It Could Happen Here - Four Campus Protest Reportbacks

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Gare, James, Mia, and Molly compare their experiences at campus occupations in four different cities.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Calls on media. everything. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm Garrison Davis. And once again, it has been happening here as protest encampments have sprung up in at least 80 college campuses all across the country as Israel continues its genocide of the Palestinian people and is now currently bombing multiple sides of Rafah. Last month, students at American universities began protesting their university's ties to Israel and weapons manufacturers, calling for divestment as well as urging their institutions to join in calls for ceasefire. After a militarized police raid at the Humboldt protest, utilizing a prison SWAT team, police departments around the country began cracking down more harshly on the protest encampments. The day after the Humboldt one, NYPD raided Columbia University and fired a gun inside

Hamilton Hall while trying to use their handgun as a flashlight. The Portland Police Bureau quickly followed suit and cracked down at the encampment at Portland State University and have since barricaded that library. As of time of recording, around 2,500 arrests have taken place at college protests all around the country. Police have displayed incredible violence, sending people to the hospital with broken ankles and concussions. In many cities, there has been heavy use of pepper spray, pepper balls, as well as tasers. The protests have also faced violence from a mix of far-right agitators, Zionist counter-protesters, and racist frats that have targeted the protest encampments with physical violence, especially at UCLA. We here at It Could Happen Here are lucky enough to have correspondents kind of based all around the country. So I'm joined today by Mia

Wong, James Stout, and Molly Conger to discuss our experiences as people who have been present at some of these encampments all across the country. I'm going to start by talking about Emory University here in Atlanta, Georgia. This is a weird one, and I think I'll actually go into more depth in a future episode, but this episode is going to kind of focus on discussions, and we're going to kind of compare our experiences. So, oddly enough, I think Emory was the first one to actually face significant police repression. Tense went up on the Emory Quad on April 15th. And that morning, there was a heavy police response from Emory PD, APD, and Georgia State Patrol.

They fired tasers, there was rubber bullets, pepper balls, and over two dozen arrests. Students and others began to rally later that afternoon to retake the quad. A few hundred people did so, and a small occupation began inside the Candler School of Theology building. MRIPD was pinned up against this building. GSP arrived as reinforcements, and people started to flee as, you know, you see GSP kind of swarm this area, but people were able to calm some of those other students down and regroup and actually hold that position for a little while longer. Police began attacking students. A small clash began. There was pepper balls. People continued to kind of hold that ground in front of the building. There was students also inside. As people try to, you know,

render aid to those who have been pepper ball. And while maintaining this position in front of the building, more and more police arrive, like a ridiculous number. And the crowd eventually starts to slowly disperse as police just flood campus. Police from all around the greater Atlanta area just flood this very small section of Decatur, which is a small suburb to the northeast of Atlanta, or to the east of Atlanta, I guess. Emory president Greg Femmes said the Thursday protest was concocted by outside entities, which is why Emory PD, APD, and GSP violently disrupted the protest because it was caused by outside agitators, a line that New York Mayor Eric Adams would then reiterate to justify the massive crackdown at Columbia.

So the next day, we had 500 people march around campus. And then this little kind of committee of Emory faculty and staff called the Emory Open Expression Committee began to negotiate with the protest. And they, quote unquote, allowed the protest to march around campus. And this small subset of the group began to occupy the Cox Hall food court. And police were ordered to stay out of sight this whole day and a few of the days after, unless the open expression committee specifically called them in. And what was able to happen is that this open expression committee was able to wield the threat of police as a deterrent from people taking kind of more militant action or to actually set up things that would hold down an encampment. Like if tents were set up, this would result in this open expression committee

to call in the police. So this was a very, a very successfully wielded threat. So as the night goes on, the open expression committee does threaten to call police on the Cox food hall protest, which scares a whole bunch of these, you young teens early 20s out of out of the building a smaller group of around 100 people remain on the quad till midnight police arrive and then everyone disperses the next day kind of follows a similar pattern uh open expression and some student organizers over the course the next few days actually start directing police to detain and criminally trespass people wearing keffiyehs on suspicion of them having been engaged in like doing graffiti. And really, it just allows police to target specific people that the Open Expression Committee kind of just don't want on campus, based on either how they dress, how they're kind of walking, acting, behaving, that sort of thing.

And this pattern followed basically up until the present. People would try to take buildings, do smaller protests. Police would either be called or there would be threats that they would be called. It would kind of calm the crowd down. Everyone would disperse. If tents got set up, that was seen as like a major sign of escalation, which would result in police being called. And it's kind of the small back and forth. And eventually this just kind of led to the situation in Emory slowly dissolving, slowly fizzling out as the people who were wanting to do stuff kind of got pushed more to the side, got pushed out. More and more people began getting criminally trespassed. And the group of students at Emory just did not want to risk a further engagement with police after the first day. And that's kind of led to things

slowly dissolving. And that's basically what the situation currently, things have mostly kind of tapered off, school's ending. I'm sure this will be a similar thing across the country as the school season is ending. And these protest encampments will slowly also just dissolve away as police repression continues. Let's see, who should we move on to the next little report? James, James Stout from your, you went to UC San Diego? That's right. I did both, both as a graduate student and then again, as an adjunct professor. And then again, as a journalist last week, which is what we're going to talk about this time. So UC San Diego had, it was interesting, the encampment began on the 1st of May, but SJP had posted this thing about their big rally was going to be on the 3rd of May,

on the Friday, right? SJP is? Students for Justice in Palestine. It's one of the groups that's organized a lot of these protests across. It depends, you know, where where you're at you might have the council on american islamic relations you might have the muslim student association you might have both yeah yeah you've jewish for peace yeah yeah very often they're collaborating which is great we love to see collaboration so what they did was they posted that they were going to have a big rally on friday and that that as it turned out was like a fake out and they actually started their encampment on Wednesday so they they distracted admin uh with that Instagram post

which is pretty clever pretty funny and they began this encampment on Wednesday uh on library walk which is kind of right in the middle of UCSD uh if people have seen you know people will be familiar with the UCSD Geisel library from the film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which played an important role. Of course. Yep. I can see the look of recognition on my colleagues' faces. But yeah, that's the only thing that's ever cool that's happened at UCSD. So they set up this encampment.

