Woke students and a weak president show the way.

There’s a feeling, some say, that overwhelms you in a car crash. Suddenly the world slows down and you’re suspended in mid-air; you can see the collision coming but have no way to stop it, and so you almost relax as the impact nears.

If that’s what you’re currently experiencing with respect to the 2024 presidential election, I feel you. It’s hard to recall now the relief so many of us felt when Donald Trump, after violent resistance from a mob he corralled, finally left the White House. I was hopeful we’d seen the last of him, with a normie moderate president destined to inherit a recovering post-Covid economy, and pledging moderation and centrism. We had a real chance to turn the corner.

We have instead turned right back. Trump swept the board in the Republican primaries. And despite — or rather because of — four indictments for scores of felonies, all authorized by Democratic DAs, including the attorney general, Trump is now narrowly leading in national polls and ahead in most of the swing states. He has managed, in his genius demagoguery, to turn himself in the eyes of many into a classic American outlaw figure — an underdog against conspiring elites and the deep state. He is making serious gains among black and Latino moderates.

His core issue — mass fraudulent immigration — is stronger than it was in 2016, when it catapulted him to the presidency. Gallup’s open-ended question about the most important issue to voters has now had immigration at the top of the list for three successive months — more salient that at any point in the poll’s history. In April 2016, 5 percent of Democrats, 7 percent of Independents, and 13 percent of Republicans named immigration as their top issue. In April 2024, those numbers are 8, 25 and 48 percent, respectively. That’s a big Trump gain.

The Biden administration’s chaotic border policies and enabling of several million migrants to enter the country — with zero-to-minimal chances of deportation — are the proximate cause. Biden had an opportunity to move to the center on illegal immigration — his core vulnerability — and decided to move, with his entire party, to the extreme left. Yes, his proposed bill earlier this year was a vast improvement. But it was far too late to gain him any serious cred on the question — and his blaming the GOP for mass illegal migration of the last four years is risible.

The same goes, I’m afraid to say, about his speech yesterday decrying lawlessness in the campus protests against Israel’s obliteration of Gaza. It was fine so far as it went, but it was given only when he had no choice, after Trump goaded him, and it reminded me of his sad attempts to distance himself and his party from the rioting and looting in the hellish summer of 2020. He was reactive, not proactive. His quiet words were overwhelmed with the noise of the streets.

As readers know, I’m deeply sympathetic to the argument that Israel has over-reached, over-bombed, and over-reacted in its near-unhinged overkill of Palestinian civilians, especially children, in the wake of 10/7’s horrors. It has been truly horrifying. I begrudge no one demonstrating passionately to protest this. But as I watch the rhetoric and tactics of many — but not all — of these students, I’m struck by how this humane concern is less prominent than the rank illiberalism and ideological extremism among many.

Preventing students from attending classes, taking exams, or even walking around their own campus freely is not a protest; it’s a crime. So is the destruction of property, and the use of physical intimidation and violence against dissenting students. The use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan, and antithetical to non-violent civil disobedience. It’s a way for outsiders to easily infiltrate and a way to escape responsibility for thuggishness. It’s menacing, ugly and cowardly.

It did not have to be this way. Imagine if students simply demonstrated peacefully for a cease-fire, placed the victims and hostages at the forefront of the narrative, and allowed themselves to be arrested proudly on camera and face legal consequences for their actions, as the civil rights movement did. Imagine if they were emphatically non-violent and always open to debate.

But they aren’t, because they are not the inheritors of the Christian, universalist civil rights movement but its illiberal, blood-and-soil nemesis, long curated in the Ivy League. The key group behind the protests, Students For Justice in Palestine, doesn’t mince words. It celebrated the explicitly genocidal murder of Jews on October 7:

National liberation is near — glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people! … Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.

The “our” is interesting. If you think these protests are only about Gaza — and not America — you’re missing the deeper context. Here’s a masked, keffiyeh-wearing spokeswoman for the UCLA protest:

Given the fact that the University of California is founded on colonialism, it’s inherently a violent institution. There needs to be an addressment of US imperialism and its ties to the UC system and how it perpetuates war and violence aboard — not only abroad, but also here, locally.

So violence is justified in response. Here’s a keffiyeh-clad spokesman at CUNY:

This revolution, which includes the mass demonstrations and encampments, are not just exclusively for students. It is for the masses. … It is for the free people of the world who are able to resist however you can — whether it be with a rock and other tools of liberation.

These are not fringe figures; they have been chosen to speak to the public. They believe in violence because there is nothing in their worldview that could prohibit it against certain “oppressor” races of people. As one of the “queer” leaders of the Columbia protest has said: “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He took his classes in decolonization seriously, even if he is now backtracking from their logical conclusion.

The illiberalism is deep and endemic. The civil rights movement was desperate for the press to show up; these thugs follow observers menacingly around, holding up barriers to prevent even fellow students from filming them. The civil rights movement ended physical borders between groups of human beings; these thugs create borders and police dissent. The civil rights movement asked America to live up to its ideals; the woke believe America is a source of evil in the world, and needs to be “decolonized.” “I love Osama [bin Laden],” one pro-Palestinian demonstrator in New York City said. “I want to suck his dick.” That mix of evil and scatology is a woke trademark.

