Sometime in the late ’40s, after his brief foray into Hollywood and his becoming familiar with the then-nascent Hollywood left, cartoonist Bill Mauldin wrote that there is something very funny about a copy of Marx’s “Das Kaptial” lying on the edge of a tiled swimming pool in a Hollywood mansion, being splashed occasionally by a drop of scented water. Mr. Mauldin, the creator of the famous WW2 “Willie and Joe” cartoons and no conservative himself, was one of the first describers of the hypocrisy of limousine liberals.
But sometimes, the hypocrisy of leftists becomes so obvious all you can do is point and laugh. From the current protests at Columbia University come some great examples, as the Free Press’s Olivia Reingold wrote on Thursday.
It’s a Monday afternoon at Columbia University, but hundreds of students are not in class. They’re camped out on a lawn in front of the main library, making friendship bracelets, painting scraps of cardboard, and gossiping about the Zionists on campus.
“What should I do?” a girl with a mullet pops out of a tent to ask her friend. She’s holding a Sharpie in her hand, staring at a blank poster board. “I’m thinking ‘Dykes for Divestment.’ ”
A few steps away, in front of a sign that says “Paint Ur Nails 4 Palestine,” a girl is fanning her freshly polished red toenails. Nearby, a student with Farrah Fawcett’s hairstyle—except purple—is frantically asking other students if they’ve seen her vape. When she finds it buried under a copy of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and a hoodie, she gasps and clutches it to her heart. No one is paying much attention to a nearby woman with a microphone, desperately trying to rally the crowd.
“Dykes for Divestment.” That’s priceless. The utter cluelessness, a self-proclaimed “Dyke” who would, in Gaza, probably be stoned to death or tossed off a roof. That’s giggle-inducing.
And a girl with a purple Farrah Fawcett hairdo frantically searching for her vape? Who would no doubt be upset that we don’t take her seriously?
Do these people never look in a mirror?
See Related: Speaker Johnson Calls on ‘Very Weak’ Columbia University President to Resign Over Pro-Hamas Protests
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But wait! It gets better!
“They say that everybody has a role in the revolution,” they told me (Ariella goes by they/them pronouns). “And so there’s a space for people who like to organize stuff—and that’s me.”
Ariella says that they spend most of their time in “the tarp,” which is a section of the encampment with all the supplies—the melatonin gummies, the gluten-free bread, the organic tampons, the Aveeno sunscreen, the charging banks, the board games, and the pins that say “Union Proud.” The workers who enter the tarp, which Ariella tells me is also called “the cornucopia,” have to take off their shoes first, since it’s also their makeshift kitchen and they “want to keep it clean,” in the words of one tarp volunteer.
Now, Olivia Reingold doesn’t specify, but I’ll bet a substantial sum that whoever these people are, they are not giving these “supplies” away for free. They saw an opportunity in this gathering of nitwits, as Ariella obviously did. She (No, I will not refer to a single person with a plural pronoun) purchased or produced these supplies, brought them to the protests, thought up a price structure for her goods, and profited from the sale of those goods.
That’s fine. That’s free enterprise. I wonder if Ariella realizes that what she is doing, leveraging some of her own time and resources to provide goods to an identified market, is… capitalism.
So, Ariella, do you want more capitalism? Because that’s how you get more capitalism.
I’m pretty sure she would be horrified at the realization, not that any such realization is likely; I will bet another substantial sum that Ariella has essentially zero self-awareness. As evidence:
Ariella, who was raised by modern Orthodox parents, tells me they went to a Jewish day school, where students sang the Israeli national anthem every morning. They began having doubts about the way they were raised at age 12, when they say they realized they were queer.
Because of course she did, and I’m sure that there was no coaching, no advocacy from anyone in this young skull full of mush’s mind that helped steer a 12-year-old’s mind in that direction. I mean, nobody would gamble with an innocent child’s future like that, right? Right?
There are lighter sides to all this insanity that is unfolding at these campuses. Seeing some Texas cops go in and sweep the campus clean is one of those lighter sides. Seeing the hypocritical nitwittery and just the good old kookoo-for-Cocoa Puffs nature of some of these kids is another.
