Some Thoughts On The UCLA Chaos

What if widespread disorder is. . . bad? And should be prevented?

I don’t want to do too much throat-clearing, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t note that there’s very little actual connection between what’s going on on American college campuses and the horrors playing out in Gaza, where the center of gravity, suffering-wise, is a large group of Palestinians who have done nothing wrong other than being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

You can — and should — be distressed by this fact, because you are a human being. That doesn’t require you to endorse Hamas, mute your outrage at what a group of their savages¹ did to innocent Israelis on October 7, nor also feel horrible for the murdered kidnap victims or the living ones caught in an unspeakable nightmare, nor, really, to hold any particular view about Theodor Herzl, Zionism, the Balfour declaration, 1948, 1967, 1973, the Oslo Accords, or anything else pertaining to this intractable conflict. In terms of the present war’s real-life impact on real-life people, the biggest thing happening is the brutal and repeated displacement and killing of civilians.

That’s over there, though. We are here. And America being America, and journalism being journalism, it isn’t a surprise that chaos on elite and otherwise brand-name college campuses gets a lot of attention. And I’m simply better positioned to opine on this than I am on the (awful) on-the-ground realities of the Israel-Hamas war. Plus, although it’s easy to lament that campus news so easily attracts our attention (even as we succumb to that very temptation), these protests are widespread, affect a decent-sized number of Americans one way or another, and do raise substantive questions about free speech, activism, and law enforcement.

I’ve got some thoughts on what’s happening on these campuses and the online furor surrounding it all. I hope they’re useful. I hadn’t planned to chime in on this further, but overnight things really escalated at UCLA, where violent clashes ensued after pro-Israel protesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment (though as we’ll see, the origins of this clash, like everything else here, are disputed).

In no particular order:

Short, Viral Videos Spreading Unverified Rumors Remain A Disastrous Societal Problem

It’s beyond obvious now that short, out-of-context videos accompanied by rumors can spark real-world violence. To me, the police shooting of Jacob Blake will always be an emblematic example because of the extent to which mainstream media outlets were complicit, but there are countless others.

These past few days have just served to reinforce this reality, in ways that have often straddled a very uncomfortable line between awful and, if I’m being honest, a little bit funny.