Biden's Wars Against His Own Kids
The violent crackdown on antiwar students this week has Biden's fingerprints all over it. On Tuesday, Biden demonized the protesters as hate groups. On the same day 22 Democratic House members called for the students at Columbia to be cleared from the campus, this was followed by Chuck Schumer speaking on the floor of the Senate denouncing the occupation of Hind Hall as an act of terrorism. Then the NYPD did its vicious work at Columbia and CCNY. On Wednesday morning, the Biden White House compared these brave students from Columbia to UCLA, Indiana to Texas, to the white power tiki torch thugs at Charlottesville. On Thursday, Biden gave a speech that would have condemned the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, women's movement, Native American Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, Stonewall, anti-apartheid movement, BLM, and the labor movement he claims to venerate (not to mention the Boston Tea Party) as outside the American tradition of free speech. Biden is the author of the most repressive crime laws in the history of a nation whose statutes are full of repressive crime laws. He hasn't changed. In fact, he's gotten worse as his brain demyelinates and his grip on power becomes more and more tenuous.
In contrast to Biden's reactionary blandishments of the antiwar movement, here are the words of the most successful progressive leader in the US today, Shawn Fain, head of the UAW:
The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice. Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months. This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong. We call on the powers that be to release the students and employees who have been arrested, and if you can't take the outcry, stop supporting the war.
Perhaps the UAW will now retract its premature endorsement of Biden? Unlikely, of course. The endorsement itself doesn't matter much. Many of the UAW's rank-and-file will still vote for Trump. The campaign money might. The endorsement lends Fain's very clear statement even more weight. Fain's statement helps to undermine the disgusting narrative put out by the White House and top Democrats that the students are naive dupes of Hamas, justifying these brutal crackdowns.
The "naive" students at Columbia understand the historical context of their movement and the previous movements on their campus better than any of the administrators seeking to evict, suspend, expel & prison them. It is why, despite the police raids, expulsions, and arrests, they will win, and their tormentors will fall in disgrace. Columbia University has an endowment of $13.6 billion and still charges students $60-70,000 a year to attend what has become an academic panopticon and debt trap, where every political statement is monitored, and every threat to the ever-swelling endowment is punished.
Doesn't the White House have anyone who speaks Arabic on staff? Perhaps they didn't hire any—that would be a Biden thing to do. Or perhaps they've all quit. Who could blame them, hearing the administration equate "intifada" with hate speech? "Intifada" means "shaking off," as in a protest or uprising, the kind of public action allegedly protected by the Constitution. In Arabic, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war protests, the women's movement, the OWS protests, and the BLM protests were all called "intifadas," as was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
This Intifada will likely spell the end of the Biden presidency without a single stone being thrown. The Biden administration is not only incapable (more likely unwilling) of practicing peace-seeking diplomacy