on campus protests, "unite the right," and jan. 6

It’s Tuesday night when I'm writing this, and there’s a photo passing around the internet showing some two dozen police officers walking up a ramp affixed to a police vehicle. The officers are moving into Hamilton Hall on the Columbia University campus. They’re armed, and there to remove a contingent of students who have occupied the building as part of an anti-war encampment that parts of the Columbia administration and U.S. political establishment has decided ought to be smashed through a show of state-sanctioned violence. 

It should be harrowing, but instead high-minded political commentators have offered their own justifications for what’s happening there to a bunch of teenagers. David Frum said at 10:07 p.m. after a phalanx of NYPD officers began dragging unarmed students around: “If you don't want to be Weimar, you unapologetically enforce public order against both the Reds and the Browns.” Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican from New York, accused the protesters of “embracing the rhetoric and ideology of Hamas.” Eric Adams, New York’s mayor, said without evidence that the protest had been “co-opted” before sending in waves of police officers armed with borderline military equipment. 

Then there’s the Biden administration. In a statement, Andrew Bates, his deputy press secretary said, “President Biden has stood against repugnant, antisemitic smears and violent rhetoric his entire life. He condemns the use of the term ‘intifada,’ as he has the other tragic and dangerous hate speech displayed in recent days.” Bates decried the students’ occupation as “wrong.” 

These comments are disingenuous. But in terms of laying the groundwork for cracking down on anti-war protesters, students or otherwise, there’s two comparisons that some commentators have drawn that provide a worrying roadmap for what to expect next. Those are parallels to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the aftermath of both events, some policymakers encouraged installing a domestic terrorism statute to combat white supremacist organizing.

While these efforts have thankfully failed, it’s hard to not see echoes of the same strategy in recent legislation and commentary that has found the bipartisan backing these efforts lacked. 

“The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was reprehensible. But it ended in two days. What’s happening now on college campuses is worse. It’s been happening for weeks with no end in sight. It’s based on hatred toward Jews and America,” Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary under George W. Bush wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night.

Fleischer was far from the first to draw the comparison. On April 26, Donald Trump told reporters outside of a New York courthouse, where he is currently on trial for allegedly paying hush-money to an adult film star, that “Unite the Right” was “nothing” compared to the protests on college campuses now.

“We’re having protests all over,” Trump said.

“Charlottesville was a little peanut, and it was nothing compared — and the hate wasn’t the kind of hate that you have here, this is tremendous hate,” he added. 

In a separate comment earlier this week, Trump compared the Columbia students occupying Hamilton Hall to Jan. 6 rioters.

“They took over a building. That is a big deal. And I wonder if what’s going to happen to them will be anything comparable to what happened to J6, because they’re doing a lot of destruction, a lot of damages, a lot of people getting hurt very badly. I wonder if that’s going to be the same kind of treatment they gave J6. Let’s see how that works out,” Trump said on Tuesday. 

Trump’s comments, in both cases, were widely reported as downplaying the violence in Charlottesville or Washington, D.C., as they ought to be. But this right-wing frame of drawing an incongruous comparison in order to justify a large-scale, violent police crackdown is one that liberals have stumbled into before. 

In late October, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to a question from a Fox News reporter asking whether “anti-Israel protesters in this country are extremist” by invoking “Unite the Right.”

“I have been very, very clear: We are calling out any form of hate — any form of hate. It is not acceptable. It should not be accepted here. And we are going to continue to call that out,” Jean-Pierre said. 

The parallels are about as nonsensical as a recent CNN segment comparing the current climate on college campuses to 1930s Germany. Nevertheless, they're telling.

In the wake of “Unite the Right” and the Jan. 6 insurrection, lawmakers, commentators and some anti-extremism groups advocated for enhanced domestic terrorism laws, arguing that such legislation is necessary to clamp down on right-wing extremism. 

These arguments rested on several pillars, but at its core was the belief that "the creation of a special designation for domestic terror organizations… [would enable] the conviction and imprisonment of those who offer material support," as I wrote in the New Republic in 2021. Doing so, proponents argued, would allow law enforcement to do their job by making it easier to interrupt violent plots or curtail mass organizing. Critics, including myself, saw it as a revival of "war on terror" tactics, albeit with a different target.

A domestic terrorist designation was meant to fill in the gap between the expansive prosecutorial and surveillance powers that the government has against foreign terrorist groups. The U.S. government keeps a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, or FTOs, but as the name makes clear, this designation does not work for domestic organizations. One key aspect of the designation is that individuals who provide what the government refers to as “material support” to FTOs are subject to prosecution. The definition of “material support” is notoriously broad and includes currency, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice, communication equipment, and a whole lot of other things—with the sole exceptions of “medicine or religious materials.” 

In early 2020, Politico reported that the State Department intended to designate Atomwaffen Division, a terroristic neo-Nazi group with ties to multiple murders and alleged murders but that was founded in the United States, a FTO. The effort failed, despite advocates for the FTO designation providing evidence that Atomwaffen Division chapters existed abroad. Instead, the State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement — a Russian ultra-nationalist group that is frequently, and incorrectly, referred to as neo-Nazi, though it has collaborated with various neo-Nazi groups — as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) group, a lesser designation. Advocates of domestic terrorist legislation welcomed the move, including the Anti-Defamation League. 

These proposals failed for good reasons (i.e., they’re disastrous for anyone who cares about civil rights) and for bad reasons (i.e., the Republican Party has aligned itself with the Capitol rioters, and Trump is now going on about people being “anti-white,” whatever the hell that means). But the notion of embracing “war on terror” tactics has lived on, now targeting the left, anti-Zionist Jews, Palestinians, advocates for Palestinian rights, and Arabs more generally.

In the Senate, there’s a bill empowering the government to strip nonprofit groups of their tax-exempt status if they’re deemed to support terrorism. The text cites an actual Hamas-affiliated organization, only to go on to reference Students for Justice in Palestine, a campus group that the bill’s authors alludes to being part of a grander conspiracy to foment antisemitic hatred on college campuses. The bill rests on the same concept of blocking "material support."

“This is how you accuse and hold accountable American citizens in violation of U.S. material support laws, and there’s a well-established way to do that that involves due process. This is a new track to do that without any due process protections,” Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace told The Nation. 

Today, the House voted 320-91 to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism into federal anti-discrimination law. The IHRA’s definition has been roundly criticized by experts for failing to delineate between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Rep. Lawler, the New York legislator who compared student protesters at Columbia to Hamas, is leading the bill. 

These pieces of legislation, combined with the repeated and seemingly systematic effort to portray student protesters as either aligned or doing the bidding of an international terrorist organization, follow in the footsteps of a post-October 7 effort to portray all pro-Palestinian activism as terroristic. They come out of the same playbook of the original “war on terror,” whose legacy has permanently stained American politics, and its subsequent mutations.

“Left alone, [the “war on terror”] will continue to produce neither peace nor victory; it will remain the soil from which to cultivate more and worse Trumps. Of all the endless costs of terrorism, the most important is the least tallied: what fighting it has cost our democracy. How like America it is not to recognize that the true threat was counterterrorism, not terrorism,” Spencer Ackerman wrote in his book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. 

The “war on terror” is a worldview, not a package of policy prescriptions. It’s the belief that using draconian legal procedures to fight an amorphous enemy, now loosely defined as “hate.” It promises security and offers nothing but violence — hardly a lasting societal building block, let alone a method to combat antisemitism — in return. 

It’s a dangerous and counterproductive game. 

Updated to reflect the recent House vote.