Four Campus Protest Reportbacks

sides of Rafa. Last month, students at American universities began protesting their university's ties to Israel and weapons manufacturers, calling for divestment, as well as urging their institutions to join in calls for ceasefire. After a militarized police raid at the Humboldt protest utilizing a prison swat team, police departments around the country began cracking down more harshly on the

protest encampments. The day after the Humboldt, one, NYPD raided Columbia University and fired a gun inside Hamilton Hall while trying to use their handgun as a flashlight. The Portland Police Bureau quickly followed suit and cracked down at the encampment at Portland State University and have since barricaded that library. As the time of recording, around twenty five hundred arrests have taken place at college protests all around the country.

Police have displayed incredible violence, sending people to the hospital with broken ankles and concussions. In many cities, there's been heavy use of pepper spray, pepperballs as well as tasers. The protests have also faced violence from a mix of far right agitators, zionist counter protesters, and racist frats that have targeted the protest encampments with physical violence. Especially at UCLA. We here it could happen here, are lucky enough to

have correspondence kind of based all around the country. So I'm joined today by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Molly Konger to discuss our experiences as people who have been present at some of these encampments all across the country. I'm going to start by talking about Emory University here in Atlanta, Georgia. This is a weird one, and I think I'll actually go into more depth in a future episode, but this episode's going to kind of focus on discussions

and we're going to kind of compare our experiences. So oddly enough, I think Emory was the first one to actually face significant police repression. Tents went up on the Emery Quad on April fifteenth, and that morning there was a heavy police response from EMORYPD, APD and Georgia State Patrol. They fired tasers, there was rubber bullets, pepper balls, and over two dozen arrests. Students and others began to rally

later that afternoon to retake the quad. A few hundred people did so, and a small occupation began inside the Kendler School of Theology building. M REPD was pinned up against this building. GSP arrived as reinforcements and people started to flee as you know, you see GSP kind of form this area. But people were able to calm some of those other students down and regroup and actually hold that position for a little while longer police began attacking students,

a small clash began, there was pepper balls. People continued to kind of hold that ground in front of the building. There was students also inside. As people try to you know, render aid to those who have been pepper bald, and while maintaining this position in front of the building, more and more police arrive, like a ridiculous number, and the crowd eventually starts to slowly disperse as police just flood campus.

Police from all around the greater Atlanta area just flood this very small section of Decatur, which is a small suburb to the northeast of Atlanta or to the east of Atlanta. I guess. Emory President Greg Fems said the Thursday protest was concocted by outside entities, which is why Emory PD, APD and GSP violently disrupted the protest because it was caused by outside agitators. Line that New York Mayor Eric Adams would then reiterate to justify the massive

crackdown at Columbia. So the next day we had five undred people march around campus and then this little kind of committee of Emory faculty and staff called it the emvery Open Expression Committee, began to negotiate with the protest and they quote unquote allowed the protest to march around campus and this small subset of the group began to occupy the Cox Hall food court, and police were ordered to stay out of sight this whole day and a

few of the days after unless the Open Expression Committee specifically called them in. And what was able to happen is that this Open Expression Committee was able to wield the threat of police as a deterrent from people taking kind of more militant action or to actually set up things that would hold down an encampment, like if tenths were set up, this would result in this Open Expression Committee to call in the police. So this was a

very successfully wielded threat. So as the night goes on with the Open Xpression Committee does threaten to call police on the Cox Food Hall protest, which scares a whole bunch of these young teens early twenties out of the building. A smaller group of around one hundred people remain on the quad till midnight, police arrive, and then everyone disperses.

The next day kind of follows a similar pattern. Open Expression and some student organizers over the course the next few days actually start directing police to detain and criminally trespass people wearing cafeas on suspicion of them having been engaged in like doing graffiti, and really it just allows police to target specific people that the Open Expression Committee kind of just don't want on campus based on either how they dress, how they're kind of walking, acting, behaving

that sort of thing. And this pattern followed basically up until the present. People would try to take buildings do smaller protests, police would either be called or there would be threats that they would be called. It would kind of calm the crowd down, everyone would disperse. If ten's got set up, that was seen as like a major sign of escalation, which would result in police being called.

