Apr. 26, 2024 ❧ Campus speech crackdowns, Biden deporting Haitians, and a fire-breathing robot dog
Plus: India's elections, Balkan insults, Maine's abortion sanctuary, and an ape escape (actually it was eleven monkeys, but "ape escape" is too good not to use)
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BIG STORY
Students around the country arrested for peaceful protests
In the wake of the past week’s demonstrations at Columbia University, students and faculty at dozens of American universities have formed their own solidarity encampments in opposition to Israel’s destruction of the Gaza Strip.
Last week, the NYPD hauled off more than 100 Columbia students despite acknowledging that they were completely peaceful, a move cheered by politicians in both parties. But rather than strike fear, state repression has only strengthened the resolve of America’s youth. They have only continued to turn out around the country in droves to oppose their schools’ investments in weapons contractors who have profited from a war that is killing innocent people at a historic rate.
According to the Associated Press:
Universities with large endowments spread their money across a vast array of investments, and it can be difficult or impossible to identify where it all lands.
The U.S. Education Department requires colleges to report gifts and contracts from foreign sources, but there have been problems with underreporting, and colleges sometimes dodge reporting requirements by steering money through separate foundations that work on their behalf.
According to an Education Department database, about 100 U.S. colleges have reported gifts or contracts from Israel totaling $375 million over the past two decades. The data tells little about where the money comes from, however, or how it was used.
And as students have remained undaunted, the crackdown on their free expression has only intensified. Over the past week, more than 400 demonstrators across the US have been taken into custody, according to The New York Times.
At Emory University in Atlanta, protesters who’d formed a tent encampment on their quad, were informed that they were “trespassing.” They were then fired upon with rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper spray. In one video shared with NBC News, a protester is shown being held down by two police officers, ziptied, and tased for at least ten seconds.
The chair of the school’s philosophy department, Noelle McAfee, was also detained, along with economics professor Caroline Fohlin who was hurled to the ground by a police officer after witnessing the violent arrest of one of her students.
Indiana University, which has been threatened with funding cuts by Congressman Jim Banks (R-IN) if it does not crack down on pro-Palestinian speech, rushed to change its decades-old free speech policy specifically so it could have pro-Palestine protesters detained. In response to a planned encampment at the school’s Dunn Meadow, which has been a designated “free speech zone” since 1969 and had numerous protest encampments over the years, the IU added language required “uncarried overnight signs, symbols or structures” to be approved by the provost.
When hundreds of protesters arrived the next day with signs and tents, a sniper pointed a rifle at them from atop the Indiana Memorial Union building in an eerie echo of the 1970 Kent State massacre.
After hours of peaceful protests that included, chants, prayers, and drumming, cops swarmed the area and arrested 33 people, including two professors for “trespassing” (in a public area of their own campus, remember). Videos show police beating many others with shields, shoving protesters to the ground, and dragging them away. Everyone arrested has been arbitrarily banned from setting foot on campus for the next year.
Perhaps the most galling crackdown happened in Texas, where state troopers called by Governor Greg Abbott brutalized dozens of protesters and journalists who’d gathered on the lawn of UT Austin. As many pointed out, these were the same troopers who sat around twiddling their thumbs as a gunman rampaged through an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, two years ago. Saving elementary schoolers from being butchered is above their pay grade, but they were more than happy to crack the skulls of some camping 19-year-olds.
The Texas Tribune describes the scene after the students refused to disband their encampment:
One officer singled out a protest organizer in a gold scarf, saying he would be the “first to go.” That protester was the first to be arrested. After that, police handcuffed more students using white plastic ties. Officers armed with batons formed a line and pushed protesters back, with many tumbling to the ground […]
One woman said she saw a large police officer place his entire body weight to detain a young woman protesting. Law enforcement was also seen kneeling on individuals’ backs and necks, pulling their hair and in one case punching a protester in the nose […]
Abbott left no illusions about why these protesters were arrested. In a tweet, he said that “Arrests [are] being made right now & will continue until the crowd disperses. These protesters belong in jail. Antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas. Period.”
Though the students were charged with trespassing, this is effectively an admission from the governor that they were detained because of the views they were expressing. As is almost always the case with such accusations, Abbott did not provide any specific evidence that the protesters had said anything antisemitic History professor Jeremi Suri, who identifies as Jewish and witnessed the protests, told The Tribune the following:
They're not shouting anything anti-Semitic, they're not harrasing anyone, they're standing on the green lawn, expressing themselves. The appropriate response would be to ask them to be contained in an area, let them stay on the grass and let them shout until they have no voices left.
