THE LEFT NEVER FACED THIS KIND OF CAMPUS OPPOSITION BEFORE: Dueling pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel demonstrations hit Clemson.

SCREAMING CAMPUS GARBAGE BABIES LIVING UP TO THEIR NAME: TRASH: Humboldt campus occupiers left 8,000 LBS of debris, university says. I remember when Tea Party protesters left sites cleaner than they found them, and the press and our national deep thinkers called them barbarians.

A CINCO DE MAYO FLASHBACK TO A SIMPLER, MORE INNOCENT TIME:

Happy Cinco de Mayo! pic.twitter.com/QWCFHnsAKt

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) May 5, 2024

ROGER KIMBALL: From Idealism to Irresponsibility: Comparing College Protests Then and Now. “Like every major college protest since the 1960s, the pro-Palestinian—which is to say, the anti-Israel—protests sweeping college campuses today have early and often been compared with the protests of that annus horribilis, 1968. There are plenty of similarities but also plenty of differences. History repeats itself as student and faculty protestors align themselves with the totalitarians. Then it was the Viet Cong, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge. Today it is the Sunni Muslim terrorist group Hamas, the main puppet master of the “pro-Palestinian” agitators. One apparently striking difference is the strong current of anti-Semitism. It is ubiquitous now; it was not a factor in the protests of the 1960s and 1970s.”

CONSEQUENCES: Hagerty joins chorus of GOP senators stoking efforts to cut funding from universities hosting protests. “Hagerty appeared Saturday on Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street to react to reports that 2,000 college students were arrested on campuses in their pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Some were charged with misdemeanors such as trespassing, while others stand accused of assaulting police officers. Videos have come out from some of these protesters revealing antisemitic themes in their chants and signage.”

The problem isn’t these protests in particular, it’s the higher education sector in general, as an incubator of toxic ideas and hatred.

THEY HAVE TO SCOTCH THIS STUFF, IT’S HURTING DEMOCRATS: Wash U Law Faculty, Students, And Alumni Condemn Protest Crackdown.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Anti-Israel Georgetown Professor Dubs US Congressman a ‘Race Traitor’ and ‘Uncle Tom:’ Zein El-Amine has long history of supporting Students for Justice in Palestine, which is leading anti-Israel campus protests.

IT’S WHO THEY ARE, IT’S WHAT THEY DO: The CDC is already mismanaging H5N1: The implications for the virus and the potential government response are vast and concerning.

After the way they blew it on Covid, it’s likely no one will listen to them anyway, so there’s that.

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COULDN’T HAPPEN TO A NICER BUNCH: ‘Ozempic Face’ Destroying the Hollywood Beautiful People?

WELL, YES: Activist Groups Trained Students for Months Before Campus Protests: Left-wing groups and veteran demonstrators provided guidance and support before rise of pro-Palestinian encampments.

For the last decade, donations to NSJP have been received and administered by the Wespac Foundation, according to Howard Horowitz, Wespac’s board chairman. The donations are passed on to NSJP “for projects in the United States,” he said, declining to provide further details.

Wespac, a nonprofit based in Westchester County near New York City, is decades old, according to its website. It has supported humanitarian causes, as well as organizations that propagate antisemitism, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Wespac has posted support of pro-Palestinian protests on social media and posted videos in which protesters held signs that refer to President Biden as “Genocide Joe.” . . .

“There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” Kates said. “These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.”

Samidoun didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. The German government banned the group last November after saying it supported terrorism and antisemitism, and incited the use of violence to enforce political interests.

This is just the surface.

BUT BUT BUT…. I THOUGHT THEY WERE ANTI-FASCIST:  U. Wisconsin Anti-Israel Protesters Chant ‘Heil Hitler’ at Jewish Students.

OPEN THREAD: Light this candle.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA awards studies for commercial Mars missions.

IT’S HOW THE MACHINE WORKS: Thoughts on Selective Law Enforcement. “You have a right to free speech, but that doesn’t give you a First Amendment right to camp out on my lawn with protest signs. That’s trespassing. But government officials sometimes allow trespassing when they sympathize with the trespasser’s viewpoint. Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC have refused to remove progressive anti-Israel protesters camping out at private universities — Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and George Washington University.”

This should give rise to civil rights lawsuits. Plus:

As a University of Pennsylvania alumnus notes, these illegal protests are only being allowed by progressive officials because of the viewpoint they are expressing. If the protesters were “white nationalists waving nazi flags and telling black people they should go back to Africa I’m sure [police] would be out there pretty quickly” to remove them. . . . This favoritism by progressive cities violates the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court, the government cannot favor certain kinds of protests over others.

But that’s how the left rolls: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies: The law.”

