RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4627216-fetterman-decries-college-campus-pup-tents-for-hamas/

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) ripped into the pro-Palestinian protests roiling college campuses, calling the encampment demonstrations “pup tents” for the militant group Hamas.

“Now, of course, it’s a great American value to protest, but I don’t believe living in a pup tent for Hamas is really helpful,” Fetterman said in an interview on NewsNation’s “The Hill Sunday.”

Protests calling for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and a halt in U.S. military aid to Israel have persisted for more than a week at a swath of college campuses across the country. Some protesters — including those at Columbia University, where the recent wave of demonstrations began — set up encampments on campus in defiance of school administrators.

Several schools called in local and state police to disperse the protests and encampments, leading to the arrest and suspension of hundreds of students across the country.

“I will say this, that it’s very clear, there is a very germ of antisemitism in all of these protests. And then sometimes, it flares up and again,” Fetterman added.

He then pointed to a student protest leader at Columbia University who was heard in a recently resurfaced video from earlier this year saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and that people should “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Columbia banned the student last week.

Last week the country witnessed the birth of a Speaker of the House, the continuing diminishment of a President, and the disappearance of a Senate Majority Leader.

 In the same week Mike Johnson stared down Marjorie Taylor Greene and her merry band of ignorant buffoons to pass the much needed and overdue foreign-aid package, he travelled to Columbia University in New York City — ground zero for the antisemitic protests exploding on our college campuses – to make two simple statements: Antisemitism is unacceptable and America stands with Israel. If only President Biden and Chuck Schumer had Johnson’s courage and moral clarity.

 While the Speaker was giving a lesson in leadership, President Biden continued to embarrass himself and diminish his Presidency by putting the politics of his reelection ahead of America’s national security interests and Chuck Schumer has gone into hiding. 

 The Biden campaign has determined that for him to win in November, the President must win both Michigan and the votes of a significant majority of 18- to 24-year-olds. There is no better example of this strategy than how he is dealing with the explosion of antisemitism on our nation’s college campuses.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/27/heroic-doubling-and-supporting-hamas/

Psychologists who have studied violence in young men and especially young men’s willingness to forsake everything they know, everything they’ve been taught, and everything they might otherwise believe about right and wrong, say that there is a set of shared circumstances and “revelations” that link spree killers and self-radicalized terrorists.  Faced with the emptiness of their own lives, isolated from many of their contemporaries, and desperately in search of something substantive to give their lives meaning and purpose, young men—especially young men who find refuge on the internet and in social media—tend to create fantasy lives for themselves, alternate realities in which they not only find the meaning and purpose they crave but do so in heroic fashion.

For more than a decade now, the journalist and editor Robert Beckhusen has noted that the ties that bind spree shooters and self-radicalized terrorists are both numerous and consistent.  Young men confronted by the social and spiritual emptiness of their lives and society default to what is often called “heroic modeling” or “heroic doubling,” which is to say that they take on a symbolic cause and kill not just to slake their own bloodlust but to exact revenge for a whole class of people with whom they believe they find common cause.

Almost exactly ten years ago, just after the spree shooting in Isla Vista, California, Beckhusen interviewed Roger Griffin, a professor of Modern History at Oxford-Brookes University in the UK and the author of Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning.  Griffin explained the phenomenon of “heroic doubling” as follows:

[I]n the mind of the killer, they’re not just killing someone as the sole purpose of the destruction. They’re killing someone symbolic of something more general, which is also meant to send a message to the survivors….

…what happens psychologically—the person has undergone a process whereby a rather confused, pained, ordinary self puts on a sort of mask, which turns them into an actor—or a protagonist—in a personal narrative drama. . . .

In his avatar double, he achieves the ability to run and fight.  I believe that’s a very powerful metaphor for what happens in the process of heroic doubling.  Because the person who’s previously felt impotent and had no agency . . . is made to feel potent and have agency returned to him by adopting this mission.  So in that moment, he becomes a heroic version, or avatar, of himself.

Although the parallels are hardly perfect, over the years, I’ve found this concept of heroic doubling to be a useful heuristic for assessing the otherwise seemingly pointless embrace by American young men—and, increasingly, young women—of foolish, intellectually abhorrent, and often violent ideologies and practices.