As with the mostly destructive 2020 summer of love protests/insurrections, the Northwestern University (NU) Hamas solidarity protests–messy exercises in anti-Semitic-tinged virtue-signaling–inadvertently revealed important truths.
First revelation:
Like countless other thankless, rebellious students leading meaningless lives, the NU students figuratively raised their soft middle fingers to the institution/system/people from whom they have so amply benefitted.
How many of them worked to pay for their hefty tuition, fees, room, and board? How many of the terrorist-supporters will go on to risk their lives to serve our country and preserve the liberties they enjoy, and which, by the way, Hamas denies its own people?
Second revelation:
The NU terrorist-supporters revealed their unwillingness to apply principles consistently. In other words, they revealed their own hypocrisy.
Since the agitators claim to want a ceasefire, why do none of the signs defacing the campus demand that Hamas release all hostages immediately and surrender?
Why do none of the signs demand that Hamas denounce any and all claims that Oct. 7 will happen again, and again, and again until Israel is destroyed (i.e., genocide)?
Why do none of the signs denounce the rape and sexual mutilation of Israeli women and the burning and beheading of Israeli babies?
Why do none of the signs condemn Hamas for stealing humanitarian aid intended for Palestinian civilians, and for turning material sent for building water lines into weapons of war?
Why do none of the signs condemn Hamas for using children and the sick as human shields?
Third, and perhaps most important, revelation:
The campus tantrum revealed why Americans no longer trust the press.
NU is home of the Medill School of Journalism, formerly one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country. Now, however, Medill has been infected with the homegrown virus of leftism, which was loosed upon the country from university laboratories where boomers have been engaged in gain-of-function research since the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Wanting to find a way to ensure ludicrous, unjust, poisonous ideas could withstand the residual anti-viral properties of a Judeo-Christian ethic, leftist boomers socially constructed a virus that could slither throughout the veins and sinews of institutional life, mutating and reproducing in ways that would gnaw through all but the strongest points of resistance.
And so now we see Medill School of Journalism assistant professor Steven Thrasher, who has no academic background in journalism, cheerleading NU children last Saturday afternoon.
Homosexual activist Thrasher received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in “film direction and dramatic writing.” A quarter of a century later, he received a PhD in American Studies, again from NYU.
In between his two non-journalism degrees, he served as a “script assistant” on Saturday Night Live, worked on “movie crews” in some capacity, was hired by Village Voice in 2009 and laid off in 2012.
In 2018, Thrasher wrote a self-pitying I-Am-Victim-Hear-Me-Whine piece for the online “LGBTQ+” magazine Them in which he describes the United States as “a country that wants me down on my knees, groveling for a place in it.”
Surprisingly, for a country that wants Thrasher down on his knees and groveling, the very next year, he landed at Medill as “the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting (with an emphasis on issues relevant to the LGBTQ community) and an assistant professor of journalism.”
Just Imagine where this graduate of the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts with a PhD from NYU and a faculty position at Medill would be if he hadn’t had to spend so much time down on his knees groveling.
Thrasher used his dramatic writing training at the NU encampment to melodramatically exhort his suffering allies to keep on keeping on:
You have put your bodies on the line.
…
You have gone up against the American empire.
It might feel scary at times. Because, in essence, a colonial war of occupation is playing out on this lawn. The empire has not just struck back at our efforts; it has hit extremely close to your homes. And when the university became an imperial battle site, the administration wanted to side with the warmongers instead of with you, the peacemakers.
(Stop that snickering and eyerolling.)
Yes, just like soldiers at Normandy and Afghanistan, or Hillary Clinton fleeing from sniper fire in Bosnia, or Uncle Bosie stewing in a Papuan kettle, those kids camping in tents on the leafy North Shore were putting their very lives on the line.
For the warmongers among us, Thrasher offers a more detailed look into what it looks like when CRT/DEI devotees put their lives on the line:
You are united against what bell hooks called “white supremacist capitalist, imperialist patriarchy.” All of you are doing your parts! Whether it’s the people in the art tent helping people express a beautiful vision of the world, Ethan and Isabel documenting what’s happening for history, Abu teaching me how to roll my keffiyeh, the kitchen feeding us or the negotiating committee working to make Northwester [sic] “Disclose! Divest,” you are each doing your part to make the world a better place.
Worse than Thrasher’s aggrandizement of efforts to support savage terrorists is his philosophy of journalism, which I assume includes not only opinion writing but reporting as well:
To the Medill students and journalists within ear shot, I say to you: our work is not about objectivity.
Thrasher elaborates on his unorthodox view of journalism by sharing with the self-sacrificing students his equally unorthodox idol:
[O]ne of the people I look up to most in the world is trans journalist Lewis Wallce [sic], who sacrificed a great deal out of love for his fellow humans. In his book The View From Somewhere, he , [sic] lays out how there are two major schools of journalism—extractive journalism, where journalists take something from people (in a model similar to colonialism), and relational journalism, where journalists are in relationship with the communities and people they are writing about.
I teach my students relational journalism.
Lewis Raven Wallace is a woman who pretends to be a man. She received a “B.A. in religion from Northwestern University … where” she “focused on gender variance in medieval Christianity.” The full title of her book is The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity.
In his over 4,000-word screed, peacemaker Thrasher never mentioned the hostages still held by Hamas. He never mentioned the horrific acts committed against Israeli women, children, and infants. He never mentioned the intentional targeting of civilian young people at a music festival.
Let’s hope Americans learn from the revelations of Thrasher and the pampered, privileged protestors at NU and across the country that we have enemies both foreign and domestic, and some of them are teaching future journalists.