Beyond reproach

Indignity Vol. 4, No. 71

Tom Scocca

Tom Scocca

— 9 min read
Beyond reproach
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 22: Police officers part of the Strategic Response Team standby during protests at Columbia University on April 22, 2024 in New York City. In response to recent campus unrest and anxieties regarding Jewish student safety, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik announced a shift to online learning for Monday. She further urged faculty and staff to prioritize remote work. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

THE WORST THING WE READ™

What Are the Protesters So Mad About?

BY NOW, THERE is effectively only one piece or post about what's wrong with the anti-war protests, an expanding consensus-shaped blob of commentators trying to convince one another to be complacent about the police being called out against student protesters. Not all of them have to be in favor of the cops dragging the students away—although the terminally sour-brained Atlantic polemicist Caitlin Flanagan went on the site formerly known as Twitter to ask the NYPD to "[p]lease, please, please arrest" NYU faculty who were trying to protect student demonstrators—but they all agree that the protests are misguided and inappropriate at best, even as more and more students pour out onto the lawns of more and more campuses, to be met by more and more cops. 

"Social media discussion has been claiming that the protests are peaceful," Columbia professor and contrarian-for-hire John McWhorter wrote in his New York Times opinion newsletter. This was after he complained that he hadn't been able to share John Cage's 4'33" with his students because the racket outside made it impossible to experience the piece as "background music," and before he described the appalling spectacle of a parent playing a musical instrument to a child: 

The other night I watched a dad coming from the protest with his little girl, giving a good hard few final snaps on the drum he was carrying, nodding at her in crisp salute, percussing his perspective into her little mind. This is not peaceful.

Here McWhorter was trying to play a very smug semantic game in the gap between "peaceful" in the "peace and quiet" sense and "peaceful" in the "not posing a threat that requires police action" sense. Presumably in his own daily life McWhorter knows the difference between dialing 311 and dialing 911, just as he must know that very, very few demonstrations, for any cause, ever count as "peaceful" on the decibel meter. He just seemed to be hoping his readers might not know those things. 

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