And it's kind of the small back and forth. And eventually this just kind of led to the situation Emory slowly dissolving, slowly fizzling out as the people who were wanting to do stuff kind of got pushed more to the side, got pushed out, more and more people became again getting criminally trespassed, and the group of students at Emory just did not want to risk a further engagement

with police after the first day. That's kind of led to things slowly, slowly dissolving, and that's basically with the situation currently. Things have mostly kind of tapered off schools ending. I'm sure this will be a similar similar thing across the country as the school season is ending, and these protest encampments will slowly also just dissolve away as police repression continues. Let's see, who should we move on to the next little report? James James stout from you. You

went to U see San Diego. That's right.

of UCSD. If people have seen, you know, people will be familiar with the UCSD guys le library from the film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which played important. Yeah, I can see the look of recognition on my colleagues faces. But yeah, that's the only thing that's ever call that's happened at UCSD. So they set up this encampment. It wasn't huge, but it was certainly a serious presence, right, and they didn't barricade it or sort of it make

it defensible. That was a conscious choice, right, And they did set up a security system whereby they had student security people controlling who entered and I guess left the encampment if you really wanted to, you could. The cops got in right, like it was a waste high vinyl offence. But in theory, these people were controlling who went in and who went out. Some times these people were asking people to sign up on a sheet. I think I hope they stopped doing that because obviously that you're sort

of helping the cops make their prosecution case there. Over the next five days, the encampment was extremely peaceful. Right. There was a focus among this group on not giving any provocation to police or to addmin to any reason to evict them. So they had some lectures, some speeches, they had some live music, they did some dancing, all stuff that like in no way provocation or violent. On the fifth of May, a large counter protest was organized.

Mostly it bought kind of like get off my law and boomer types, but then also like some right wing streamers Oreo Express or I guess the surviving half of Oreo Express, Josh Fulfer was there. I think the guy who was first responded to media, Housway or Joe Felix

was also there. These are right wing streamers that, sadly like, if you live where I live, you have to be familiar with where they do a lot of border harassment to They were obviously trying to film and identify students, so I guess this was on the evening of the fifth. That evening, the Chancellor Costler sent around an email basically saying that what the students were doing was prohibited, that the tents were not included in freedom of speech, and

asking them to disband peacefully. The next morning at about five or six in the morning. Literally only hundreds of cops from several agencies. Right, the UCPD does not have the footprint that we saw. There was California Highway Patrol, San Diego Sheriff's Department, and UCPD all in full right gear lined up opposite the encampment. They say that they asked students to leave and that those who didn't were arrested, and when they arrested, obviously like violence was used by

the police, as always is, the encampment was destroyed. Everything that was there was tossed into a dumpster. Some stuff was then recovered. I guess there's now a Lost and Found people to recover there things like laptops, right, like expensive personal items that were swept up. At that point, people were arrested and then detained in the Price Center at UCSD. The Price Center, if you've not been on campus, is like a large shopping mall that also has some

lecture facilities. But it's where the Panda expresses on campus.

the Sheriff's department using massive amounts of violence. Right our Sheriff's department still carried just like big wooden sticks. They're not like the black night sticks you know, with like the right angled grip.

