IF THE ELECTION WERE HELD TODAY, DUMP-BIDEN PUNDITS WOULD FEEL VINDICATED

The general election is six months away. A lot can happen in that time. Candidates who are leading right now might not be leading in November. Nevertheless, there's a notable disparity between the poll numbers for President Biden and the numbers for vulnerable Democratic senators.

In the Real Clear Polling average, Biden trails Donald Trump by 1.2 points in a two-candidate race. Trump's lead is small, but Biden hasn't led since October. What's worse, Biden trails in every swing state -- Trump leads by 5 in Arizona, by 3.8 in Georgia, by 1.2 in Michigan, by 4.5 in Nevada, by 5.4 in North Carolina, by 1.8 in Pennsylvania, and by .5 in Wisconsin. If these numbers are accurate and were to hold up in November, Trump would win a popular-vote squeaker, but he'd win the Electoral College easily.

Obviously, that might not happen. But it's where the polls say that the race stands now.

Democrats also face a brutal Senate map, defending seats in a number of red or purple states, as well as fighting to hold on to a seat in Maryland, where a popular Republican ex-governor, Larry Hogan, is running. Democrats are certain to lose the Senate race in West Virginia -- Joe Manchin was the state's last electable Democrat, and he's retiring. A loss there would reduce the Democratic caucus in the Senate from 51 seats to 50, but only if Democrats run the table everywhere else.

If current polls are right, they might just do that. In Arizona, according to Real Clear Polling, Democrat Ruben Gallego leads Republican Kari Lake by 6. In Michigan, Democrat Elissa Slotkin leads her likely Republican challenger, Mike Rogers, by 1.2. In Montana -- Montana! -- Democrat Jon Tester leads Republican Tim Sheehy by 5.5. In Nevada, Democrat Jacky Rosen leads her likely Republican opponent, Sam Brown, by 7. In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown leads Republican Bernie Moreno by 5. In Pennsylvania, Democrat Bob Casey leads Republican Dave McCormick by 5.3. And in Wisconsin, Democrat Tammy Baldwin leads Republican Eric Hovde by 6.7.

In Maryland, according to the RCP average, Larry Hogan leads his potential Democratic challengers, David Trone and Angela Alsobrooks. But in the most recent poll conducted by Emerson College for The Hill, Alsobrooks leads Hogan by 10 and Trone leads Hogan by 11.

I know that many of you don't believe in polls. But this doesn't seem to be a collection of random numbers. Democrats in competitive Senate races are running several points ahead of Biden. Maybe that won't hold up. But if it does, pundits who argued that Biden should drop his reelection bid are likely to feel vindicated.

I hope the optimists are right. I hope skeptical voters come home to Biden. I hope there's a Trump conviction in New York that leads to a decline in his polling. I hope Democrats overperform in this race the way they have in off-year races. But right now, it looks as if Biden is a weaker candidate than the average Democrat, and that's not good.

WHY WOULD OIL BARONS PAY TRUMP A BRIBE FOR SOMETHING HE'LL GIVE THEM FOR FREE?

This, as reported by The Washington Post, is both corrupt and ridiculous:

As Donald Trump sat with some of the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago Club last month, one executive complained about how they continued to face burdensome environmental regulations despite spending $400 million to lobby the Biden administration in the last year.

Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.

Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.

But why should the oil barons bribe Trump to do things he's going to do anyway, as we know from Project 2025, the blueprint for his second presidency?

... Scott Waldman has spent the better part of the year digging through Project 2025 to understand how it would shift U.S. energy and climate priorities and policies....

“To sum it up, what it’s trying to do on climate and energy is basically take the government totally away from any sort of regulation and to use the tools of the government to actually help fossil fuel companies increase their output,” he said.

For example, Project 2025 would replace the president’s clean energy adviser ... with an aide whose efforts would include revoking climate regulations and weakening permitting requirements for fossil fuel companies.

