May 1: NYPD Liberates Occupied Columbia
Radical protest tactics; Poll: Americans still back Israel; Biden paid porn star to pimp KBJ
The Big Story
Welcome back from our second Passover break, and happy May Day to those who celebrate.
On Tuesday night, the NYPD moved against the student protesters and professional radicals who had barricaded themselves inside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall on Monday, following weeks of escalating protests. Police arrested 109 people in the operation and are reportedly planning to charge them with criminal mischief, trespassing, and third-degree burglary, which is a felony (we’ll see about that one). The NYPD also arrested 173 people in a separate Tuesday raid on an anti-Israel encampment at the City University of New York (CUNY).
According to New York Mayor Eric Adams and various spokespeople for the NYPD and Columbia University, some portion of those arrested were not Columbia students but “outsider agitators.” Many of those agitators were, we presume, affiliated with the various far-left or Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations (such as Students for Justice in Palestine, or SJP) that have been coordinating the campus protests—and the wider pro-Hamas protest movement—from the beginning. At the University of Texas-Austin, university officials announced Tuesday that 45 of the 79 people arrested there Monday had “no affiliation with UT Austin.” The school also announced that police had confiscated weapons from the protesters including “guns, buckets of large rocks, bricks, steel [reinforced] wood planks, mallets, and chains,” and that police cars had had their “tires slashed with knives.”
We don’t have similar hard data from Columbia, but what we do know is suggestive. For instance: The professional far-left “protest consultant” Lisa Fithian, who appeared at Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, and the antifa-led “Stop Cop City” protests in Atlanta, was filmed on Columbia’s campus instructing students on how to build barricades. Within Our Lifetime—a subsidiary of the same nonprofit that sponsors National SJP, and a link between the far-left and Islamist branches of the protest movement—issued a call on social media on Monday to “flood” the encampments at NYU, Columbia, CUNY, and other New York-area colleges. Around the same time, WOL leader Abdullah Akl, who is also a field organizer for Linda Sarsour’s MPower Change, was leading chants of “Palestine will be Arab” at CUNY’s campus and broadcasting calls for activists to show up at Columbia via his personal Instagram account. And The Washington Free Beacon reported today that more than 100 anti-Israel activists convened on Monday night at The People’s Forum, the radical-left event space funded by the wealthy Maoist and Chinese Communist Party influence agent Neville Roy Singham. After delaying the start of the event so that protesters could arrive from Columbia, The People’s Forum’s executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, urged the attendees to go out and “support our students so that the encampments can go on for as long as they can.” A few hours after the meeting concluded at 9:30 p.m., activists, most of them masked, smashed the windows of Hamilton Hall and barricaded themselves inside.
Speaking of Manolo: as Kyle Shideler noted in his chapter in Unmasking Antifa: Five Perspectives on a Growing Threat, several former New Left radicals who have remained active in the far-left organizing sphere—including Susan Rosenberg, a Weather Underground terrorist who later became vice chair of the progressive nonprofit Thousand Currents, and Michael Novick, another former Weatherman who is the web registrar for Torch Antifa, the major Midwest antifa network—have traveled to Cuba as part of the Venceremos Brigade, “an assessment and recruiting operation for Cuban intelligence for the training and indoctrination of American radicals.” We mention that because, well, Manolo—the guy urging New York radicals to go fight the “Zionist” Columbia administration—was based out of Cuba prior to assuming leadership of The People’s Forum, and his internet presence is littered with praise for the Cuban regime, including a fawning 2022 interview with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Is De Los Santos a Cuban intelligence asset? We don’t know. But it certainly would be an interesting question for a more functional FBI to investigate.
But it hasn’t all been bad news. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, pro-Palestine radicals removed the American flag and replaced it with a Palestinian one—only for UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts, accompanied by a police escort, to personally remove the Palestinian flag and rehoist Old Glory. After Roberts left, the Free Palestine crowd attempted to remove the American flag again, only to be stopped by brothers of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, which led to one of the photos of the year:
It’s a good reminder that at the end of the day, normal Americans aren’t radicals, Jew-haters, or terror sympathizers. But it does raise the question: Why, if most normal Americans despise this stuff, is the Democratic Party leadership pandering to those responsible for it?
