This isn't fascism. These people will get a slap on the wrist and be sent home in a day or two. Under fascism these people would never be heard from again.
This is fascism-lite. Just because people aren't disappeared doesn't mean it's not in the same category. And the only way we can hope to stop from getting to "actual" fascism is by resisting shit like this.
So ACAB, and we are a country with stupidly low quality of freedom despite the morons who just think guns=freedom, and fuck this was a BS move.
However, the Constitution states only that the government will not pass laws that interfere with freedom of assembly. Courts have decided that this includes protests, picketing, labor strikes, etc.
Courts have also concluded that this doesn't mean you can assemble wherever you want, namely on private property. These students were essentially just trespassed by the university. Can't really blame the policeor government for this one, unless you want to lean more extreme that they should be saying "fuck off, we disagree". But I'd rather have a system where the police follow the law because I don't trust any of them to make any good decisions on their own morals.
The chief even came out with a statement that was a dig at the university president that he only observed peaceful protest, not the bullshit she was claiming.
And not a single one of the articles OP posted refer to these as anti-genocide protests.
Every media outlet who keeps framing this as students supporting Palestine or opposing Israel is burying the lede, that these students wouldn’t be supporting or opposing anything if there wasn’t a fucking genocide.
Thats why after years of tiktok bans being non starters the shit suddenly happened in like a week - its the only platform they can't bully into censoring any mention of genocide.
People should really start linking images directly, or at least link to screenshots of that site instead of linking directly to it. I can't view this, and I won't bother if it's on that site.
I'm a Columbia alum. Thank you op for continuing to bring this story and similar ones from all over the country to Lemmy. Hats off to The Spec for still covering the situation on campus. Shefik somehow hasn't tried shutting them down just yet.
I'm still shocked to think NYPD was actually brought into South Lawn. Even there police chief said everyone was peaceful and they were only there because the president called them in.
Now that we’ve reached imperialism, the monopoly stage of capitalism, the police are brutalizing anyone who stands between the capitalists and their imperial interests, in this case their interests in West Asia.
Why is this escalating so much faster than the 1989 Chinese democracy protests or the 2019 Hong Kong protests? In those cases, it took weeks for arrests to happen and months for force to be deployed. Most law enforcement in those cases were unarmed.
Let me get this straight. Public universities (including the University of Minnesota, UT Austin, and others) are private property, despite receiving billions in government funding?