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The past few weeks of student protests, counter-protests, and police activity at Columbia have been the tensest moments the University has seen in over 50 years. What’s it like to be a student and graduating senior during this historic moment?
When GZERO writer Riley Callanan began her senior year at Barnard, the women’s college within Columbia, she never expected it would end this way: thousands of student protesters, an encampment and takeover of an administrative building, the attention of the national news media, armed police officers swarming campus, and, ultimately, a canceled graduation ceremony. Now, as she tells colleague Alex Kliment on GZERO World, instead of senior galas and grad parties, Columbia students are having intense debates over the Israel-Palestine conflict, antisemitism, and free speech.
Callanan has been documenting it all—from the early protests on the academic quad to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson delivering on her library steps. GZERO correspondent Alex Kliment sat down with Callahan to hear more about what it’s like to be a college senior in 2024, what she saw during the protests, and what happens after graduation.“We absolutely need to change the default setting on campuses from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm."
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
- With summer looming, where will student protesters turn next? ›
- From the inside out: Is Columbia’s campus crisis calming down? ›
- Chaos on Campus: Speaker Johnson's visit fans the flames at Columbia as protests go global ›
- Columbia & Yale protests: What campus protesters want ›
- Campus protests spill over into US political sphere ›
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take to kick off your week.
Of course, the Middle East is leading our concerns and the headlines right now. There is no deal despite Bill Burns, the most respected senior interlocutor the United States has to offer, director of the CIA, making a last-ditch effort last week in the region, including Israel, to try to get everyone to agree to a short-term cease-fire, in return for significant numbers of hostages being released. Did not happen. Lots of reasons for that. One is because it's hard to talk with Hamas, engage with Hamas. It is a terrorist organization. A lot of people refuse to negotiate with terrorists. And also because, by the time you get a message through to the leadership, it takes usually a minimum of a week, sometimes two, and things change quickly.
Secondly, Israel did not want any ambiguity on what was going to happen after the six weeks of the cease-fire. Prime Minister Netanyahu in particular, saying that they were going to go into Rafah, that they were going to continue and destroy the remaining battalions that Hamas has available to them on the ground in Gaza while the Americans were trying to say, “well, if you've certain further agreements were met, then it could extend and could become permanent. And that was the only way that Hamas was going to agree.” Well, the Israeli government didn't want that, particularly because the government would collapse in all likelihood. It would be very hard for the Prime Minister to maintain the support of his far-right coalition if he were to accept that in a deal. So he did his best to scuttle it.
And also, the fact that the United States pushing Israel as hard as they did publicly, gives Hamas more wiggle room, more support from the international community, more alignment with the international community, to say no. So now, the or else is that Israel is going in. What had been just the capture of the border controls, allowing in humanitarian aid, limited amounts be coming in is now going to become a full-fledged ground invasion.
Some 300,000 Palestinians of the 1.2 to 1.5 million that have been sheltering in Rafah have evacuated into areas with very limited facilities and aid, but certainly better than facing the onslaught which is coming. More will certainly evacuate, not enough to make the Americans comfortable, not including fighting age males among the Palestinians, irrespective of whether they are or not believed to be Hamas.
And there will not be adequate humanitarian support for those, either that have evacuated or those that remain there, which means this is breaching the red line as defined by President Biden, his administration, telling Israel do not attack Rafah or else. The or else at a minimum, being that the United States is going to boycott provision of offensive weapons, that would be used in these Rafah attacks. Biden spoke about that in an interview with Erin Burnett. probably not the way it should have been announced, really should have been a well prepared speech about US policy towards Israel, ideally should have been coordinated with American allies. Look, at the end of the day, when the war started, the US was not aligned on Israel policy with all of its allies out there. Increasingly today it is, with the entirety of the G7 and with allies in the Gulf, in the Middle East, and a US policy like its policy on Ukraine, where the US is leading but is coordinating security policy with everyone, is a much stronger policy than one where the Americans are by themselves. Biden is now in a position where he's increasingly by himself internationally, and he's also increasingly by himself at home.
