Politics 🏛️
Khymani James, the Boston Latin graduate who resigned in 2021 as the Boston School Committee's student representative after calling the committee "racist and adultist" now gets in trouble for saying "Zionists don't deserve to live." Sounds like he is a lot of fun to work with in a team environment!
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/nyregion/columbia-student-protest-zionism.html
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I thank the gods every day that there is zero record of any of the opinions I ever had at age 17, and that no adults deemed it necessary to stick a fucking microphone in front of my face.
I use to get reminded of the shit I use to say in high school every once in a while through Facebook. Basically it’s like “Hey Zach! 12 years ago you said this borderline cancelable thing on your page! Here look!”
Oh, look at that. <delete> <delete> <delete>
No one hates me like myself!
I'd cancel the fuck out of 18 year old me.
Must be stressful being a teenager right now.
Yep this right here 😂
I believe he recorded and posted it himself.
Different events: One is when he's 17 and being a dumb ass as a member of the Boston school committee, and the second one is from several years later where he's saying he's considered murdering "Zionists" and it's the second one that he recorded and posted himself, as you said.
Don’t think you get to play the “they are only 17” card when they’re calling for mass murder but hey that’s just me
Two different events: 1. when he was 17 he was on the boston school committee as a a student liaison and made a fool of himself apparently. 2. he posted an IG live recently (now several years after the school committee) where he said he we should be thankful he's not murdering "zionists."
So he was even older when he escalated coolcooolcool
Why is Zionist in quotation marks?
Probably because it’s the important word in a paraphrased quotation
Because he means Jewish people.
It's because he wants to sound foreboding. We are meant to picture him saying it out loud while using air quotes like he is Dr. Evil talking about Austin Powers's mojo.
👏
I said some straight up abhorrent shit right up until ~18 when my peer group shifted from high school to university. Unless high school has dramatically changed in the last ~25 years I suspect saying abhorrent shit is still in vogue (at least it still seems to be for my nephew).
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Soooo many people use to say n***a when I was in middle school. Pretty sure most grew out of it by now but yeah
Seriously. My millennial friends and I were warned to be careful with what we posted on Facebook because future employers may be put off by something we posted in college. It’s insane some of these college kids have absolutely no awareness that purposefully posting politically charged content on social media can damage your life.
I wasn't doing that shit either but I also wasn't asked to be a liaison for a huge school committee after suffering terminal online tik tok activist brain rot. These are two different events. When he was 17 he was on the school committee and saying stupid shit, but not calling for murder. Now as a 19 (20?) year old he's on IG live and obviously in need of psychiatric help.
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Yeah he seems... unwell. At best. Obviously calling for the murder of people based on their religion is uh, not great. Or normal. Or something that a university should be encouraging in its student body.
I was a high school senior during 9/11 and Islamophobia was pervasive. Not everyone, but all too common. This is not a new phenomenon.
Nonsense. He's just a "Progressive Person."
This feels like hearing “boys will be boys” after a college student rapes someone. Yes, I was dumber when I was young. No, I didn’t rape anyone and this is not normal.
People say dumb and edgy shit all the time as teenagers into college. They might mean it or they might just be trying to be funny and make their friends laugh. The point is teenagers say and do dumb shit, and it would suck to have that held against at you the rest of your life.
Congrats on not being a dick. Doesn’t mean others haven’t fucked up. Hell I can remember counter protesting the Iraq war in college blaring born in the USA from my friend’s car. Felt funny at the time, decades later I’ve spoken with my friend who drove the car about how much we regret that.
I wasn’t being racist, xenophobic, or violent. But I’m 100% embarrassed by my decisions at the time and I’m glad there isn’t evidence online of my stupidity.
There's a difference between what you did then and what this dude said now. Violence should be a fairly solid line that shouldn't be crossed. Especially since he's like 19 or 20 years old now.
That all said, I don't think he's irredeemable but serious consequences would be appropriate.