PHOTO OF THE WEEK
We are currently witnessing one of the most authoritarian crackdowns on speech in recent American history, and it’s being cheered on by much of our media and political class. While we usually avoid throwing around the term “fascist” too flippantly to avoid diluting its meaning, it’s hard to think of another word to describe a country that abets a genocide and sends jackbooted thugs to brutalize and imprison those who speak out against it.
But despite attempts to make protesters seem like agents of terror and bigotry, actually digging down into the reports of each individual protest that’s been dispersed shows how remarkably disciplined most of them have been. In virtually every case, the worst things that protesters are accused of are nonviolent offenses like unlawful assembly or trespassing. The only instances of violence have begun once the cops start beating people up. But while it’s easy to feel despair as the entire media and political apparatus has aligned to crush these protests, it’s heartening that they’re not just continuing but growing stronger.
It’s clear that bringing attention to the crimes being committed in Gaza has moved public opinion. The majority of Americans now say they oppose Israel’s military action in Gaza, something that would have been unthinkable even five years ago. And young Americans, who make up a greater percentage of the electorate each year, are the bleeding edge of this change.
Our government’s old tactics—of ignoring the treatment of Palestinians or accusing anyone who brings it up of antisemitism—are no longer working. With words failing to persuade, they are resorting to the only thing left: force. And as scary as that is, it’s also a sign that these protests pose a genuine threat to the status quo.
CHECK OUT THE LATEST EPISODE OF THE CURRENT AFFAIRS PODCAST
Today we have a documentary episode examining and analyzing the ongoing pro-Palestine uprisings at campuses around the country. We look at the horrifying facts on the ground in Gaza that have caused U.S. students to risk their academic careers in solidarity demonstrations. We discuss how universities have repressed the demonstrations an a manner disturbingly reminiscent of authoritarian states. We expose the myths that the protests are hateful, antisemitic, and pro-terror. And we put the demonstrations in context, looking at how prior generations of anti-war students were similarly motivated to take a stance against violence and injustice.
⚜ LONG READ: In Mehdi Hasan’s new outlet Zeteo, Jewish Columbia student activist (and prior Current Affairs contributor) Jonathan Ben-Menachem writes, “Don’t Believe What You’re Being Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’”
As this national discourse over “campus antisemitism” reached a boiling point over the weekend, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment saw CUAD organizers lead joint Muslim and Jewish prayer sessions and honor each other’s dead. This is wholesome, human stuff – it doesn’t make for sensationalist headlines about Jew-hating Ivy Leaguers.
On Monday, I joined hundreds of my fellow student workers for a walk-out in solidarity with the encampment; we listened respectfully as a similarly sizable group of Columbia faculty held a rally on the library steps. Frankly, it didn’t feel much different from the environment during my union’s most recent strike on campus – I felt inspired again by my colleagues’ commitment to making Columbia a safer and better place to work and study.
Later that night, a Passover Seder service was held at the encampment. Would an antisemitic student movement welcome Jews in this way? I think not.
Here’s what you’re not being told: The most pressing threats to our safety as Jewish students do not come from tents on campus. Instead, they come from the Columbia administration inviting police onto campus, certain faculty members, and third-party organizations that dox undergraduates. Frankly, I regret the fact that writing to confirm the safety of Jewish Ivy League students feels justified in the first place. I have not seen many pundits hand-wringing over the safety of my Palestinian colleagues mourning the deaths of family members, or the destruction of Gaza’s cherished universities.
STORY THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
Biden’s “atrocious” deportations to Haiti
This week, a growing chorus of human rights advocates and leaders in the Haitian American community are condemning the Biden administration for its recent decision to resume deportation flights to Haiti. The flights had been paused since January on account of the escalating gang violence that has plagued the country since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. But on April 18, they started up again, with a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security telling Al Jazeera that ICE had “conducted a repatriation flight of around 50 Haitian nationals” who were “found to not have a legal basis to remain in the United States.”
On Thursday, reporters from southern Florida’s NBC 6 spoke by phone to Gerson Joseph, one of the people who was deported on the 18th. According to Joseph, the only reason he was put on the ICE flight was because he missed an immigration court date after the notification didn’t reach him through the mail. Now, he’s trapped in Haiti:
“I have no idea what I’m going to do[...] I barely sleep man, I am not going to lie to you, I barely sleep, I am moving from place to place[...]They dropped us over here with no travel documents, I don’t even have a paper that can identify who I am right now, where I’m at,” said Joseph.