This decision to cut off the Israelis from some of these offensive weapons opposed strongly by the entire Republican Party, certainly by Trump, even by people like Senator Mitt Romney, also by a number of independents and centrists on the Democratic right. At the same time, the left of the Democratic Party strongly opposed to Biden for continuing to support Israel, defend Israel, provide lots of military capabilities and intelligence in response to what they believe is a genocidal policy on the ground in Gaza.
So this is no man's land for Biden. This is going to hurt, and it's going to hurt at a time that Netanyahu is not going anywhere. He has looked stronger, certainly stronger in his ability to lead a defense of Israel against the 300 plus missiles and drones that were struck against it by Iran. Not a single Israeli military casualty there, but also not going anywhere because as long as this war on Gaza continues in a significant way, it is hard to call for a new election on the ground in Israel. Which means that when we're looking ahead to November, this Israeli government is very likely in place. Opposition of this Israeli government to Biden is growing more public. The Israelis saying they need to go it alone, which is certainly not what's happening. The reality is there's massive intelligence support, military support, defensive support continuing from the United States. But politically, it plays very strongly for the Prime Minister to say, I am the guy who is ensuring that we Israel are defended against Hamas, defended against Gaza, defended against an Iranian-led axis of terror across the region.
And that also means that this fighting is continuing in this US election cycle with more proxy attacks with over 100,000 Israeli citizens that continue to be evacuated from the north of the country, that's the equivalent of 4 million Americans. Imagine how important that would be in a post 9/11 environment, with them still not being able to live in their homes, have their children in their schools, all those things. That is an issue that certainly the Israeli government intends to address before the school year starts in September, which is of course before the US election in November. So a lot of ways that this gets a lot worse. And that's even before we talk about the potential for Iran-Israel to heat up again, before we talk about significant accidents from Iranian proxies to get through and kill American soldiers, on the ground in the region.
And of course, potential for terrorist activity, Islamic extremist terrorist activity gone way up on the back of all of this. So not great news. The worst week in the Middle East War for the United States, since it started back in October. And also the most challenging week for peace and stability in the Middle East.
TikTok logo on a phone surrounded by the American, Israeli, and Chinese flags.
Last Wednesday, as part of the sweeping foreign-aid package that included much-neededfunding for Ukraine’s defense, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill requiring that TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, sell the popular video-sharing app to an American buyer within a year or face a ban in the United States.
As Iwrote a little over a year ago, I think this is a close call but the right move. TikTok is ultimately beholden to the Chinese government, an authoritarian state-capitalist regime locked in an increasingly adversarial strategic competition with the US. As intelligence agencies have warned, the platform poses a national security vulnerability because Beijing can commandeer it to surveil and manipulate Americans. No remedies or assurances to the contrary can mitigate that risk short of a Chinese divestment or an outright ban.
Most importantly, the Chinese Communist Party already bans all US social media apps under the guise of national security. TikTok itself is banned in China, where ByteDance is only allowed to operate a heavily censored version for domestic users. In my ideal world, this would be an area for US-China competition rather than confrontation. Alas, the CCP isn’t taking down its so-called Great Firewall anytime soon, so I see the US divestment/ban order as a fair and reciprocal response that will protect not only US national security but also American social media companies from their most formidable competitor.
Why now?
TikTok has long drawn political condemnation from both sides of the aisle, especially in the fractious House, where hostility to China is the only reliable area of bipartisan agreement. And yet, over the past three years, the viral Chinese social media platform survived effort after effort to bring it to heel, including a forced divestiture order in 2020 under then-President Donald Trump, a near-pass RESTRICT Act, and a struck-down ban in Montana. Through it all, its reach has continued to grow unabated.