Plus: “From what I can gather, the problem in cities is usually not that the police department itself is unwilling to assist, but that they are under orders from the mayor, afraid of upsetting far left constituents, to stand down. This is going a bit beyond my expertise, but from what I understand the Justice Department could and should, but won’t under the Biden administration, investigate whether these police departments are violating the terms of their federal funding, and also denying equal protection of the law, by refusing to enforce the law for ideological and political reasons. An added factor is that this lack of enforcement is to the specific detriment of Jewish students who have disproportionately faced threats, intimidation, and violence from people at the encampments.”

SO IN PROSECUTING TRUMP FOR MISHANDLING CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS, THE PROSECUTORS MISHANDLED THE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS: Prosecutors: Docs in boxes seized from Mar-a-Lago were inadvertently jumbled. “Special counsel Jack Smith’s team acknowledged Friday that some evidence in the prosecution of former President Donald Trump for hoarding classified documents at his Florida home may not be in the same sequence FBI agents found it when they swept into the Mar-a-Lago compound with a search warrant in August 2022. The concession from prosecutors in a court filing Friday afternoon came after attorneys for one of Trump’s co-defendants asked for a delay in the case because the defense lawyers were having trouble determining precisely where particular documents had come from in the 33 boxes the FBI seized almost two years ago. In their filing, prosecutors acknowledged the government had previously — and incorrectly — told U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the boxes remained ‘in their original, intact form as seized,’ other than a decision to replace classified documents with placeholder sheets.”

YOU DON’T WANT TO BE STUCK WITH AN OBSOLETE PLATFORM: Experts Discuss The Dark Likelihood of ‘Abandoned’ Brain Implant Technology.

THIS SHOULD MAKE TERRAFORMING EASIER: NASA’s Curiosity Rover Uncovers Signs of an Earth-Like Environment on Ancient Mars.

IT’S LIKE JURASSIC PARK FOR BIRDS: What happened when scientists taught parrots to video chat?

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OF SORTS: Tested: 2023 Mercedes-Maybach S680 4Matic Is a Bargain of Sorts.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Woke God.

The writer James Lindsay said in a talk (here available on YouTube) before the European Parliament that ‘Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian’. Lindsay, described in Wikipedia as a promoter of right-wing conspiracy theories, goes on to describe how 20th-century Marxists, disheartened by the failure of the abolition of economic property to create wealth, expanded their evangelical model to include other types of properties. Race, civilization, and even sexual normalcy were all regarded as oppressive advantages that had to be mocked, abolished, and otherwise scattered for “equity” — the great leveling — to be achieved. This expanded their audience considerably and allowed them to expand beyond the traditional working class.

The James Lindsay talk explains why radical politics and Wokism in particular always involve God, or at least universals, whether Judaism, Islam, or Christianity, or in the negative sense of militant atheism. That is because it deals with the eternal issues, the nature of humanity, the origin of civilization, and the meaning of social relations. Hence Lindsay’s remark that “Marx was not an economist. He was a theologian.”

Indirect proof of this assertion can be seen in the traction of the Woke message in historical, parochial, or ethnic contexts where they were alien. Examples include anti-colonial movements in Ireland, which never had a colony; Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Europe and perhaps this most curious of imitations:

“Palestine wasn’t initially their thing, but now they are doing more than we are, and [we] felt ashamed and that we should do more,” Ali Tayyar, a student organizer at Lebanon’s American University of Beirut, said at a protest Tuesday. “We needed to at least show some support for our friends in the U.S.”

The message is nothing to do with the facts, just the feelings. Will it last? If Marx’s thesis, as Lindsay argues, was fundamentally erroneous in the domain of economics, the mistake cannot be fixed by expanding the flawed analysis to explain race, culture, sexuality and history after its original failure. Mistakes just get bigger by expanding their scope. Wokism as enlarged Marxist economics doesn’t get better, it gets worse.

Also from Lindsay: Marx was “a privileged white European male.”

Karl Marx Was a Conservative | @ConceptualJames pic.twitter.com/3Dn3aNpGrK

— New Discourses (@NewDiscourses) April 30, 2024

Flashback: Berkeley students angry that they have to read Marx, not because he was, well, a Marxist, but because he was yet another dead white European male: “The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.”

As James Lileks wrote in response, “Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate. By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.”

Related: Karl Marx Calls Mexicans Lazy. Will Social Justice Warriors Demand Noted Racist Karl Marx Be Banned From Study on Campus?

GEORGE WASHINGTON STUDENTS HOLD ‘PEOPLE’S TRIBUNAL,’ CALL FOR FACULTY’S DEATHS.

I’m pretty sure that Christopher Nolan didn’t intend for the Dark Knight Rises to be a how-to guide:

THE ATF PERFORMING TO ITS USUAL STANDARDS: South Carolinian Faced 115 Years in Prison Until ATF Admitted They Got the Wrong Man.

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