the two jails, right, we have a different facility. There's a men's jenneral at women's jail, and they tend to they tend to incartrate trans people with the gender they're assigned at birth. I've heard about lots of things that happened in those jails that were pretty bad, but I haven't been able to confirm them enough that I think I'd be comfortable airing them. So people are released, lots of them charged with several misdemeanors, trespassing, encroachment, being at

the scene of a riot, resisting arrest, things like that. Right, two members of faculty were also arrested. Forty people were students, and at the last time I checked, they hadn't confirmed the status of the other twenty ish people. So that happened on the sixth yesterday, which was of course the eighth. There was a big march about a thousand students. It looked like kind of both calling for the UC to divest and calling for the UC to drop charges and

drop academic sanctions. So right now, all the people who are arrested are facing interim suspension. They're facing a viction from their student housing, which San Diego as we've spoken about Brazilion times has an incredibly expensive housing market and it's almost impossible to access affordable housing here. And in some cases, you know, they're facing serious academic sanctions. It

could affect the rest of their academic careers. Student workers who are arrested also now not being allowed to work on campus. So one hundred and eighty three faculty sign a letter asking the university to not do that. That came out last night, and that's kind of where we're at in terms of what's happened to these people. I think it's probably worth noting that the U see Riverside settled right that they negotiated a settlement. That's in so Riverside is north and slightly east of here, east of

Los Angeles County. You see Riverside is. I don't know in terms of student numbers how big it is, but they they settled I think on the Wednesday, so it'd be made May day, the Friday, made the third. I was at the UCSD encampment that day and I heard them announce it and there were a side settlement. I'm just going to say it didn't achieve some of the more radical goals of the student organizing movement not to

be divestment, to be an academic boycott. They did get the university to publish its investments which are linked to Israel at least, which is a step. I guess they've got a task force. The university is going to be very willing to grant you task forces and panels and things which can turn your radical aims into a bureaucratic mess. Right, And they got the university to look into removing subra Hummas from its men use as well.

sort of visa concessions or university is going to give you. Right, you might get a snack task force, and you might get they're already publicly available investments listed in one place on their website at UCSD. The administration claims that the students were unwilling to negotiate. I wasn't able to ascertain if what system they had, right, Like I was trying to ask if they had delegates or representatives, who are going to those being different things, right, who are going

to negotiate? I was enabled to get a clear answer and that they did very clearly publish their demands right, And the university doesn't seem to have proceeded to any of them. So that more or less is where we're at in Sandy. There are ongoing panels and press conferences. I'm going to attend one, so it's going to be one by faculty tomorrow on the ninth. The faculty have also been organizing right in a group called Faculty for

Justice in Palestine, and they've been organizing. I think it was very impressive that they like accepted student leadership and didn't try and like, you know, come in and take a vanguard role or tell everybody what to do. But but there mostly to facilitate the student protest and protect it. So they're having a press conference tomorrow, so things that's definitely ongoing here. But that's kind of where we're at as of today, which is the ninth of me.

this process. They're not there's reasons for this that I can't get into, but they're all kind of late comers. On April twenty fifth, Northwestern one starts, and it's a really chill occupation for the most part. So there's like a police raid on night one, but then the kids just come back and put all the tents up again.

And then after that, like the Evanston Police Department is a joke, right, Like they're not I mean they've probably done terrible things, but like they're they're not They're not like the police departments in the rest of the city, who are like the guys you teach the CIA how to torture people, right, Yeah, and so yeah, I wanted to talk a bit about kind of the vibes of it because it was it's a very like early occupation kind of vibe.

thing you see over and over and over again. Right, It's like, yeah, these are about the encampus that I'm at art. You know, obviously they're about Palestign. But there's this real there's very kind of there's a deep internationalism

there that's very tangible and powerful. I mean, like you know, I was walking through the tamp and I was I was like, you know, there are kids like reading on the on the lawn and I'm like I'm like pointing out, like, oh, hey, this is that's the copy of The Wretched of the Earth that I have from college. Like you know, it's all stuff like that. It was all very chill. It like rained on us, so we spent much time like

waterproofing tents. I think the interesting things about this is that there's a there's a really kind of wild mix of people there. It's it's this it's this thing you only really get in social movements that are like going somewhere where, you know. I mean I was running into people from groups like old school, like like I ran to someone from Students for a Democratic Society, Like I didn't even know that groups still existed, like I thought.

