Are There Long, Curved Knives too?

Created
Thu, 02/05/2024 - 23:00
Updated
Thu, 02/05/2024 - 23:00
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…