Small Group of Elites Are Letting Small Group of College Idiots Drive Policy - Commentary

Martin Gurri, a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University (VA), writes: The importance given to the recent anti-Israel student protests at Columbia University, on close inspection, turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. Stampeded by the news media, prominent people, very much including Columbia president Minouche Shafik, believed they were confronting something like the second coming of Black Lives Matter. These elites imagined the protesters to represent the vanguard of a radicalized generation, the Zoomers, eager to storm the precincts of power and shove American society toward the extreme progressive left. As with the BLM riots, the elites were terrified of doing or saying the wrong thing. To keep their jobs in the coming Age of the Zoomer, they felt the need to tread carefully. None of this was remotely true.