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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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The campus protests are run directly by the propaganda arm of Hamas?

Spicy lawsuit just dropped: https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/05/National-Jewish-Advocacy-Center-the-Schoen-Law-Firm-and-the-Holtzman-Vogel-law-firm-vs-1.pdf

The American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) are accused of providing substantial assistance to Hamas. The plaintiffs, who are survivors and victims of Hamas's October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, are alleging that AMP and NSJP are Hamas's propaganda wing in the United States

Summary:

  • AMP and NSJP are successor organizations to groups that were previously shut down or held liable for providing material support to Hamas.
  • Within hours of the October 7 attack, AMP and NSJP allegedly disseminated a "toolkit" that identified them as "part of" Hamas's "Unity Intifada" and called for "confrontation by any means necessary," including "armed struggle."
  • The groups allegedly instigated riots, violence, and chaos on American college campuses, recruiting students as "foot soldiers" to support Hamas through intimidation and fear tactics.
  • AMP and NSJP are accused of providing crucial communication services to Hamas, which cannot legally hire American PR firms due to its terrorist designation.
  • Hamas and other terrorist groups have publicly recognized and expressed appreciation for the support provided by AMP, NSJP, and their campus allies.

I can't exactly tell how much of this is BS and how much of it is real just from the claim but it is definitely going to be an interesting argument. I cannot wait for discoveries.

Even if the lawsuit is successful though, I can't see the US government really clamping down on campus protests. The whole situation has been an interesting case study for the rest of the world as to how to infiltrate/affect US political sentiment and public unrest though.

Somewhat echoing @Primaprimaprima, I just don't care. When it was Russian mind control rays from Facebook, I didn't care. The current run of Chinese brainwashing from TikTok does not induce me to care. Now that I find out that American rioters are actually being puppeteered by Hamas, I likewise do not care. In all of these cases, there's the same belief that the Americans being mind-controlled lack their own agency and that an utterly trivial investment on the part of foreign actors can create a completely inorganic belief system within the United States. Efforts to suppress speech across borders didn't even work when it was literal printed text, we still wound up with a bunch of communist spies and Nazi sympathizers and they sure as hell aren't going to work in the modern electronic world. You have to deal with the reality that people will see, read, and hear things that you don't like and then address them where they're at.

I absolutely despise the campus "protestors" and it's irrelevant to me whether their puerile, idiotic ideas came from Facebook or the original Communist Manifesto.

In all of these cases, there's the same belief that the Americans being mind-controlled lack their own agency and that an utterly trivial investment on the part of foreign actors can create a completely inorganic belief system within the United States.

They can change the relative size and influence of existing movements even if they can't create movements from scratch.

Changing the size and influence of movements is actually pretty hard. If Hamas can do that for some fairly trivial investment, that's pretty impressive on their part. I find it a lot more plausible that the primary drivers aren't actually Hamas-controlled NGOs, but the academic elites at the institutions where the mostly peaceful protests are happening.