It wasn't huge, but it was certainly a serious presence, right? And they didn't barricade it or and sort of make it make it defensible that was a conscious choice right and they they did set up a security system uh whereby they had student security people controlling who entered and and i guess left the encampment um if you really wanted to you could the cops got in right like it was a waist-high vinyl fence it um but but in theory these people were controlling who went in and who went out and sometimes these people were like asking people to sign up on a sheet i think i hope they stopped doing that because obviously that you're sort of helping the cops make their

prosecution case there over the next five days the encampment was extremely peaceful, right? There was a focus among this group on not giving any provocation to police or to admin to any reason to evict them. So they had some lectures, some speeches. They had some live music. They did some dancing, all stuff that's like in no way provocation or violent on the 5th of may a large counter protest was organized mostly it bought kind of uh like get off my lawn boomer types um but then also like some right-wing streamers uh oreo express or i

guess the the surviving half of oreo express josh fulfer was there i i think the guy who was first responders media jose or joe felix was also there these are right wing streamers sadly like if you live where i live you have to be familiar with right they do a lot of border harassment too they were obviously trying to film and identify students i guess um this was on the evening of the 5th uh that evening the chancellor cost less than around an email basically saying that what students were doing was prohibited that tents were not included in freedom of speech uh and asking them to disband peacefully the next morning at about five or six in the morning literally hundreds of cops from several agencies right

um the UCPD does not have the footprint that we saw there was California Highway Patrol San Diego Sheriff's Department and UCPD all in full right gear um lined up opposite the encampment uh they say that they asked students to leave and that those who didn't were arrested right and when they're arrested obviously like violence was used by the police as always is the encampment was destroyed everything that was there was tossed into a dumpster some stuff was then recovered i guess there's now a lost and found for people to recover their things like laptops right like expensive personal items that were swept up at that point people were arrested and then detained in the price center at ucsd the price center if you've not been on campus is like

a large shopping mall uh that also has some lecture facilities but like it's where the panda express is uh on campus like it's not trapped in with the panda express which is a dangerous situation yeah yeah and the panda express is not operational sadly more is a dangerous situation. Yeah, yeah. And the Panda Express is not operational, sadly. More is a shame. But it's where they have their dining hall. And it's like the center of corporate operations on campus. It's a very bleak place. So they're trapped in the Price Center.

The students around campus, those who are not in the encampment, then rallied to protect these students and tried to block the police from loading them on buses and then block the buses from leaving and that's when we saw the sheriff's department using massive amounts of violence right our sheriff's department still carry just like big wooden sticks they're not like the black nightsticks you know with like the right right angled grip it's just a giant it's just a big wooden baton yeah it's the aesthetic of the our sheriff's department's riot gear is consciously or unconsciously something that i associate with

the civil rights era and the repression of the civil rights movement perhaps that's a choice i don't know uh but that was when the sheriff's department started to become violent that's when they brutalized and arrested both journalists and students in total 65 people were arrested protests then moved down to the two jails right we have a different facility uh there's a men's jail and a women's jail and they tend to uh they tend to incarcerate trans people with the gender they're assigned at birth i've heard about lots of things that happened in those jails that were pretty bad uh but i haven't been able to confirm them enough that I think I'd be comfortable airing them. So people are released, lots of them are charged with several misdemeanors, trespassing,

encroachment, being at the scene of a riot, resisting arrest, things like that, right? Two members of faculty were also arrested. 40 people were students. And the last time I checked, they hadn't confirmed the status of the other 20-ish people. So that happened on the 6th. Yesterday, which was, of course, the 8th, there was a big march, about 1,000 students, it looked like, kind of both calling for the UC to divest and calling for the UC to drop charges and drop academic sanctions. So right now, all the people who are arrested are facing interim suspension. They're facing eviction from their student housing,

which San Diego, as we've spoken about a bazillion times, has an incredibly expensive housing market, and it's almost impossible to access affordable housing here. And in some cases, they're facing serious academic sanctions that could affect the rest of their academic careers student workers who are arrested also now not being allowed to work on campus so 183 faculty signed a letter asking the university to not do that that came out last night and that's kind of where we're at in terms of what's happened to these people, I think it's probably worth noting that the UC Riverside settled, right?

That they, they negotiated a settlement. That's in. So Riverside is North and slightly East of here, East of Los Angeles County. UC Riverside is, is, I don't know in terms of student numbers, how big it is, but they,, I think, on the Wednesday. So that would be May the Friday, May the 3rd. I was at the UCSD encampment that day and I heard them announce it.

The Riverside Settlement, I'm just going to say it didn't achieve some of the more radical goals of the student organizing movement, notably divestment, notably an academic boycott. They did get the university to publish its investments, which are linked Israel at least, which is a step I guess. They got a task force. The university is going to be very willing to grant you task forces and panels and things which can turn your radical aims into a bureaucratic mess, right? And they got the university to look into removing Sabra hummus from its menus as well. The biggest concession was the hummus, which isn't great. Wait, that wasn't a joke?

I thought you were joking. No, no, I'm not joking. No, no, no, no. Sabra hummus was called out by name. They didn't... Snack divestment. Yeah, no, no, they're not divesting from sabra hummus molly they're looking into doing that uh in conjunction with their acquisitions procedure yeah so you know it's huge dub and i don't want to undermine what these people have done like it's it's scary when the

cops come to get you and totally i understand but this is a sort of these are concessions the university is going to give you right these these like you might get a snack task force and you might get their already publicly available investments listed in one place on their website um at ucsd the administration claims that the students were unwilling to negotiate i wasn't able to ascertain if system they had. I was trying to ask if they had delegates or representatives who were going to negotiate. I wasn't able to get a clear answer on that. They did very clearly publish their demands, and the university doesn't seem to have acceded to any of them.