But TikTok’s luck has just about run out. And as strange as it may sound, it had little to do with a change in the US-China relationship and everything to do with … the Gaza war.
Since Oct. 7, many Americans’ TikTok feeds have become awash in anti-Israeli and, in a lot of cases, antisemitic content. This isn’t entirely surprising – after all, by virtue of their demographics (young, non-Western, Muslim), TikTok creators and users are far more likely to hold pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and antisemitic views than their Instagram or X counterparts. But beyond this organic bias, there’s also reasonably suggestive evidence that TikTok’s algorithm and moderation rules have artificially suppressed pro-Israeli content and amplified pro-Palestinian and antisemitic sentiment. This is consistent with otherstudies that show ByteDance shapes the feed’s content in accordance with the Chinese Communist Party’s policy goals.
After trying and failing to convince TikTok CEO Shou Chew to change course, a small but motivated group of wealthy and politically connected Jewish and Israeli Americans bootstrapped a PR and lobbying campaign that ultimately managed to achieve what years of anti-China efforts couldn’t.
Congress was already primed to do something/anything on antisemitism and show support for Israel; beating up on Beijing just was the cherry on top. House Speaker Mike Johnson figured he could use the TikTok divestment provision as a sweetener to get the foreign assistance package over the line with his members, knowing the prospect of finally passing Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan aid would be enough to overcome tepid Senate opposition to the TikTok bill. (Maybe he’s effective at his job, after all?) A ban would also meet no resistance from the White House given the Biden administration’s approach to tech and investment restrictions on China, especially in an election year. It was the perfect storm for TikTok.
What’s next?
Worry not: You can keep doomscrolling on TikTok at least through Inauguration Day. The law gives ByteDance until January 19, 2025, to sell the app and allows the president to grant a one-time 90-day extension into April. In the meantime, TikTok will likely challenge the legislation in court on First Amendment grounds, which – though unlikely to succeed – will extend the timeline and almost certainly push any decision into the next presidential administration.
Ironically, TikTok’s best hope lies with Trump retaking the White House in November. Ironically, I say, because Trump was the one who first tried to ban TikTok in 2020 through an executive order that was blocked by the courts … before flip-flopping earlier this year and becoming a vocal opponent of the policy on the back of a sizable campaign contribution by major Republican donor and TikTok investor Jeff Yass. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Trump would use the threat of a divestiture order/ban as a bargaining chip in negotiations with China on other issues closer to his heart and less damaging to his wallet, eventually agreeing not to enforce it in return for concessions in areas such as trade.
Should Biden win reelection and TikTok’s legal challenges fail, it will be up to the Chinese government to decide whether to allow ByteDance to divest. As of now, Beijing’s official position is that it will prohibit the export of TikTok’s AI-powered recommendation algorithm – the platform’s core asset – to a US buyer (without which the app is practically worthless). But the issue is still being quietly debated within the Chinese system, suggesting the only decision maker who really matters, President Xi Jinping, is yet to make a final call – and may not until and unless a sale is actually forced.
Of course, even if Beijing were to sign off on a spinoff, it takes two to tango. There’s only a handful of potential American buyers who could afford theprice tag of TikTok’s US business. Former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had reportedly made a bid to purchase the app with a group of investors back in March, but it remains to be seen whether he’d cough up the cash when the rubber meets the road. The most obvious candidates to snap up the company would be publicly traded tech giants that would come under immediate regulatory scrutiny over antitrust issues.
If there was no viable buyer or if China’s government refused to allow the sale, the divestiture order would effectively become a ban. In this scenario, TikTok would eventually be kicked off the US market, forcing the app’s 170 million American users to Google “how to download free VPN.” Overnight, cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes would lose their oomph. Real estate influencers would have to move back to their parents’ basements. Kids might have to learn to talk to each other. Chaos would no doubt ensue.