If somebody talked about blacks the way this black dude talks about Jews they would literally never be forgiven. It doesn't matter if they were 70 years old and this had happened literally half a century ago. They would not be forgiven. We saw recently people lose their jobs because they did black face or used an anti black slur like 40 years earlier. This guy will be forgiven quickly because he is black. And he's doing it for a cause that progressives are sympathetic to. Seeing the discrepancies with how seriously anti-black racism is treated versus how openly contemptuous and sometimes hateful black activists are to Jews, and weaponize the Palestinian cause to get a free pass, well it makes me start to wonder whether I need to start assuming those same attitudes towards black folks. Cuz I know it wouldn't be tolerated. It is taboo if you're progressive to object to some of the human rights violations blacks commit right in front of your face. And adding insult to injury, black activists then describe the perpetrators as "at risk youth" and play the poverty card usually with great success.
Depends very heavily on what one's family is like growing up. If someone has racist, xenophobic or violent parents raising them that's a massive influence shaping their lives and how they view the world until they've had a chance to live on their own, get some space and develop more independently and even then it takes time to get out of your system.
With people getting on social media as kids or teenagers that's years of opportunity to leave a paper trail echoing what they were immersed in by relatives and peers.
I'm not saying you're lying but I am saying you don't remember everything you said and did so you can't possibly say this with certainty.
What group did you want to genocide at 17?
He called the press conference himself.
I'm mean, sure, but I'm pleased to share that my youthful indiscretions did not extend to calling for the murder of anyone. Also, it does not appear that the situation was that this kid was minding his own business and some adult stuck a mic in his face. Seems as though he is the one who picked up the mic and started talking into it.
People say this all the time, but no, my embarrassing childhood moments never involved the call for mass murder.
On the one hand, the joke that "everything I did before 30 is a rumor" is true for me, but on the other hand, I wasn't leading any protest movements that were covered by the NYT. Even if it didn't come up on a Google search, LexisNexis would still find it.
Same. I was smart enough to not put anything I actually thought on FB.
Come the fuck on now, even before the permanence of the internet came about, even idiots knew not to spew antisemitic shit.
No the fuck they didn't.
He’s 20 now and it was apparently his own mic.
I never once advocated for the death of a group of people when I was a teenager. I knew better back then, and I also knew better at age 20 (the age this kid currently is). There’s many people that I strongly disagree with politically (far right and far left) but I would never wish death onto them. And nobody stuck a microphone in his face, he did all of this on his own. Saying he was only 17 is an excuse.
In college I got into communism and started hanging out with essentially a tankie club. In retrospect the group (including me) had some pretty goddamn evil ideas about how to treat people we disagreed with, our definition of who was a "fascist" seemed to encompass more than half the country. But still, none of us were going public with this shit. When we went to DSA meetings we pretended to be normal moderate socialists because we knew that "kill all fascists, and liberals get the bullet too" was beyond the pale.
This kid clearly lives in an environment where he feels like such sentiments are not beyond the pale. He got into Columbia after graduating the Latin School, he's clearly not stupid, he's just been socially conditioned by TikTok and overly permissive adults to believe that this bullshit is 100% A-OK.
What do you think was motivating you and your fellow “tanky”, psychologically? I’d be fascinated to hear your viewpoint if you felt free, sharing it. When I was in school, it seemed the extremist on all sides were pretty angry people from pretty difficult backgrounds. Or sometimes from very non-difficult backgrounds, but still very angry, indeed about something other than the state of the world.
I grew up in a pretty decisuvely right wing household. My family aren't like neonazis, but they're pretty far right and very intense about it. Going to college was eye opening and also just learning more about the world, I realized my worldview was deeply flawed. I felt betrayed by my upbringing and reasoned that I might as well go as far left as possible to get away from it. I also made friends with immigrants, Trans people etc, who were directly harmed by right wing policies, and I got even angrier about it than they did.
Basically the way I was raised I had the impression that the only way to engage with politics was to fully commit and be extreme. So when I decided to be left wing as a young adult, I fully committed and went extreme.
