Why read this article? Pro-Palestine college protests are not Vietnam or a new ’68. The US, and even Biden, is trying to “wake up” from woke culture.
A new ’68 in America? Let’s take it slow. The protests at today’s most elite colleges in the world have little to do with the riots during the Vietnam War. Harvard, Yale and Columbia they have long been the cradle of woke culture, its terminal stage. The drift of which risks clashing with the Palestinian cause. And to make the world relive every progressive’s nightmare: Trump’s victory. Even Biden has noticed this and is trying everything possible to stem the protests in colleges, which risk moving to the polls in six months.
The woke drift on pro-Palestine protests in colleges
“For now let’s add these protests in North Face tents on ATVs on $75,000-a-year campuses to the widespread feeling among Americans that their country is going off the rails“. With biting sarcasm, Daniel Henningerhe commented on Wall Street Journal the protests that are proliferating in what he calls “our most selective colleges.”
The protests in colleges according to the WSJ contain a list of phenomena that are also contradictory to each other, which refer to woke culture. With its fixation on the criteria of diversity, equality and inclusion, defunding of the police, various conspiracy theories, isolationism and self-centered political polarization. This combination of things, Henninger says, is leading more and more people to say Enough!
Protests in elite colleges, far from Vietnam
The analogy with 1968 brought Pier Paolo Pasolini into question. He composed a famous poem on the occasion of the Valle Giulia clashes in Rome: he sided with the policemen, sons of proletarians, against the students, sons of bourgeois who attacked them. In America today “Pasolini lives again”. The epicenter of the protest is found in universities with seventy thousand dollars in annual tuition.
Among the students stopped by the police, and immediately released, stand out children of celebrities, scions of politicians and bankers. Hollywood stars bring solidarity to students. Those who wear the uniform, on the other hand, did not study at Harvard, and will probably vote for Trump even if he is black or the son of Latino immigrants. In short, the situation at the time of the protests in colleges and campuses against the Vietnam War was decidedly different.
If at the time of Black Lives Matter prevailing, the American political and cultural world remained silent to observe the damage of extremist thought, now reactions are starting to be seen in America. After two weeks of silence, on May 2, US President Joe Biden called for a return to order on university campuses, shaken by a protest movement against the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip. Six months before the election, the president gave a speech on the issue, which could complicate his election campaign, arguing that “order must prevail”.
Biden’s awakening from awakening
Biden has “woken up” from the woke awakening. He must have realized that in six months he will vote. Four years ago, Arab Americans were also with Biden. A survey of theArab American Institute showed how in 2020 59% of Arabs in the US voted for the current occupant of the White House. Things, however, have changed since October 7th. Support for Joe Biden among Arab-Americans has in fact fallen to 17% since the start of the new war in the Middle East. Biden’s first fear is mass abstention which leads him to be in difficulty in key states as happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016. But there’s more: many Arab-Americans would in fact be with the Republican Party which, ironically, is instead a staunch champion of support for Israel.