Under the plan, agencies that conduct climate research would be downsized. The U.S. military would be barred from considering climate science when planning for national security threats. And international aid that helps poorer countries respond to climate impacts would instead be used to boost coal, oil and gas. Certain agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, would be downsized....

The 920-page blueprint aims to cut “every regulation or anything, including the federal science itself, that goes toward fighting climate change and reducing U.S. emissions,” Scott said.

Or, as the plan puts it: “The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.”

Trump probably won't prioritize everything in the Project 2025 blueprint -- but he's likely to prioritize this. We know because he regularly mocks efforts to transition from fossil fuels. He says the use of wind power means imaginary TV viewers can't watch when there's no breeze (“‘Darling, I would like to watch the President on television tonight.’ ‘Honey, I don’t think we’ll be able to, the wind is not blowing’”). He grasps on to claims that windmill noise can cause health-threatening sleep disruptions and argues that therefore windmills cause cancer (and he also claims that wind power "kills all the birds"). He's called electric vehicles a "hoax" and said to supporters of a transition to all electric vehicles, "MAY THEY ROT IN HELL."

There's a name for Trump's viewpoint on energy: petro-masculinity.

The [fossil fuel] industry, especially in the U.S., ... serves as an avatar for a certain kind of cultural worldview, one that resonates with tough-guy masculinity and patriarchal families.

In 2011, a study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that white males were overrepresented among people who denied the reality of climate change. Researchers attributed the phenomenon to a desire to “protect their cultural identity.”

... In 2014, researchers in Sweden found that climate denial was “intertwined with a masculinity of industrial modernity that is on decline.” Those who defended the industries destabilizing the planet were trying “to save an industrial society” that men like them had built and dominated, argued the researchers, whose work appeared in Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies.

In 2018, Virginia Tech political scientist Cara Daggett gave the concept a name: petro-masculinity.

“The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit,” Daggett wrote in the international studies journal Millennium. “Fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics.”

Most people think Trump is purely "transactional" and has no strong opinions, but I think this is visceral for him. So if he's elected, especially with a GOP Congress, he'll do what the oil barons want whether or not they give him money. (And remember, this anti-renewable absolutism is mainstream in the GOP, and has been for years, going back to the pre-Trump era.)

The Post story reports on one reason oil billionaires might want to donate to Trump:

“You’ve been waiting on a permit for five years; you’ll get it on Day 1,” Trump told the executives....

He'll be handing out permits like a new store handing out free samples, but it might be worth bribing him to get to the front of the line.

I assume this won't be the only time Trump asks businessmen for bribes. He says he's planning to deport every undocumented immigrant in America. Trump's brain, Stephen Miller, says there'll be raids on workplaces.

More broadly, Mr. Miller said a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.

If this happens, it will be very disruptive to businesses, including some big businesses. I think Trump will tell (or is already telling) executives of companies that hire a lot of undocumented workers, "Bribe me and I won't raid your factories." And they'll pay up.

NEW YORK TIMES STORIES ABOUT ANTI-SEMITISM APPARENTLY NEED "BALANCE," BUT ONLY IF THE ANTI-SEMITES ARE REPUBLICAN

There's a pretty good story in The New York Times right now headlined "How Republicans Echo Antisemitic Tropes Despite Declaring Support for Israel":

For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots.

The conspiracy theory taking on fresh currency is one that dates back hundreds of years and has perennially bubbled into view: that a shady cabal of wealthy Jews secretly controls events and institutions contrary to the national interest of whatever country it is operating in.

The current formulation of the trope taps into the populist loathing of an elite “ruling class.” “Globalists” or “globalist elites” are blamed for everything from Black Lives Matter to the influx of migrants across the southern border, often described as a plot to replace native-born Americans with foreigners who will vote for Democrats. The favored personification of the globalist enemy is George Soros, the 93-year-old Hungarian American Jewish financier and Holocaust survivor who has spent billions in support of liberal causes and democratic institutions.