And these protests are clearly as much about the abolition of the Jewish state as they are the horror of Gaza. They are driven by the neoracist idea that “white-people-are-bad-but-black-and-brown-people-are-good”; they are about a blood-and-soil “anti-imperialism” that requires the abolition of any state not reflective of ancient indigenous populations. (The SJP refers to the US as “Turtle Island,” an allegedly indigenous name.) They are against “cultural appropriation” but prance around in keffiyehs. They glibly use the word “genocide” to trigger and re-traumatize Jews, while ignoring the genocidal goals of Hamas; and chants of “There Is Only One Solution: Intifada Revolution!” ring with echoes of Nazism.

And they will help Trump get an Electoral College landslide, just as the new left handily elected Nixon in 1968 and 1972.

It tells you something when even Al Sharpton is rattled by these violent fanatics. “How do the Democrats — how do all of us on that side — say January 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses?” he asked on MSNBC. It feels like 2020 again. Replacing Old Glory with the Palestinian flag or defacing a statue of George Washington (see above), is not how you win over the country. But the more you know about these fanatics the more you realize they don’t want to win over the country; they want to destroy it as mindlessly as the pro-Trump fringe. And they’d welcome the even deeper polarization he’d bring.

And this is happening as Trump himself drifts into an ever-more deranged revenge-fantasy for his likely second term. Read the Time magazine interview this week. Any circumspection about trampling the rule of law has now disappeared. He will task his AG to prosecute his political foes and fire him if he doesn’t. He will pardon every participant in the January 6 riot — even as he claims he wanted to join them personally in their attack on the Capitol. His re-election will render all prosecution of his own misdeeds temporarily moot. It will be an unprecedented, national dismissal of the rule of law.

My own hope that his dictatorial impulses would be as toothless in his second term as they were in his first has also taken a bit of a hit. In Time, he all but commits to deploying the military — against the law — to round up millions of civilian illegal immigrants. More pertinently, when and if he does so, far more Americans will support him than we might ever have thought: 51 percent of the country — including 42 percent of Democrats — now say they support mass deportations, and 45 percent of Hispanics and 40 percent of blacks are also on board. That’s Biden’s achievement. In David Frum’s formulation, if liberals don’t enforce borders, fascists will.

On Trump’s core vulnerability, abortion, he has triangulated into a defense solely of states’ rights to do as they see fit, and says he’s against a national ban. It won’t solve his abortion problem, but it’s something. And in his latest speech in Wisconsin, he showed unusual discipline in focusing on the economy and immigration, rather than his own personal grievances and obsessions.

Biden? He’s busy showering privileged college grads with debt relief; he has riddled his popular policies — like the IRA and the industrial policy behind repatriating chip manufacturing — with “equity” red tape; and he is maxing out on cultural extremism. He just released his revision to Title IX rules: he wants to scrap due process for those accused of sexual assault on campus; remove the right of the accused to cross-examine their accusers or to see the full evidence being used against them; and to include biological men in the same category as biological women. In a measure designed to protect women, he has effectively redefined the word “woman” to mean “man.”

It is of a piece with his administration’s full-on support for the sex reassignment of children despite no solid evidence for its medical effectiveness or safety. These are policies not of the left, but of the extreme left. Like many other gay men and lesbians, I regard these treatments as homophobic, and a violation of children’s fundamental human rights. They are no more defensible, in my view, than the genital mutilation of girls. But Biden is all-in — to the left of Europe’s socialists.

This is how you re-elect Trump: keep pandering to the far left, suck up to wealthy college grads, allow millions of fraudulent “asylum-seekers” to enter the country, insist that men are women, discriminate against whites and Asians and men, while constantly appearing as merely reacting to events rather than creating new political realities. Biden is losing this election, deservedly. And if he cannot pull off an almighty pivot — and I suspect at this point, he really can’t — this election really is Trump’s to lose.

My old and dear friend Johann just released his latest smashing book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. That follows Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression (2018), and Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (2022), which we covered on the Dishcast.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the ways that Big Food gets us hooked, and the biggest risk of Ozempic. That link also takes you to commentary on our recent episodes with Kara Swisher on Big Tech and media, Abigail Shrier on kids in therapy, and Eli Lake on Israel. Readers also discuss Trump’s immunity claim, queer theory, trans acceptance, NPR and public noise, with my responses throughout. Plus a dose of Truman!

“That’s our [American] flag, folks. You don’t take over our buildings and put another flag up. … It’s despicable …. So blame me for being proud to be an American. … We’re not surrendering our way of life to anyone,” – Eric Adams on the campus protests.

“Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle,” – Frank Fukuyama, The End of History.

