American Vandalism: My Recurring Nightmare

Some thoughts about the rise of political violence in the past two weeks.

(Royce Hall at UCLA after the encampment was removed)

(The same location was used in years past for graduation photos.

I stayed up late watching a dream I’ve had a thousand times. 

But this time it was real – this time it was live. 

It is a strange and uncanny thing to watch your dreams, or your nightmares, unfold before your very eyes. It betrays your sense of wakefulness – am I awake now? Or was I awake before? Or has this all been one big dream? 

But it wasn’t a dream, it was the campus. 

It was Columbia, it was UCLA, it was Princeton.

It was Emory, it was UT, it was Brown. 

It was organized, it was ready, it was planned. 

Just as the speed and viciousness of October 7th attacks belied detailed planning and preparation, the immediacy with which these campuses were bivouacked and blockaded demonstrates tremendous amounts of preparation. 

That is one of the things we always miss in these conversations – the planning. Random acts of violence happen all the time – random acts of building seizures do not. 

Whoever organized these student occupations had been planning them for months, if not years. And then, once Columbia, ground zero for the intellectual coup, showed signs of weakness, the full plan went into action. 

Anyone who has ever tried to get a group of college students to arrive at a specific location at a specific time knows how difficult this can be – college students do not tend to be punctual nor disciplined.  

Recall your college years. Imagine trying to organize a dinner party with 10 of your friends. Think about how hard it would have been to agree on which restaurant, at what time, in what place. 

Yet within a matter of days these encampments were planned, organized, and constructed, complete with matching tents, multiple days worth of supplies, dairy-free creamer, and bullhorns.  

The occupation paraphernalia, the tents, the medical supplies, the generators, the projectors – all of that stuff had been stockpiled. It had to have been. Or it had to be bought under urgent circumstances, which would imply spending a tremendous amount of money – money college students typically do not have.   

For 20 years, Hamas has been saying that there is no aid in Gaza, there is no food in Gaza, and there is no shelter in Gaza. 

And for those same 20 years, Hamas has been stockpiling that aid, hoarding that food, and commandeering those shelters, all for one purpose – to attack Israel on October 7th. 

October 7th was the crowning achievement of self-government in Gaza. Every decision Hamas has made since seizing power has been dedicated to making October 7th possible. 

Twenty years worth of preparation went into that strike. From building the tunnels to buddying up to Biden, everything Hamas has done was focused on that attack. 

So too with the SJP, Students for a Jewless Palestine.

The Students for a Jewless Palestine have been one of if not the most successful and fast-growing organizations on campus. 

Unlike other causes which tend to attract grassroots and localized activism, the SJP is an incredibly centralized organization that runs top-down like a naval ship. 

Just go on Instagram, find any one of your local SJP chapters, and look through their feed. Then, go find one from across the country, and look through theirs. The similarities are shocking. 

The centralized power of the SJP is a very significant issue. 

Although the antizionist movement masquerades as a grassroots movement, everything that comes out of it is formulaic and censored. That’s why students in the camps are not allowed to speak to the media. That’s why they have dedicated “media liaisons,” or what we might call, “Commissars.” 

Ironically, the people demanding free speech on campus are the ones who speak the least freely.  

True free speech advocates tend to be loudmouthed narcissists who love the sound of their own voice so much they would rather die than be silenced. I know because I am one. 

This movement has absolutely no interest in free speech or the free discourse of ideas. For a movement that has no shortage of speakers, there are precious few debaters. For a movement that claims moral superiority, there is no one standing up and defending its moral superiority. For a movement that is obsessed with “the discourse,” they seem to be, for lack of a better phrase, anti-discourse. 

Since the beginning of the Columbia Coup, there must have been over 1000 different people, across America, who picked up a microphone to chant or to speak.

These encampments have been taking heavy criticism recently – it would have been the perfect opportunity for an emerging leader to take the stage and challenge their critics to a formal debate.  

What could be better for a free speech warrior than to witness an open debate?

Imagine if, instead of everything that has happened in the past two weeks, Columbia University hosted a debate between Speaker Mike Johnson and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on the steps of Low Library to debate these issues. 

At the very least, we should see students squaring up against to challenge one another – the righteous pursuit of knowledge is the academic foundation upon which the encampment movement claims its legitimacy – why then are none of the campers pursuing knowledge through debate? 

These are two very different questions, but the response to them is almost always the same: antizionsts are afraid to debate because they know they will lose.  

If we are talking about the people at the head of the snake like AOC and Ilhan Omar, I am sure that is true, but most rank-and-file antizionists believe that they are on the obvious side of truth. 

Their belief, although misguided, come from a near religious level of conviction that they are marching on the right side of history. 

People like that tend to be chomping at the bit to prove how right they are.  

However, they have all received very strict orders not to engage anyone in open discourse. 

We, the self-righteous campers who are exercising our free speech rights, will not speak freely to anyone outside the camp. 

The people inside the free speech encampments seem to be the most censored people in America. 

It seems that, by entering the free speech camps, each student renounces their own right to free speech to ensure there are no breaks in the party line. 

Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against letting thousands of brainwashed American idiots give up their right to free speech – just don’t do it in the name of free speech. 

It is offensive to everyone who has died fighting for the right to speak their own minds. 

