Editors’ Blog

Very weird story here to keep an eye on. Last week either 15 or 17 police cars at a Portland Police Bureau lot were torched in what was treated as a suspected case of arson. Yesterday local news reported that a group calling itself the “Rachel Corrie Ghost Brigade” claimed responsibility for the incident. (Corrie was a pro-Palestinian activist who was run over by an IDF bulldozer in 2003). The group said that they cut through a fence at the Bureau’s training facility and lit the fires to strike a blow before police could respond to a pro-Palestine occupation at Portland State’s Millar Library — “raid them before they raid you.”

It’s important to note that people can claim responsibility for something they didn’t do in order to gain publicity for a cause. So we shouldn’t assume the claim is necessarily legitimate. But someone did apparently light the vehicles on fire. Portland police say they’re aware of the claim of responsibility but won’t comment beyond that.

A TPM Reader passed on to us this post from David Pozen writing at Balkinization on the recent events at Columbia University. But Pozen sets aside the specific controversy — Gaza, antisemitism, the use of the NYPD — to look at what is shows about university governance more generally. As he writes, “For all the talk of how the modern university has been corporatized, neoliberalized, and so on, there hasn’t been as much attention paid to the ways in which it has been presidentialized.” I don’t know enough about the history of the internal governance of universities over the last century to have a good feel for how much has changed on this front. My general sense is that boards of trustees, acting through university presidents, have always called the shots, at least in the final analysis. But there’s where ultimate power lies and there’s how government actually functions — how much university administration seeks to create consensus among major stakeholders versus acting in a more unilateral way. I’m still digesting what I think of the post but I wanted to flag it to your attention.

One thing that bedevils current polling on the 2024 presidential race are basic questions about just who will show up and what the electorate will look like. That’s always central to polling and it becomes much more central when the race is tight. (If it’s a 45-55 race the precise composition of the electorate becomes less important.) But take the new Ipsos/ABC News poll out today. The headlines that are running focus on the number for Adults — which are Trump +2. Go to registered voters and it’s Biden +2. Go to likely voters and it’s Biden +4.

It’s possible there have been other polls. But this one released by YouGov is the first I’ve seen since recent events at Columbia, UCLA and other colleges and universities around the country. It shows a very interesting picture — both that the protests are not very popular with the American public but also that — which of course we know — they’re highly complicated for Democratic candidates.

Kate is joined by HuffPost reporter Matt Shuham to talk about how the war in Gaza is refracting domestically, from college protests to presidential politics.

Belaboring The Point is now on YouTube! Check out the latest video episode of the podcast here.

I’ve had a few responses to last night’s post about the identity of the maurauding pro-Israel demonstrators/thugs who attacked the Gaza encampment on Tuesday night. There are clearly a lot of rumors circulating about it. The most interesting article I’ve seen so far is one that came out yesterday afternoon from the Los Angeles Times. It doesn’t include identities but reports on the team of online sleuths trying to identify them. Think of it as broadly similar to the “Sedition Hunters” group which has identified probably hundreds of people involved in the January 6th insurrection. The article doesn’t include any identities though it does seem like the sleuths have already identified or contingently identified some people.

This is a brief follow up on my post earlier that touched on the violence on Tuesday night at UCLA. As I noted, and has been widely reported, on Tuesday night a small contingent pro-Israel counter-protesters attacked the Gaza encampment on campus. This group appears to have been willfully violent and focused on tearing down the barricades of the encampment, throwing various projectiles at pro-Gaza demonstrators, throwing anywhere from one to four firecrackers into the encampment and using something like pepper spray or other similarly noxious spray on people in the encampment. In short, a group of vigilantes or thugs who went in to break up the encampment and terrorize the protestors.

But as far as I can tell there’s no clear information on who these people were. And I’ve seen no evidence that any of them were or have been arrested.