I got done with work at 11 last night and then saw a statement from the NYU university president explaining that they got the NYPD to clear a camp because of "outside infiltration" and "anti-semitic chanting." On my way home I saw what remained of it - there was 3-4 police vehicles, 50 cops in dystopian all-black probably riot gear, a police drone, and 50 remaining protestors on the public pavement outside a university building. The chants that I remember were Hitlerian classics like "free Palestine", "the more you silence us the louder we shout", and "NYU your hands are red, there are 40 thousand dead." (A reference to the university's collaboration and investments in Israel - the object of these and other student protests has been university divestment from Israel).
Then came home and saw on twitter the denunciations of Columbia - the president, multiple senior members of the Democrat party, every level of state and city government. A senator compared it to a pogrom. I have a twitter mutual there who was posting frequent updates from inside the Nuremberg rally + Passover Seder collab on campus, and how the (definitionally antifa) NYPD is heroically trying to evict them with 24*7 helicopters and drones overhead. I saw a report from an NBC reporter who was inside that encampment about the lack of the Hitlerian behaviour and rehtoric, and how the big objectionable incident heard around the world actually took place outside the Columbia campus. Thankfully the published NBC News report was headlined "120 arrested at NYU protest; Columbia president urged to resign over campus ‘anarchy'", so that people were never in doubt about whom to hate. Finally I learnt that among the people arrested by NYU for being outsiders were faculty who were protecting their students within the encampment, the faculty have now released a detailed statement contradicting their university president.
I think I realised why this gaslighting gets to me so much. We have had student protests in India where the leaders were arrested and demonised nation-wide, one of them is still in jail pending trial for 5 years on a new case, another was beaten up by lawyers when he was released, and the entire media spectrum spread obvious rubbish about them and what they were saying. But in India being anti-right-wing is such a fringe position that almost everybody close to me immediately knew that those media reports aren't to be taken seriously. So there is a shared reality and reference frame to talk within.
In the US, on the other hand, liberalism and even mild leftism aren't as fringe. And the mainstream media caters to and is made up of people with these ideologies, at least to an extent. It is more difficult to dismiss them than with Indian media. So, to see them use exactly the same tactics as Chinese state media or Indian mainstream media when it comes to demonizing protestors is more infuriating, not because I expect better, but because there are other people with ostentsibly similar politics who will take this seriously.
