Too Gay to Rebel

The flaccid histrionics of our contemporary protest movement

Since last week, antiwar protests have broken out on college campuses across the country. What’s notable to me is the combination of a complete lack of violence along with the hysterical accusations of such and hyperbole going back and forth between the two sides. Everyone deep down knows that no one is going to get hurt, not by the police and not by the protestors, but that it is to their advantage to pretend as if this isn’t the case. We are truly in an era of flaccid histrionics.

The whole thing feels limp and fake, perfect for a generation afraid to go outside, have sex, or otherwise pass what used to be normal milestones on the road to adulthood. I thought about this while watching a video of Khyami James (“he/she/they”), a protest leader at Columbia, declaring that the rest of us are lucky that he is not out murdering Zionists. The contrast between the gay theatric voice and the words coming out of his mouth highlights the absurdity of the current moment. I would personally not feel the least bit threatened walking by Khyami while waving an Israeli flag. At worst, I imagine that he/she/they might tell me to “talk to the hand,” if gays still say that. Ilhan Omar posted a video of herself walking around Columbia, and the two males she greets are characteristically behind N95 masks and have extreme cases of gay voice.

Pronoun person threatening violence in gay voice.

Over a quarter of Ivy League and more than a third of liberal arts students now identify as LGBT. The numbers at Harvard have approximately tripled over the last decade, up to 29%, with Brown at 38%, and Princeton at 35%. Younger generations are gayer overall, but LGBT is still so overrepresented at elite schools that it calls out for an explanation. Some of it might just be that having a minority sexual preference or identity positively correlates with intelligence and other factors that justifiably help one get into an elite college. But Eric Kaufmann thinks that the increasing LGBT numbers in the general population might be exaggerated by sample bias. And knowing university admissions offices, there’s a good chance that they’re using indicators like personal essays to directly select for LGBT, along with political views that are strongly correlated with it.

While some thought has been given to the effect that the entrance of women has had on institutions, there hasn’t been much attention focused on what it means for our elites to become so overwhelmingly gay. This is because we are in the earliest stages of this transformation, as LGBT identity among youth didn’t begin to skyrocket until the last decade or so. Thus, there hasn’t been enough time for this trend to remake society, though today’s college students are part of the gayest generation we have ever seen.

The protests we now see reflect that. This isn’t Kent State, where students were throwing beer bottles at cop cars and breaking storefront windows and an ROTC building was set on fire, eventually provoking the Ohio National Guard to kill four people and wound nine others. We saw actual violence during the Summer of Floyd, but very little from college students themselves or young people with prospects. The offending parties were generally disturbed antifa losers and run-of-the-mill urban criminals.

In contrast, with the Gaza protests involving college students, we witness an extremely low propensity towards violence or actual aggression along with a great deal of screeching about liberating Palestine, fascist governors and cops cracking down on them, and how all Zionists need to die. The fact that certain Jewish students take this seriously and are being indulged by conservative media shows that the culture of victimhood is bipartisan and crosses ideological lines. I’m not necessarily against this as a political strategy, as it’s an election year, and if we’re going to have a society where claims of victimhood are the currency of the realm then Republicans are probably going to have to play that game too. But we can still find what it says more broadly about the culture disturbing, and consider it a problem.

Jewish students claim that they are “under threat,” with Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley calling for the National Guard to protect them. More than 100 Israeli students at Columbia wrote a letter to the school saying that they “fear for their lives.” An MIT graduate student warns of brain drain if Jews start fleeing American universities. Meanwhile, on planet earth, among the worst cases of explicit antisemitism we’ve seen is Jewish students being told to “go back to Poland,” which is not a nice thing to say, but hardly worth congressional hearings and new federal legislation. At George Washington University, someone had a sign that said “Final Solution,” but he looks way too old to be a student, the intention behind the message seems pretty ambiguous given his likely disturbed state of mind, and I would guess that this is just a case of a crazy local street person making his way into the protests. I do in fact think anti-Zionism is motivated by antisemitism, in the same way that socialist and pro-crime views are motivated by anti-white animus. But this is standard leftist hate, not a return to nineteenth century pogroms, and more threatening for the bad policies it can lead to than any kind of direct violence it may inflict on innocent people.

I think that these protests are a harbinger of what is to come, just as how incidents like the Yale costume controversy of 2015 foreshadowed trends that started on college campuses taking over the rest of society. Future generations of leaders will be more LGBT than they were in the past, both because homosexuality and trans identity have increased generally and that is what elite universities are selecting for.

This means we will have an elite that is so averse to violence that it is not only unlikely to form the vanguard of any kind of revolutionary movement, but be extremely uncomfortable with its use to maintain order, whether at home or abroad. The revulsion at the harshness of the Israeli war effort, which others might see as a necessary evil, goes hand-in-hand with a dislike of law enforcement and men with weapons employed to settle disputes or solve problems more generally.

A distaste for violence does not mean a live and let live attitude, however. There is also an extreme safetyism, as can be seen in the commitment to masking among student protesters. It’s amusing that when the president of Columbia wanted to justify her decision to call in the NYPD, she said it was necessary to prevent students from burning their tents down while cooking. Force can only be used to make sure you don’t hurt yourself. This is what Sam Francis called anarcho-tyranny, though I’d put more emphasis on the personality flaws and neuroses of our elites than any kind of conscious or unconscious plan to expand government power. It’s probably not a coincidence that San Francisco is the gayest major city in America and also the one that has gone furthest down this path.

The silver lining here is that conservative political power is getting better at coping with low human capital, and geographically and institutionally limiting the damage that an increasingly insane leftism can do. This generation of gay hysterics aren’t the types to truly rebel or sacrifice for their cause. DeSantis threatening to expel them all seems like it’s been enough to keep a lid on things on Florida campuses. The president of the University of Texas has consciously sought to prevent his school from becoming another Columbia, with the active support of politicians. But if that’s your strategy, and one has to give up on winning over Elite Human Capital for at least a generation, you better do what it takes to make sure you don’t lose political power. Exaggerating the degree of antisemitism we’re seeing on college campuses is a small price to pay in order to keep the masked pronoun people from overrunning the rest of society, and make sure that Hamas is defeated abroad. In the long run, however, I’d still like to see a political culture that rejects all unjustified claims to victimhood. Perhaps we can look to Israeli society in its heroic war against savagery for inspiration.