That, more or less, is where we're at in San Diego. There are ongoing panels and press conferences i'm going to attend one so it's going to be one by faculty tomorrow on the 9th the faculty have also been organizing right in a group called faculty for justice in palestine and they've been organizing i think it was very impressive that they like accepted student leadership and didn't try and like you know come in and take a vanguard role or tell everybody what to do but but they're mostly to facilitate the student protest and protect it um so they're having a press conference

tomorrow so things are definitely ongoing here but that's kind of where we're at as of today which is the the 9th of may we will be back and hear about the happenings in chicago and i believe richmond charlottesville after this this ad break. Yeah, for Sabra. I hope, probably not. Chocolate hummus. The chocolate hummus is a travesty. Crime against humanity, yeah. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron,

host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

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you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. All right, we are back back i have a big bowl of non-sabra chocolate hummus actually so fuck all of you yeah in the break garrison got out their chickpeas and a blender it was a really beautiful thing let's hear from mia about what's been happening in chicago where there's been multiple multiple of these protest occupations yeah so there's been four occupations so far in chicago that it's it's possible there's i don't know i'm actually kind of surprised like the university of illinois hasn't like there have been a few campuses that i thought would go up that haven't yeah so we're going to talk about three of them because the other one i didn't get to well well we'll we'll explain why i wasn't at the the school the art institute one because

that's a shit show 68 arrests yeah disaster um we will get to that so the first one i was at was at northwestern um and i i think the other thing that's important about these encampments is that they're really really geographically spread out across the city so northwestern is not in chicago um it is in is it a a like is in a suburb called evanston is a very rich suburb okay the other thing we should probably get across is these the chicago encampments all started kind of late into this process um they're not there's reasons for this i can't get into but they're all kind of late comers um on april 25th northwestern one starts and it's a really chill occupation

for the most part so there's like a police raid on night one but then the kids just come back and put all the tents up again and then after that like the evanston police department is a joke right like they're not i mean they've probably done terrible things but like they're they're not they're not like the police departments in the rest of the city who are like the guys who teach the cia how to torture people right yeah and so yeah i wanted to talk a bit about kind of the vibes of it because it was it's a very like early occupation kind of vibe right it's i mean like i walk in there there's a it's just it's a bunch of kids like sitting on tents doing homework yeah people are sleeping there's like people are like eating meals everyone's really happy

very similar to people just hanging out in the quad at emory and i'm sure many other places around the country yeah i i think i think and everything that that should be mentioned is you know so like obviously these are these are proto these are camps in solidarity with palestine right so you're you're expecting an international event this one like i walked in there and there was a woman on the stage in the encampment well i say stage there was a woman using their sound equipment which made you quieter um but was was talking about the zapatistas and this is the thing you see over and over and over again right it's like yeah these are about these the encampments that i'm at are you know obviously

they're about palestine but there's this real there's a very kind of there's a deep internationalism there that's very tangible and powerful i mean like you know i was walking through the tamp and i was like you know there are kids like reading on the on the lawn and i'm like i'm like pointing out like oh hey this is that's the copy of the rest of the earth that i have from college like you know it's all stuff like that it was all very chill it like rained on us so we spend much time like waterproofing tents i think the interesting things about this is that there's a there's a really kind of wild mix of people there it's it's this it's this thing you only really get in social movements that are like going somewhere

where you know i mean i was running into people from groups like old school like like i ran into someone from students for a democratic society like i didn't even know the group still existed like i thought i did not know that either well so there was there was a second round of them in the 2000s i thought they died after that but apparently not you know so you have these mix of people from like groups that everyone thought was dead right like you know there's a lot of sort of very experienced like student organizers there's also a lot of grad students which is a dynamic i don't think it's talked about very much because it's not it's not just like 18 year olds there are a lot of people in these camps who have been doing this for a very long time and you know so you have those

people but you also have people who just i mean like i talked to people who this was literally their first protest right it's like the first thing that ever came out to and you know there was this very kind of there's this very sort of camaraderie vibe what there wasn't was a functional democracy and that's that's a very that's the other thing about this encampment that was very different than the u chicago one which i'll be getting to in a second it's like they there was this sort of there was this group that was negotiating with with the administration and no one could really tell what they were doing like every once in a while a representative would come back from them

and you'd hear something but in the meantime everyone is sort of running around based on rumors trying to figure out what these people are negotiating and it turns out what they're negotiating is an end to the protests and basically basically, the students like, OK, so there's a complicated set of demands. What actually happens is that all of the entire occupation is taken down after a week. It's completely gone now. There's nothing there. What they get from it was the university is reestablishing an advisory committee on investment responsibilities. re-establishing an advisory committee on investment responsibilities they got like question this northwest supposed to answer questions about holding some stakeholders

which may be disclosure may not be um and they got some stuff that like is real from for like visiting like palestinian faculty but basically they didn't get any of the goals of the encampment right there's no divestment there's you know a committee that can make recommendations about the investment and we'll see if that even happens because that's supposed to be spun up back in the fall so you know they take down the encampment they get nothing they get no leverage and nothing is how you know and all of the sort of student negotiators and these are negotiators. You know, OK, so there are also like political splits in the camp, right? It's kind of hard to get a sense of them just from looking at it.

