{"id":9287,"date":"2016-05-05T10:46:37","date_gmt":"2016-05-05T17:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=9287"},"modified":"2016-05-05T10:46:37","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T17:46:37","slug":"protesters-have-jumped-the-shark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/protesters-have-jumped-the-shark\/","title":{"rendered":"Protesters Have Jumped the Shark"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online<\/em><\/div>\n
\n

\u2018J<\/span>ump the shark\u201d is an American pop-culture expression that derives from a 1977 Happy Days<\/em> sitcom episode; it describes a moment of decline. At a certain point, a TV show becomes so predictable, empty of ideas, and gimmicky that in desperation its writers will try anything \u2014 like the character \u201cThe Fonz\u201d jumping over a shark on water skis \u2014 just to keep on the air.<\/p>\n

Contemporary protesters have reached that moment, when demonstrations exist for demonstrations\u2019 sake, without any consistent or coherent agenda of dissent.<\/p>\n

At a recent forum on political correctness at the University of Massachusetts, three invited guest speakers were shouted down by protesters in the audience. A video of one shouter went viral. In the manner of a two-year-old, she threw a loud temper tantrum, interrupting the speakers, screaming obscenities, and repeatedly yelling, \u201cKeep your hate speech off this campus!\u201d<\/p>\n

How does one stop \u201chate speech\u201d by bellowing out four-letter obscenities to disrupt free expression at a university? The childish protester then proved that she had jumped the shark when she finished by screaming, \u201cStop treating us like children!\u201d<\/p>\n

At an earlier protest at Yale, one particularly emotional student jumped the shark by cursing at a faculty member whose crime was advising students not to overreact to the childish Halloween costumes that other students would be wearing.
\n<\/p>\n

Protesters have a right to object to Donald Trump\u2019s various crudities, as long as they do so peacefully and respect the right of free speech. But recently, disrupters at a Trump rally in California likewise jumped the shark when some waved the flag of Mexico or bore placards with slogans such as \u201cMake America Mexico Again.\u201d If the protest was directed against Trump\u2019s pledges to deport undocumented immigrants to Mexico, then it made little sense to celebrate the country to which protesters did not wish immigrants to return, or to suggest that immigrants\u2019 new home should become identical to the old home that they had chosen to leave.<\/p>\n

At the University of Missouri last year, protesters demanded concessions from the university. In a public area, assistant communications professor Melissa Click called for \u201csome muscle\u201d to manhandle a student journalist who was trying to photograph a public demonstration. Click might as well have put on water skis and jumped a plastic shark. A right-wing cartoonist could not have dreamed up a sillier scenario, with a faculty member from a university\u2019s communications department trying to have a student reporter physically blocked from covering a news story in a free-speech zone.<\/p>\n

Harvard Law School is supposedly as liberal an institution as exists in America. Recently, a Harvard Law student in a public forum asked former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, \u201cHow is it that you are so smelly?\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0It\u2019s regarding your odor \u2014 about the odor of Tzipi Livni, very smelly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Politically correct Harvard Law dean Martha Minow offered little more than a broad e-mail condemnation of the incident. In fact, she shielded the identity of the questioner. And just to reiterate its pro-Palestinian credentials, Harvard Law School edited out this anti-Semitic smear from its video of the event.<\/p>\n

Last year, someone placed tape over portraits of African-American faculty members in a Harvard Law School building. Minow publicly decried it as a racist act, then later stayed mostly mum about the results of an investigation to find out who was responsible. Yet when Minow recently accepted an award at Brandeis University, a group of student protesters jumped the shark by heckling her for not doing enough to address racism at Harvard Law \u2014 even as she was being honored for making \u201ca lasting contribution to racial, ethnic, or religious relations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brown University President Christina H. Paxson tried to quiet student protesters by promising to spend $100 million to ensure \u201ca just and inclusive campus.\u201d No matter: The protesters jumped the shark when they derided Brown\u2019s proposed $100 million \u201cDiversity Action and Inclusion Plan\u201d as \u201cinsufficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Student debt in America has surpassed $1 trillion. Many graduates did not receive in return an education competitive enough to qualify them for high-paying jobs.<\/p>\n

The country owes about $20 trillion in debt. It will soon not be able to meet its pension and Social Security obligations. After slashing the military budget and raising income-tax rates, the United States is still running unsustainable annual deficits. The world abroad is becoming dangerously chaotic.<\/p>\n

Instead of protesting those existential crises, students cry over Halloween costumes, deride free speech as hate speech, devour their own liberal administrators, and dismiss $100 million payoffs as too little.<\/p>\n

Protesters have finally hit rock bottom and jumped the shark. From now on, the same old screaming will be seen mostly as going through the tired motions in lieu of offering coherent ideas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online \u2018Jump the shark\u201d is an American pop-culture expression that derives from a 1977 Happy Days sitcom episode; it describes a moment of decline. At a certain point, a TV show becomes so predictable, empty of ideas, and gimmicky that in desperation its writers will try anything \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1092,1091,79,92,11,187],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2pN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12530,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-antifa-wont-tell-you\/","url_meta":{"origin":9287,"position":0},"title":"What Antifa Won\u2019t Tell You","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 30, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"The following article is from my colleague, Paul Roderick Gregory, in The\u00a0American\u00a0Mind Observers of the demonstrations, statue toppling, and riots that followed the police killing of George Floyd on May 25 could not help but notice a distinctive pattern of protest. 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