General principles for resolving the campus takeovers sweeping America

Grabbing the revolution by the throat

Big things are happening in America. Thousands of college students, professional leftist activists, and various hangers-on have set up sprawling encampments on college campuses across the country, defying college rules and local laws. Although the most easily understandable goal of the protests is to force college endowments to divest from Israeli companies, the rhetoric surrounding these events is pretty nebulous. The protestors want their colleges to “stop genocide.” It’s obvious from interviews with the protestors that many of them have no idea why they are there.

This is critical to understand: Although the protests have a nominal political goal, most participants probably aren’t aware of it. They’re protesting to protest. Getting together in a mob makes you feel powerful. Doing something out of the ordinary, like defying the school administration or resisting the police and getting away with it, makes you feel powerful. By undergoing this sort of struggle (however incoherent their motivations may be), the protestors are becoming heroes in their own minds. You really shouldn’t think about what they want too much, they certainly aren’t.

Despite this ideological incoherence, the protests are working. College campuses are shutting down. People require the mob’s permission to travel through public spaces. Furthermore, the protests are provoking what appears to be an overreaction: Platoons of armored riot cops are carrying off college kids while professors screech in the background. It’s a big show.

I genuinely do not care about the Israel-Palestine conflict any more. I know everyone hates Israel and “Zionism” now and likes to talk about it all the time, but to me this seems like a mirror image of moronic Bush-era neoconservative Israel worship. If you’re an American who is obsessed with Israel, either for or against it, you probably have pretty skewed priorities. We shouldn’t give Israel a blank check, we shouldn’t make Israel’s foreign policy goals our own, but the anti-Israel movement is also dominated by insane leftists who hate America and want to kill us. Conservatives are supporting these people controlling public spaces at their own peril.

Leftists gathering together in large mobs for any cause is bad. There comes a point in every period of leftist radicalization when they realize that, if they get enough freaks together, they can break the law and hurt people until they get what they want. They create a civilizational hostage situation, with the ultimate result being either total surrender or a revolution followed by the implementation of a new order.

I’ve written about this phenomenon during the Floyd Riots. Large groups of leftists took over highways and controlled traffic. The roadblocks were organized in advance. They had blocking cars and even pursuit vehicles. The roadblocks were backed up with lethal force. There were multiple incidents of leftists shooting people who tried to pass through their roadblocks. The gunmen claimed “self defense,” and were greeted with free lawyers, fake witnesses, and complicit local officials. Leftists shot people in the head and were given less than 5 years. This was organized terror.

Whatever you think about the Israel-Palestine conflict, large groups of leftists being taught that they can achieve their goals by taking over public spaces is a bad thing.

It’s clear people do want to address this problem, but it seems like they’re going about it the wrong way. In particular, I’m thinking of Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott deployed state riot police to break up a large gathering of protestors at the University of Texas. Although it’s theoretically good that Abbott intervened, Austin’s city government has been taken over by the far left, complete with an openly socialist District Attorney who charges people for self-defense against leftist mobs, Abbott’s later statements undid any positives that might have come from his show of force.

I’ve decided to put together general principles for dealing with these disruptions based on my fixation on the Russian Revolution and the parallel (largely forgotten) mass leftist violence that occurred in the United States during that period.

1. Remember: This is not a debate

The issue at hand does not matter. Do not talk about whatever leftists are talking about. If you do this, you are allowing them to set and ultimately control the conversation. Antisemitism isn’t illegal. Protesting Israel isn’t illegal. This is not about Jews or Palestine or whatever. If you make your objection viewpoint-specific, you’re going to alienate not only moderates who might agree (at least abstractly) with the protests, but also anyone who is concerned with fairness. Conservatives are generally good-natured and fair people. They want an orderly society that’s governed by clear rules.

In my podcast episode on the book “A Russian Dance of Death,” which describes the persecution Dutch Mennonites faced during the Russian Civil War, I recounted a passage where the author identified the biggest contributing factor to the moral degradation and apathy of the period: an inescapable sense of arbitrariness in every aspect of people’s lives. There was no internal logic to society anymore. People did bad stuff and got away with it. Moral conceptions that underlie any functional state, like “stealing is wrong,” gradually disappeared until the population became gripped with a sort of nihilism. Although in practice the enforcement of any law against public disruption or takeovers is going to be rightwingers arresting leftwingers, it’s important to avoid even the appearance of arbitrariness in this process.