Many examples of this kind of rhetoric are quoted.

Mr. Trump frequently referred to Mr. Soros as “shadowy” and “the man behind the curtain who’s destroying our country.” He linked Mr. Soros and other enemies to a “globalist cabal,” echoing the trope that Jews secretly control the world’s financial and political systems.... Republican members of Congress repeatedly made incendiary and conspiratorial claims about Mr. Soros and globalists — that they were “evil,” that they “hate America” and that they wanted the American people to be “humiliated or destroyed and replaced or dead.” Republicans blamed them for leading people to “forget about God and family values,” for controlling the media, for allowing “violent criminals and rapists to get off scot-free” and more.

But apparently a story like this can't appear in the Times without "balance." We're reminded that college campuses harbor anti-Semites as well:

While largely peaceful, the campus protests over Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that has killed tens of thousands have been loud and disruptive and have at times taken on a sharpened edge. Jewish students have been shouted at to return to Poland, where Nazis killed three million Jews during the Holocaust. There are chants and signs in support of Hamas, whose attack on Israel sparked the current war. A leader of the Columbia protests declared in a video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

And hey, what about those Democrats?

In November, the Republican-led House, with support from 22 Democrats, censured Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat and Congress’s sole Palestinian American, for her statements after the Hamas attack, including “from the river to the sea.”

To be fair, the Times story clearly suggests that the problem is worse in the GOP: The paper found that "at least 790 emails from Mr. Trump to his supporters invoked Mr. Soros or globalists conspiratorially," and that there were "more than 300" similar messages "from 79 [Republican] members [of Congress] in 2023," while "roughly 20 [statements] from the last decade by a handful of Democrats, including Ms. Tlaib, ... could be construed as antisemitic."

Nevertheless, the Times deemed it necessary to point out this messaging from Democrats and campus progressives in a story about Republicans -- despite the fact that the paper didn't think it was necessary to mention Republican anti-Semitism in stories about pro-Gaza protests.

There's nothing about the GOP's own anti-Semitism in the Times story "Republicans Try to Put Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn on the Defensive About Antisemitism," from December 5; or in "Columbia’s President Tells Congress That Action Is Needed Against Antisemitism," from April 17; or in three Times stories about high school officials who were grilled by House Republicans yesterday. Elise Stefanik, the Republican who led the charge against all these educators, is specifically mentioned in today's GOP anti-Semitism story as a purveyor of conspiratorial tropes -- but that never came up in the Times stories about the GOP-led hearings in which she starred.

Today's story is well worth reading, and I hope the paper's audience learns something about the Republican Party from it. But if "balance" was necessary in this story, it should have been necessary in the earlier ones.

IF RIGHT-WINGERS ARE HAPPY, WHY ARE THEY SO ANGRY?

In The New York Times, Thomas Edsall examines the reported disparity in happiness between liberals and conservatives:

Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?

A partial answer: Those on the right are less likely to be angered or upset by social and economic inequities, believing that the system rewards those who work hard, that hierarchies are part of the natural order of things and that market outcomes are fundamentally fair.

Those on the left stand in opposition to each of these assessments of the social order, prompting frustration and discontent with the world around them.

Edsall devotes most of his lengthy column to the question of whether liberals are miserable because they think the world treats certain groups poorly. He seems to agree that that's the case.

He points out that conservatives also have problems with the world as it is. However, they don't turn sad -- they just get angry:

Citing a wide range of polling data and academic studies, [Vox's Zack] Beauchamp found:

* More than twice as many Republicans (39 percent) as Democrats (17 percent) believe that “if elected leaders won’t protect America, the people must act — even if that means violence.”

* Fifty-seven percent of Republicans consider Democrats to be “enemies” compared with 41 percent of Democrats who view Republicans as enemies.