I think, well, so there there was a second round of them in the two thousands, so I thought they died after that, but apparently not. You know, so you have these mix of people from like groups that everyone thought was dead, right, Like, you know, there's a lot of sort of very experienced, like student organizers. There's also a lot of grad students, which is a dynamic. I don't think it's talked about very much because it's not

It's not just like eighteen year olds. There are a lot of people in these camps who have been doing this for a very long time. And you know, so you have those people, but you also have people who just I mean, like I talked to people who this was literally their first protest, right It's like the first thing that ever hilly they'd ever come out to. And you know, there was this very kind of there's this

very sort of camarader ReVibe. What there wasn't was a functional democracy, and that's a very That's the other thing about this encampment that was very different than the Chicago one, which I'll be getting to in a second. It's like they there is this sort of there was this group that was negotiating with the administration, and no one could really tell what they were doing. Like every once in a while representative would come back from them and you'd

hear something. But in the meantime, everyone is sort of running around based on rumors, trying to figure out what these people are negotiating. And it turns out what they're negotiating is an end to the protests, and basically the students like, okay, So there's a complicated set of demands. What actually happens is that all of the entire occupation is taken down. After a week, it's completely gone. Now

there's nothing there. What they get from it was the university is re establishing an advisory committee on Investment responsibil They got like question there's Northwest supposed to answer questions about holding some stakeholders which may be disclosure may not be. And they got some stuff that like is real from for like visiting like Palestinian faculty. But basically they didn't get any of the goals of the encampment, right, there's

no investments. There's you know, a committee that can make recommendations about the investment and we'll see if that even happens, because that's supposed to be spun out back in the fall.

So you know, they take down the encampment. They get nothing, they get no leverage, and nothing is you know, and all of the sort of student negotiators and these negotiators tend they you know, Okay, so there are also like political splits in the camp right, It's kind of hard to get a sense of them just from looking at it, but you know, if you talk to enough people, you can sort of get the sense of like what the

splits are. Right, and Northwestern was sort of split between like the sort of liberal student negotiators who are from a lot of like some of the sort of more liberal student organizations, and the people who want to like you know, they're sort of like Baximblist radicals and the Maximus radicals get out maduvry because there's just not enough of them, and so they take the encampment down. And the people who were doing the negotiations had this whole

line by we're building power. This is just the beginning, and there's nothing, there's been nothing else.

They're a suburb. The University of Chicago, on the other hand, is smack dab in the middle of the South side of Chicago. There's the Universe city bubble, and then around the university this is like the heart, like the heart

of black Chicago, right, very very different vibe. The other thing that's important about this is so the University of Chicago occupation starts in the context of the massive raids in Colombia, the raid and Humboldt, and very importantly the raids in UCLA, and both of both the sort of brutal police raid and the like absolute horrowing mass fascist attack on the barricades, where you know, you have people

getting beat up in the middle pipes, they're shooting. They're shooting like Fourth of July ass fireworks, like directly into into the people on the barricades. They are trying to kill the protesters. They beat, They beat a bunch of student journalists like half to death. And so University of Chicago camp when when I get there, is right in the middle of transforming from a kind of like Northwestern style everyone's getting along like singing Kumbaya camp to like

an actual fighting camp. Because I get there and like that day I get there at like nine, right three hours from when I get there, they were scheduled to be a giant rally of like right wing frats that is going to go come and attack the encampment. So the vibe is extremely different. It is a fighting camp. Everyone is preparing to, like, you know, fight for their lives. Everyone knows what happened at UCLA, and also everyone knows

what happened at Northwestern, and people are fucking pissed. People are like, I mean, unbelievably angry that then you know, then their view is the Northwestern camp sold everyone out, sure, and so you know, I mean, And the other thing about Chicago that was different from Northwestern is that U

