“Well, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson killed Hamas' spring break in Colombia today.”
The quip came from Fox News host Jesse Watters, who was interviewing Johnson on Wednesday's prime-time show.
Johnson was visiting Columbia University's campus, where students had set up an encampment in solidarity with the Palestinians, following a confrontation between student demonstrators and the university's president. He was booed during a brief press conference on the steps of the school library.
“Jesse, a lot of them don't know what the hell they're talking about,” Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson's appearance on “Jesse Watters Prime Time” embodied the conservative media's often hostile tone and rebuke of recent protests on college campuses over Israeli operations in Gaza. The protests have long troubled liberal institutions, especially Ivy League schools, even as social movements like Black Lives Matter and now pro-Palestinian activism have grown in influence in conservative media circles. It is yet another evidence of the disorder and insecurity that has plagued the country.
“There's a difference between educated people and smart people,” former Arkansas governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee said on the network Tuesday. “Many college students are educated, but they're not actually smart.”
It's an old line with a new moment.
For years, conservative commentators have regularly pointed to campus incidents as examples of elite liberal hypocrisy. Instances in which conservative speakers were yelled at by students during events have sparked outrage at the idea that university administrators are intolerant of opposing views while coddling students.
In 2016, then-Fox News host Todd Stearns pointed to a Black Lives Matter protest inside Dartmouth College's library as evidence that white students were being “verbally assaulted.” did. Two years later, conservative activist Charlie Kirk Said Fox: “It turns out that the most intolerant people on college campuses are the ones who preach tolerance.”
This type of commentary has taken on new value over the past week as student encampments and protests have roiled campuses. Many Jewish students have reported feeling unsafe due to the protests, and conservative media outlets have highlighted this in their coverage. Ricky Schrott of the New York Post wrote in a recent column that the camps were a “betrayal” of Columbia University's Jewish students.
Katrina Shish of Newsmax, a small conservative network, said in an interview Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's press secretary Tal Heinrich that anti-Semitism is “exploding here in the United States.” Ta.
The student protesters, many of whom are Jewish, have been intentionally falsely labeled as violent and anti-Semitic in order to distract from their goals, which include forcing universities to divest from Israel. claims. Protest leaders say they are simply trying to support Palestinians and speak out against the war in Gaza.
However, there were several instances of hate speech and threats of violence directed specifically at Jewish students.
“We are Hamas, we are all Hamas” and “All you do is colonize” are some of the lines directed at Jewish students on and off Columbia University's campus during recent protests. This is one of the ugly attacks. On Friday, a student leader of a protest at the university apologized for saying in a January video that “Zionists don't deserve to live.”
Fox News, Newsmax, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post did not respond to requests for comment.
Protests have spread far from elite universities in the Northeast, which have become favorite punching bags for conservative commentators, to schools across the country. Those include the University of Texas, where state troopers arrested more than 50 protesters, and the University of Minnesota, where nine protesters were arrested after setting up encampments.
But criticism of how universities are handling the situation is consistent with some political views on college campuses. Polls show that conservatives have lost faith in higher education in recent years, and conservative media frequently portray campuses as incubators of left-wing ideology and as hostile to conservatives.
Kimberly Strassel, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal's conservative op-ed page, said, “This is one result of a campus culture that has become increasingly problematic over the years. “Because the administrators have tolerated identity, left-wing politics and protest.” he said on Tuesday's “Potomac Watch” podcast.