* Among Republicans, support for “the use of force to defend our way of life,” as well as for the belief that “strong leaders bend rules” and that “sometimes you have to take the law in your own hands,” grows stronger in direct correlation with racial and ethnic hostility.

... [They] respond to adversity and what they see as attacks from the left with threats and anger, while a segment of the left often but not always responds to adversity and social inequity with dejection and sorrow.

So research suggests that they're angrier than liberals, but they're also happier than liberals. Edsall seems to accept the notion it's possible to stew in anger while feeling quite happy. Does that match your real-world experience? It certainly doesn't match mine.

Right-wingers certainly seem angry -- angry that Joe Biden is president; angry because they think the election was stolen; angry at the very existence of Black people, undocumented immigrants, gay and trans people, feminists, abortion-seekers and providers, Muslims, vegetarians, Hollywood filmmakers, city-dwellers, and liberals in general. So how do they remain cheerful?

Here's a theory: Right-wingers aren't angry at all. They have fulfilling, happy lives in their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Christian, permanently Republican outer-ring suburbs and exurbs. What they express as anger is actually mild frustration because they can't force the rest of us to live exactly the way they do.

Where they live, no one would dare to stage a Pride parade or open a vegan restaurant, much less an abortion clinic. But that's not good enough for them. They want to impose constraints on us as well. They don't want our children to read books they wouldn't want their children to read; they don't want any of us buying from companies that market to groups they don't like, even if those companies separately market to them.

And they certainly don't want to share power with us, even though, based on the popular vote totals in seven of the last eight presidential elections, we outnumber them, and even though our politicians regularly do outreach to them -- with welfare reform and the crime bill in the '90s, and the infrastructure bill now -- while their politicians express nothing but contempt for us.

They want us to become them, by force if necessary. But they're happy to live their bubble-dwelling lives in the meantime, because they're not really angry -- they just want conquest.

RIGHT-WINGERS THINK ABOUT SPERM A LOT

I found this at Reddit yesterday, under the headline "Pro-Trump Supporters on Twitter Make AI Images of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Being Pro-Trump and Being Trump’s Wife":

The top image is unsurprising -- Fox News taught right-wingers to hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but straight right-wing guys find her desirable, and for them, "desirable" means both pornified and Trumpified. But it's the second image (which has been kicking around since last fall) that's truly creepy. This is pregnancy as conquest, ideologically and racially. If it makes you think of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, or Strom Thurmond and Carrie Butler, congratulations, you've solved the puzzle. Ick.

I'm trying to figure out whether there's a connection between the mindset that produced these images and this:

In one of his most bizarre interviews in recent memory, Donald Trump insisted abortion is “not that big of an issue” [and] claimed Republicans are the “party of fertilization”...

During an interview last week with a local Michigan TV station FOX-2 Detroit, Trump ... called the GOP the “party of fertilization,” apparently trying to make the case that Republicans have fought to ensure women’s access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF. But not only is that false, he lost that point completely in an indecipherable word salad.

On IVF, Trump said:

We're, like, the party of fertilization, because we are for the women. We want to help the women. Because they were going to end fertilization, which is where, what, the IVF, where women go to the clinics and they get help in having a baby, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And we’re for it 100%. They tried to say that -- they weren’t for it. They actually weren’t for it and aren’t for it as much as us, but women see that,” he said.

Trump says this as part of his usual talking point on abortion -- namely that it's now being decided by the states, and that's wonderful and democratic and everybody should be happy (and, by implication, nobody who's pro-choice and happens to live in a state where abortion is banned should blame him). If I understand his monologue, Trump is describing the restoration of legalized IVF in Alabama as proof that the Republican Party is totally on board with IVF (even though just about every opponent of IVF is a Republican), and additionally saying that because Democrats overwhelmingly support abortion rights, they're less in favor of fertilization than Republicans -- because you can't support the right to an abortion for someone who doesn't want a child and also support the right to IVF for someone who does, right?