With this in mind, there are two important steps for navigating a situation like this. The first is appointing a single person to spearhead efforts to bring the crisis to a close. The protestors have a lot of public faces and a lot of different messages, there needs to be a single voice through which normal people can say “What you are doing is wrong.” Furthermore, this single person needs to have absolute executive authority over the resources being brought to bear against whatever the problem is.

Russia descended into civil war after the Bolsheviks toppled the government and established a dictatorship. The Bolsheviks were a unified and ruthless political party. Their opposition was relatively disorganized. Anti-Bolshevik forces couldn’t agree on what they wanted, much less how to resolve the situation they had been presented with. Endless debates crippled any effective resistance to Bolshevism. There were too many competing authorities and too many different worldviews.

Contrast this experience with that of Finland during that same time period. The Bolsheviks quickly granted Finland independence after the Russian Revolution, knowing that the political, social, and economic disruption caused by the creation of a new nation would allow them to sweep in later and seize the country without much of a fight. The Bolsheviks successfully ran this divide and conquer scheme in nearly all of the short-lived new nations that arose out of the collapsed Russian Empire.

Within a year of Finland’s independence, which was supposed to separate the country from the Russian basketcase, Finland was on the brink of a communist revolution of its own. Finland’s legitimate government, knowing that a revolution was inevitable, appointed a single figure, respected general Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, to lead a unified resistance to Bolshevism.

Mannerheim had watched with horror as his former colleagues in the Russian military descended into incoherence and impotence with the collapse of the formal chain of command. The Bolsheviks had captured the Russian government mostly intact, they had a bureaucracy and clearly delineated authority. The opponents of Bolshevism were making it up on the fly. They could not agree on who was in charge and spent precious time fighting about that and other relatively unimportant issues while the Bolsheviks advanced across all fronts. Because of this, Mannerheim insisted on being granted absolute executive authority, knowing that although in normal times governing by committee can be useful or even essential, in times of crisis it is a fatal handicap.

With a single leader, who had legitimate authority and one vision that everyone could generally get behind, Finland was able to successfully put down its communist revolution when it came. Although the Russian Civil War lasted 4 years and led to approximately 10 million casualties, mostly civilians, the Finnish Civil War lasted just a few months and led to just a few thousand casualties, the overwhelming majority of whom were combatants. Strong executive leadership is essential for navigating any crisis. You are not running a debate club.

Tangentially related to the importance of executive leadership is the importance of never entering into “negotiations” with the protestors. These people are breaking the law and making life unlivable for everyone else. There can be no recognition that their position has any legitimacy at all. Whatever their views on this or that issue, their methods (and the beliefs that led them to these methods) are unacceptable. The only message that can be sent is that they will never achieve anything at gunpoint.

If you look at the leaders of the protests on campus, these are clearly not people who you can work with.

When you grant these people concessions, you are telling them that their tactics work and that this is really just a negotiation over how much they can take before they have to start the process all over again. Listening to these people talk, it’s obvious that their concerns aren’t narrowly confined to Palestine. If they get divestment from Israel or whatever, they’re just going to be demanding something else next week. When they don’t get that, they’ll just escalate their tactics even further. This is the violent process that happened hundreds of times during the Civil Rights era.

Whatever happens, whatever the end result is, these people need to be cut out of the process entirely. They would not engage with you in good faith even if they could (affirmative action has placed a lot of very dumb people in places they wouldn’t normally have access to).

2. The thing you are defending is normal life

So, we’ve established that this is not personal or political. No one cares about what you’re saying. They’re not going to argue why you’re wrong or concede that “maybe you have a point even if I don’t like what you’re doing.” That’s all irrelevant, what really matters is the behavior. Schools are for learning, not for whatever your political cause of the day is. Most students are not participants in these protests. It’s only a small minority who really feel passionately either way. Students have a right to an education and to enjoy a campus free of obnoxious behavior.

Schools must make clear rules for student conduct that forbid vandalism, camping, demonstrating outside of approved zones, obstructing public areas, loud disruptions, and any other kind of behavior where, if it were to be caught on video, people could clearly articulate what was really at issue. Make this widely known. Posters, public announcements, emails, etc. It should never be mysterious what the rules of the road are on campus.