Chicago had has functional general assemblies. So there are like functional democratic meetings where everyone in the camp goes, Okay, we're going to like figure out what we're going to do and these meetings are people are not happy with, you know, like they're not happy with what happened at the Northwestern. They're also like really pissed off at the third occupation, which was well, I mean, I guess I

think that Paul happened in the middle of there. But the third occupation was the occupation at the School of the Art Institute. The School of the Art Institute is literally right in the heart of downtown Chicago, Like it is across like it is like across the street from Ballennium Park. It is like across the street from like the Art Institute of Chicago. It is in like the corporate center of Chicago. Sure, so they they they do.

They do an occupation right and inside of like like I think I think they got seven hours in before swat teams showed up. They arrest sixty of people. It is a brutal raid. They're they're like, the cops are beating people with metal bars like it is.

fear of police deppression. But the thing that it does that's important is that this goes fucking this like completely backfires on Brandon Johnson and you know, so sort of the mayor of the political administration, because this is you know, it turns out people are very very angry that a bunch of swat teams just beat up a bunch of art students with metal bars, right, And the consequence of this is that Brandon Johnson like refuses to or at

least openly. What he's saying is that he won't use the Chicago Police Department at at at you know, on the University Chicago campus. University of Chicago has its own police force as about one hundred and fifty officers. It's sort of vaunted as like the largest police force in like the largest private one of the largest private police forces world. You know, they also shot a fucking kid while I was at school there, so you know, I

have a like depatriot of them. But what kind of ends up happening is so there's there's that big the day I'm there, there's this big like confentration between protesters and kind of protesters, and you know, the kids form.

better somewhere else. But something that's very interesting about both of these encampments, and this has been true of Moost of the encampments that I've I've seen is is who is like the racial and gender composition of who's there, because these are you know, and you could see this like when you're when when the counter protesters are facing off against the protesters, is the counter protesters they're like exclusively white, like most of them are white frat ros,

white cis dudes usually yeah yeah. And then in the camps it is basically like it is like non it's non white people of all genders and like non sis dued people of all races. Yeah, very very very very prominently. And this this is something that I think is a sign of how the sort of like American political alignment has changed, and the kind the kinds of political alliances that are kind of so normal now that we don't

even really think about them. But if you step back for a second and look at what's actually happening, this is this is the this is the actual political composition of these protests. It's queer people and non white people and obviously like people like me who are both. And I think that's an important thing because you know, it's it's a dynamic of these camps. It doesn't get talked about en off but is the core.

we are back. Mollie. You saw some pretty bad police violence at the camp in Charldsville, I believe right.

put their stuff down, they put up some tents. The police chief of the University Police Force, Timothy Longo, showed up immediately and said no tense tends to the red line. Take the tents down. So that first night they took the tents down, and so for three nights they slept outside unsheltered because it was clear from the university that the tents are going to be the problem. That's the only issue that we have is the tents. You can be here. You just can't put up the tents, and

you can't use amplified sound. You can't be too noisy. The place where they'd set up was this patch of grass. That's so if you're familiar with the University of Virginia, there's the lawn. It's called the lawn. It's not the only grass, but it's the special grass. It's the grass between the lawn rooms and the rotunda. It's like a long narrow They weren't on the lawn. I think that would have been a much bigger problem for the university, just because of the optics of it, and because students

live in the lawn rooms. So they were actually on the other side of the rotunda, in this shady, grassy area between the rotunda and the chapel, within kind of spitting distance of that statue of Thomas Jefferson that the Nazis famously surrounded in twenty seventeen, so that same sort of area of the university. So for three nights they were out there unsheltered. It was pretty quiet. It was you know, a few dozen students. Most of the time classes had just ended, so they were preparing for finals,