I think Trump is dumb enough to have put this together all by himself. But I wonder if his use of the word "fertility" was in any way influenced by sperm- and pregnancy-obsessed aides, especially younger male aides who might have chuckled over those AOC images.

A related story I read yesterday was this one:

The Daily Wire announced the launch of a new “men’s lifestyle” company named Responsible Man on May 1, promoting its only current product — a men’s dietary supplement that it says is “designed to help … sharpen brain cognition” and that it suggests will help address what the outlet calls the “increasing health risk” of declining “sperm concentration.”

The Daily Wire's announcement is a trip:

Just like the constant consumption of MSNBC and CNN lacks the truth and reality your mind requires, your modern diet is often deficient in key vitamins and minerals, leaving you weakened and diminished — unable to reach your full potential. Sadly, in recent years, men have faced an increasing health risk as studies have shown that among men worldwide, sperm concentration has fallen drastically over the past 50 years, and the drop is accelerating....

Wokeness is a devastating disease that can affect both the mind and the body. And the woke Left loves to celebrate when it sees men fail. With so much wokeness causing chaos and uncertainty, it’s crucial that you take charge of your mind and body.

And you can start with the Emerson Multivitamin from Responsible Man.

Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk is still arguing that "more young women need to get married at a younger age and start having kids," because they become "depressed, suicidal, anxious, [and] lonely" if they remain single and childless after thirty, after which "they're not going to be able to have kids and that they're not as desirable in the dating market."

Why do YOU think women are less conservative?

Don't miss YWLS 2024 this June 7th-9th in San Antonio, TX for the biggest gathering of conservative women! Register now: https://t.co/vHgFgaF0cm 💗 pic.twitter.com/KGnMDD96SG

— Turning Point USA (@TPUSA) April 22, 2024

I suppose we should be grateful that Republican propagandists aren't advocating harems of babymamas for white men, like Andrew Tate, who says whitre guys should adopt this approach if they're worried about the so-called Great Replacement:

I sometimes think about trying to write a dystopian near-future novel in which the president of the United States is an Andrew Tate figure -- a charismatic misogynist psychopath whose politics are today's Republicanism, but with even more upfront toxic masculinity. I don't think that could really happen -- you'll say we're already there with Donald Trump, but he pretends to be a happily married man. In any case, a diluted form of Tateism is showing up in GOP messaging. And I expect more in the years to come.

WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS BIDEN IS OLD, IT DOESN'T REMIND YOU THAT HE'S STILL SHARP

I'm seeing a lot of social-media criticism of Ben Smith's Semafor interview with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. I don't think Kahn is entirely off base when he says this:

... there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

The Times does report on Trump's dangerous second-term agenda fairly often, in pieces like this one:

But it does seem sometimes as if this reporting is walled off from campaign-trail reporting on Trump, and from the kind of "lifestyle" reporting on Trump that regularly appears -- here's Trump using his iPad to DJ at Mar-a-Lago! and that sort of thing. But maybe it's not the job of the Times to connect these dots. Maybe it's up to readers to do that, and up to the Biden camapign and the Democratic Party.

I'd say that the coverage of President Biden in the Times is more dangerous than the coverage of Donald Trump. What do you know about the paper's perspective on Biden? That he's portrayed as really old. Here's a Times story: "Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024." Here's another: "Why the Age Issue Is Hurting Biden So Much More Than Trump." This one includes the following paragraph:

Mr. Biden’s voice has grown softer and raspier, his hair thinner and whiter. He is tall and trim but moves more tentatively than he did as a candidate in 2019 and 2020, often holding his upper body stiff, adding to an impression of frailty. And he has had spills in the public eye: falling off a bicycle, tripping over a sandbag.

Here's another story: "Polling Has Indicated a Majority of Voters Are Concerned About Biden’s Age — Including Democrats."