In 1919, Bolshevik agitators from Russia joined with American labor activists to stage the first General Strike in American history. The entire city was shut down, roughly 1/4th of the entire population of Seattle was forced to go on strike. Only a few businesses were issued “permits” by unions to remain open. Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson, though he was a progressive reformer himself, understood the bad-faith hostage dynamic at play. He assembled an army of auxiliary police to prevent any violence and issued the following proclamation to the public:

By virtue of the authority vested in me as mayor, I hereby guarantee to all the people of Seattle absolute and complete protection. They should go about their daily work and business in perfect security. We have fifteen hundred policemen, fifteen hundred regular soldiers from Camp Lewis, and can and will secure, if necessary, every soldier in the Northwest to protect life, and property. The time has come for every person in Seattle to show his Americanism. Go about your daily duties without fear. We will see to it that you have food, transportation, water, light, gas and all necessities. The anarchists in this community shall not rule its affairs. All persons violating the laws will be dealt with summarily.

Ole Hanson made it clear: It was not going to be a bunch of leftist activists who decided how life was going to be in his city. The city has laws. American civilization has even higher, unwritten, laws. Americans should be able to buy food and go to work and do whatever else they want without needing permission from a labor union or someone from Bolshevik Russia. That’s something that most people can agree on and (more importantly) be convinced to actively support. This hard line against disruption and direct defense of normal life worked (full article here). The strike eventually ended without violence and the agitators were humiliated.

3. No pointless confrontations, only ever (figuratively) “shoot to kill”

A central component of leftist activism is aggressively engineering situations where they can claim to be the victim. Take the roadblocks: These people are shutting down public roadways with guns. When someone tries to go down a public road controlled by leftists, they throw themselves in front of the car. If the driver, knowing that the leftists at any moment could simply move out of the way, continues going forward, then a gunman could shoot him. After this occurs, millions, maybe even tens of millions, of leftists will all claim that the gunman was acting in “self-defense.”

All these people do is lie. Most are not consciously aware that they’re lying (please see my essay “Political and cultural change in the era of massive psychic damage” for more on this phenomenon). Leftists have well-funded professional legal and media operations to get everyone on the same page and punish those who resist.

With this in mind, actual physical confrontations need to be carefully managed. I cannot overstate my contempt for statements like those made by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who said that more people should be physically removing leftist protestors from the streets. The scale of these organizations and the mass social movements they control creates situations that are impossible for normal people to resolve. You are opening yourself up to huge peril by physically engaging with leftist protestors.

In Denver, a leftist provocateur shot a rightwing counter-protestor on camera in broad daylight after a minor altercation. Charges against the gunman were dropped. Nothing ever happened to him. I assume most conservatives have no idea this even occurred. Leftists shot people all the time during the Floyd Riots, including in Red states like Utah. They’re not afraid of consequences because there’s no reason to be.

These groups are organized by professional activists. They have tens of millions of dollars behind them. Dealing with this problem is not the responsibility of normal people who just want to go to work or go to school or attend a counter-protest. The only effective response to this problem is going to come from the state.

The recurring mistake people make when dealing with organized leftist violence is treating it like regular street crime or merely obnoxious behavior rather than a social contagion. These people are terraforming the minds of spectators when they act out: they teach people that their behavior is normal and, by humiliating the authorities and openly breaking the law, that they are the ones actually in charge.

I’ve already written about Pyotr Stolypin, the Russian Prime Minister who, though his personal efforts alone, successfully ended a leftist terror wave that had caused thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of other incidents of violence. Although Stolypin faced different problems than we do and handled them in different ways, in principle he cracked the code: The process of social decline is only halted by immediate and severe consequences for the perpetrators.

Leftists are used to getting let off with slaps on the wrist. This emboldens them, it tells them that they have a license to break the law and encourages them to escalate further. It’s also humiliating for the authorities. Getting arrested doesn’t mean anything anymore. There’s no inconvenience. It’s not a deterrent. Eventually police won’t bother to make arrests at all.

The problem is often procedural: local governments in places where major protests occur are usually controlled by the far left. The local prosecutor will never find charges against leftist activists acceptable, even in cases of flagrant lawbreaking that’s caught on camera. Even if local prosecutors (and likely judges) weren’t totally compromised by radical politics, there is also a veritable army of activist lawyers on standby to make prosecution of these cases effectively impossible.

When faced with the situation like this, state government and school officials cannot simply shrug and go home. Rather, they should create parallel processes that strip rogue officials of their authority and ensure the rule of law is maintained in the affected areas. I’m not an attorney. I have no idea what this process will look like in the end, but the current arrangement can’t continue.