But, you know, if you talk to enough people, you can sort of get get the sense of like what the splits are, right? And Northwestern was sort of split between the sort of liberal student negotiators who are from some of the sort of more liberal student organizations and the people who want to – they're sort of like maximalist radicals. And the maximalist radicals get out-meduvered because there's just not enough of them. And so they take the encampment down, and the people who were doing the negotiations had this whole line, we're building power, is just the beginning and there's nothing there's been nothing else they're screwed they lost everything their negotiating power is gone they got nothing so in the wake of this the University of Chicago

encampment starts up the University of Chicago complete other side of the city like Northwestern is in like the like the fucking bougiest like richest whitest of the city uh like northwestern is in like the like the fucking bougiest like richest whitest of the like of like the north side of chicago which is like where the rich white people are except i mean they're not even in chicago right they're they're they're literally like they are they are a uh they're a suburb the university of chicago on the other hand is

smack dab in the middle of the south side of chicago there's the university bubble and then around the university this is like the heart like the middle of the south side of Chicago. There's the university bubble, and then around the university, this is like the heart of black Chicago, right? Very, very different vibe. The other thing that's important about this is, so the University of Chicago occupation starts in the context of the massive raids in Columbia, the raid in Humboldt,

and very importantly, the raids in UCLA. And both the sort of brutal police raid and the like absolute harrowing mass fascist attack on the barricades where you know you have people getting beat up with metal pipes they're shooting they're shooting like fourth of july ass fireworks like directly into into the people on the barricades they are trying to kill the protesters they beat they beat a bunch of student journalists like half to death and so university of chicago camp when i get there is right in the middle of transforming from a kind of like northwestern style everyone's getting along like singing kumbaya camp to like a an actual fighting camp because i get there and like that day i get there at like nine right

three hours from when i get there they were scheduled to be a giant rally of like right wing frats that is going to go come and attack the encampment. So the vibe is extremely different. It is a fighting camp. Everyone is preparing to like, you know, fight for their lives. Everyone knows what happened at UCLA. And also everyone knows what happened at northwestern and people are fucking pissed people are like i mean unbelievably angry that you know then their view is the northwestern camp sold everyone out sure and so you know i mean in in the other thing about you chicago that was different from northwestern is that you chicago had has functional general assemblies so So there are functional democratic meetings where everyone in the camp goes, okay, we're going to figure out what we're going to do. And these meetings are... People are not happy with...

They're not happy with what happened at the Northwestern. They're also really pissed off at the third occupation, which was... Well, I mean, I guess I think DePaul happened in the middle of there, but the third occupation which was well i mean i guess i think depaul happened in the middle of there but the third occupation was the occupation at the school of the art institute on the school the art institute is literally right in the heart of downtown chicago like it is across like it is like across the street from millennium park it is like across the street from like the art institute of chicago it is in like the corporate center of chicago sure um so they

they they do they do an occupation right and inside of like like i think i think they got seven hours in before swat team showed up they arrested people it is a brutal raid they're like the cops are beating people with metal bars like it is it is it is fucking terrible it is it is a bunch of swat teams beating up art students very special and harsh to make sure it doesn't become like a continued thing yeah yeah because because and this is the thing about about both you chicago and depaul to less to extent too but uh you chicago and northwestern are on basically like opposite extremes of the city right they're not they're not in the middle of the city of the downtown area that yeah like the

political elite care about it's on the north side and south side yeah yeah let's go the other side like this is literally the middle of chicago and so they like it's very clear orders are coming down from above that this encampment can't be allowed to stay and so they get the shit beaten out of them and this is important for a few reasons one it kind of like it kind of heightens the fear of police oppression but but the thing that it does that's important is that this goes fucking this like completely backfires on brandon johnson and you know sort of the the mayor of the political administration because this is you know it turns out people are very very angry that a bunch of swat teams just beat

up a bunch of art students with metal bars right and the consequence of this is that brandon johnson like refuses to or at least openly what he's saying is that he won't use the chicago police department at at at the on the university of chicago campus um the university of chicago has its own police force that's about 150 officers it's sort of vaunted as like the largest police force in in like the largest private one of the largest private police forces in the world you know they also shot a fucking kid while i was at school there so you know i have a like deep hatred of them but what what kind of ends up happening is so there's there's that big the day i'm there there's this big like confrontation between protesters and kind of protesters and you know the kids from a shield from protesters and counter protesters yeah yeah so so like the

the the frat show up there's like a huge right-wing media circus but the kids have a shield wall and the shield wall fucking holds and the the counter protesters can't break it they eventually back off they're separated by the cops and from there things get weird the encampment gets cleared by a raid that probably could have been stopped. You know, they have one of these 5 a.m. raids. You can't stop the police. Well, okay, so the thing I say about this, though, this isn't CPD. This is UCPD.

They have, like, 40 total. Like, the number of people they can amass at one time is about 40. So, like, this was the only occupation that, like, maybe, like, plausibly could have actually beaten off the police attack, because, you know, if they only have 40 people and you have 600, like, that's about the point

at which it's, like, plausible. It's unusual for cops to engage if they don't have the numerical advantage. That's odd. Yeah. But what happens is that, basically, the protesters through, like, there's a very convoluted process of this, but the happens is that the basically the protesters through through through like there's a very convoluted process of this but the protesters decide not to defend the camp so everyone it gets raided and they all and like no one ends up getting arrested but they destroy the entire camp oh and okay i guess there's one thing that i i probably should have

fit this in better somewhere else but something that's very interesting about both of these encampments and this has been true of both of the encampments that I've seen, is who is like the racial and gender composition of who's there. Because these are, you know, and you can see this like when the counter protesters are facing off against the protesters. The counter protesters, they're like exclusively white. Like most of them are white frat bros. White cis dudes usually. Yeah, yeah. like exclusively white like most of them are white frat bros white cis dudes usually yeah yeah and then in in the camps it is basically like it is like non it's non-white people of all genders and like non-cis dude people of all races yeah very very very very prominently and this this

is something that i think is is a sign of how the sort of like american political alignment has changed and the kind of kinds of political alliances that are kind of so normal now that we don't even really think about them but if you step back for a second and look at what's actually happening this is this is the this is the actual political composition of of these protests it's queer people and non-white people um and and obviously like people like me who are both. And I think that's an important thing because, you know,

it's a dynamic of these camps. It doesn't get talked about enough, but is, is the core thing that's happening like politically. I agree. That was the same. That was the same demographic balance at Emory. Let's take another break and we'll come back and hear from Molly and then

kind of have a bit more of an open discussion to close things out, comparing the similarities and differences from our experiences at these, these four different protest encampments or different cities, I guess. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone

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search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. All right, we are back. Molly, you saw some pretty bad police violence at the camp in Charlottesville, I believe, right? Yes, the encampment at the University of Virginia was cleared on May 4th by Virginia State Police. It was not a pretty sight. So the students at the University of Virginia set up an encampment on April 30th, on the afternoon of the 30th. They had announced ahead of time that there would be programming during the day on May Day.