Now, here's part of an exchange from the Semafor interview:

Ben: Do you think that an alien reading The New York Times would come away thinking Joe Biden is a good president?

Joe: I think you would see a much more favorable view of Biden’s conduct over foreign policy at a difficult time than the polling shows the general public believes. The reporting in detail on his real commitment to national security; his deep involvement on the Ukraine war with Russia; the building or rebuilding of NATO; and then the very, very difficult task of managing Israel and the regional stability connected with the Gaza war … shows a degree of engagement and mastery over some of the details of foreign policy. I believe even an alien would see Biden as much more hands-on in this area....

I also think we’ve done much more — whether it’s the Inflation Reduction Act, whether it’s the infrastructure bill — on the details of the legislation that passed, and the efforts of this administration to actually implement that and get the money out there. So if you were reading The New York Times you would know about that legislation. In the general public, he actually doesn’t get enough credit for the legislation. So I think you’d get a pretty well-rounded, fair portrait of Biden. Of course, you’d also see some coverage about his frailty and his age. But it depends.

So here's a problem with the coverage of Biden in the Times: Yes, the paper depicts his "deep involvement" in issues, his "engagement and mastery," his efforts to get domestic legislation passed and make programs work -- but we're never told about any of this in stories about his age. To hear Kahn tell it, Biden has unquestionably demonstrated ability to do the work he's expected to do as president. So if this is a plain fact, why isn't it presented that way in the many news stories about Biden's age? Why aren't we told in those stories that Biden might walk slowly or stumble over a word or a name, but he's on top of this very difficult job and doing it effectively?

Maybe the Biden campaign can't wait around for good media coverage -- I've argued that Biden's team should shoot documentary footage of Biden engaging with his staff energetically and intelligently in the White House, and release it to demonstrate that Biden's still sharp. But if Biden still has mental clarity, a command of the facts, and an ability to make judgments, the Times needs to report this when it reports on his age. It's not editorializing to do that. It's reporting plain facts in order to give the public the context it needs to make a judgment on whether Biden should continue to govern.

THE "PROFESSIONAL OUTSIDE AGITATORS" DELUSION IS A LOT LIKE TRUMP'S BIG LIE

Eric Adams, the nominally Democratic mayor of New York, believes that "outside agitators" bear a great deal of responsibility for the pro-Gaza protests on colleges campuses in the city. On Fox News (naturally), a deputy commissioner of the city's police department delivered the city's official line on this issue:

NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard to Neil: "We're very confident that we know that these, outside agitators and influences were present and, will continue to be present at these protests." pic.twitter.com/PKwKAdFyu8

— Neil Cavuto (@TeamCavuto) May 2, 2024

CAVUTO: ... You have no doubt that some of what you picked up and saw shows that there are outside agitators involved. How would you know?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER SHEPPARD: Absolutely. So, some are self-identified on social media. We recognize them from the past and some of the protests they've attended before. But also, when we look at the arrests and we run histories of some of the people we arrested, we see some of them who have participated in some protests, in some of the actions that they've participated in before. And so we're very confident that we know that these outside agitators and influencers were present and will continue to be present at these protests.

So Sheppard can identify some of these "outside agitators and influencers" because they're among the arrestees, right? Gosh darn it, he can't.

SHEPPARD: But make no mistake: They may not be swept up in an arrest. These are professionals. They get a heads-up when we're starting to tac up and get ready to go into these schools, and they may just fly in for a day or two and leave. But their job is --

CAVUTO: So they could be coming from way outside --

"They could be coming from way outside" is a dog whistle to the Fox audience, one that's instantly understood to mean They could be trained terrorists who crossed over Biden's open border so they can destroy America.

SHEPPARD: Many times --

CAVUTO: And they go from protest to protest, or spark one --

SHEPPARD: Absolutely. You'll see them travel around the country. And they have funding. They are funded by private individuals around the world sometimes who --

So that's the Conspiracy So Vast part of this argument. Here's the brainwashing part:

CAVUTO: But how do they get the students involved, then? Do they gun them on, or -- What's their role?