IN THE BACK PAGES: Isaac Simpson on God, communism, and TikTok
The Rest
→For a partial answer to that question, and some general analysis on the protesters and their tactics, here’s Kyle Shideler in our Thread of the Day, which we’ve abridged and rendered into text for readability:
I think what people are confused about, regarding the recent campus and related protests, is they think this is a national conversation. It’s not. Your view of the optics is irrelevant. The target is establishment Democrats.
“But this is an election year! They risk splitting their base and losing.” Sure. IF you care about that kind of thing, which revolutionaries do not, but the establishment does. “Give us everything we want, or you get the Bad Orange Man again” is implicitly part of the threat. The threat of Trump reascendant is essentially a Kornilov coup. It exists as a specter in the distance, to force the progressives more fully into the radical camp for fear of a counter-revolution.
The radicals deliberately nostalgia bomb the establishment with 1968 language and actions as well. Because 1. The establishment is sympathetic to those prior radicals (or literally were them) and 2. The implicit warning is, you will give us what we want, or you get Nixon.
Why do radicals think that this would work? Because it almost ALWAYS works. And they have the further evidence of the BLM kneeling and siding with antifa against federal law enforcement in 2020. Add to this that the same mega-donors who are funding these protests are major level Democratic donors. Why are they funding an upheaval aimed at the very people they support? Because they want to push them further left. They want to move the Overton Window.
In the same way that “abolish the police” became a mainstream Democrat “defund the police” on the backs of riots, the Democrat position on Israel has moved to what would have been previously unthinkable. And they will continue to move leftward.
But it’s not really about Israel at all. This is about sawing off legs of a stool. The more you cut out from under the target, the more reliant upon you they become. Eventually when you step aside, they topple.
“Don’t they know they’re losing pro-Israel Jewish Democrats?” Yes. Duh. That’s the point. This is a major leg of the party stool, and the radicals intend to cut it away.
→A new Harvard-Harris poll shows 80% of Americans support Israel over Hamas, but 43% of those aged 18-24 support Hamas over Israel. The poll, released on Monday, also found that:
61% believe that a cease-fire should happen only after Hamas releases the hostages and is removed from power.
Asked if they favored a “permanent cease-fire” in Gaza, 70% of voters said yes, but that number dropped to 32% if the question explained that this would allow Hamas to remain in power and continue to hold the hostages.
72% believe that “Israel should move forward with an operation in Rafah to finish the war with Hamas, doing its best to avoid civilian casualties.”
71% mostly blame Hamas for the crisis in Gaza.
49% believe the casualty figures in Gaza are exaggerated.
75% believe Iran is responsible for “the attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah.”
64% believe there is a problem with what “higher-learning institutions” are teaching kids today.
83% support suspending students and professors who engage in violent antisemitic protests.
→U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel Wednesday, meeting with Israeli political leaders following what Blinken described as Israel’s “extraordinarily generous” truce and hostage-deal offer to Hamas. The text of the offer has not been made public, but according to a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, it would see Hamas release 33 hostages—female civilians and soldiers, children, and the elderly, sick, and wounded—in an initial 40-day phase, to be accompanied by a staged Israeli withdrawal and the delivery of 500 trucks of aid, including 50 trucks of fuel, per day into Gaza. Israel will also release Palestinian prisoners in exchange for hostages, although the exchange rate reported in the media has varied from 20-1 to 27-1. Later stages of the deal, to last 42 days each, would see further prisoner and hostage exchanges and negotiations for a “five-year rehabilitation plan” for Gaza, which would include a requirement that Hamas not rebuild its military infrastructure.
The ball is now in Hamas’ court, though reports during the day Wednesday were pessimistic—Haaretz columnist Amos Harel reported today that both Israeli and American negotiators believe Hamas’ Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar will reject the deal. From a strategic standpoint, we can’t say we blame him. Israel has already largely withdrawn from Gaza, and Sinwar knows that the Americans and Europeans are exerting tremendous pressure on the Israeli government not to go forward with its planned Rafah offensive. He also knows that U.S. pressure, combined with Hamas’ psychological warfare in releasing a series of hostage videos, is likely to exacerbate tensions between the Israeli left, which wants to release the hostages and attempt to repair the relationship with Biden (a fool’s errand, but we digress), and the Israeli right, which wants victory. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that the Rafah offensive will go forward “whether or not there is a hostage deal,” but momentum is everything in warfare, and Israel, for the past month, has been losing it.
