MomLinks: Student Spring

Campus protests, voucher grifters, and more in this week's link roundup.

This week is one of my favorites each year. I live on the side of a large hill, or small nameless mountain, near the top of the treeline in a steep river valley. In spring, the lowland trees are always the first to bloom. For a few days in late April, a trip downhill is like visiting a different season, the gray highlands by my house giving way to the fresh green of new leaves in the woods around my children’s school. Then day after day I watch the foliage creep up the slopes, the trees filling in, more birdsong, more petals until one morning I wake to the sun coming in softer, through a forest that has unfolded almost overnight.

It’s a time when I’m most aware and appreciative of life and the work that goes into protecting it. Some nights this week I’ve tuned into Columbia University’s student radio, where undergraduate journalists have documented the police assault on their school’s Gaza solidarity protests. I’ve been appalled by police and vigilante crackdowns on pro-Palestine demonstrations on campuses from Dartmouth to UCLA. These students represent the country’s first large-scale protest surge since the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement and the anti-protest laws that followed it. These students are rallying for Palestinian life in a moment when mass protest is increasingly criminalized, bail funds are increasingly prohibited, terrorism statutes are increasingly weaponized, and counter-demonstrators are increasingly empowered to hit protesters with cars. It’s with horror and hope that I listen to Columbia’s student radio and hear the voices of young people who have weighed these risks and followed their consciences anyway. I don’t know how much these protests will accomplish—how much they even can—but listening to Columbia’s student journalists at night feels like watching green shoots of new life pushing up through a gray landscape of despair.

Anyway, here are some MomLinks:

-More than 2,000 people have been arrested at pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses over the past few weeks, the Guardian reports. Those arrests include students at Columbia, where police fired a gun in Hamilton Hall, a building being occupied by student protesters, The City reports. The officer was reportedly using a flashlight attachment on a gun and fired accidentally, lodging a bullet in a wall. Other footage of the Columbia raid shows police storming the building with guns drawn, and using stun grenades on the unarmed demonstrators. 

In Los Angeles on Wednesday, police also used flash-bangs, batons, and impact munitions on UCLA’s pro-Palestine protesters, leaving some demonstrators with injuries. The previous night, police had stood by while counterprotesters stormed the UCLA encampment, beating protesters on video and reportedly singling out four student journalists for physical attacks. Catherine Hamilton, the 21-year-old news editor of UCLA’s student paper, told the Los Angeles Times that a counterprotester who had harassed her and photographed her press pass “instructed the group to encircle the student journalists, she said, before they sprayed the four with Mace or pepper spray, flashed lights in their faces and chanted Hamilton’s name.

“As she tried to break free, Hamilton said, she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen; another student journalist was pushed to the ground and beaten and kicked for nearly a minute.”

-These campus crackdowns occur within a broader campaign against education. Several red states have enacted new censorship laws restricting or outright prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. In some states, schools are fighting back by simply renaming their DEI departments to things like “the Office of Access and Engagement,” the New York Times reports.

-The reasons for active inclusion efforts in education are obvious. A new survey by the Trevor Project found LGBTQ youth to be facing persistent physical threats, leading to mental health struggles. Nearly 25 percent of respondents said they had been physically harmed or threatened over the past year. Approximately a fifth of those youth said they had been prohibited in school from wearing clothes that correspond with their gender, amid a wave of new laws and policies dictating how students can express their identities. Seven percent of students who reported mistreatment said they ultimately left their schools, and respondents who faced violence or threats were three times likelier to attempt suicide. 

-While lawmakers unveil new policies that punish LGBTQ youth or smear the queer community as inappropriate for children, far-right groups continue to act as the footsoldiers for that homophobic movement. On his Substack Radical Reports, Teddy Wilson reports on a Drag Story Hour at a Montana library, where participants were menaced by members of the groups Patriot Front, White Lives Matter Montana, Wyoming Active Club, Big Sky Active Club, and Great Plains Active Club. (These are literal, overt fascists.) 

-Of course these homophobic groups do not have children’s interests in mind, and prefer to defame LGBTQ adults as predators while overlooking patterns of actual abuse that flourish in hierarchical institutions popular with the right. The Archdiocese of New Orleans appears to be under investigation for possible child sex trafficking, according to a search warrant obtained by New Orleans’ WWL Radio. The warrant, which demands records from the archdiocese, alleges a decades-long system by which children were abused by clergy, while church officials covered up the abuse. (Incidentally this spring, Louisiana’s Supreme Court blocked a judgment against a priest found to have sexually abused children in the 1970s. The court ruled that the priest’s property rights prohibited the ruling from being applied to his actions in decades past.)

Meanwhile a new investigation from the Marshall Project finds a pattern of abuse in a nationwide program for children interested in law enforcement careers. The police Explorer programs face nearly 200 allegations of misconduct, with court records revealing police to have sexually abused children who participate in the program.

-In Pennsylvania, where GOP megadonor Jeff Yass has helped warp education policy around school privatization, private schools and religious can now accept public funds while upholding strict pro-discrimination policies that let them bar students on the basis of things like sexuality and disability, the New Republic reports.

-Arizona lawmakers repealed the state’s barbaric 1864 abortion ban. Once it’s officially off the books in a few months, it’ll be replaced by a 2022 law prohibiting most abortions past 15 weeks.