SHEPPARD: Yeah, it's propaganda, it's social media, it's -- the student are already passionate and upset about an issue and now you have a person whispering in your ear that "Hey," you know, "we should take over the building," or something like that. It's -- when young minds are in that state, it's pretty easy to then be influenced by somebody who is a professional at manipulation.

This is so ridiculous that even The New York Times isn't buying it:

One of the people arrested at Columbia University this week was a middle-aged saxophonist who headed up to the campus from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment after learning about the protests on social media.

Another was tending his sidewalk pepper patch a few blocks from the student demonstrations when he learned the police were moving in and, grabbing a metal dog bowl and a spoon to bang against it, rushed to the students’ aid.

A third had been active in other left-leaning protests across the city but also happened to work as a nanny nearby. She went to the university gates on Tuesday and linked arms with other protesters in an unsuccessful attempt to thwart the advancing officers, she said.

... Mayor Eric Adams and other city leaders have accused so-called outside agitators — professional organizers with no ties to the university — of hijacking a peaceful student protest and spurring its participants to adopt ever more aggressive tactics.

... A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country....

But the examination also revealed that far more of the unaffiliated protesters had no such histories. Rather, they said, they arrived at Columbia in response to word of mouth or social media posts to join the demonstration out of some combination of solidarity and curiosity.

There was little evidence to suggest they had helped organize or escalate the protests, and many were arrested without having ever set foot on campus. Typical among them was Matthew Cavalletto, a 52-year-old computer programmer who has lived within a half-mile of Columbia for most of his life. Mr. Cavalletto, the gardener with the dog bowl, was arrested on the street outside Columbia after he stood in the middle of the intersection and refused to budge. He dismissed the notion that any outsiders were pulling the strings.

“I sort of had to laugh because I guess you could think of me as an outside agitator,” Mr. Cavalletto said. “Not that far outside, like six blocks away, but, you know, almost outside.”

Here's a photo of Cavaletto:

He doesn't exactly look like a guy who's living large on globally sourced payments from Big Unrest.

What Sheppard and Cavuto say reminds of the way Donald Trump and others talk about the 2020 election. There couldn't possibly have been 81 million legitimate votes for Joe Biden! It's unimaginable that anyone would prefer Biden to Trump! Professional vote fakers and vote tally manipulators must be responsible!

Similarly, no one would actually want to do what the students are doing now. Professionals must have brainwashed them!

Trump generally argues that some (most?) of Biden's votes in 2020 were fake, but he argued for brainwashing in his speech to donors at Mar-a-Lago yesterday:

“When you are Democrat, you start off essentially at 40 percent because you have civil service, you have the unions and you have welfare,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday. “And don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that — they cheat.”

It's just unimaginable to these people that anyone would freely make a decision to act in a way they wouldn't act. Only bribery explains a vote for a Democrat.

You don't have to be an ignoramus like Trump, Adams, or Sheppard to think this way. Here's the Very Smart public intellectual George Packer explaining in The Atlantic why the students are revolting -- it's because the unrest of 1968 turned colleges into brainwashing factories:

A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

The students can't help themselves! These malign instincts have been inculcated in them!

(I was Class of 1980. I'm not sure why this never happened to us.)

There's hardly an inch of daylight between the very smart George Packer and our not-very-bright mayor:

On a local Fox News channel, Adams was asked to provide firm details but instead gave an analogy: “If you have one bad professor educating 30, 40, 50 college students with inappropriate actions, you don’t need 50 bad professors speaking to 50 students.”

He added that “if it’s one, if it’s two, it’s 20, that is what we need to be focusing on”.

It's the evil professors! It's the international cabal of outside agitators! It can't possibly be that the kids have actually thought about the issues involved and arrived at their own conclusions.