→Amid reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) is considering issuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders over alleged “war crimes,” Israel has warned the United States that it will retaliate directly against the Palestinian Authority, which it holds responsible for the push at the ICC, if the court issues the warrants. According to a Wednesday report in Axios from Barak Ravid, the anti-PA measures could include freezing the transfer of tax revenues that Israel collects for the PA, which could bankrupt the authority.
→Farha Khalidi, a TikTok influencer and OnlyFans (i.e., amateur porn) star, claimed in a recent interview with Richard Hanania that she was paid to spread “political propaganda” for the Biden administration on social media. Khalidi, who said she was contacted by a third-party “conduit” rather than the administration itself, claimed the company paid her to say that, as an “edgy girl of color,” she felt “reflected” by, for instance, the White House’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. The revelation comes less than a week after Politico reported that the X account called New York Times Pitchbot—which “parodies” the Times for being too pro-Trump—was in regular contact with White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates, who sends the account owner “material for potential posts.”
→We missed this when the story broke in April, but the U.S. State Department is now conditioning eligibility for promotion on employees’ ability to document their work in promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), according to Fox News. Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, President Obama’s former ambassador to Malta and the State Department’s chief DEI officer from January 2021 to June 2023, described the policy at a City Club Forum event in April 2023:
We made the change that if you wanted to be considered for promotion at the Department of State, you must be able to document what you are doing to support diversity, equity and inclusion and accessibility. This is how you are judged for promotion. So that means my allies who are not female or minority are also interested in being able to show ‘I'm doing good work on this.’
The policy, enacted to comply with Biden’s Executive Order 14035 on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce, was announced in September 2022. A State Department press release from the time, heralding the department’s new “Five-Year DEIA Strategic Plan,” noted that the plan would establish the “advancement of DEIA as an element for all employees as part of their job performance criteria, career advancement opportunities, and senior performance pay.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Q&A with Yosef Begun, by David Samuels
The great Soviet dissident and refusenik talks about discovering Hebrew, foiling the KGB, and surviving the ‘banya’
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Those Fine Young Communists
How the schizoid discourse of TikTok captured the youth, and why their clueless elders are the bigger problem
By Isaac Simpson
Say to your 3-year-old daughter “I am the king.” Her response will be something along the lines, “No, I am the king.” Maybe “no, Mama is the king.” Perhaps “no, you’re the elephant.” She certainly will not say “yes, you are the king” or “you are a great king.” She will flip the hierarchy so that you, the closest thing to a king she knows, is anything but.
I remember my time as a communist. A brief, angry, dark time. I’d left a career in law and been fired from another one in advertising. I was bartending and freelancing for LA Weekly for $50 an article. I forced down the Communist Manifesto alongside a sausage egg and cheese, hungover, at a low-end coffee shop in Miracle Mile.
It was 2015 and Trump was still a twinkle in the media’s eye. Bernie was my option. I went around criticizing capitalism. Pharma and landlords really pissed me off. I had no idea what I was talking about. I attempted to get involved in organizing. At my bartending job, there was a skinny mustachioed Colombian who carried around a leather-bound notebook. A busboy. He muttered communist-ly in the breakroom. I tried to ingratiate myself with him, maybe get invited to a meeting or something. He could sense I wasn’t right, and pushed me off.
There was the socialist Vice writer I had coffee with at The Bungalow on Larchmont. Race came up and destroyed any hope of a relationship there. Then there was the LA Tenant’s Rights meeting, affiliated with DSA. A group of 15-20 sitting around in a circle like an AA meeting, we had to state our pronouns and our preferred language. They passed around rotting headsets that were supposed to auto-translate, but they didn’t work. By the time we were done fumbling and stating, 15 minutes remained to discuss protesting landlords who were conducting mass evictions. I never went back.
Instead, I dedicated myself to digging out of the hole I was in. The shroud of my communism began to lift. The anger always caused me pain anyway. I discovered I was better without it.
The communist instinct tempts the youthful soul as it seeks God. The communist is always anti-God because he is hypersocialized. God, for him, is the collective. Today’s Westerners are taught that empathy is an evolved behavior—it’s what makes us human. We see a state of nature with empathy-lacking proto-humans killing and eating each other due to their glaring lack of care for the other. God, they believe, is a crutch for those not progressively evolved enough to care just for the sake of it. The communist, however, is truly evolved, because he doesn’t need a man up in the sky to have empathy for others. This self-congratulatory belief is the foundation of his self-worth.
