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.
Despite the media’s unwillingness to ask probing questions, we know a couple of things about the protesters. We know they were few in number, for example. The original “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” was said to be the work of “about 70” activists.
News reports never mentioned more than “hundreds” of students involved — and the abundant video taken of the episode shows this to be a generous estimate. Columbia has 31,000 students. The protesters never came close to 1/100th of the total.
But did these angry few somehow embody the revolutionary fervor of the younger generation? The question is impossible to answer empirically, but signs point in the opposite direction. The Harvard Youth Poll showed Gaza to rank “near .