The People Setting America on Fire

An investigation into the witches’ brew of billionaires, Islamists, and leftists behind the campus protests

Over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed what has seemed like a mass outpouring of support for terror on elite college campuses. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern, Texas, and elsewhere, masked mobs have occupied schools with tent encampments, established self-proclaimed “autonomous zones,” clashed with police, harassed and threatened visibly Jewish students, and issued demands for their universities to divest from Israeli “genocide.” Politically, moreover, the protests have displayed an incoherent mix of campus progressivism, hardcore Islamism and Arab nationalism, and revolutionary anarchism and communism, including open praise for North Korea. The only unifying thread would appear to be opposition to Israel and its alleged imperial patron, the United States.

Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.

But students are not the only, and perhaps not even the most important, faction active in the campus protests. As in the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, “outside agitators”—professional radicals and organizers, black bloc antifa thugs, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, and Palestinian and Islamist radicals—have played a central role in organizing and escalating the campus protests, just as they have organized and escalated the wider anti-Israel protest campaign that began almost immediately after Oct. 7. This largely decentralized network of agitators is, in turn, politically and financially supported by a vast web of progressive nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, and dark-money groups ultimately backed by big-money donors aligned with the Democratic Party.

The first hint that the protests are not entirely organic is their striking resemblance to previous rounds of organized far-left agitation, from the “uprising” of summer 2020 to the rolling antifa vs. Proud Boys brawls of 2016-17. The creation of “liberated” or “autonomous” zones on campus, for instance, is a hallmark of anarchist organizing familiar from Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone and New York’s City Hall Autonomous Zone four summers ago. Familiar, too, is the governance of these zones, with masked security details prohibiting filming from outsiders and directing reporters to trained media representatives. During clashes with police or with counterprotesters, students and their allies have deployed classic “bloc” tactics, covering their faces and dressing in matching outfits to promote anonymity, linking arms to interfere with police attempts to conduct arrests, and attempting “de-arrests”—i.e., the coordinated swarming of police officers—to rescue apprehended comrades. At Yale, student activists doxxed the police officers sent to clear them out of the encampment—another harassment tactic frequently deployed by Antifa.

Scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides’ involvement somewhere……

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Continue reading this article at Tablet Magazine.