It’s hard to overstate the cruelty and stupidity of these deportations. The situation in Haiti right now resembles an outright civil war: the prime minister has been forced to resign, heavily armed gangs control around 80 percent of the capital of Port-au-Prince (according to United Nations estimates), and mass prison breaks have only increased their numbers. There really is no functioning government, and the United Nations says that “the scale of human rights abuses is unprecedented in modern Haitian history,” as murder, kidnapping, and sexual violence become commonplace. In short, it’s obviously unsafe to deport anyone into what is effectively an active war zone. Doing so could easily condemn them to death.
There’s been no shortage of voices telling the Biden administration that, either. In a public statement on the 18th, Representative Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick— who’s currently the only Haitian American in the U.S. Congress—called the decision to resume flights “simply an act of atrocious cruelty.” More recently, Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami called the deportations “unconscionable given the realities on the ground,” and North Lauderdale mayor Samson Borgelin (who was born in Haiti) said they were “unthinkable” and “a moral failing.” That’s a pretty clear message.
But this is an election year, and Joe Biden wants to look tough on immigration. He’s already been trying to beat the Republican Party at its own xenophobic game, pushing a “bipartisan border agreement” that would expand ICE and the U.S. Border Patrol and talking about closing the U.S.-Mexico border by executive order. Meanwhile, right-wing commentators have been busy fearmongering about Haitian immigrants, spreading racist nonsense about “cannibal gangs” who might enter the country. By starting deportations again, Biden is giving the right exactly what they want—and he’s throwing ordinary Haitians under the bus to boost his own chances of reelection.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ The state of Maine has passed an important “sanctuary” law for abortion and transgender healthcare. It’s called LD 227, or “An Act Regarding Legally Protected Health Care Activity in the State,” and it’s one of the most sensible and humane things a state government has done in recent memory. In a few quick pages, it not only establishes a “legal right to gender-affirming health care services and reproductive health care services,” but prohibits other states from taking any “public act” against people who come to Maine to access those forms of care.
This is a direct rebuke to monstrous policies like those proposed in Tennessee and Idaho, which seek to create a new criminal offense called “abortion trafficking” for anyone who helps a woman travel to a state where the practice is legal. As journalist Erin Reed notes, the Maine legislature received bomb threats in the lead-up to the legislation being passed, which ranted and raved about “degenerates.” But that didn’t stop Governor Janet Mills from signing LD 227 into law on Tuesday, making Maine a safe haven for anyone who needs it. It’s kind of weird to see state leaders making good decisions on transgender and reproductive rights, after so many bad ones in the last few years—but it’s definitely a welcome change of pace.
❧ This week, an angry woman confronted New York City Mayor Eric Adams on an airplane—and she was right about everything. Upon noticing Adams on her flight from Miami to New York, the unidentified woman really let him have it:
Are you Eric Adams? Yeah? Fuck you! You support the genocide in Palestine. There are homeless people all over New York, yet you’re always partying! You don’t actually care about the citizens of New York. Why are you even in Miami? You know there are people being arrested there. People are homeless in New York. People cannot afford food. You keep cutting the education budget, so that you can fund the police. That’s all you care about, funding the police!
On every point, the woman (who identified herself to Fox News only as “Pro Palestinian Flyer”) was spot-on. Adams really is one of the most ghoulish supporters of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, even going so far as to say he wants to retire to an illegal settlement in the Golan Heights. Just this week, he announced that he still wants to slash funding to the New York Public Library system, while hiring 1,200 more cops. The city’s homelessness rate really is high, and Adams doesn’t seem too concerned, spending $6,000 of city funds on a single cocktail party last December.
Politicians like Adams, or West Virginia’s Joe Manchin—who got called a “sick fuck” by a climate protestor this March—should be getting yelled at when they dare to show their faces in public. The amount of human suffering they’re personally responsible for merits that treatment, at the very least. Meanwhile, for the sake of New York: can the airplane lady just be mayor instead?
❧ Fire-breathing robot canines may soon come to a street near you. This week, the aptly-named company Throwflame released a “robot dog with a flamethrower” known as “Thermonator,” which can be purchased across the United States. According to Ars Technica, this friendly pooch “is a quadruped robot with an ARC flamethrower mounted to its back, fueled by gasoline or napalm. It features a one-hour battery, a 30-foot flame-throwing range, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity for remote control through a smartphone.” (How convenient!) It is currently being sold for less than $10,000!
