Republicans are up in arms about students demonstrating against the war in Gaza on university campuses across the nation. The epicenter for the now weeks-long protest movement is Columbia University, where on Tuesday students occupied Hamilton Hall before the NYPD forcibly removed and arrested them. J.D. Vance, the Trump-loving Republican senator from Ohio, on Wednesday night told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that the students who took control of the campus building should face legal consequences.
“So you agree that people who break into and vandalize a building should be prosecuted?” Collins asked.
“Exactly,” Vance replied.
Collins then pointed out that this is what’s happening to hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters who broke into an vandalized the United States Capitol, and that Vance, like many Republicans, is aghast that Trump’s supporters are facing federal charges. “You did help raise money for people who did so on Jan. 6,” Collins said. Vance then lamented about the media’s “obsession” with Jan. 6 and that people who didn’t assault cops are having the “full weight” of the Justice Department thrown at them.
Vance isn’t the only Republican who has been hypocritical on the issue.
House Speaker Mike Johnson last week gathered a group of House Republicans to travel to New York to lecture students protesting on Columbia’s lawn. “You cannot censor and silence viewpoints you disagree with,” Johnson told the crowed of demonstrators. Johnson this week replied to a video of protesters breaking windows in Hamilton Hall by calling the act “terrorism.”
Rioters broke windows in the Capitol, battered down doors, and assaulted law enforcement. Johnson is one of many Republicans trying to rewrite history about what actually happened on Jan. 6, pushing the idea that most of the people who stormed the building were innocent. He described some of them to Newsmax last month as “people who were there and just happened to be walking through the building.”
Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) both called for President Biden to send the National Guard to break up the Columbia demonstration late last month, before students occupied Hamilton Hall. Meanwhile, Cotton signed a brief backing Jan. 6 defendants, and Hawley was photographed holding up a fist in solidarity with the rioters as they marched toward the Capitol building.
Donald Trump has repeatedly denigrated pro-Palestine campus protesters — labeling them as worse than the neo-Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville in 2017 (whom Trump defended), and wondering whether they’d be punished like his supporters who rioted on Jan. 6. Trump has, of course, rallied behind those supporters, suggesting he will pardon all of them should he win back the White House.
The double-standard cuts to the core of the Republican worldview. They get to exercise their rights however they want while policing how others do so. They get to skirt the law while weaponizing it against others. They are real Americans while their opponents are, as Trump put it last year, “savage animals.”
