Let Cops and Schools Take out the Trash

An atavistic confession: As a child of the Eighties, I grew up with the Hollywood action-cinema triumvirate of Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Reagan. I retain those sensibilities; I’m dispositionally inclined to enjoy watching good guys righteously manhandle bad guys in proportion to their just deserts. I understand the place of civil disobedience in our society, sure, but civil disobedience lacks any meaning whatsoever unless there are real consequences for disobeying that one is willing to endure to draw attention to one’s cause. And quite frankly, the vast majority of people who flatter themselves as practicing “civil disobedience” nowadays — by blocking highways or tossing food products at classics of Western art — are in truth practicing mere a**holery. So I’m a big “consequences” sort of guy — you fought the law, son? Well don’t be surprised when the law comes back atcha and wins nine times out of ten. Change it if you can.

And I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been enjoying the heck out of the past two days so far. If you share my general disdain for punk kids screaming slogans of hatred and shutting down campus in freshly purchased tents, then I hope you’ve been joyscrolling social media as I have. Nothing has warmed my lead-lined coal lump of a heart more in recent weeks than watching video after video of cops rousting pro-Hamas protesters from quads across America. They didn’t mess around at the University of Texas at Austin yesterday, as befits Texan sensibilities. (Enjoy this video of police smoothly and professionally closing upon and arresting the rally leader.) The president of the school then wrote, in what had to be the best moment of his week: “Peaceful protests within our rules are acceptable. Breaking our rules and policies and disrupting others’ ability to learn are not allowed. . . . Our rules matter, and they will be enforced. Our University will not be occupied.”

At Princeton an attempt to occupy the quad was immediately quelled, perhaps in part because of the vigilance of NR’s own Abigail Anthony (class of ’23), who acquired copies of the planning documents and published them before the planners could strike. (It truly sucks to have a mole in your organization, dude, believe me.) At Northwestern University, activists claimed to “successfully fend off the police,” but what these kids fail to realize is that even in Evanston, Illinois, the cops will be back soon — and they will come prepared to not take “no” for an answer. I await this with glee. (I read that they were already getting handsy with Hamas-sympathetic faculty on the ground — a detail that, Grinch-like, caused my heart to spontaneously grow three sizes.)

I suppose it’s easy to take pleasure in the unhappiness and public humiliation of people whose views you find repulsive. I know it’s a moral trap to be carefully avoided because it shades far too quickly into making excuses for civic abuses. But I don’t care — my spirit soared to see this video of pro-Hamas campers being forcibly ejected from the quad of Emory University’s campus. And it’s not the dumb kids getting wrangled that warms my soul so much, it’s the line of despairing, disgusted faculty looking on. The only thing that would have made the video more delightfully perfect is if the camera panning past all the hissing and jeering pro-Hamas grayhairs had ended on one guy, standing off to the side, rubbing his hands together and cheering, “YES . . . HA HA HA . . . YES!” That guy would have been me in some alternate dimension.

So while Columbia University is still apparently locked in 48-hour “negotiations” with a bunch of spoiled bigoted children who properly ought to be immediately expelled from school without recourse, other universities have learned from its disaster and understand that giving even an inch to these people means giving away the whole school to them. Their demands are unanswerable and can only escalate. Here’s to the cops and school presidents finally taking out the trash, as many times as they have to.