Today, youthful naïvete and this thirst for attention is supercharged by social media. After all, until now, no generation has ever been able to virtue-signal to the whole world before. The powerful desire, not only to speak truth to power, but to be seen doing it while claiming the mantle of Civil Rights, is intoxicating. Joy Pullman once called this “Selma envy.” Ultimately, these students, who are often unsure why they’re protesting their schools and flirting with support for terrorism, are a product of universities in which the goal of education is activism rather than wisdom.
Many college and university campuses across the nation descended into petulant anarchy last week as students protested Israel’s war in Gaza. Demonstrations broke out at Columbia University in New York, Harvard, MIT, Emerson College in Boston, the University of Southern California, and the University of Texas, Austin, to name only a few. “Gaza solidarity encampments” were built, Jewish students were threatened and assaulted, and protestors demanded that their campuses “divest from companies linked to Israel” and sever academic ties with Israeli universities. Some Jewish students were told to “go back to Poland,” an apparent reference to death camps. “Stop funding genocide,” the signs demanded, as if Israel carried out the atrocities of October 7. Others said “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” without knowing which river and which sea.
Those sympathetic to student protesters claimed that the uprisings are about ending Israel’s war in Gaza, which was waged in response to the October 7 attacks. Clearly, however, many are calling for something far more radical, such as so-called “decolonization,” or an end to Israel as a nation altogether.
Left-wing students do have a long history of jumping on protest bandwagons, including those not-so-subtly associated with Islamic terrorism. Part of this reality is the “cult of youth” that has long pervaded American society, at least since the 1960s. This idea that young people are the conscience of our nation and that youth-led movements are always morally right was plainly articulated by a Democratic Socialists of America activist who wrote:
A good law of history is that if you ever find yourself opposing a student movement while siding with the ruling class, you are wrong. Every single time. In every era. No matter the issue.
This revisionist view of history forgets, among other things, that the Nazi movement in Germany and Mao’s Cultural Revolution were popular with students who mobilized against the ruling classes.
In the case of the campus protests last week, however, it’s not even clear who the ruling class is.