So this sudden setup the day prior was, I think, a surprise to the university. When the students first put their stuff down, they put up some tents. The police chief of the university police force, Timothy Longo, showed up immediately and said, no tents. Tents are the red line. Take the tents down. So that first night, they took the tents down. And so for three nights, they slept outside unsheltered because it was clear from the university that the tents are going to be the problem. That's the only issue that we have is the tents. You can be here. You just can't put up the tents and you can't use amplified sound.

You can't be too noisy. The place where they'd set up was this patch of grass. So if you're familiar with the University of Virginia, there's the lawn. It's called the lawn. It's not the only grass, but it is the special grass. It's the grass between the lawn rooms and the rotunda. It's like a long, narrow, they weren't on the lawn. I think that would have been a much bigger problem for the university just because of the optics of it and because students live in the lawn rooms. So they were actually on the other side of the rotunda in this shady grassy area between the rotunda and

the chapel. So within kind of spitting distance of that statue of Thomas Jefferson that the Nazis famously surrounded in 2017. So that same sort of area of the university. So for three nights, they were out there unsheltered. It was pretty quiet. It was, you know, a few dozen students most of the time. Classes had just ended, so they were preparing for finals. They were writing papers. I think some afternoons they had TAs come out and help people with their papers, help them study. You know, it was chill. They were just kind of out there vibing. And then on the evening of the third, they held a vigil for the dead in Palestine. There was great turnout for that. A lot of people came out, students, families, you know, there were babies there, dogs, like it was, it was a safe place, right? It was a place where people felt safe letting their

toddlers kick a ball around. Like it was not a violent or embattled environment. There were babies there and they held the vigil. And after the vigil, they had Shabbat dinner. But as the sun was going down, it was starting to rain. So they put up a pop-up tent to cover the Shabbat dinner, the food that had been set out. And it was at that point that they began setting up the camping tents. And they'd been told all along by the police chief, you can't put tents up, you can't put tents up. It's against the rules. That's when we're going to have to intervene if you put the tents up. But every UVA school policy is available on the school's website they have a policy database where you can you know search by keyword you can you know you can see every official school policy

and the official school policy is that tents are allowed it's on the website you can have a tent and so now this you know the university is saying that this discrepancy as well, you know, that actually isn't a policy. It was a sort of, it's guidance on the policy, but it is in the policy database on the policy website where they keep the policies and it says guideline on it and a guideline, it's a synonym for a policy. I think the lesson to take away here, you know, I'm not going to Monday morning quarterback the student organizers. I was not privy to internal discussions. I don't think that's my role. I think the takeaway here, though, is that they're always going to move the goalposts. The only protest the administration will ever approve of is one that happened at least 30 years ago, right? You have to be decades removed from

progress to see it as positive. They never like progress while it's happening. They never like protest while it is happening. There's nothing you can do that will be allowed, right? Because the entire time, those first three days when the police were keeping their distance, they were always there. There was always this sort of like needling back and forth. Well, you know, can you just, can you adjust this? Can you change this kind of behavior? Like, you know, you're not breaking the rules yet, but just, you know, we're watching, be careful, this kind of behavior. Like, you know, you're not breaking the rules yet, but just, you know, we're watching, be careful, this constant needling. And so in the end, on the 4th, when the Virginia State Police showed up, you know, up until that point, the idea was,

well, the provocation was the tents. The problem was the tents. The police had to become because of the tents, you know, that the policy on the school's website changed Saturday morning. Like we have the, you know, the cash on the website. You can see when the PDF was altered. It was that morning. So it's like, is it about the tents? Did you change this policy as pretext for the police raid? Because now in the aftermath, since they were caught out changing that policy

immediately before the police raided the camp, they're saying, well, no, actually, actually it wasn't about the tents. That's not really what this is about this it's because they're saying now that you know four men in essentially black block right so four men in black carrying backpacks with helmets were seen in the area and they're known to law enforcement and yeah i'll be honest with you i did not see these individuals but at the same time time, who care? Who care? It's public property, right? This is a public university. You know, this outside agitator narrative, you know, we had to beat and pepper spray these students because of these mysterious men. But at the same

time, you know, the entire time that the students were in the encampment, they had faculty liaisons from Faculty for Justice in Palestine. And the faculty liaison were not, you know, negotiating because students were clear that there was no negotiation, right? That, you know, they're not negotiating on their demands, but that all communication between admin and the police into the encampment came through these faculty liaisons. And they were in constant open communication. And the faculty liaisons are saying, well, if there was someone dangerous here,

if the police had identified like a, you had identified an actual danger in this space, they never communicated that to us. That before this raid happened, no one ever said to the faculty liaison, someone here is dangerous. There's a known criminal here. This is why this has to... That was never communicated. So I'm not sure these four mysterious individuals exist. I don't know i think that is a manufactured you know sort of after the fact pretext but in any case on

saturday morning um the the anniversary of the kent state massacre um state police showed up a lot of them all at once and there was um you know the local police set up a perimeter around the encampment, and again, so it had been raining all night, it was soaking wet, like, I showed up Saturday morning to take some wet blankets home to wash them, because things seemed fine, things were very calm, again, there had been babies there the day before, it was very calm, and so I thought, well, I'll wash their wet blankets and socks, and bring them back, and then we can, you know, they can regroup and move forward. And while I was at home washing wet socks, I heard that the raid was starting. And again, so, you know, because it had been raining and it was a pretty small protest to begin with, people are doing their finals. There were maybe a few dozen people there,

