"The Attackers Hurled a Firecracker"

a reason to worry less

I was planning to drop the topic, but a trend developing in the media coverage forces me to say one more thing about the UCLA encampment.

FEARS ARE STIRRING:

Look closely at the lead photo the Guardian uses to illustrate this theme, because it’s very telling:

Remember that I went to the UCLA campus and spent a few hours walking around the edges of this encampment, not long before this terrifying attack. East side of the encampment, double fence and big plywood wall:

But here’s the west side of the encampment, and the person in the mask behind that little 3.5-foot fence is inside the camp (with a hummingbird flying near her head, if you look closely):

Here’s the entry to the plaza at the northwest corner of the encampment, with tents a few feet away from the top of these stairs:

Again, a single length of fence, 3.5-feet high, not secured to anything, guarded by three skinny undergraduates who checked armbands to make sure their camp stayed progressively pure of filthy Zionists.

The north and south approaches to the encampment, up long walkways that back into buildings with classrooms and offices, were also protected by a very few of these short, movable crowd control fences.

Here’s how the New York Times describes the late-night attack on the encampment:

The clashes that erupted late Tuesday at U.C.L.A. turned the campus into a national flashpoint. Masked counterprotesters entered the encampment set up last week by students opposed to the war in Gaza. The attackers hurled a firecracker into the encampment, tore down its outer walls and threw heavy objects at the pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

So.

A planned attack on the encampment, with dozens of attackers, could have begun from the barely protected north, south, west, or northwest approaches, or all the above at once, which would have allowed attackers to overrun the camp in a few seconds by jumping, or shoving aside, single pieces of short, light fencing. Instead, let’s look at that image again, the attackers approached….

The big plywood wall.

They attacked the only fortified piece of the camp, the one place where it was sort of hard to get in. And then they fought at the perimeter.

The encampment was a joke, with cosplay internal security in their revolutionary keffiyehs and N95 masks. If a group of counterprotesters had intended to attack the camp — to storm it, in earnest, with a real plan to inflict serious injury on a good number of people — they would have done so. Nothing would have stopped them. Your arthritic grandmother could have the kicked the everloving shit out of these kids with her knitting club.

In a piece that isn’t paywalled, the New York Times analyzes the fighting at the edge of the encampment, with video. In hours of fighting, people hit each other, and people got hurt. But there was a great deal of signaling and display in this fight, and much less violence than there could have been.

Journalists are promoting the idea that violence is on the table in the standoffs between pro-Hamas campus idiots and normal people:

“If police open fire on students, and kill them….” Neil Young on line one, Simon.

What’s actually happening is that campus protesters who are being arrested are mostly being released in a few hours with citations — and, in Los Angeles, with free to-go breakfasts, having been bused to a jail that they never entered.

That chill-ass pig gave me a bagel sandwich

So fears will stir — and then, no doubt, swirl — and people will be terrified in the news. But so far, between protesters and counterprotesters and between protesters and government, the ratio of brutal asswhooping to performative display has favored the latter quite heavily.