“Well, House Speaker Mike Johnson today derailed Hamas’ spring break in Columbia.”
That joke came from Fox News anchor Jesse Watters, who interviewed Mr. Johnson on his prime-time show on Wednesday.
In response to a standoff between student protesters and the university’s president, Mr. Johnson had visited the Columbia University campus where students had set up camps in solidarity with Palestinians. He was booed during a brief news conference on the steps of a school library.
“So many of them, Jesse, don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” Mr. Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson’s appearance on “Jesse Watters Primetime” epitomized the conservative media’s chiding and often hostile tone toward the recent wave of campus protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza. In the conservative media space, the protests are new evidence of the disorder and unrest that has long gripped liberal institutions — particularly at Ivy League schools — as social movements like Black Lives Matter and now pro-Palestinian activism expand their influence.
“There is a difference between educated people and smart people,” Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and Fox News host, said on the network Tuesday. “A lot of these college students are educated but not really smart.”
It’s an old line that has found a new moment.
For years, conservative commentators have routinely pointed to incidents on campus that illustrate the hypocrisy of elites and liberals. Instances of conservative speakers being shouted at by students at events were evidence that university administrators did not tolerate dissenting views while coddling students.
In 2016, then-Fox News host Todd Starnes pointed to a Black Lives Matter protest at a Dartmouth College library as evidence that white students were being “verbally attacked.” Two years later, Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, said on Fox, “I find that on college campuses the people who preach tolerance are the most intolerant.”
These types of comments have taken on new meaning in the past week as student camps and protests have roiled campuses. Many Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe because of the protests, which conservative media outlets highlighted in their reporting. The New York Post’s Rikki Schlott wrote in a recent column that the camps were a “betrayal” of Jewish students at Columbia.
Anti-Semitism is “exploding here in the United States,” Katrina Szish of Newsmax, a smaller conservative network, said Thursday as she interviewed Tal Heinrich, spokeswoman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The student protesters, many of whom are Jewish, say they are deliberately being mischaracterized as violent and anti-Semitic to distract from their goals, which include forcing their universities to secede from Israel. Protest leaders insist they are simply trying to support Palestinians and speak out against the war in Gaza.
However, there were several cases of hate speech and threats of violence specifically targeting Jewish students.
“We are Hamas, we are all Hamas” and “All you do is colonize” are among the uglier attacks on Jewish students inside and outside the Columbia campus during recent protests. On Friday, a student leader of the university protests apologized for comments he made in a January video in which he said, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”
Fox News, Newsmax, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post did not respond to requests for comment.
The protests spread far from elite universities in the Northeast, a favorite punching bag of conservative commentators, to schools across the country. These include the University of Texas, where state troopers arrested more than 50 protesters, and the University of Minnesota, where nine protesters were arrested after setting up a camp.
But criticism of how universities are handling the situation is consistent with some political views about college campuses. Polls show that conservatives have lost faith in higher education in recent years, and conservative media outlets have often portrayed campuses as breeding grounds for left-wing ideologies and as hostile to conservatives.
“This is one of the results of a campus culture that has become increasingly problematic for years, especially as university administrators tolerate identity politics and left-wing politics and protests,” Kimberley Strassel, a columnist for the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, said Tuesday on the podcast “Potomac Watch.”
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2024-04-26 23:57:36
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