Except, the communists have it reversed. “Empathy” is in reality the most primitive instinct we have. The opposite of what makes us divine. It perverts and inverts the sort of hierarchical superstructures that elevate us above monkeys and bugs. It is our ability to reject the herd, not to stick to it, that makes us the most “human.” And God is the key to doing this. God is shorthand for empathy toward a relationship that makes no earthly sense. All of humanity’s specialness derives from our ability to tear ourselves away from the comfort of the crowd and connect with something larger than ourselves. The books, movies, and theater that have risen to the top of Western civilization foster the relationship between the individual and that cosmic irrational mission, whether we call it God or not.
TikTok is the opposite of that drive. TikTok is the crowd. TikTok is fertile ground for communism to take root.
***
TikTok, as we know it, began as Musical.ly, a Chinese karaoke app. The app was designed to pair clips from songs with users singing into the camera. It was so cringey no American could’ve possibly dreamt it up, but it exploded from East to West, just like karaoke did. It’s interesting because as a copying function, karaoke is more collectivist and buglike, and thus more primitive, than your typical Western activity. It appeals, at first, to a childish, underdeveloped instinct that makes enlightenment-infused Westerners uncomfortable. If Facebook started with elite college students, TikTok started with flyover-state 13-year-olds who lacked the self-consciousness that would stop them from unironically lip-syncing to Britney Spears for all the world to see.
The necessity of matching trending songs with cringe-inducing selfie videos presented an interesting algorithmic challenge. You needed to analyze many different streams of data to determine what was interesting content versus what was less interesting content. It was a similar challenge for YouTube and the defunct short-video app Vine, but made even more complicated by the secondary stream of trending audio clips. (The music industry embraced TikTok very early on because it’s the easiest way to spread short clips of hot songs without forfeiting ownership of the full track.) Then throw in the normal factors of likes, shares, and full views—not into a “social network” dashboard, but into a single, one-at-a-time, swipe-able feed. It’s actually an incredible invention.
In my new professional life, I learned to master the TikTok algorithm. It’s an odd beast, quite different from prior forms of virality on Twitter or Instagram or even YouTube. The most important part is the first three seconds. The algorithm selects videos that people tend to watch for more than three seconds, and puts those in the central scroll of more users. Also important are how long people watch and whether the underlying sound is trending. I won’t get too much into what this means, but remember, this is originally a karaoke app. So, the way a video sounds, and whether it’s a reaction to another sound, are vitally important. Likes, shares, and engagements are far less heavily weighted than time viewed in the feed.
This strange algorithmic set of factors creates a sort of negative exposure of Instagram. Where on Instagram, being smiley and breathtakingly perfect gets you lots of likes and therefore virality, on TikTok, the opposite is true.
The moment of enlightenment for me was watching what looked like a boy band heartthrob, wet mop and all, except he was smoking a cigarette and lamenting his “mental health” at a construction site. And he had over 500,000 followers.
It wasn’t an act. There is literally a smoking, construction-working mental health heartthrob influencer on TikTok. The more natural, flawed, and weird you seem, the longer people look at your video. The funnier you are, the more people will stop the scroll. And finally, the more apparently truthful you are, within a certain context, the more your video will be amplified in the algorithm.
Put very simply, where conspiracy theories and gender red pills have zero place on traditional Instagram, and even on Twitter will generally produce mostly eye rolls, on TikTok a “last honest man” type with crazy eyes and wild haircut who piques your interest about North Sentinel Island or MK Ultra can have a major impact. Instagram is ego. TikTok is id. It’s what we really want to see, not what we want to be publicly associated with.
And thus we arrive back at the new information system at the core of the generational divide. Millennials are perfect mini-boomers. They love BIG HEROES and BIG STORIES, with clear black and white, good and evil. They like PERFECT BODIES and EPIC WEEKENDS. Their informatics, from Hollywood films all the way down to Instagram, supported this kind of traditional BIG storytelling.
Beyond millennials there’s a new sort of chasm. It’s all about subtlety, little moments, depressing weekends, comic characters unpacked in seven seconds, models like Julia Fox recording their faces with literally no makeup, not the look of no makeup. Weirdness, bizarreness, and flaws are appreciated. We are leaving the age of autism, where everything must be perfect and lines must be clean, and entering the age of schizophrenia.
