Chaos will find us

Police crackdowns on college campuses allude to the real battles to come.

Keep your phone charged, that’s the main thing. Have an idea of where you are in whatever city you’re in and try to pay attention to geographic direction. Stay on the outskirts of a big mass of people and never get in the middle unless you really have to, unless something is happening that must be documented. Put your back to a wall as much as you can. Walk away from anyone trying to start an argument with you.

Keep breathing, stay calm, get home alive. You can’t report if you’re dead.

As I’ve watched these past few days as protests over the war in Gaza have exploded on college campuses across the country, I’m reminded of the basics of what it takes to cover these events. That’s because I’ve been in these environments many times and can predict almost down to the hour how they’re going to play out. Protesters will inevitably occupy a place they’re not supposed to — because that’s what protesting is — police will be called in, someone will get fired up, and cops will overreact. Match, gas, flame.

“It’s 2015 level of breaking news right now and I am too old for this shit,” an editor friend told me the other day.

Young people of color are speaking their minds about U.S. support for Israel in its war with Gaza, and they’re getting their asses kicked by cops who were sent to their campuses to do exactly that by, in many cases, Republican governors bent on crushing liberalism any way they can. It looks like the police are only too happy to help. Across the country, my research has shown that hundreds of local election officials are primed to overturn the results of any election that doesn’t result in a win for Donald Trump, in addition to their harboring of Christian nationalist beliefs and support of political violence. At the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers are arguing for the exact kind of immunity that would give him the legal cover to explicitly commit political violence upon the American left, a case that’s being partially decided by a conservative judge whose wife tried to overturn the last election for Trump.