Violence against peacefully protesting students is now taking place at an unfathomable scale. Hundreds of protesters were attacked and arrested at Columbia; hundreds more were also assaulted and rounded up at UCLA, across the country. And dozens of schools in between are mounting their own solidarity encampments, and facing massive repression from the alliances of universities and local police forces.
These alliances are not new. They characterized the university’s response to protests against apartheid in South Africa and against the Vietnam War. What’s especially disturbing is that from the local level to the federal level, our government is, on the whole, utterly failing to protect these young people peacefully exercising their right to protest a genocide. The failure of leadership from Biden in particular — a president who has and will again demand the youth vote as the anti-Trump — is galling. Students across America are being left at the mercy of cops’ batons as they lose their housing and face total uncertainty in their academic careers.
We talk with Zaid Jilani this week about this massive uprising that’s sweeping the country, the insidious response from universities and governments, and what any principled free speech advocate should be doing right now about it. You can listen to this podcast when it’s released tomorrow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.
Episode 173 Audio: Zaid Jilani