[guest post by JVW]

I’m not really up for crafting a long post about what has been going on at UCLA over the past couple of weeks, so let me just provide some bullet points and links:

* UCLA erred when they allowed protesters to congregate in Dickson Plaza over the past week. They seem to have believed that by being lenient and tolerant they could contain the disruption, but all they did was encourage lots of other activists.

* Much of this falls on Chancellor Gene Block, who plans to retire at the end of this academic year. He goes out in disgrace, having bungled this situation from beginning to end.

* Somebody up high in administration ordered campus police and the hired security contractors to have a light touch, which meant that they refused to intervene when pro-Hamas activists began to harass “Zionist” students. Somebody should lose their job over this.

* Had not pro-Israel students attempted unsuccessfully to breech Fort Intifada on Monday night, I doubt very much that UCLA would have finally come to the conclusion that allowing activists to commandeer a huge chunk of campus for their own use might not be a great strategy for maintaining campus harmony. Those counter-protesters are the ones who helped bring this nonsense to a close.

* You can watch what happened last night on this five-hour video from the local ABC Affiliate. Here are the key parts:

5:00 – LAPD approaches the encampment, protesters rush to confront them in response.

10:20 – LAPD beats an ignoble retreat. Was this just a test to see how the protesters would react, or was this a complete strategic failure? Either way, it was a horribly bad look and only served to embolden the pro-Hamas crowd.

57:30 – California Highway Patrol officers approach a mostly unprotected entryway to the encampment.

1:04:49 – CHP officers begin pushing through the rabble to enter the encampment.

1:28:24 – CHP officers approach a second entry point to the encampment and mobilize around it. It is now approximately 3:15 am.

1:38:48 – CHP Officers begin tearing down the fortifications that the terrorists have built up over the past week.

1:47:04 – Camera view split-screens to ground-level where we can start watching the terrorists being arrested.

* The initial arrests go rather smoothly, as they were mostly silly children who were probably just as interested in accumulating social media likes as they were in protesting the plight of the Palestinian people. These kids generally let themselves be guided away without any resistance (#Resistance, that should read). About an hour in, however, law enforcement begins encountering the more hardcore elements of the activist groups who try to resist arrest. Law enforcement largely appears to be content to wait out this gang of miscreants, and instead focuses on removing all of the barriers erected in the encampment.

* At 4:40 am, approximately three hours into the video, law enforcement decides to clear out Royce Hall, the venerable campus landmark which houses an excellent concert hall as well as assorted classrooms and offices. I’m sure the little jerks did at least some degree of vandalism in the building, based upon all the debris that litters the area surrounding the building. This is the sort of thing which absolutely infuriates me.

* There is an interview with one of the alleged student organizers at the 3:56:30 point in the video. She may or may not be stupid, I cannot tell, but she is truly delusional. She acts surprised that the administration was no longer willing to drag negotiations on interminably and actually decided to end the little scamps’ hissy fit.

That’s about it. From what I see on the video, it appears that law enforcement continued to make progress on arrests as the morning light began to break. I would imagine that there is a giant mess on campus today which hard-working maintenance crews will be called upon to clean. Because if there is one hallmark of privileged left-wing protest, it is that it always leaves behind messes for the proletariat to deal with. UCLA will probably disappoint all of us by going as lightly as possible on these reprobates, but that’s what we would come to expect from the stultified echo chamber of wokeism. Nor do I have much faith that UCLA will put in place procedures to prevent something like this from happening again and probably soon, especially if the November election enrages them.

Two and three decades from now I am sure some middle-aged radicals, many of whom will no doubt end up in one of the various sewers of modern academia, will look back in pride on their participation in these events, but I am confident that history will eventually treat them much as it treats fellow-travelers for the Soviet Union from the 1920s-50s: somewhat well-meaning, somewhat stupid, somewhat malevolent, but completely delusional and naive. It’s just a shame that they are able to do so much collateral damage in the meantime.

UPDATE
Collin Rugg has some footage of the aftermath of the area on the UCLA campus where the budding terrorists held their slumber party. It won’t surprise you to see what a colossal mess it is. Everybody that was arrested this morning needs to be fined an amount commensurate with the costs of clean-up (and while we’re at it, the costs of the extra security and the multi-agency task force which broke up the party) and should have grades, transcripts, and degrees withheld until they do so.

NEW: UCLA campus looks like a landfill after pro-Palestine protesters, many of whom are also environmental activists, demolished the campus.

Police are dismantling the fortified camp after an intense night.

Police fired flash-bangs at the protesters last night before… pic.twitter.com/d70wBEmxD6

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 2, 2024

– JVW