they were writing papers. I think some afternoons they had tas come out and help people with their with their papers, help them study. You know, it was chill. They were just kind of out there vibing. And then on the evening of the third they held a vigil for the dead in Palestine. There was great turnout for that. A lot of people came out, students, families, you know, there were babies there, dogs, like it was it was a safe place, right, It was a place where people felt

safe letting their toddlers kick a ball around like. It was not a violent or embattled environment. There were baities there and they held the vigil, and after the vigil they had Shabbat dinner. But as the sun was going down, it was starting to rain, so they put up a pop up tent to cover the Shabbat dinner. You know, the food that had been set out and it was at that point that they began setting up the camping tents. And you know, they've been told all along by the

police chief, you can't put tens up. You can't put tense up. It's against the rules. That's when we're going to have to intervene if you put the tense up. But every UVA school policy is available on the school's website. They have a policy database where you can, you know, search by keyword. You can, you know, you can see every official school policy. And the official school policy is that tens are allowed. It's on the website. You can have a tent. And so now this, you know, the

university is saying that this discrepancy as well. You know that actually isn't a policy. It was a sort it's guidance on the policy. But it is in the policy database on the policy website where they keep the policies, and it says guideline on it, and a guideline it's a synonym for a policy. So the other I think the lesson to take away here. You know, I'm not going to Monday morning quarterback the student organizers. I was privy to internal discussions. I don't think that's my role.

I think the takeaway here though, is that they're always going to move the goalposts. The only protest the administration will ever approve of is one that happened at least thirty years ago. Right, you have to be decades removed from progress to see it as positive. They never like progress while it's happening. They never like protest while it is happening. There's nothing you can do that will be allowed. Right, because the entire time, the first three days, when the

police were keeping their distance, they were always there. There was always this sort of like needling back and forth while you know, can you just can you adjust this? Can you change this kind of behavior like you know you're not breaking the rules yet, but just you know, we're watching, be careful this constant needling. And so in the end on the fourth, when the Virginia State Police showed up, you know, up until that point, the idea

was well, the provocation was the tense. The problem was the tents the police had to become because of the tents. You know that the policy on the school's website changed Saturday morning, like we have the you know, the cash on the website. You can see when the PDF was altered. It was that morning. So it's like, is it about the tents? Did you change this policy as pretext for

the police raid? Because now in the aftermath, since they were caught out changing that policy immediately before the police raid of the camp, they're saying, well, no, actually, actually it wasn't about the tents. That's not really what this is about. It's because they're saying now that you know, four men in essentially a black block, right, So four men in black were carrying backpacks with helmets, were seen

in the area, and they're known to law enforcement. And I'll be honest with you, I did not see these individuals. But at the same time, who care?

their demands. But that all communication between admin and the police into the encampment came through these faculty liaisons, and they were in constant open communication. And the faculty liaisms they are saying, well, if there was someone dangerous here, if the police had identified like a you know, an actual danger in this space, they never communicated that to us,

right that before this raid happened. No one ever said to the faculty liaison, someone here is dangerous, there's a known criminal here, there's you know, this is why this has That was never communicated. So I'm not I'm not sure these you know, four mysterious individuals exist. I don't know. I think that is a manufactured, you know, sort of

after the fact pretext. But in any case, on Saturday morning, the anniversary of the Kent State massacre, state police showed up a lot of them all at once, and there was, you know, the local police set up perimeter around the encampment. And again, so it had been raining all night, it was soaking wet. Like I showed up Saturday morning to take some wet blankets home to wash them. Because things

seemed fine, Things were very calm. Again, there had been babies there the day before it was very calm, and so I thought, well, I'll wash their wet blankets and socks and bring them back and then we can, you know, they can regroup and move forward. And while I was at home washing wet socks, I heard that the raid was starting. And again, so you know, because it had been raining, and it was a pretty small protest to

begin with, people are doing their finals. There were maybe a few dozen people there, like a few dozen at most. But once the riot cops showed up, people start pouring out of the libraries. Hundreds and hundreds of students come to see what all the noise is about, right, they come to see what the disturbance is about. The university used the emergency alert system that texts students. It sends texts and emails for emergencies, you know, things like a

fire or a tornado or a mass shooting. Right that a lot of these twoudents have recent memory of a very serious shooting here that they got these texts for. These text are for real emergencies. But they used the emergency alert system to tell students to avoid the area.

