Last Night’s Palestine Crackdown Was Authoritarian
Both the police crackdowns at Columbia University and elsewhere, and the propaganda that enabled it resembled scenes from an authoritarian foreign country. So we wrote about them as if they were.
NYPD police officers arrest protesters during pro-Palestine demonstrations at the City College of New York on April 30, 2024 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
If we watched the scenes that played out in New York and throughout the country last night happening in a country unfriendly to the United States, we would know exactly how to describe them: a regime, its legitimacy dented and its grip on power slipping, unleashed a wave of propaganda and state violence in a desperate attempt to contain a growing wave of anti-government protests. In fact, if these events had happened in a foreign country, the mainstream US reporting would likely have looked something like the following:
Conspiracy Theories, Fake News Fuel Night of US State Repression
Last night, as Israel carried out another round of violence against Gazans, killing six women and five children in Rafah along with at least eleven other Palestinians while planning a disastrous ground invasion of the city, its chief military patron saw an outpouring of violence of its own.
Over the course of hours, the New York City police, under orders from Mayor Eric Adams — an authoritarian member of the ruling Biden government’s party, who is currently under investigation for corruption and had vowed to bring Israeli tactics to the city’s police force — sent a small army of militarized security forces to disperse a Columbia University protest against the war. Three hundred protesters were arrested after a night that saw brutal violence against antiwar demonstrators at several other universities.
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