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Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2024/04/27/college-protests-israel-hamas/73454043007/

Excerpt:

It’s protest season. Again.

This time, the Israel-Hamas conflict is the pretext for activists to block freeways, vandalize buildings and occupy universities.

Protesters took over Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus, renaming it the Gaza Solidarity Encampment.

An estimated 800 students set up tents before replacing the American flag with a Hamas banner. They chanted Islamist slogans, told Jewish students to “go back to Europe” and menaced anyone who disagreed.

Being a prestigious Ivy League school (annual cost of nearly $90,000), Columbia administrators quickly shut down the unrest.

Just kidding, they canceled in-person classes, as during the pandemic. Seems $90K doesn’t buy what it used to.

his week, the occupation has spread to other campuses, including Harvard and Yale, where a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye.

Students tried a similar stunt at the University of Texas, but the Lone Star State wasn’t having it.

Although Columbia’s organizers have tried to keep out the press, videos have spread across social media. The anger and chaos recalls scenes from 1934 Germany.

What were initially sold as anti-Israel protests quickly dissolved into pro-Hamas, antisemitic mobs.

Although 2024’s target is new, at least for America, we’ve witnessed the same tactics summer after summer after summer. Only the cause has changed.

Every year presents a new excuse to hoist signs, spray-paint buildings and shatter glass. Let’s review recent history.

It’s the latest in a string of causes to protest
In 2017, the Women’s March was launched in reaction to the #MeToo revelations, while in 2018, the anti-gun March for Our Lives dominated headlines. Neither attracted much violence; you could find that at anti-Trump protests.

In 2019, Greta Thunberg grimaced at the United Nations over climate change, which apparently was solved by blocking traffic and throwing tomato soup on Van Gogh paintings. This Monday was Earth Day, but it didn’t get much coverage. Environmentalism is so five years ago.

The pandemic put the kibosh on public gatherings, which made mass protests a bit hypocritical. So, the anger went online. In 2021, it was COVID masks and vaccines, while in 2022, anyone skeptical of funding Ukraine was labeled a Putin devotee.

But those annoying COVID restrictions were put on hold back in 2020, just as the virus was at its peak. Black Lives Matter protests swamped cities from coast-to-coast, often peaceful during the day but turning ugly by night.

Downtown Seattle was turned into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone while Portland burned for months.

What uproar are we planning for 2025?

One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox.

It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

All the topics cited above are important issues for public debate. Sexism in the workplace to gun control to wars abroad, each is worthy of media attention, no matter the year.

What’s bizarre is the singular focus on one moral panic each summer to the exclusion of everything else. Earth Day was huge in 2019, while in 2022 it was met with a yawn.

ALERT: ‘American Privacy Rights Act of 2024’ Sneaks In Quotas

In the name of preventing bias, APRA imposes quotas. And it imposes them everywhere.

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/04/apra-is-a-quota-bill/

Excerpt:

When the Supreme Court struck down Harvard’s use of race in admissions, liberals denounced the decision. President Biden said he “strongly, strongly disagreed” with the decision. Conservatives predicted “massive resistance” to the ruling.

Those who expected an attack on the Supreme Court’s decision were right. Those who supported Harvard are a minority. But they have no doubt about their moral clarity or their right to make the rules. Remarkably, despite the unpopularity of identity-based allocation of scarce resources, they have decided that the best defense is a sweeping offense. Legislation now pending in Congress is poised to extend racial, gender, and religious quotas well beyond education — to housing, employment, healthcare, insurance, and credit decisions – and to make them more or less mandatory.

Proponents are making only one concession to the unpopularity of their cause. They are hiding it. In fact, they’ve hidden it so well that dozens of Republicans in Congress have already voted for it, thinking that it’s a welcome bipartisan resolution of a decades-long battle over federal privacy rights.

The bill, called the American Privacy Rights Act of 2024 (APRA), does have a lot to say about privacy. It’s the result of hard negotiation between companies who make money from personal data and their Congressional critics. But when it comes to quotas, there was no one negotiating for the proposition that Americans should be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Instead, the drafters seized on the fear of biased algorithms to adopt a provision essentially banning the use of an algorithm that causes harm. And harm is defined as “disparate impact” on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, or disability,” (plus, weirdly, “political party registration status”). Those modest-sounding words are a magical incantation to summon quotas, because avoiding disparate impact means ensuring that benefits are divided up by identity — racial minorities and women must be more or less proportionally represented.

So, in the name of preventing bias, APRA imposes quotas. And it imposes them everywhere. The mandate applies whenever a human being uses a computer and personal data to help make a decision. It covers practically all businesses and nonprofits. So if Harvard wants to get its old quota system back, it just needs to enter applicants’ data in a computer, rank the applicants using GPA and SAT scores, then look to see if that algorithm has a “disparate impact” on some groups. The law says that’s a harm that must be mitigated – and it provides immunity from claims of race discrimination to any mitigation aimed at “diversifying” a pool of participants, such as Harvard’s freshman class.

And there you have it. Harvard’s old admissions policy is legal again – maybe even mandatory. And, not satisfied with that result, the drafters decided to apply identity politics to decisions that affect access to practically every scarce product or service in the country — “housing, education, employment, healthcare, insurance, or credit.”

This wasn’t a mistake. I’ve written about similar language in a similar bill in the last Congress, when Democratic and Republican members of the House commerce committee approved it by an overwhelming 53-2 vote. I can only conclude that the Democrats wanted the quota mandate and the Republicans didn’t think that their business constituents would care as long as they couldn’t be sued for obeying it.

Nobody was negotiating for the roughly three-quarters of Americans who think that it’s wrong to make decisions based on race or religion or gender.