So of course they poured into the area to see what was happening, and so they set up a perimeter around the camp so the people inside could not get out and the people who came to see what was happening could not get in, and a lie on riot cops marched into the camp and just bludgeoned and pepper sprayed at like point blank range. Pepper sprang them directly

into their mouth, nose, and eyes. I think one student was wearing goggles and they removed her goggles so they could spray her directly in the eyes while she was already prone on the ground. One woman was having a seizure, but they didn't stop arresting her to let her seize in peace, and they were just sort of dragging her limp body away. It was very nasty, and once they made their leave twenty six arrests, they turned on the crowd that had gathered to watch, and they started pushing

this massive crowd of students out into the street. They didn't close the street, like there was a dean on scene who was watching this happen and sort of making frantic phone calls to try and close the street that the students were being pushed into, because it was an open street with traffic and then the frat boys showed up, right, So,

you know, students are coming out to see. Some of them are joining the protests, some of them are just curious, And all of a sudden, now there's an entire hillside covered in frat boys. Some of them have Israeli flags, some of them have American flags. And there were times as that, you know, the police were you know, I'm very short, I'm about five feet tall, so there were

times as the police were pushing towards us. I can't actually see that because the person in front of me is taller than me, and I would know the police were starting to advance again because the frat boys would cheer. They would start cheering, and you know, at one point,

I'm standing next to this older professor. You know, I don't want to call anybody elderly, right, but this was this sort of a grandmotherly professor who'd been pepper sprayed and was you know, shouldered or shoulder with students, and she looked over at those frat boys and she said, I don't know how we're supposed to teach them.

is UVA. UVA is Charlottesville is the largest employer in the region. It is sort of the you know, the iconic focal point of the region. It's a public school. People attend sporting events there, They attend concerts that like our largest local concert venue as a UVA property. You know, I did attend UVA, and I sometimes speak at classes at UBA, So like I have some sort of tangential affiliation with the university, but I don't have to justify

my presence there, right. I mean, that's like saying you can't protest albit or boeing unless you purchase bomb systems or work there.

barricades up. And you have like, you know, pretty pretty big barricades in Portland of course, and then like Humboldt being really the one that was like no, like you can like hold down a space for like a while if you'd have like lots of barricades, we'd see that. We see that uh in l A and know the difference between the bear kids going up and the barricades not and how that that does kind of slow that's just slow a police ory. That does slow some police response.

And I think one of the one of the one of the dam dynamics we have there is like at least her Emory, right, we had the first day, people faced, you know, a pretty sizable amount of police violence. You know, there was like twenty eight arrests, a lot of people were assaulted by police, and for many people this was

their first protest. A lot of these people were too young to participate in twenty twenty, which is kind of you know, odd looking back on it, but yeah, a lot of these people were quite young, and this is their first experience of like police brutality in person.

wanted from her. And it was until he raised the object above his head that she had this realization that he can hit me. Yeah, not only can he hit me, but he is going to hit me. That like, to have that realization in real time that you are not safe in your body, that the state will carry out violence against you. To not have known that before and to find it out as it is happening, I think is truly horrifying.