like a few dozen at most. But once the riot cops showed up, people start pouring out of the libraries, Hundreds and hundreds of students come to see what all the noise is about, right? They come to see what the disturbance is about. The university used the emergency alert system that texts students. It sends texts and emails for emergencies, you know, things like a fire or a tornado or a mass shooting, right? A lot of these students have recent memory of a very serious shooting here that they got these texts for. These texts are for real emergencies, but they used the emergency alert system to tell students to avoid the area. So of course they poured into the area

to see what was happening. And so they set up a perimeter around the camp so the people inside could not get out and the people who came to see what was happening could not get in and a line of riot cops marched into the camp and just bludgeoned and pepper sprayed at like point blank range pepper spraying them directly into their mouth nose and eyes i think one student was wearing goggles and they removed her goggles so they could spray her directly in the eyes while she was already prone on the ground. One woman was having a seizure, but they didn't stop arresting her to let her seize in peace. And they were just sort of dragging her limp body away. It was very nasty.

And then once they made their, I believe, 26 arrests, they turned on the crowd that had gathered to watch. And they started pushing this massive crowd of students out into the street. They didn't close the street. Like there was a dean on scene who was watching this happen and sort of making frantic phone calls to try and close the street that the students were being pushed into

because it was an open street with traffic. And then the frat boys showed up, right? So, you know, students are coming out to see, some of them are joining the protest, some of them are just curious. And all of a sudden now there's an entire hillside covered in frat boys. Some of them have Israeli flags, Some of them have American flags. And there were times as the, you know, the police were, you know, I'm very short, I'm about five feet tall. So there were times as the police were pushing towards us. I can't actually see that because the person in front of me is taller than

me. And I would know the police were starting to advance again because the frat boys would cheer. They would start cheering. And cheering and you know at one point i'm standing next to this older professor you know i don't want to call anybody elderly right but this was a sort of a grandmotherly professor um who'd been pepper sprayed and was you know shoulder to shoulder with students and she looked over at those frat boys and she said i don't know how we're supposed to teach them yeah Yeah. Like, I mean, I expect a cop to be a cop. I've been pushed around by a cop before. I'll survive.

But I've never seen a cheering section for police violence before. And like... I have a few times, and it's one of the most disturbing feelings I've ever had is when you have police attacking people and there's a group of like 20 to 50 to 100 people on the other side of the police cheering them on it's it's it's one of the most like like death worshiping moments in my life that i've like felt like it's it's very ugly

it's very very ugly yeah it reminds me of how in, it's not the same, but like, like in the Napoleonic era, for certain battles, it became a thing to go and spectate. And people would sit on hills and watch the like formations move and literally have a picnic, right. And have this.

They do this in Israel. Like they do in the West. Yeah. They did it in Turkey in the battle of Kobani to like people, they called it media hill. Until the Turkish police take us to BBC guys who were there do you know how do you know uh around numbers for arrests or anything like that I believe there were 26 arrests the majority of them students one was a professor

one was a reporter but a lot of students and grad students and again like I think it's important to talk about this idea of the outside agitator right because i don't want to get bombed down and like oh you know a third of the arrests were not affiliated with the university that doesn't mean anything right like charlottesville is a college town charlottesville is uva uva is charlottesville it is the largest employer in the region it is sort of you know the focal point of the region. It's a public school. People attend sporting events there. They attend concerts. Our largest local concert venue is a UVA property. I did attend UVA and I sometimes speak at classes at UVA. So I have some sort of tangential affiliation with the university, but I don't have to justify my presence there.

That's like saying you can't protest elbit or boeing unless you purchase bomb systems or work there right right yeah it's ridiculous what this enormous institution does with its billions of my tax dollars actually is my business it is my business and if you're going to beat teenagers in my backyard that is my business right yeah and like this is yeah the university is part of the community they spend their entire like 364 days a year that that is their messaging and then as soon as the community shows up for the university they change that let's maybe have like a brief discussion about some of this i think one thing i was definitely hearing from from you molly is like

like the presence of tents is seen as like a massive sign of escalation. Like this is there. For some reason, that's where they decided to draw the line. It's like when tents are going up, that's what needs to be cracked down on. Which makes no sense because, like I said, they've been sleeping there for three days. Sure. They're not wanting to be wet. It's symbolic.

Yeah. It's very symbolic. Like I think especially if you look at like the images from the Columbia Quad, like it's be very symbolic yeah it's it's very symbolic like i think especially if you look at like the images from the columbia quad like it's a very symbolic thing of like tense is like we are we are like staking territory like literally putting down stakes yeah i think like that that is has been a massive thing um i think it's interesting the universities that have and haven't had barricades set up like there was there was no barricades at emory there was no really attempt to put barricades up and you have like you know pretty pretty big barricades in portland of course and then like humboldt being really the one that

was like no like you can like hold down a space for like a while if you have like lots of barricades we see that we see that uh in uh la and you know the difference between the barricades. We see that in LA. And yeah, the difference between the barricades going up and the barricades not and how that does kind of slow, that does slow a police raid, that does slow some police response. And I think one of the dynamics we have there is like, at least here at Emory, right? We had the first day people, a pretty sizable amount of police violence. You know, there was like 28 arrests. A lot of people were assaulted by police. And for many people, this was their first protest. A lot of these people were too young to participate in 2020, which is kind of, you know, odd looking back on it.