Somewhat more seriously, a ban would put a strain on an already tense US-China relationship. At the same time, given all theefforts to stabilize ties since Woodside, Beijing’s response would focus more on insulating the Chinese economy from further US tech containment efforts than on tit-for-tat retaliation against high-profile US tech companies. Not only because there’s little the Chinese can do on this front that they haven’t been doing for years, with most American social media platforms already banned from the Chinese market. But also because targeting any remaining potential targets, such as Apple or Tesla, risks dampening foreign investor sentiment at a time when China is struggling mightily to boost confidence in its economy.
At the end of the day, Xi doesn’t care much about “decadent” consumer apps such as TikTok. He’d rather worry about the commanding heights of tech and economic competition. The Chinese people writ large, however, would see a ban as yet another US attempt to constrain China’s rise.
Is sleeping like breathing? Do Americans have a Constitutional right to sleep? In April, Supreme Court justices heard a case involving homeless encampments and whether cities that don’t provide shelter space can arrest or fine people for sleeping outside. At oral arguments, they asked philosophical questions about the idea of sleeping and whether or not providing space to sleep qualifies as “cruel and unusual” punishment under the 8th Amendment of the Constitution.
Legal expert Emily Bazelon joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World to unpack some of the biggest cases before the Supreme Court this year. Former President Trump’s legal woes are front and center in the news, but many other major issues are at stake during this court term, including homelessness, gun rights, free speech on social media, and the power of federal agencies to interpret laws.
One case in front of the Court this year that isn’t generating a lot of headlines but will have a big impact on the daily lives of Americans involves the landmark 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defence Council decision that provides the legal bases for government agencies like the EPA, SEC, and FDA to interpret laws how they see fit if they are ambiguous. At oral arguments, the Court’s conservative majority seemed skeptical of allowing the Chevron ruling as it stands to remain in place, which will fundamentally change the way the federal government operates.
“One way to think about these agencies is that they keep us safe. They make sure the water is clean and that the air is clean,” Bazelon explains. “Another way to think about them is they're intruding on corporate profits and taking up too much power.”
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
A demonstrator stands in front of a row of National Guard soldiers, across the street from the Hilton Hotel in Grant Park, site of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, on Aug. 26, 1968.
Last week, my friend Alex Kliment wisely urged us to “Stop with the 1930s stuff,” current historical comparisons between what President Joe Biden has called a“ferocious surge” of antisemitism in response to the war in Gaza and the murderous anti-Jewish hatreds of the 1930s that led to the Holocaust.
Let’s pump the brakes on another distortion of history — that of today’s US political environment with the upheavals of 1968. (Seehere,here, andhere for recent public examples.)
Here’s the argument some are making …
As in 1968, the Democratic Party, burdened with a weak incumbent, is fighting to keep the White House as a deeply unpopular war ignites angry student protests, provoking confrontations between students and police. The Democrats, preparing to nominate their candidate (in Chicago!) will face ugly demonstrations there that provoke yet more activist confrontations with police, adding to a sense that the nation is out of control and prompting centrist voters to favor a restoration of order.
Conclusion: The Dems lost in 1968, and Biden now faces defeat for the same reasons.
Not so fast. First, today’s student protesters are furious over the war in Gaza, the heavy civilian death toll among Palestinians with nowhere to go, and the seeming refusal of the US government and US institutions, including their schools, to make it stop.
But the students of 1968, angry over segregation in America and the war in Vietnam, faced the reality they might be drafted and sent to kill or be killed in Southeast Asia. The furies that fueled those students were far more personal.
Second, if today’s political environment feels chaotic, consider this … As of May 2024, hundreds of students have been arrested, and graduation ceremonies have been canceled. President Biden is unpopular.
By May 1968, a much larger number of protesters had been arrested, state troopers had killed three students and wounded 50 more at South Carolina State University, President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek reelection, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, and Robert F. Kennedy would soon follow.