At the UCLA rally for Israel last week, a group of men wrapped in Keffiyehs linked arms and surrounded two women holding bullhorns. They had come into the pro-Israel rally to do this, and it was quite obvious that they had come to provoke us. 

My father, observing the scene, remarked that the men looked like drones unconsciously orbiting and circling the Queen Bee. 

They are drones, all of them, thoughtlessly repeating and doing whatever they are told. 

The million dollar question is: who is doing the telling? 

These men were orbiting around two women with a megaphone. Those women were repeating chants we have all heard 10,000 times. They learned those chants from someone who taught it to them. Those people learned them from someone else. 

From what I have gathered, there is only one organization whose name is always associated with these copycat movements – the SJP. 

I cannot recall a single rally or protest that has happened without a significant presence from the Students for a Jewless Palestine.

(Except on November 8th, 2023, when organizers specifically told protestors NOT to come and show any affiliation with the movement unless they were Jewish. The reason being that it was the 85th anniversary of Kristalnacht, and they did not want to do anything so overtly antisemitic at the time. Of course, many non-Jews came as well, but the Jews were all well-instructed to handle all of the talking so that no one could accuse the protest of antisemitism. Of the Jews who were there, not a single one knew what Kristallnacht was.) 

But before I start rambling too much more, we must ask why does any of this matter? 

The SJP is just a student organization that plays to students’ idealistic tendencies and Marxist fantasies. 

What is the harm in letting them cosplay a Marxist revolution? 

Surely, by the time they are seniors, they will join the capitalist ranks of consulting firms like the rest of their peers. 

But that could not be further from the case. 

The SJP is a highly-centralized organization that has been planning these school takeovers for years, and, in order to ensure an efficient school takeover, they policed their own adherents' thoughts and speech to prevent dissention in the ranks when the real antisemitism began.  

Since the very beginning of this war, the Students for a Jewless Palestine have done everything in their power to turn our attention away from the most heinous act of antisemitism in nearly a century. 

For years, the SJP has been spreading a tremendous amount of propaganda “explaining” how antizionism is not antisemitism while simultaneously acculurating their acolytes to silencing discussion. 

Then, once the acolytes have heard this mantra enough times to believe it blindly, they are ready to be turned loose upon the world, completely hardened in their faith that antizioinism is not antisemitism. 

Then, when a counterprotestor calls them an antisemite, or a nazi, or a Jew hater, they can smile and blithely say, “antizionism is not antisemitism” and whatever other mantras they learned from their commissars. 

Of course, no belief, no matter how religiously held, is free from doubt. 

So, when antizionist drone starts to have doubts about the incorruptibility of antizionism, the SJP sends them over to the members of the Jewish Voice for Pogroms to get a much needed injection of “As a Jew.”

Once hopped up from their “As a Jew” cortisone shot, they are ready to once again report for duty. 

After this happens a few times, a student is completely inoculated from guilt, and they feel no shame at all about accusations of antisemitism. 

Soon enough, they start to wear the badge of antisemitism with honor. It is almost like a right of passage in the SJP – in order to be a member in good standing, you have to get called a nazi at least once a week. 

What we are witnessing on college campuses right now is the large scale brainwashing of an entire generation of American students by a handful of dubious organizations and operators. 

I believe that we will soon find out that the SJP is somehow run, more or less directly, by Hamas. Or, as my theories get zanier as the night grows longer, perhaps we will find that Hamas is more or less run by the SJP. 

Or, as a third option, Iran is the ultimate ringleader in the plot against America, and Hamas runs their Israel-operations, and the SJP runs their American-operations. 

We may never find out who is at the top of that organization, but every single American politician who has either supported the SJP or been supported by them should be investigated. 

~

As I write this, I am saddened to think about what has happened to our universities as a result of gross negligence. 

However, I am heartened to know that, for the first time in three years, I am not the only person watching this horrible nightmare. And I take some solace in that. 

Since May 2021, I have had horrible visions of the extreme left and the extreme right engaging in street violence while the police remain quietly standing on the sidelines. 

In my nightmares, I saw American streets set ablaze, statues covered in graffiti, and masked men climbing flagpoles to tear down Old Glory and hoist up the MAGA flag or the Hammer and Sickle. 

I saw bricks breaking windows and guns being carried.

I saw the skull masks of the Proud Boys and the Keffiyeh wraps of the antizionists lined up across from each other, getting ready for an old-fashioned rumble.

I saw graduations being ruined, classes being canceled, and families being split. 

I saw the Democratic and Republican National Conventions set ablaze in the flames of self-immolation. 

I saw grown men and women too terrified of their own children to speak.

These are the horrifying nightmares I have been having for the past three years, and they all took place during the summer. 

As always, I am praying to be wrong, but I am preparing to be right. 

The summer is the season of political violence. Tensions run hot like the weather, as the lingering doom of the ballot box creeps ever closer in the mind. 

(Image from the summer of 2020)

(Image from January 6)

(Image from Columbia encampment)

I am very afraid about what will happen this summer. The left and the right have been radicalizing their youth movements for many years now, and there is no room for any discourse any more. Both sides have demonstrated they are comfortable using violent means, and I believe we need to prepare for a long and ugly summer. 

At least, that is what my dreams told me. 

Spread Love, Spread Light.

Am Yisrael Chai