Where Are the Protests?

An annoying occupational hazard of punditry is stumbling across a news story that perfectly supports the thesis of your column … after you’ve already published it.

Maybe “annoying” is too much. It’s gratifying to see one’s opinion vindicated by events! When the New York Times drops this six days after I wrote this, I feel like Dispatch subscribers are getting their money’s worth.

But it sure would have been nice to have had the Times item in hand a week ago when I was putting that piece together.

That’s not the only time it happened to me this week. Two days ago I wrote about Donald Trump’s habit of “kidding on the square,” framing outré policy ideas in comic terms to normalize them while granting himself and his supporters plausible deniability about his sincerity. He’s only joking about running for a third term in 2028! Although, now that you mention it, it *would* be nice….

Late on Tuesday night, not 48 hours after I posted that newsletter, he dropped the mother of all “kidding on the square” examples on Truth Social.

You can’t watch that clip without laughing. There’s Elon Musk stuffing his face with hummus. And a pale, husky Trump sunbathing by the pool with Netanyahu. And bearded men, er, belly-dancing in barely-there women’s clothing. (“Trump Gaza” will be vastly more “woke” than the current iteration, it seems.) Even the music is catchy.

If you can get past the fact that juvenile trolling of this sort coming from the president is a complete embarrassment to the United States, you’d have to call it one of the more enjoyable pieces of AI slop to reach mass circulation.

Buried beneath the absurdity, though, are two semi-serious ideas. One is that Trump earnestly wants the United States to take over Gaza, or so he says. The other is that he foresees the forcible displacement of the Palestinian population as a necessary step in the process.

Where are the cries from America’s pro-Palestinian left over the president proposing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza?

I can’t tell you how many times that question has come up this month in conversation. Dispatch colleagues have raised it. Family members have raised it. Strangers on social media have raised it. A year ago, campus Hamasniks were occupying buildings and setting up tent cities to protest Israel’s effort to punish the perpetrators of the October 7 pogrom. Today the leader of their own country is suggesting a gratuitous American incursion into Gaza to evict the impoverished locals and convert the land into a playground for the rich—the most grotesque conceivable expression of “settler-colonialism”—and seemingly no one cares.

Where are the protests?

Overtaken by events.

They haven’t disappeared entirely, contrary to popular belief.

Last month, on the day the spring semester began at America’s most notorious “anti-Zionist” campus, the usual suspects bearing “intifada” signs staged a walkout. According to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which maintains an updated list of daily agitation across the country, protests are scheduled today in Burbank, California, and Oneonta, New York, and another is set for tomorrow in Dallas, Texas.

There’ll be some sort of demonstration in Los Angeles on Sunday to coincide with the Oscars and an “International Day of Action” next Wednesday aimed at convincing businesses to stop supporting Israel’s military. Protests are still happening!

Just at one-one-thousandth or so of the intensity that we saw last year.

In fairness, is that really so strange under the circumstances?

The point of the 2023-24 protests was to force the Biden administration to pressure Israel for a ceasefire. Whether you believe those ceasefire demands were primarily motivated by a desire to protect Palestinian civilians or by a desire to protect Hamas’ ability to menace Israelis depends on how charitable you feel toward leftists. Either way, we do have a ceasefire at last. Barely.

So it makes sense that protests would have fallen off, notwithstanding the obnoxiousness of Trump’s interest in redeveloping Gaza. It’s hard enough to sustain the intensity of demonstrations when the mission hasn’t yet been accomplished. It’s really hard when it has.

And insofar as it hasn’t been completely accomplished, it’s been rendered moot. The sort of pro-Hamas degenerate who hoped last year’s demonstrations would scare a Democratic president into forcing the Israelis to back off before they weakened the group’s capabilities in Gaza has been overtaken by events. Many of Hamas’ leaders are dead, its power to wage war is degraded, and its brothers-in-arms across the border in Lebanon have been routed.