Third, this year’s election dynamic is very different. Polls say Biden is a weak leader for Democrats, but he is the incumbent. The advantages this confers on his reelection bid exceed anything 1968’s ill-fated Dem nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, had on hand.
Biden has another advantage: Party convention organizers are already prepping for the worst in Chicago. In 1968, the Dems and Chicago PD weren’t ready for demonstrations of that scale, intensity, and sophistication of organization.
Further, in 1968, for voters who wanted a leader who could calm the raging passions of that moment, Richard Nixon could offer himself as an experienced statesman, a Cold War-era safe pair of hands — a man without the personal baggage that would permanently stain his legacy a few years later.
Donald Trump is a different political character. Love him or hate him, he will not be the choice of voters who crave a return to “normalcy.” Trump presents himself, and many of his devoted fans see him, as a political revolutionary, a Molotov cocktail to throw at the nation’s political elite.
In addition, while Nixon could win over persuadable voters as the “law-and-order candidate,” Trump now faces 91 felony charges in four separate criminal cases and is currently making headlines for defying a judge’s orders.
Finally, from the “tragedy-repeated-as-farce” department, 1968’s Robert F. Kennedy was a murdered martyr for social justice. His son, Robert Kennedy Jr., is aconspiracy theoristwho says a doctor once told him that “a worm got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” Nor is the younger Kennedy likely to win five states that had voted Democrat for decades, as third-party segregationist George Wallace did in 1968.
Biden faced an uphill reelection fight before the war and related protests erupted, and Trump might well beat him in November. If so, when seeking explanations, look to the problems Biden faced before Hamas attacked Israel.
“The [abortion pill case] affects women across the country, it’s not state by state,” Bazelon stresses, “It’s the FDA’s authority to allow pills to be shipped everywhere and other rules that have made abortion pills more accessible for women in blue as well as red states.”
A group of doctors is challenging the Food and Drug Administration's authority to allow doctors to prescribe abortion pills without an in-person visit with a patient and for those pills to be sent through the mail. Bazelon explains that this group of plaintiffs is unusual in that they haven’t yet experienced direct harm from the FDA’s ruling, which you usually need to prove has happened before a case makes it all the way up to the highest court in the land. Four female justices are also on the bench this year, a historic high-water mark. Could that make a difference in the way justices rule on either case?
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
Displaced Palestinians, who fled Rafah after the Israeli military began evacuating civilians from the eastern parts of the southern Gazan city, ahead of a threatened assault, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, travel on a vehicle, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip May 6, 2024.
On Tuesday, the Israeli military reported its tanks had rolled into Rafah and established control over the Gaza side of the border crossing with Egypt. The incursion was more restrained than the long-threatened ground invasion was expected to be, likely because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing pressure to agree to a cease-fire with Hamas, which is backed by the United States and Arab nations.
On Monday, Hamas unexpectedly accepted a Qatari-Egyptian cease-fire proposal for Gaza, which Israel says it is examining. The deal would secure the release of hostages still being held in Gaza. But rather than stalling the invasion, the Israeli war cabinet “unanimously decided” to continue with plans for the invasion and launched strikes in eastern Rafah late Monday.
The diplomatic breakthrough – which followed mass weekend protests demanding the Israeli government bring home the remaining hostages held in Gaza – was meant to put pressure on Netanyahu. The United States and other key allies had also been pressuring Israel to refrain from attacking Rafah.
“Netanyahu is trying to have it both ways — continue talks in Egypt by sending a team while proceeding with attacks into Rafah,” says Eurasia Group analyst Greg Brew. ”The door hasn't closed on a deal yet.”
Israel’s war cabinet said it would continue to work on a deal, sending delegates to Cairo on Tuesday to negotiate aspects it still finds objectionable (the deal’s full details are not publicly known).
We’re watching for Hamas’ reaction to the Rafah attacks and how it affects any longer-term cease-fire prospects.
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The battle over TikTok’s future, explained
This is not 1968