“Most Black Americans say that even if crime is declining and new police reforms are not enacted, they would still prefer to maintain (or increase) police patrols and spending,” – Matt Grossmann on a new study.

“They’d cut my tongue out if they could,” – Donald Trump in the subject line of his fundraising email.

“This is really rather sinister. Unherd has tried to raise ad revenue, but was not getting close to expected targets. Why? Because an organisation called the ‘Global Disinformation Index’ has put it on a blacklist. … The reason? Because they carry articles critical of gender ideology,” – David Quinn.

“There is a shrine to Matthew Shepard — a meth dealer killed by a group of other meth dealers that included a former gay lover — at the Washington National Cathedral that commemorates a fake narrative of his death,” – Wesley Yang. Today, president Biden will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Shepard’s mother.

“Man is born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth, sustained by the tradition of sacred ages and by the conviction of countless generations to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination,” – Benjamin Disraeli.

Falun, Sweden, 7.22 pm

A reader writes:

I’m in broad agreement with your assessment of Katherine Maher, but I don’t think what she said in her TED talk shows that she denies objective truth. In between the parts you quoted, she said: “Now, that is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist, nor is it to say that the truth isn’t important.”

So I don’t think she denies that there’s objective truth; she’s just saying that, with regard to certain things at least, there are several different truths, informed by different experiences. This is undoubtedly true. There’s that old story about the blind men and the elephant, wherein a bunch of blind men touch different parts of an elephant and get wildly differing ideas of what it’s like, and it’s only through a synthesis of all their ideas that they can form an accurate picture of an elephant. Much of scientific knowledge is like that too, often gleaned from seemingly contradictory truths: light is like a wave — no, it’s like a particle — oh wait, it’s actually both, which is where wave-particle duality comes from.

I think Maher is muddled, but that her emphasis is on the subjectivity of truth. Another reader takes issue with my diss of Fox News:

No, it’s not worse than the illiberal media represented by NPR because even the craziest right-wingers still adhere to the notion that there is such thing as truth, which provides hope that they can be convinced with evidence. That is no longer the case on the left, as you point out in your piece. All of civil society rests on the premise that there are truth and lies, and without that premise we will collapse.

Secondly, the arguments of the illiberal media now permeate every major institution in our country. All the power lies in the hands of people who believe the sorts of things that Katherine Maher does, and they are using that power effectively. That makes their deceit more threatening to the liberal order. Fox devotees are easy to spot and castigate, while NPR devotees are running the universities, corporations, etc. See what just happened to Title IX?

I did. Another touts other conservative pockets of the media:

I want to push back on your characterization of right-leaning media as a wasteland outside of the WSJ. This is certainly true of Fox News and many other large players, but there are plenty of right-leaning outlets who have managed to avoid becoming Trumpy fever swamps. Reporters from the Washington Free Beacon were the first to expose Claudine Gay as a fraud. The Dispatch has quickly become a great source for political reporting and commentary. Even National Review, which at times has been too comfortable with Trump for my liking, has managed to maintain a mostly Trump-skeptical editorial line and does great reporting on gender issues and DEI craziness.

Fair enough. One more reader has a “minor nit”:

The ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) that you mentioned exist in many large institutions. When I worked at Google, I was a member of the Greyglers (Gogglers over 40) ERG. ERGs are not “siloing”; they are voluntary spaces where people with similar interests commune, and yes, sometimes advocate internally. They are incredibly useful for their members and the organization as a whole. The problem is not the existence of ERGs, but the outsized influence some of them have been given in places like NPR.

I think that’s siloing, but I take the point that some of it is benign. The identity groupings? Not so much.

As always, keep the dissents coming: [email protected].

Truman vibes:

• Erickson unpacks the latest “temper tantrum” to oust the Speaker. He also tackles the dog-killing governor of SD.


• Linker looks to ancient philosophy to grapple with Trump’s immunity claim in SCOTUS.


• Should we do as Biden wants and raise taxes?


• Will the Southern Poverty Law Center call out the anti-Semitism on campus?


• Barro pleads with the political class not to take the protestors so seriously.


• Bob Wright and Coleman Hughes debate whether Palestinians were ever truly offered a two-state solution.


• As elections in India begin, “International criticism of Indian democracy under Modi is growing louder.”


• Richard Reeves is thrilled that Norway — #2 in women’s rights — is taking a “pro-male agenda” seriously.


• Poverty isn’t the cause of the homeless crisis in America.


• There are racial disparities in crime even when class isn’t a factor.


• Ted Gioia explores “the rise of the anonymous music star” — one has 15 billion streams on Spotify.


• Freddie referees a fight in the publishing world, which is “designed to make most authors feel like losers.” Ross Barkan asks, “What do publishers actually do?”


• Did Trump break political comedy?


• Rosie Spinks cured her insomnia with inspiration from her toddler.


• Ken Klippenstein resigns from the Intercept and leans into his substack. Here’s the story he wrote with Dan Boguslaw that their bosses tried to kill.

Where do you think? Email your entry to [email protected]. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.

See you next Friday.