If the goal was to stop the war before real damage was done to the glorious jihadist cause, there’s no point in continuing to protest. That ship has sailed.

If, on the other hand, the actual goal of pro-Palestinian activism is something more subversive and closer to home, there’s … also no point in continuing to protest. Domestic politics has moved on and has taken the salience of the demonstrations with it.

Mission accomplished?

I agree with economist Noah Smith, who alleged earlier this month that “the purpose of the Palestine movement was (A) to seize power from the establishment wing of the Democratic party, and (B) to reduce the influence of Jews in the American left.”

Whether Jewish voters were scared into voting meaningfully more Republican on Election Day is a matter of dispute, but it’s always felt like more than coincidence that Kamala Harris bypassed the popular Jewish governor of Pennsylvania as her running mate despite the importance of that swing state. The protests put her on notice that her pro-Palestinian base would tolerate only so much “Zionism” at the top after Joe Biden and the Democratic establishment backed Israel’s war in Gaza. The message was received, apparently.

Snubbing Josh Shapiro didn’t save Harris, though. It was Trump who won the majority-Arab city of Dearborn, Michigan, a surprise outcome that seemed to confirm a backlash to Democrats among pro-Palestinian voters. That outcome makes no sense as a matter of geopolitics given that Trump’s support for Israel is far less conditional than Harris’, to the point that he’s not above using the word “Palestinian” as an insult. (Buyer’s remorse has already begun in Dearborn.) But it makes sense as a matter of domestic politics, through Smith’s frame. If the point of last year’s Gaza protests was to warn Democratic leaders that the party can’t win by governing from the center, especially but not exclusively with respect to Israel, those protests served their purpose.

Harris lost. Dearborn went red. Democratic leaders will think twice next time about telling the left “no,” supposedly. So why bother continuing with the protests now? The progressive mission was accomplished.

That’s the optimistic view for Palestinian activists, anyway. The pessimistic view is that not only did the protests not succeed in terms of foreign policy—“Trump Gaza” is certainly not what the “uncommitted” movement had in mind—but they’ve backfired domestically as well.

A Gallup poll published a few weeks ago asked Democratic voters and “leaners” whether they want to see the party become more liberal, more moderate, or stay the same on policy. “More moderate” earned 45 percent, up 11 points from four years ago; “more liberal” declined to 29 percent, down 5 points over the same period. That jibes with the sense that it wasn’t just inflation and immigration that did Harris in, it was working-class voters across the partisan spectrum concluding that Democrats have grown far too fringe-y on cultural matters to be trusted with power.

“Defund the police,” gender weirdness, and an antisemitic streak ugly enough that even progressive stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have gotten nervous about it: The Democratic Party looks so radical to so many swing voters that a proto-fascist convicted felon seemed like a more responsible option in November.

The sort of left-wing activist who protests the war in Gaza in hopes of “seizing power” from Democratic leaders, as Smith imagines, won’t care about losing elections. But the sort of activist who prefers government by milquetoast centrist Democrats to government by a proto-fascist convicted felon will. Pro-Palestinian protests that too often played like pro-Hamas protests are, or were, yet another progressive cultural excess that ended up scaring the horses on Election Day.

Can you blame those more sensible liberal activists for not wanting to participate anymore? No wonder the number of demonstrations is down.

The Trump factor.

In many ways, the fact that Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden is now president has also undercut the rationale for protests.

For starters, it’s harder now for activists to get the media’s attention. Every day since January 20 the press has been forced to prioritize between covering the end of the American-led world order, the probably illegal subversion of federal agencies by the richest man in the world and his band of twentysomething geeks, the appointment of comically unfit nutjobs to positions of high influence over public health and law enforcement, and more mundane stuff like a new tax-cut bill that’s going to blow another sucking wound in America’s fiscal stability.

The press is a little busy. Who wants to go to the trouble of building a tent city if reporters don’t have time to come out and gawk at it?

Fear is another consideration for demonstrators in the age of Trump, as it is for all of us.