of use threat of police. It's a very effective to turn to be like, hey, if you keep things kind of chill, no tense, nothing crazy. But if you just hang out on the quad, that's it. Like that's fine, But if you do anything else, we're gonna call in those guys again and they're gonna fuck you up even worse. And like that is very effective and scaring people away

from from doing anything. And I think a big thing to navigate here is like how how can you get students to feel like empowered once again, to like actually be able to do stuff. There was this there's this there's this one moment at emory where some like some other like like more like you know, more militanty. I don't know their exact affiliation with the university. I don't care. But some more it's some more like militant need more

anarchistic people. Because it's Atlanta, we're like kind of like like shaming some of the students for not like doing more stuff. Like they got on the microphone and were like shaming them be like, hey, this this isn't a protest, You're just you're just hanging out, and like, I I get it, but also like what is that going to accomplish? I think I think shaming people for being scared of

police is not effective. You need to you need to help them to feel empowered and that that's a very different thing to navigate.

what does success look like? That if you know, most of these university encampments aren't going to win divestment, right, they all have really similar demands and they include, you know, divestment of university funds, and most of them aren't going to get that but I think you can still envision success. As you know, these are young people. They are learning to organize together, they're learning to create that space together, they are coming together to talk about this issue, and

I think that can be success. I don't think you have to bleed to have succeeded.

term trauma and possibly long term trauma. But like you have a much more accurate view of how the world works now, especially for a lot of these like IVY kids who've never never thought of police as a threat before.

was just like a baptism of fire. Like the people in twenty twenty got to go out in twenty sixteen for Donald Trump, right in twenty seventeen and wear the little pink hats and walk around in the pink hats, you know, and they got introduced to the cops and the fact that they are just going to fuck you up because they want too slowly. But these people didn't.

And I don't think we should blame them for being like none of us are, to be clear, but like folks, I've seen it too much on the internet, like don't do that shit, like teach people to be stronger than the state. Don't shame them for not already being there.

people to knock out an encampment, and they couldn't do it. Like, they hurt a lot of people, right, like two hundred people I think went to the hospital or like Leaster treated by medics after it.

mean they weren't still weren't really barricades. But like you got to watch these kids and you know, the people who were there, like you know, like realize that a group of them can stand and fight and hold these people, and they and they did it. They fucking stood there, they stood their ground, they held them, they fought and at the end of the day, the fucking fraproos ran

away and it wasn't really intel. And then this is I think it's been a really interesting element of this is that like these these per military groups have been just staggeringly unable to actually like beat a bunch of protesters like in you know, in in in the sort of military sense of like who holds the field at the end of the fight. They can't do it, and only the cops have been able to.

And I don't know, it was it was like it was it was a really emotional experience for like a lot of the people there, and it was really cool.

massive failure. Is everyone who has not been participating, how they have been viewing what's going on, and this is, this is, this is this will be the last thing I talk about, especially even even I just on like the media side and in this general discussion, like there's been such a such a singular focus on the campus encampment like itself, instead of like why the protests are happening in the first place, what's going on in Gaza and just instead just focusing on like, yeah, the actual

the actual thing on campus, but but but not caring about why these protests are even happening, willfully ignoring why it's happening, framing all literally all of the campus protests as inherently anti semitic, as if that is the main driver, and ignoring ignoring the many instances for people who have expressed anti semitic things have been have been like removed and pushed out of campus, which has happened in many places.

But it's it's just it's just so lazy to totally like reject the reasoning for why these protests are happening. The framing of trespassing as a form of violence, call calling these encampments violent as if as if being on campus is violent, and meanwhile never once mentioning the actual violence on display, which is almost solely at the hands

of police and these other far right groups. Friend of the Pod Cody Johnston had a had a very very good tweet quote, these people who I despise and never agree with, should protest the way I prefer unquote right.

I think that this episode's already pretty long, but I was happy to hear a collection of of our four different accounts from four different places.

wanted to stop. We had a world war about this, like genocides are bad. So this will be a topic we continue to cover on the show over the course. At the summer, we'll have I'm planning a deep dive about what happened at Emory Margaret has an upcoming episode about how people who were engaged in the campus protests can stay involved over the summer, and of course we will continue to talk about what's been happening in Gaza. Thanks for listening, solid Air to everyone who's out there.