So where does this leave us with regard to viral communism and the Jews? A relevant anecdote. I learned how to use TikTok from a zoomer freelancer of mine, a young rich girl from the Valley. She was half-Jewish, 23 years old. She came with me a couple times to Shabbat dinner with my rabbi, who runs a hip Chabad house for young professionals in Echo Park. She bore all the signs and signals of a well-to-do mischling girl, a desire to embrace Judaism purely for the status it afforded her and to impress her older Jewish boyfriend. But, this was also a smart person. A good head on her shoulders. A lot of talent and potential.
That said, her politics represented complete derangement. Gay-ally. Trans-ally. BLM-ally. COVID mask adherent. Girlboss celebrator. And, I would assume today, Palestine-ally. So how does a smart, young, ambitious white girl receive these beliefs? Especially if she’s Jewish?
Well, beyond the daily birth control and Lexapro (real), the answer is that there are no elder-masculine inputs in her information regime. There sure used to be—his name was Steven Spielberg. His generation of Hollywood told the American story during her youth, and she listened. But then where did he go? Who filled in after him? Who would tell young girls like her about the importance of tolerance? Of not judging people by their race or skin? That Hamas are terrorists who would kill every American, not to mention Jew, with a finger snap if they could? Even my Jewish mother, after Oct. 7, said “well there’s two sides to the story.” She would’ve never said that in 2006. What changed?
What changed is that the elder males who still remain inside Hollywood and media are now deathly afraid of cancellation. I have a friend who works for a core big American TV show with veteran writers. “They’re all based!” he says, “It’s crazy! They’re just afraid to say anything!” So in the upper echelons you have a new regime of fear. Everything that comes out of it feels clenched and forced. So where do youth turn for content? Away from the TV, and toward their phones.
And inside the phone, it is chaos. Zero social immune system has been developed to control the schizoid narratives it propagates. Our elders haven’t developed any ability to understand it, let alone inject it with any sort of positive message.
So what happens to the soul of the angry youth in the state of nature? It leans, inevitably, toward communism. Until it sees some trajectory toward success and respect in its own life, or until an adult in the room gives it something better to believe in.
Now Congress is considering banning TikTok, which is one of the growing list of things Donald Trump was right about and that the regime initially resisted, but can no longer avoid. Of course, Congress is uniformly anti-TikTok for the same reason it’s generally pro-Israel—because its network of patrons and donors demands it. And they demand it because TikTok is being blamed for a rise in antisemitism that is impossible to ignore or deny. I wouldn’t even call it a “rise in antisemitism,” I would call it more like a return to the normal condition of the relationship between Jews and gentiles, which has been nonhostile for maybe 0.1% of its history. Nothing is more Lindy than hating Jews.
Which is why “banning TikTok” misses the point entirely. TikTok is being scapegoated for something unavoidable, very similar to how Facebook was scapegoated for the rise of Trump. Mimetic art is the art of our time, the carrier of all relevant messages. It will replace TV, just as TV replaced theater and books. There is simply no avoiding this result. The scroll is here, and it’s not going anywhere. Plop a young person on a couch and give them a book, a remote control, and a phone. They will pick the phone every single time. Nowhere will they hear “No, I am king!”
The ideology of anti-worship is the ideology of the infant, of the child, and of youth. They have always been iconoclasts and “rebels” and this is part of what we love about them. However, the older generations must instill and enforce respect for the morals of the structure. They must successfully handle the inevitable hierarchy-reversal attempts of the younger generation. This is how a society survives.
The problem is not that the Steven Spielbergs of the world are unwilling to learn TikTok. The problem is a regime that’s not talented or innovative enough to create compelling work in a shifting environment. When we say “the left can’t meme,” what we really mean is “the regime can’t meme.” The people whose job it is to push culture forward, to harness the natural talent arising from the youth (for example on Frogtwitter or r/wallstreetbets) and ensure that at least some of it is used to keep everyone properly propagandized enough to not be communists, have been replaced by mediocre Girlboss apparatchiks and racial apartheid freaks.
Of course, we aren’t allowed to talk about this kind of thing in our ever more (quite literally) castrated and suffocating official media. But we are on TikTok.
Compare the fine looking young fraternity men in the photo protecting our flag with the ugly mugshots of demonstrators arrested at Columbia. No wonder the Left hates the former.
Those frat boys ensuring Old Glory flies again. You can see their faces, proudly so. The ‘other side’ however, still has many with diapers on their faces. But moreover, where is Biden’s face in all this? Joe is hiding behind his surrogates to denounce the anti-Israel (antisemitism). He should get out front and and allow citizens to see & hear from him directly. Then again, perhaps that isn’t what his handlers want…wacko world right now