The great Republican counter-protest of 2024

James Comer and his colleagues were not on George Washington University’s campus for very long. They arrived at 2 p.m. on Wednesday — first for private meetings with administrators, then for a slow walk through the “Liberation Zone” that pro-Palestinian students had built on University Yard. Seventy-four minutes later, after a short press conference, they climbed into a white van and headed off.

That was still too long for the protesters they met. Some of them blocked activists who’d wrapped their heads in keffiyehs before they could approach members of the House Oversight Committee. One group sang and clapped along to “Palestine is Heaven,” and another positioned itself to raise mocking signs behind Comer. Lauren Boebert stopped to yank a Palestinian flag on the statue of George Washington — “this is America, and that shit needs to come down” — until a faculty member convinced her to keep moving.

Comer got to deliver his message: D.C. needed to shut the protest down, and his committee would “follow the money trail to see if there are outside groups that are paying for these types of activities.” And afterwards, on Fox, Comer said he’d been to “ground zero” and “heard the ‘death to Israel’ chants” — not audible to reporters that day — from people who wanted the Biden administration to get on “the side of Palestine and Hamas.”

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, there had been some campus activism that fit Comer’s description. Some of it happened at GWU, where the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter was suspended last year after projecting the phrase “Glory to our martyrs” onto a library, and where masked members of a “People’s Tribunal” chanted “guillotine, guillotine” as they named administrators working to end the protest.

Republicans, who are stepping up a six-month investigation into campus protests, are making the worst incidents famous — and linking them back to Democrats.

The Republican counteroffensive against the protesters has taken two forms. One has been a wave of legislation and hearings that aim to limit criticism of Israel on campus. The other is a combination of hearings and media hits that highlight, and sometimes overstate, the most offensive reports of what’s happening there.

“The very campuses which were once the envy of the international academy have succumbed to an antisemitic virus,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Tuesday, at a Holocaust remembrance event headlined by President Biden. “Students who were known for producing academic papers are now known for stabbing their Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags.”

That incident was debated and questioned weeks earlier. A pro-Israel activist at Yale recorded a protester waving a Palestinian flag in her face, hitting her with the tip, injuring her left eye. Activists had adopted careful media strategies, from widespread face-masking to official spokespeople who other protesters would direct reporters and social media influencers would talk to. That didn’t change the coverage Republicans saw, from the flag-stab incident to videos of protesters using their bodies to keep some students out of their camps.

“Do you believe that students who spend their time in college calling for the destruction of an ethnic or religious group, or spend their time preventing students of particular ethnic or religious groups from walking around campus freely, or occupying campus buildings, deserve to have their student loans forgiven?” House Education and the Workforce Committee chair Virginia Foxx asked Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona on Tuesday. When the secretary started to couch his answer, Foxx clarified: “I’m talking about the students who are being antisemitic and stopping Jewish students from going to class.”

All but a few Democrats were wary of endorsing the protests, out of fear that this might happen. Now that it has, the Republican response has been swift, carried out from the House to the states.

The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which would codify anti-Israel speech as antisemitic, divided House Democrats like no other response to the Oct. 7 attacks. In North Carolina, where Republicans hold a legislative supermajority, House Speaker Tim Moore is moving the SHALOM Act, which would implement the same Working Definition of Antisemitism; Moore will almost certainly join the U.S. Congress next year, as the nominee for a re-drawn and safely Republican seat near Charlotte. In Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is urging the next legislative session to work on “combating antisemitism on Texas college campuses.”

Some Republicans have dissented from that campaign; 21 of them opposed ASAA last week. But they’re far more united than Joe Biden’s party, far more ready to highlight the worst incidents on campus, and effective at bringing like-minded Democrats on board. Biden’s remarks on the protests have angered protesters, who want him to at least endorse a ceasefire, and been dismissed by Republicans, who want him to weigh in on specific campus incidents and condemn them.

“He didn’t specifically speak to what they’re saying and what they’re doing,” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton told ABC News on Sunday. “They’re chanting ‘final solution.’ They’re telling Jews to go back to where they came from. They’re spray-painting buildings with vile, antisemitic hate.”

The White House has tried for weeks to differentiate between “peaceful protesters” and agitators. Comer and other Republicans don’t get so specific. The existence of the campus protests is a reason to pull back government grants to universities and student loan forgiveness; Cotton’s “No Bailouts for Campus Criminals” legislation would bar people “convicted of any offense” from getting that.

“What everyone in the Democrat Party realizes is that a significant percentage of the Democrat Party base is solid in the antisemitic category,” Comer told Fox News after his GWU visit. “They’re against Israel, and they expect Joe Biden to [be] on the side of Palestine and Hamas against Israel.”

• In Politico, New York Rep. Jerry Nadler talks to Ryan Lizza about why he led the opposition to the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act: “It could make criticism, under certain circumstances, of Israeli government policy antisemitic, which it clearly isn’t.”
• In The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg argues that the logic of the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is already indicting Israel critics with no bias against Jews; Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa has been labeled antisemitic because she “called for a cease-fire in Gaza and because she signed an open letter about the killing of Gazan journalists.”
• In The Free Press, Francesca Block reads the manuals that are helping some protesters be “taught to become militants,” carrying out actions that Republicans have highlighted and Democrats have condemned.
• In his newsletter, Ken Klippenstein finds that a widely-reported claim, that “Death to America” has become a popular protest slogan, has “no evidence,” even after it inspired House Republicans to ask for an investigation.