Antifa-da is comin’ ta git ya
At Dartmouth College Wednesday night, students holding a peaceful pro-Palestine protest on the college green were quickly met with …. well, let Prof. Jeff Sharlett (“The Undertow“) tell it:
It wasn’t as dramatic as the police breach of Columbia University carried live from New York.
Meanwhile, Brown University administrators reached a negotiated settlement with student protesters:
Northwestern did as well.
Which do you think will get more press? Which do you think will fuel the right-wing culture war? Okay, likely all of it.
Charlie Sykes recalls being a kid at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago when Mayor Daily unleashed his police against Vietnam War protesters. Those clashes helped Richard Nixon win the presidency. “[T]hey hastened the realignment of much of the American electorate. Republicans would hold the White House for 16 of the next 20 years. Indeed, the politics of the past six decades have been shaped by the divisions that sharpened that year.”
We are still suffering the hangover from that period, Sykes believes:
Donald Trump obviously hopes that history will repeat itself, and that the left-wing theatrics of the anti-Israel protests, on college campuses and beyond, will have an outsize effect on the 2024 election. Like Nixon and Wallace before him, Trump (and the congressional GOP) will seize on the protests’ methodology and rhetoric—this time to further polarize an already deeply polarized electorate. The irony, of course, is rich: Even as Trump stands trial for multiple felonies, he is trying to cast himself as the candidate of law and order. Even as he lashes out about the campus protesters, he is pledging pardons for the rioters who attacked the Capitol.
Before events Dartmouth, Brown and Northwestern, Paul Waldman predicted (irony being dead) Team MAGA will dial its law-and-order claxon up to 11. Never mind that these mostly peaceful camp-ins isolated to a few college campuses had no impact on 99.99% of Americans. You won’t be accosted by “antifa” at the McDonald’s drive-thru at breakfast. The right-wing media machine will insist They are coming for you in your bed with their long, curved knives:
Yet Republicans would have you believe that these protests are causing “chaos” from sea to shining sea, that the nation is on the verge of a complete breakdown of law and order that threatens every American. The solution to the protests is for the kids saying things conservatives don’t like to shut up, and if they won’t, some good old-fashioned skull-cracking is necessary to protect the rest of us from their anarchic criminality.
This has become the dominant theme of the right’s response not just to these protests but to the state of the country in general: America is in chaos. You hear that word repeated over and over; to take just one example, when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went to Columbia University for a photo op, he demanded that the university’s president “resign if she could not immediately bring order to this chaos.” While Columbia students have since taken over a university building, that hadn’t happened at the time; they were just occupying the quad. On the other hand, one student did yell “Mike, you suck!” so it was probably pretty scary for him.
People who have actually reported from the protests (see here or here) have by and large found them to be well-behaved. Are there problematic things being said at some of them? Yes there are. Have there been antisemitic incidents around some of them? Yes there have. But nearly everything resembling “chaos” has come in the crackdowns. Scenes of violent confrontation you’ve witnessed on TV or social media have occurred when the police moved in, often in riot gear to remove and arrest students and sometimes faculty (and in at least one case, when counter-protesters stormed a protest). At the universities where the administrators had the sense to just let the students have their say, there has been almost no violence. But this is how Republicans portray what’s happening:
Are there a few students uttering noxious things? Sure. (Ever been to a hockey game?) But where administrators allowed student to “have their say,” there has been “almost no violence.” But, you know, skulls must be cracked. Donald Trump is itching for it.
Furthermore, the chaos narrative fits in with their broader claims about life in America today, which is supposedly a nightmare of economic misery and violent mayhem, where people have to dodge murderous gangs just to make it to the store to buy a gallon of milk for 25 bucks and immigrants are pillaging our communities.
Not where you live, of course, but everywhere else. This is the trick: convincing people that even as their own days proceed in an ordinarily mundane fashion, chaos awaits just a few miles away, particularly in American cities, which liberals and their permissive policies have turned into hellholes of crime. This is a regular feature of conservative rhetoric, whether it’s from politicians or Fox News hosts or “bro country” singers.
If you point out that in fact crime is dropping quite dramatically, Republicans will laugh in your face. How can you not realize that America is in chaos? After all, that’s what they see every night on “Hannity”! And sure, the only immigrants they know are washing their dishes or putting a new roof on their neighbor’s house, but haven’t you seen the hundreds of “CHAOS AT THE BORDER!!!” segments on Fox? It’s a jungle out there! If you doubt, just head over to bidenbloodbath.com, a website set up by the Republican National Committee to warn people about the immigrant “invasion” (another word repeated endlessly on the right). Or check in with your favorite Republican PR ghoul, who will tell you that we’re on the verge of a complete breakdown of the social order:
J.D. Vance insists 21st century hippies go home and “take a shower.” The 1950s weren’t the only good old days for Republicans. Chaos, real or imagined, sells papers and right-wing crackdowns, especially to red state residents completely cut off from reality.
The reaction to the protests, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes notes, is “out of proportion to the protests themselves.” But for the right, a shiny distraction from carnage in Gaza. And politically useful.
Waldman again:
While the campus protests will quiet when students return home for the summer, Republicans will continue to talk about them for as long as they can, spinning out a tale in which every college in America became the scene of berserker rioting that left half the country aflame. That’s the way they still talk about the summer of 2020; if you asked the average Fox News viewer, they’d tell you that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, cities like Portland were literally burned to the ground, leaving nothing more than a pile of rubble. The fact that it’s not true is meaningless; those viewers will never visit the cities they’ve been convinced are something out of Mad Max, just as they’ll have no firsthand experience with the current atmosphere at the nation’s universities.
But they’ll know in their hearts that it’s madness out there. Bar the door, buy some more guns, prepare for the collapse of civilization if Joe Biden wins. The chaos is coming for you, and only voting for Donald Trump can stop it.
Madness! Antifa-da! Urban hellscapes! Somewhere I cannot find at the moment, a conservative visiting New York recently was shocked to find that the city was not awash with the homeless, with brown-skinned immigrants, bombed-out neighborhoods, etc.
George Hahn mocked that imaginary liberal Mad Max America during the pandemic, you’ll recall.
But as Waldman points out, the truth is not the point for Trump. Even his persona is a lie. Truth has never been what Trump is selling his marks.
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