[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 79 (Tuesday, May 7, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3375-S3376]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                Protests

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, yesterday, the world marked Holocaust 
Remembrance Day, an annual reminder of mankind's horrific capacity for 
evil and our obligation to combat hatred toward Jews wherever it 
emerges.
  Today, of course, anti-Semitic hate is welling up amid the lawless 
radicalism across our own country--in the physical blockades barring 
Jewish students from getting to class; in the ransacking and occupation 
of campus buildings; and, of course, in the torrents of noxious slurs 
against the Jewish people and the Jewish State.
  Just last week, President Biden finally weighed in with a belated 
banality: ``order must prevail.'' Unfortunately--and unsurprisingly--
this glancing finger wag hasn't exactly quelled the campus chaos or 
steeled the spines of college administrators. The President's words 
haven't yet prompted local leaders in Washington to send the 
Metropolitan Police Department to clear out the anti-Semitic vandalism 
convention that continues to unfold half a mile from the White House on 
the campus of George Washington University.
  In the absence of firm, responsible campus leadership, radicals at 
UCLA have once again managed to bring collective punishment on their 
fellow students with the cancellation of in-person classes. Harvard and 
MIT are still struggling to muster the resolve to clear out and punish 
the squatters on their campuses. And at the epicenter of the chaos, 
Columbia has canceled its main graduation ceremony.
  So there is only one way to interpret this outcome. It is an 
undeserved victory for the unhinged radicals who have been disrupting 
campus life and forcing Jewish students to steer clear for weeks.

  University administrators caving to the mob only validates the 
performative tactics of wannabe revolutionaries--like the scofflaws 
whose first order of business upon breaking into a campus building last 
week was to post Maoist revolutionary slogans and make a list of their 
comrades with vegan dietary restrictions and the doctoral student 
specializing in ``theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted 
through a Marxian lens'' who became their spokesperson and demanded 
that Columbia administrators provide violent trespassers with food

[[Page S3376]]

and water so they could persist in lawlessness.
  What deluded nonsense. It is important to acknowledge that Columbia 
isn't even the only hotbed of retrograde 20th century communism on the 
island of Manhattan. While the meatless Marxists take over Morningside 
Heights, a brand of Juche jihadism has emerged further downtown at NYU.
  You heard that right. A teach-in quite literally praised North 
Korea's solidarity with the Palestinian people, specifically 
enumerating the ways the Kim regime has helped train and equip 
Palestinian terrorist groups who wage war on Israel. Take heart, 
comrades. Brutal totalitarians and savage terrorists have actually got 
and found a common cause.
  The glorification of leftist revolutionaries at supposedly elite 
universities is actually not new. Berets emulating Che Guevara were on 
campus long before jihadist garb that signals solidarity with Hamas.
  And as addled as any generation's radical cries may be, the American 
people have usually been able to trust that eventually the would-be 
Maoists would submit to the lessons of history, read about how the 
Cultural Revolution really ends, and become contributing members of 
society. But today, the guardrails against professional radicalism have 
grown vanishingly thin. Unlike in the 1960s, today's Red Guards 
actually have academic tenure. And more than ever before, the brain 
trust of the American universities sees the indoctrination of students 
in postmodern leftism not just as a privilege of tenure but an 
obligation.
  From the comfortable, endowed sinecures where they count on 
foundation grants, these professors of the ``vanguard elite'' urge 
their impressionable students to engage in unlawful acts with 
potentially lasting repercussions--cannon fodder for the cause.
  Meanwhile, to an alarming degree, campus administrators have 
abdicated their responsibility to treat their charges as adults capable 
of bearing the consequences of their actions, and in the face of a mob 
that increasingly represents their political base, elected leaders have 
shrunk from the duty to ensure that the order President Biden 
referenced last week actually prevails.
  To borrow from one of the campus radicals' favorite fonts of wisdom, 
Karl Marx famously wrote that if history repeats itself, it comes ``the 
first time as tragedy, [and] the second time as farce.''
  It is hard not to worry that, in 2024, it has arrived as a bit of 
both.