A big part of the social contract for a modern society is an agreement that citizens will grant the state a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in exchange for that state protecting its subjects, including from mobs within the state and other illegal behavior. The expectation is that the rules will be enforced fairly and equally, or the contract loses legitimacy.
The United States has a First Amendment that protects speech to a level that doesn’t exist in other countries, including speech that is openly supportive of terrorism and mass murder. In this regard, the groups organizing campus protests are putting on a fine civics lesson for everyday Americans exhibited by the main groups behind many of the current college protests we are witnessing.
The problem arises however when the mobs taking over several campuses in predominantly blue areas go beyond awful speech and instead insist on tactics that clearly violate the rules everyone else is subject to, including taking over parts of schools, assaults, destroying property, harassment of other students and restricting movements based on ideological preferences. That’s exactly what we have witnessed at multiple schools nationwide — the worst examples coming from UCLA.
Over the last week at UCLA, the “protesters” have taken over several school areas, including the library entrance. They have openly imposed ideological tests on who they allow into those areas, even handing out wristbands to signal who has acceptable views and questioning students if they are “Zionists.” Beyond that, the mob has tried to enforce their takeover by force, on several occasions by cornering Jewish students and journalists whom they deemed as unacceptable in their area. There have also been several assaults. All of this is unacceptable, but far worse is that UCLA security and Los Angeles police have refused to do anything about it. You can see security forces standing by in many of the videos and refusing to intervene. This is a choice that security forces are openly saying is part of their instruction. By refusing to enforce their rules or protect students, UCLA and the local authorities are essentially sanctioning the mob behavior and thus betraying their end of the social contract.
The inevitable result is that the victims of the targeting and harassment will increasingly view it as their right and obligation to protect themselves and abandon reliance on the state or university. That’s exactly what happened at UCLA on Tuesday night. After stories spread among the Jewish community at and around the UCLA campus of one Jewish student being held hostage by the mob without help from UCLA security and another student being knocked unconscious without consequences, a group of counter-protesters gathered and confronted the anti-Israel encampment. Clashes broke out for hours while the UCLA security and police simply stood by and watched. Now many of the same people who encouraged zero action as the situation worsened over the last week and the anti-Israel mob acted with impunity are upset that they faced aggressive opposition.
That shouldn’t happen. It shouldn’t have to happen. But the failure here lies with UCLA and local authorities that abdicated their responsibility to create the circumstances where a clash of mobs became likely. The same people who ignored the illegal and illegitimate behavior of the anti-Israel mob and insisted that it’s wrong for the cops or university to enforce the rules, as they did on the same night at Columbia University against a similar mob that had committed numerous crimes while taking over Hamilton Hall, are creating circumstances where a clash of mobs is inevitable. There will be no one-sided monopoly on violence. Either the state and the universities live up to their end of the contract and enforce the rules equally against the increasingly antisemitic and pro-terrorist mobs taking over some campuses or there will be more counter-mobs that will view it as their right to fight back.
