Anti-Israel protesters are once again causing chaos on college campuses from coast to coast. In New York City, Columbia University has been taken over by tents and law enforcement has been on hand to prevent a similar situation from developing at New York University.
As it turns out, at least some of the students turning out for the demonstrations don’t have the slightest clue what they are doing there.
On Wednesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Heather Mac Donald, author of When Race Trumps Merit, to discuss the ignorance of many of the protesters and whether or not they could even find Israel and Gaza on a map.
Ignorance at NYU
As Columbia administrators “negotiate” with those who have set up an encampment on the Ivy League university’s Morningside Heights campus to protest the school’s financial ties with Israel, crowds have also gathered downtown at NYU.
A group called the NYU Palestine Solidarity Coalition led students in a walk out of classes on Tuesday in the aftermath of violent protests that unfolded the night before. While some of the antics are being blamed on ‘professional agitators,’ it appears as though a portion of the people in attendance aren’t even totally sure why they are there.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani posted a video on X on Wednesday in which a man asks a woman who had gathered outside a NYU building near Washington Square Park what she was protesting. Her response? “I really don’t know.”
QUESTIONER: And what did you say is the main goal with tonight’s protest?
PROTESTER 1: I think the goal is just showing our support for Palestine and demanding that NYU stops– I honestly don’t know all of what NYU is doing.
QUESTIONER: Is there something that NYU is doing?
PROTESTER 1: I really don’t know. I am pretty sure– Do you know what NYU is doing?
PROTESTER 2: About what?
PROTESTER 1: About Israel. Why are we protesting here at NYU specifically?
PROTESTER 2: I wish I was more educated.
PROTESTER 1: I’m not either. I came from Columbia. I was there up at Columbia and we came down. They said NYU students needed our support, so I came down. I heard there’s lots of cops. Some people were saying it’s getting dangerous.
Mac Donald was willing to wager there is a lot more the young women don’t know. “They know nothing. Let’s give them a map with all of the countries’ names wiped out and let’s see if they can even find Gaza on a map – much less Jordan, the Golan Heights, Syria, Iran,” she said. “Right now [they] should be devoted to one thing and that is overcoming [their] embarrassing ignorance about the world and [their] place in it.”
Victimhood Culture
The term being used to describe many of the student protesters on their elite college campuses is, as Megyn noted, “Selma envy” because “they’re just so desperate to be part of something that matters and they missed that particular movement.”
Instead, Megyn said “they’re finding something else and falsely trying to compare themselves to people who actually did suffer and didn’t endure a lot in order to change this country.” Case in point: The students who are “claiming they are on a hunger strike when really they are ordering sushi to their George Soros-funded tent… claiming ‘woe is me’ while they’re sneaking off for a little salsa dancing… claiming, as Ilhan Omar’s daughter who goes to Barnard… and was suspended in connection with one of these protests, [she is] now homeless.”
With the academic year drawing to a close, Mac Donald believes these students will soon be in for a rude awakening. “You can pretend like you’re hostages and we’re negotiating with you and you’re in danger, but they’ll be thrown out into the real world and there will be nobody to negotiate with,” she cautioned. “They’re like little babies swaddled by all of the DEI bureaucrats, and the ‘student services’ bureaucrats, and the vice presidents of ‘first get students,’ and… they’re addicted to melodrama and to fiction because they are living in fictional worlds.”
In reality, Mac Donald said, “they are not oppressed in America, they have more freedom than has ever been experienced in all of human history, and yet they live in a world that perversely celebrates victimhood by self-acclamation.”
You can check out Megyn’s interview with Mac Donald by tuning in to episode 774 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.