But yeah, a lot of these people were quite young. And this is their first experience of like police brutality in person. And like what a what a first protest though i mean like i'm trying to think back to like you know usually your first protest doesn't end like this sorry my dogs are going crazy right now but i you know i was i was thinking about this i was it's just i think it's a radicalizing and traumatizing first protest experience for a lot of young people i was i was talking to a young student when i give too much information about her but she was quite young right it was you know one of her first protest experiences and she said when the cop approached

her with something in his hand she didn't know what it was and she couldn't understand what he was doing or what he wanted from her and it wasn't until he raised the object above his head that she had this realization that he can hit me. Not only can he hit me, but he is going to hit me. To have that realization in real time that you are not safe in your body, that the state will carry out violence against you, to not have known that before and to find it out

as it is happening i think is is truly horrifying well yeah and so we have all these people who've experienced it now for the first time and when they you know return to to the campus the next day they don't want to go through that traumatic event again like they they don't want to and and so after we we saw this in a few cities but we saw this even in col Colombia. But like after the first police response, how people behave afterwards on campus can be quite different because they really don't want that. And now admin is able to kind of use the threat of police. It's a very effective deterrent to be like, hey, if you keep things kind of chill, no

tense, nothing crazy. But if you just hang out on the quad, that's it. Like, that's fine. But if you do anything else, we're going to call in those guys again and they're gonna fuck you up even worse and like that is a very effective and scaring people away from from doing anything and i think a big thing to navigate here is like how how can you get students to feel like empowered once again to like actually be able to do stuff there was this there's there was this one moment at Emory where some like, some other like, like more like, you know, more militant-y,

I don't know their exact affiliation to the university. I don't care. But some more like militant-y, more anarchist-y people, because it's Atlanta, were like kind of like shaming some of the students for not like doing more stuff. Like they got on the microphone and were like shaming them,

be like, hey, this isn't a protest. You're just, you're just hanging out and like i i get it but also like what is that going to accomplish i think i think shaming people for being scared of police is not effective you need to you need to help them to feel empowered and that that's a very different thing to navigate and you can't expect you can't expect their first protest action to be all-out militant nor should you want it to be like and i think one of the things to remember is that what is you know what does success look like that if you know most of these university encampments aren't going to win divestment right they all have really similar demands and they include you know divestment

of university funds and most of them aren't going to get that. But I think you can still envision success as, you know, these are young people. They are learning to organize together. They're learning to create that space together. They are coming together to talk about this issue. And I think that can be success. I don't think you have to bleed to have succeeded. No, totally. Absolutely. I think just this being a learning experience for people. And now you have a lot of both professors and students whose view of police will forever be different, which, you know, in the long run, it's probably I would view that as it's like a quote unquote good thing, even though it is, you know, it's short term trauma and possibly long term trauma. But like you have a much more accurate view of how the world works now, especially for a lot of these like Ivyy league kids who've never never thought of police as a threat before police was always like a helper right a lot of these are like you know good kids quote exactly yeah right and and and learning that like you there doesn't need to be provocation to entice a police response that is yeah that is not a that's not a real

dynamic i mean especially at uva right like this wasn't one of those encampments where there had been prior clashes or real escalation or any sort of hardening of barricades no they were they were lying in their tents when the cops showed up i mean right the lesson is that nothing you can do is acceptable so you might as well do what you want yeah and like keep your eyes the other thing i wanted to mention was like victory looks like a number of different things in these protests but like you should focus on whatever that is and like something i saw among faculty colleagues sometimes like was just like should we get arrested like sure um should should we choose to get arrested like and like no no you should not choose to get arrested like uh you know we always avoid it if you can yeah avoid it you it is not an end it's not a good strategic goal to get arrested on purpose yeah

i mean this isn't dc where you get you know a ticket and they let you go home yeah no this will fuck up as well i'm lucky of your tenured faculty it will fuck up your life a lot less than people in other social and economic circumstances right but even in the most privileged possible circumstance like it fucking sucks yeah you might be denied access to your medication you might be confined in a cell with people who do not identify with the same gender as you right the cops are going to be fucking mean to you that's what they do like they do violence to protect capital that's why a lot of people are getting permanent nerve damage from being left in flexi cuffs like even if even if your charges get dropped like you could suffer forever from this yeah and there's you have no you know it doesn't matter how good your dad's

lawyer is or whatever you do they're the cops they're gonna get away with it but yeah like when i think about the young people i was talking to people and like when i think about 2020 when i was talking to young people i'm older and i'm 37 like i think about my own like uh you know growing up as a little kid, like there was the anti-sweatshirt movement, which morphed into the G8 movement, which morphed into like Zapatista Solidarity, which morphed into the Free Palestine movement, the movement against the British National Party.

And we got to like step up until we were fighting Nazis, right? Because folks, young people who are protesting now who didn't participate in 2020 didn't get like this was just like a baptism of fire like the people in 2020 got to go out in 2016 for donald trump right in 2017 and wear the little pink hats and and walk around in the pink hats you know and they got introduced to the cops and the fact that they are just going to fuck you up because they want to slowly but But these people didn't. And I don't think we should blame them for being like that. And none of us are, to be clear.

But like, folks, I've seen it too much on the Internet. Like, don't do that shit. Like, teach people to be stronger than the state. Don't shame them for not already being there. That's something that happened. Like, I literally watched this, like, happen at the Chicago camp. It was people, like, getting ready to have to fight off like these frat bros and you know like that experience and you know and this is something i think is

interesting about these protests too was like from ucla like ucla was like a pretty explicit attempt to try to use these like right-wing like paramilitary people to knock out an encampment. And they couldn't do it. They hurt a lot of people. 200 people, I think, went to the hospital, at least treated by medics after it. They hurt a lot of people. It was really scary. But they couldn't break the barricades. And that happened at UChicago, too.

