up negative working class outrage than exposing the excesses — or, rather perceived excesses — of privileged college students.
Which leads us back to the media coverage. Most of the borborygmous media coverage — surprise, surprise — involves elite coastal universities. Students at Columbia and NYU, situated squarely in the media capital of the world — at least for now — are enjoying the most robust coverage. Perhaps, dare I say it, too much coverage. CNN’s journos have given rap attention to NYU, Columbia, Yale and, for a smidgeon of balance, California/Humbolt. Charmed, I’m sure. Slate has focused on USC and Columbia. The BBC focused on NYU and Columbia. The AP went in for Yale, Harvard and Columbia. And Teen Vogue covered the rising celebrity of 21-year old Barnard protester, Isra Hirsi, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's daughter. The fly-over state colleges, as usual, don’t really matter all that much in this elite media scheme of things, even when they are pretty much in solidarity.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how do you say inequality without saying inequality.
And what is the meaning of this myopic navel-gazing? Why aren’t journos and their editors, allegedly objective, so blind the manner of this belief that only elite schools deserve such obscene focus? Philip Bump of the WashPo raises his hand, slowly, with the uncomfortable answer:
There are a few reasons. One is that lots of top-tier journalists attended these universities, just as members of the top-tier of other institutions and organizations did. And while it is probably not technically true that every Ivy diploma requires a seminar course in navel-gazing, it might be technically true. Ivy League people invest a lot of money and energy in the Ivy League and in higher education in particular and, as such, they have a more-robust-than-usual interest in the goings-on within the world of higher education and at Ivies specifically. So, you get lots of fulmination about Ivies and college, and what’s happening there which is generally offered through the lens of “this is important because these people will leave college and influence society” but generally reflects the lens of “this is important because I left that college and influenced society.”
They don’t, in fine, get it. That their coverage is looking better suited to alumni magazines than national publications. That in the process of all the navel-gazing and name checking, they are also making what can only be properly construed as an unforced error. An unforced error against said alleged journalistic objectivity. An unforced error into the conservative argument that the mainstream media is biased towards coastal elite. They are inciting not just the white working class, but the working class in general, away from the Progressive movement, away from the injustices being wrought against the Palestinian people daily and, I suspect, ultimately farther away from President Joe Biden. I would further warn that this bias not only alienates the already embattled legacy media from working class whites — but from working class people of color as well. What a way to build an audience!
Which brings me around to the point I’ve always wondered about regarding legacy media. Why do kids spreading their wings for the first time in their lives after moving out of their childhood homes merit so many front page top-of-the-fold stories in newspapers? Why are they at the top of cable newscasts? This is, of course, not to suggest that these kids are not perhaps representing a cultural change worth exploring in longform. Rather, I am curious as to why the writers and editors and producers at media organizations — all smart people — are so blissfully tone-deaf as to how much they are overcovering the subject now and how much they have overcovered the subject in the past. And why, probably, nothing is going to change.
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The pendulum swings. The Presidents of the colleges appear to have been broken by pressure from the donor class and the Republican-controlled House during an election year. Elise Stefanik, Harvard, ‘06, must be so proud of her own particular role in the chilling of speech. Her brand of culture warrior Trumpism has already led to the ouster of two college Presidents and very well might catapult her into the Vice Presidency that she so dearly covets. Stefanik’s politics game is, whatever you think of her, so much tighter than that of, say, Ron DeSantis or even a Glenn Youngken. “Anyone who thinks she is merely calling attention to the problem of campus antisemitism has not looked closely enough at the House hearings in which she has taken the lead grilling four Ivy League presidents,” David Bell writes in The Chronicle for Higher education. “Her goal has not been simply to humiliate these educators, but to force them to accept her diagnosis of what is happening at their institutions, and to push them to change their policies.” And so she has.
Finally — on a sunny note — Jimmy Carter’s legacy appears to be on the rise. Curiously, I’ve never forgotten that the former President’s daughter, Amy, was arrested as a freshman at Brown University for protesting apartheid. I read about that in high school and thought it to be so brilliant, even though the media had a field day with her “radicalism.” Decades later, Carter publicly associated the Palestinian situation in Israel with that of apartheid, which he always opposed, but did not have the luck to preside over its dismantling. At the time — and for decades afterwards — Carter was regarded as vaguely anti-Semitic for making such an argument in polite circles. The neoconservatives had all the more reason to hate his liberal humanitarianism. And Carter bore the slings and arrows of that outrageous characterization because he was already a spent political force, almost wholly irrelevant. And because he truly believed it in his heart. He was willing to be the piñata to further the cause.
Even as Carter now defies the odds in hospice care during his last farewell, the young have come around to his way of thinking on the Middle East. Further, the youngs have come around more to his way of thinking than they have to the largely irrelevant worldviews of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and even Joe Biden. And not just on the subject of the Middle East is Carter increasingly relevant to the rising generation. He has proved to be hugely relevant on Human Rights, on “New Deal vintage government controls,” and on the Environment. The new Progressive left increasingly owes as much to Jimmy Carter as it does to Bernie Sanders. Who would have predicted, in 2006, when Carter wrote Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, that nearly two decades afterwards his tarnished legacy would be on the rise and the mainstream media that dismissed him altogether as an one-term failure would be careening, instead, headlong into the abyss of irrelevance.
“I’ve been in a number of conversations with smart observers of politics who make the following argument: If Biden and the Democrats can just beat Trump this fall, MAGA will gradually splinter and fade. Typically, several reasons are given. First, Trump is a unique specimen—a political unicorn. With his long experience as an entertainer, his intuitive sense of how to rally a base, and his feral facility for making the outrageous endearing to his cult, he has held together a fractious coalition in a way that nobody else could. Look beneath the superficial unity that Trump has wrought, the argument goes, and the Republican coalition is a mass of fissures. Economic nationalists abhor free-traders. Fiscal conservatives disagree with supply-siders. Isolationists have little use for police-the-world internationalists. Take Trump personally out of the equation, and his working-class zealots might begin to notice that Republican policies do not serve their interests … All of this is true. But the modern Republican Party has been a bundle of contradictions at least since Ronald Reagan. And as long as Republican rule has produced tax cuts and deregulation, the socially urbane corporate types who hire gays, believe in abortions, and want global alliances have been happy to hold their noses and vote in coalition with fundamentalist rubes whom they privately ridicule. When it comes to personalities who might keep the MAGA/corporate coalition intact, there is only one I really worry about. That’s J.D. Vance.” (Robert Kuttner/TAP)
“Two recent news items illustrate the challenges facing low-income countries trying to escape poverty and underdevelopment in an age of climate change; and the continuing inability to have a reasonable discussion on the subject at a global level.In South Sudan, the government directed the closure of all schools due to intolerably high temperatures. Consequently, 2.2m children had to stay home. South Sudan’s school attainment rates are already deplorably bad. Secondary school enrollment rate is barely above 11%. These kinds of disruptions, which undoubtedly will become more common as global temperatures rise, will only worsen education attainment rates and therefore dampen South Sudan’s growth prospects. In general, research suggests that failure to mitigate high temperatures will mean that both farm and non-farm work will struggle to see any productivity gains. There’s very little air conditioning or irrigation infrastructure in South Sudan. The subtext here is that even before it can consider transitioning to a greener way of life, South Sudan needs rapid economic growth and development in order to be able to address the effects of climate change.” (Ken Opalo/The Africanist Perspective)