Stolypin created emergency military courts to quickly process cases where an accused person’s substantive guilt (i.e. whether or not they did the crime) was not in dispute. For instance, if someone was found with bombmaking material in their home or if they were tackled after shooting a public official in broad daylight, they were moved to an expedited court process with special rules. Some of these rules were incompatible with the American justice system, we wouldn’t want to use them here, but the general idea of a special court system (perhaps supervised directly by a state’s supreme court) to handle these cases of public unrest more quickly than normal criminal matters is a good one. Breaking the law on camera should give you a ticket straight to jail, not years-worth of trials and hearings. Speeding this process along is not incompatible with Constitutional protections.

As a general matter, only immediate and severe consequences are enough to get leftists to stop. Getting arrested and then let go afterwards is not going to cut it. You should not give leftists the opportunity to create a scene or change the issue into a procedural or ideological one. If someone needs to be arrested, arrest them in private and only do it if you can guarantee life-disrupting jailtime. These people are on video, they can be identified after the fact. Physical force should be used sparingly and only as a last resort. This is a society, not a circus. Cops should not be getting into shoving matches with students that don’t have a clear resolution. Shit or get off the pot.

Universities should be aggressive about terminating insubordinate staff members and expelling students who violate campus rules to “protest.” It’s not real for them until they suffer consequences. With unions for employees and students, activism often turns into a blackmail situation: “You can’t fire or expel all of us without destroying the institution, you better give us what we want.” State governments would be wise to figuratively shoot the hostage here. It is better to have these places not operating at all than have them under mob rule. You can hire new professors. You can always find new students. Whatever inconvenience this response causes is more than worth it.

Strong condemnations don’t matter. Misdemeanors don’t matter. Suspensions don’t matter. Victory here is going to be measured in the number of employees terminated, students permanently expelled, and criminals jailed for lengthy periods. Take these people off the board so you don’t have to deal with them any more. If someone wants to break the rules and make life unlivable for everyone else, they need to do that somewhere else. State legislatures should more carefully supervise university administrators, as well. If someone is not willing to take a hard line against public disruption, then they need to go too.

The author of “A Russian Dance of Death,” Dietrich Navall, the Russian Civil War memoir I mentioned above, narrowly escaped with his life and moved to America. Navall was extremely gifted with languages and became the head of (then brand-new) Pepperdine University’s language program. At the time, Pepperdine was located in South Central Los Angeles.

Pepperdine was an experimental Christian school with an institutional mission to change the world for the better. However, it was also a lone white enclave in an increasingly black neighborhood. The school became the target of major “Civil Rights” agitation, which only accelerated after the Watts Riots. Students were physically attacked and the campus was frequently invaded by non-students, including militant black nationalists. As the campus conversation spiraled out of control, Pepperdine hired local “community liaisons” to resolve tensions. These newly-hired staffers ended up leading violent protests against the school administration. Eventually, black students set fires in several buildings on campus and activists began to occupy the administration’s offices. It was a hostage situation.

Although there were frequent calls for “compromise,” Pepperdine’s Dean was shockingly open about the fact that the problems were coming from the local black community and activists. The conflict was one sided: the school and students who just wanted an education were the victims of aggression and bad faith. The school eventually had to move out of South Central Los Angeles, though (almost miraculously) it was gifted a fortune to buy land in, then undeveloped, Malibu.

It’s tough to find much information on the expulsion of Pepperdine. It’s just another forgotten “battle” of the Civil Rights era that people would rather not talk about. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar incidents that occurred during this period. However, the story of Pepperdine at least reveals the folly of tolerating internal radicalism. Leftists activists do not have good intent and will stab you with any olive branch you offer them. There should be zero tolerance for support of disruptive or illegal behavior from university faculty and staff. Get those people out before they can abuse their positions of trust. Most states don’t have the option of moving their flagship universities.

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Richard Luckett wrote in the closing of his (great) book on the Russian Civil War, The White Generals:

[T]he business of revolutionaries is revolution, but the business of counter-revolutionaries is seldom counter-revolution. Revolutionaries are born into their condition. Counter-revolutionaries have it thrust upon them.

This is the fundamental problem we face. Things that work for our enemies won’t work for us. Although there are a lot of ways to destroy a society, there is only a narrow path to hold one together. I hope that good people will be willing to put themselves aside, see things clearly, and work together to build something that can change the world for the better. Discipline, sensitivity, and the truth are going to carry us a lot farther than impulse, fads, and mere reaction. Donald Trump says “Namaste.”

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