A week after he was sworn in, the president signed an executive order pledging immediate action by the Justice Department to punish unlawful acts of antisemitism on college campuses. The fact sheet that accompanied the order contained a bonus threat for foreign students. “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” it declared, pledging to “also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

Is it legal for the government to punish someone who’s here lawfully for expressing an opinion with which it disagrees? Probably not. Would you want to be the foreign student who tests that theory in court? Also probably not. The legal cost of protesting has gone up since Trump signed his executive order, and as with any good whose price has risen, demand for it has begun to fall.

It’s not just Trump whom activists need to worry about, though. Universities have grown bolder about punishing unruly campus demonstrators since Election Day 2024.

On Monday Barnard College, affiliated with Columbia University, expelled two students who disrupted a class on the history of Israel last month. Not once since the war in Gaza began in October 2023 had that happened at Columbia—until this week. Another example: In December a student at the University of Chicago was arrested in a dorm by local cops and detained for 30 hours for having grabbed the hand of an officer while he was swinging a baton at a protest in October. The student was designated a “threat” by the school administration and barred from campus.

It’s hard to say whether universities are acting out of heartfelt fear of Trump, perhaps fretting that he might meddle in their federal funding if they don’t “monitor” disfavored activism by students, or whether they’re using that as a pretext to follow through with a crackdown they’ve secretly longed to implement. I strongly suspect that the American corporations rushing to jettison their diversity programs were eager to unburden themselves of being ideologically policed by wokesters—and the attendant compliance costs—and viewed Trump’s election as a convenient excuse. (“We don’t want to to do it but we can’t risk angering our vindictive president!”) The schools, or at least some of them, might be behaving similarly.

Either way, protesting is obviously riskier when you know that people with influence over your career prospects are looking to make an example of those who cross a line. There’s a reason some pro-Palestinian activists went anonymous last year when law firms started rescinding job offers from the most obnoxious agitators.

Even if the spirit among demonstrators is willing, the financial flesh might be weak. The tents in those tent cities aren’t free, you know; left-wing fatcats are already at high enough risk of being persecuted by Trump’s administration that they might understandably decline to antagonize the White House by funding a new round of campus chaos.

Futility.

The biggest effect that “the Trump factor” has had on progressive protesters, though, is also the simplest. What would be the point of demonstrating against his Gaza plan, exactly? Now that he’s president, whose opinion would theoretically be moved by a new round of protests?

Protests, in theory, are designed to pressure the government into changing its policies. Trump won’t do that. Not only won’t he do it, he won’t even pretend to take the demonstrators seriously, as Biden and Harris were required to do. He’d love to have them as a foil, I’m sure: Nothing would make his insane “Sandals: Gaza” resort plan seem more appealing than watching pimply teens in Hamas headbands cosplaying as revolutionaries screeching about it at Columbia.

“Forget Trump. Protests might move public opinion,” one might answer. I guess? But how much will public opinion move, realistically, now that the war in Gaza is (sort of) over, Americans are distracted by rising inflation and dozens of daily new Trump insanities, and his “kidding on the square” shtick has made his plans to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians momentarily seem like just another bit of outrageous comic excess that he doesn’t really mean.

Can’t these protesters take a “joke”?

If and when he alarms Americans by turning serious about bulldozing the Gaza Strip and creating a seaside paradise for hirsute belly-dancers, that might finally trigger another burst of large pro-Palestinian demonstrations. But until then, “Trump Gaza” will cause precisely as much public anxiety as turning a crazed, possibly high mega-billionaire loose on the federal government and inviting him to shut down whatever he likes. It’s the sort of thing that would have shocked the activist class and galvanized a response had a “normal” president done it. But when Trump does it?

Americans knew what they were signing up for and handed him a near-majority in the popular vote anyway. Protests only work when the government’s conduct defies popular expectations. How do you build a protest movement in a country that now expects, and accepts, lunacy?