It was like they couldn't... In UChicago, they're on... But at 9 o'clock in the morning on the day of that encampment, there were no fucking barricades. It was just a bunch of tents on a lawn. In three hours, they set up a thing that still weren't really barricades, but you got to watch these kids and the people who know like realize that a group of them can stand and fight and hold these people and they and they did it they fucking stood there they stood their ground they held them they fought and at the end of the day the fucking trap rose ran away and it wasn't really until and then this i think it's been a really interesting element of this is that like these these paramilitary groups have been just staggeringly unable to actually like beat a bunch of protesters like in in you

know in in in in this sort of military sense of like who holds the field at the end of the fight they can't do it and only the cops have been able to and the other thing about that is like you had you have a a more legitimate way to fight off these like non-state actors yeah yeah right whenever you there because of the nature of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence fighting off the police can be a lot more tricky than fighting off these like frat boy groups um yeah like that that is that is a a very different dynamic that was a process that like unfolded there. It was a lot of people who were like, yeah, we don't want to escalate.

And it was like, well, okay, so several hundred people are going to show up. We all saw what happened at UCLA. It has to, right? I mean, you can't just keep doing your sort of like, we're not going to engage with counter protesters thing when there's 200 of these people who are going to try to beat the shit out of you. Right. I mean, there's choosing not to engage with someone

who just wants attention and then there is self-defense i think those are two different things yeah definitely some like you don't you know you don't give someone their viral video that they can put on youtube or whatever but if someone's going to beat you with a stick yeah and it's like like i'm not saying either of them are like right or wrong it's just like yeah like you can't you you can't use the same tactics and being forced to defend yourself like had this real sort of like impact on people and like i don't know it's like i gotta see people just like understanding what you can do with the physical mass of a group of people and i don't know it was it was like it was it was a really emotional experience for like a lot of the people there and it was really cool.

So, yeah, I think we, it would be wrong just to like criticize these, these students specifically for dropping the ball and in various ways. I think the thing that we can completely criticize and point to as a, as a, as a massive failure is everyone who has not been participating, how they have been viewing what's going on. And this, this, this, this will be the last thing I talk about, especially even, even just like the media side and just general discussion.

Like there's been such a, such a singular focus on the campus encampment, like itself, instead of like why the protests are happening in the first place, what's going on in Gaza. And just instead, just focusing on like are happening in the first place what's going on in gaza and just instead just focusing on like yeah the actual the actual thing on campus but net but but not caring about why these protests are even happening willfully ignoring why it's happening framing all literally all of the campus protests as inherently anti-semitic as if that is the main driver and ignoring ignoring the the

many instances where people who have expressed anti-semitic things have been have been like removed and pushed out of campus which has happened in many places but it's it's just it's just so lazy to totally like reject the reasoning for why these protests are happening the the framing of trespassing as a form of violence, calling these encampments violent, as if being on campus is violent. And meanwhile, never once mentioning the actual violence on display,

which is almost solely at the hands of police and these other far-right groups. Friend of the pod, Cody Johnston, had a very, very good tweet. Quote, these people who i despise and never agree with should protest the way i prefer unquote right don't don't debate tactics with people who don't share your goals yeah yeah and again like these people who who disagree who have like an ideological opposition to every single thing these protesters stand for bush admin people doing

this like guys who were in the actual bush administration just a wild fucking mental gymnastics to be like it is illegal for you to have your tents here that is trespassed therefore we can violently displace you also i stand with israel like exactly what the fuck is happening in your head to remind people of too is you know you know the same like well technically they broke the rules okay well technically if you're going 20 over the speed limit the cop can book you into jail would it be a bizarre escalation of force for him to do that do they normally do it no they don't right so just because just because the police can intervene in certain ways doesn't mean it makes sense for them to do so technically you're not supposed to bomb 40 000 civilians right so i think that's

really the weapons are illegal under the under under the lahey act and it doesn't matter for shit right because the rules you know the police are only only powerful to punish you the the fact that there's more moral outrage across the country for students protesting a genocide than there is for 40 000 civilians being murdered is just looking at a deep hole at the at the conscience of this country yeah although the thing i will say about that is if you look at the polling numbers on this like yeah there's like like 47 ish percent support for like banning like protesters on campus however when you actually look at the numbers like especially if you look at the numbers among colleges we look at the numbers of people in general who now like who now support like ceasing like ceasing sending

arms to israel it's been interesting so like they have been working totally it's just that the people who control this country is a different demographic than all the young people who are protesting on campus right which is what we're looking at. And I think it's also important to reminder that almost every single campus protest historically has been completely vindicated over time because they're obviously correct. And if you deny that, who are you fooling? Anyway, I think this episode's already pretty long, but I was happy to hear a collection of our four different accounts

from four different places. Oh, I do just want to say really quick before we wrap this up, to everyone who says these students are too young to know what they are protesting, they couldn't possibly understand what they are talking about. Fred Hampton was 21.

People forget how young MLK was when he started doing stuff. And they're young enough for fucking Israel to kill them, right? Absolutely. There are no universities in Gaza anymore. Like, it's just ridiculous. They're also young enough to join the IDF or any other military and go and kill people. It's a ridiculous argument.

Like, you don't have to be able to. Just go out there and talk to these students. They know exactly what they're protesting. They know exactly what they're talking about. A lot of them are actually fairly well versed on the minutiae of what divestment means and what that looks like and what the fiduciary duties are like they're not stupid they know what they're talking about all these dumb college educated youngsters all these idiots at columbia anyway this fucking nerds you chicago it's like yeah we don't talk about palestine enough in classes like i teach

a lot of world history classes. It's certainly not on the little boxes you have to take. And some people came to the encampments to learn and that's fucking great too. Like, and some people taught people

and that's great too. Like, it's a place where a lot of learning happened and people became more informed over time. Absolutely. You don't need to have a PhD or master's in an area

to understand that bombing children is bad and want it to stop. We had a world war about this. Genocides are bad. So this will be a topic we continue to cover on the show over the course of summer. I'm planning a deep dive about what happened at Emory. Margaret has an upcoming episode about how people who were engaged in campus protests can stay involved over the summer. And of course, we will continue to talk about what's been happening in Gaza. Thanks for listening. Solidarity to everyone who's out there. Flush your eyes with water.

Flush your eyes with water. No milk. You finally learned. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran

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Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series,

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