Despite being a form of arms that literally shoot fire, flamethrowers are somehow not considered firearms under the National Firearms Act. This means that the Thermonator will be legal to purchase in 48 states. The two exceptions are the freedom-hating communist regimes of California, where they are limited to flames of 10 feet, and Maryland, where they are totally banned.
You may be asking why anyone could need a mechanized death-beast such as this. The Throwflame website lists some practical applications like “snow and ice removal,” “agricultural management,” and, hilariously, “wildfire prevention.” (After all, everyone knows that the best way to fight a wildfire is to spray it with more fire… That’s what the saying “fight fire with fire” means!)
In its marketing, Throwflame is not leaning very much into the machine’s supposed usefulness for outdoor chores. Believe it or not, the main appeal of a device called the “Thermonator” seems to be that it can turn the user into a god of destruction. Just take a look at this promotional video, which shows the dog torching a forest while Dr. Robert Oppenheimer’s infamous quote, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” is read in the background.
⚜ LONG READ: A new investigation from Meghan Morris in Business Insider shows how private equity is taking over special education across the United States:
Emily had a lot of fight in her.
The petite 7-year-old had blonde hair and blue eyes. She was also diagnosed with autism, and she had been struggling ever since her mother, Sarah, moved her and her brother hours away from their dad during the pandemic. After the move, Emily became increasingly frustrated with her inability to articulate her thoughts and began boiling over into rages that required interventions at the public school she attended.
In August 2021, Sarah moved Emily to New Story, a private school in State College, Pennsylvania, dedicated to serving children with special needs, in the hopes that the teachers there would know how to keep her little girl calm. But at New Story, Emily seemed to be having even more meltdowns, and the school called Sarah to intervene when her daughter broke down. So Sarah left work, again and again, to comfort her daughter with bear hugs.
She would rather miss work than let New Story teachers use their preferred tactic: corralling the first grader with gym mats that Emily would fight and scratch so hard, she'd come home with foam lodged beneath her bloody fingernails. Then one afternoon in April last year, Sarah asked a family friend to pick up Emily from New Story. When the friend arrived, the little girl was on the playground, pinned down under the weight of four adults.
Sarah didn't know it at the time, but when she enrolled Emily in New Story, she was unwittingly signing on to an experiment in American education, one that worries former staff, US senators, and special-education researchers alike: New Story is the country's first large-scale special-education-school network owned by a private-equity firm.
In 2019, the Boston-based private-equity arm of Audax Group, which manages $36 billion for investors, including the Kentucky Teachers Retirement System and the Pennsylvania State Employees' Retirement System, purchased a mid-Atlantic special-education-school network called New Story Schools for an undisclosed price. Under Audax, New Story has purchased other local school chains, like Pennsylvania's River Rock Academy, as well as various behavioral-services companies, and rolled them up under New Story's corporate umbrella. The deals have created what New Story calls one of the largest special-education companies in the US, serving children with autism, behavioral problems, and other issues.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ The people of 13 states will head to the polls today for the second phase of India’s weeks-long national parliamentary elections. Over the next six weeks, India, a country with 970 million registered voters, will complete the single-largest democratic election in world history. And the stakes are fittingly enormous.
It will be India’s first opportunity in five years to unseat its Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which, during its time in office has overseen a massive crackdown on civil rights within the country for ethnic minorities and political opposition groups. According to a 2023 report from Amnesty International:
Government officials, political leaders, and supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – the ruling political party at the federal level – advocated hatred and violence against religious minorities with impunity, particularly Muslims, marking a rise in hate crimes. Punitive demolitions of largely Muslim properties – including homes, businesses and places of worship – resulting in mass forced evictions after episodes of communal violence, were commonplace and went unpunished. India continued to impose arbitrary and blanket internet restrictions including internet shutdowns. The government withheld the Twitter (now known as X) accounts of journalists and civil society organizations without due process. Dalits, Adivasis and other marginalized groups continued to face violence and entrenched discrimination, with women and girls facing specific attacks on their right to bodily autonomy.
While the BJP is favored to with the majority of seats in India’s Lok Sabah, Modi’s party has reacted with panic at the threat of opposition, jailing activists for peaceful protests, arresting opposition leader Arvind Kejriwal, and freezing the bank accounts of the Indian National Congress, the largest party in the opposing INDIA coalition. Modi is hoping to harness voters’ bigotry against Muslims to maintain power. During a speech last week, he intoned darkly about how if the opposition takes control, they would distribute wealth to Muslim “infiltrators” who “have more children” than the Hindu ethnic majority.
Modi’s party does not actually have majority support in India. But the opposition—led by former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s son, Rahul and made up of dozens of parties ranging from centrist to communist—has struggled to unify on much. Right now, they lag in the polls. And if Modi’s BJP maintains or expands its hold on power, it could herald even worse things to come.
❧ A deadly heat wave engulfed West Africa this month, and scientists say climate change is to blame. On the streets of Bamako, the capital city of Mali, people were faced with temperatures as high as 111 degrees Fahrenheit in late March and early April. Because of its military government, it’s hard to get reliable statistics out of Mali, but the nonprofit World Weather Attribution group notes a “surge in hospital admissions and deaths” in Bamako that coincided with the heat wave. In nearby Burkina Faso, temperatures spiked even higher at 113 degrees, and Scientific American says that “Extreme heat also scorched parts of Niger, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea” during the same period.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize that climate change played a key role here. According to World Weather Attribution data, a dramatic spike in temperatures like this effectively never happened in Mali or Burkina Faso before the industrial era. Now that fossil fuel use has driven global temperatures higher by around 1.2 degrees, they’re rare events, happening roughly once every 200 years. But if temperatures rise by just 0.8 degrees more, they’ll become almost routine, happening every 20 years. Or, as researcher Claire Barnes of Imperial College London put it: “the extreme temperatures across the region simply wouldn’t have been possible without human-caused warming.” This isn’t just a climate issue, but one of imperialism and racial injustice too: the more fossil fuels are burned in the United States and other wealthy countries with high rates of consumption, the more West Africans will suffer and die. Just another reason that oil, coal, and other carbon-based sources of energy need to be phased out as soon as possible.
MEANWHILE, THE RICH TRADITION OF BALKAN INSULTS CONTINUES
⚜ LONG READ: At a time when documenting human rights violations is critical, Human Rights Watch is laying off 39 employees. In The Nation, Saliha Bayrak writes:
According to a source familiar with the information, 39 staff members, including unionized employees, are facing layoffs—almost 7 percent of the total staff—in departments ranging from operations to media as well as in research areas like women’s rights and the US-Mexico border. Many more long-term workers will not have their contracts renewed.
Staff had been notified as early as November that the organization was going through financial troubles and would be making attempts to cut costs, according to correspondence that was shared with me…
Stacy Sullivan, a spokesperson for HRW, told me that the organization grew from a staff of some 550 in 2020 to over 600 while responding to crises in Sudan, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, and more, which “was not sustainable.”
Proposed pay cuts for leadership would save the organization nearly a million dollars on its budget, 70 percent of which is spent on personnel. But 361 HRW staff members wrote to Hassan to demand more—asking for salary reductions of up to 30 percent for the top 20 earners, and for “equitable pay ratios” by fiscal year 2025.
The former executive director, Kenneth Roth, had a salary of $622,656 in 2022, according to ProPublica, while the minimum salary of an associate is $58,000. A former employee at Human Rights Watch, who wished to remain anonymous, described a toxic workplace with a major gap between the standards of living and treatment of senior staff and lower-level staff.
MONKEY FACT OF THE WEEK
In 1937, eleven monkeys escaped from a zoo and lived in the woods of Warwick, Rhode Island!
For the Providence Journal, Paul Edward Parker has a charming retrospective on the whole incident. Nobody knows exactly how the monkeys got loose from their cage at the Rocky Point amusement park, although a “prank” is strongly suspected. But what we do know is that they lived surprisingly long and eventful lives as Rhode Islanders. According to Parker, they “retreated to thick evergreen trees and sought shelter in some old boxes” to cope with the harsh winters, survived a hurricane in 1938, and even stole pies from window sills cartoon-style. In 1940 one particularly ornery monkey—dubbed “Jocko” by the locals—“burst through the window” of a girls’ dormitory, leading to one of the best headlines in journalistic history:
There was reportedly a “rash of monkey sightings” until 1943, although it’s not clear how many were real. Eventually, the monkeys disappeared (presumably due to the passage of time, which comes for us all,) but they left behind a lovely local legend. It’s hard not to feel that the United States, which has no native monkeys of its own, is a little poorer for it.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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