I couldn't tell you what motivated most of the other tankies I hung out with. A lot of them had serious mental health issues, and I think that had something to do with their radical politics. Many were just LARPers. Like, they were pretty chill people but they talked about politics like cartoon villains, I think they just use "the revolution" as like a therapeutic revenge fantasy to let off steam. I think a big part of why I eventually drifted away from that extremism is because I'm a pretty inherently happy person and I like my life, a lot of the tankies I knew/know are just dismal, miserable people.
Today I've mellowed out a lot. I still think it's important to participate in politics, and I'm still left of center, because without that participation democracy dies, but I actively strive to be normal and at least consider multiple sides to issues.
Thanks so much for taking time to write that. I actually learned something.
Preach
Advocating for, essentially, mass murder is pretty severe..
He's an adult now. He can and should be held responsible for what he said.
He livestreamed it to his university's disciplinary committee.
Did you say things like this when you were 17? Also this guy got caught not because somebody stuck a microphone in his face but because he chose to record himself bragging about how he wanted to kill Zionists and he sent it to administrators. He also was filmed on campus encouraging a mob to gather to chase Jewish students off campus.
you didn't have a livejournal? :D To be fair, while some of my opinions back then were definitely cringworthy, none of my opinions involved publicly wishing entire groups of people dead, much less a dogwhistle one.
I’m very glad I was graduating high school as MySpace came out. Now all my dumb teenage thoughts aren’t archived forever on the internet, thank fucking Satan!
I definitely did and said some dumb shit when I was young, but I'm pretty sure I didn't go out in public at 17 and call for an entire group of people to die.
There is something extremely troubling going on in academia today. These young kids are being turned into close-minded, hate filled, intolerant radicals on a mass scale and its not good for society nor mankind in general.
The craziest part about this story is he sent the video expressing his desires to murder all Zionists to officials at Columbia back in January. Not only was he not expelled, or even suspended in the last four months, he was rewarded by being designated the official spokesperson and negotiator for the protestors.
And then spewed more hate in a livestream with the university disciplinary committee.
Dudes a bonafide sociopath.
Wonder how many people he calls a Nazi or a terrorist, while directly supporting a terrorist organization who wants to kill Jews.
Why the fuck are we accepting of people who are literally supporting a terrorist regime? Send'em over there to Palestine.
Shit these people won't even lift a finger to fix their own settler-colonial situation.
Protected races in this country ATM regarding social commentary, there’s really no other way to explain it
He’s still a protected status that can only be removed if he said he was a conservative
This is sad. They've obviously ruined their life. I just watched the video where they are being interviewed by school administrators to determine possible disciplinary action, and it's absolutely tapped.
This is the same person who's been leading the protests and surrounded Jewish students who seemingly were just trying to get across campus.
What does tapped mean in this context?
KooKoo, crazy, out in left field, etc
Insane in the membrane.
(I’m assuming - that’s what it meant growing up in the 2000s)
Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs
Out to lunch
Totally cooked
Adultist? Can't just add "-ist" to everything people.
Stop being so peopleist
You’re being stupidest, be nicer.
That's sounds so phrase-ist.
I laughed pretty hard at "adultist." You mean a bunch of adults with jobs are not taking a teenager as seriously as the teenager believes they deserve to be taken? Quelle surprise. First time that happened I am sure.
And “-phobe”
I mean, as a Jew who is horrified by the (easily-predictable) Israeli overreaction, and thinks a cease-fire is the way to go, fuck this kid. Apologies not accepted.
At this point a solid chunk of the student protestors aren't even calling for a ceasefire anymore, they're calling for the annihilation of Israel.
I think I was on here yesterday blathering that we need better reporting on the protesters' beliefs. I want detailed focus groups and polling, etc. But yes, that's a worry.
These protests are all organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime, Palestinian Youth Movement, etc. They all celebrated on October 7 and have made it abundantly clear that they want the total eradication of Israel. Anyone joining the protests either holds the same beliefs or is being willfully blind to them.
We don’t go around polling members at KKK rallies to figure out whether they actually hate black people. I don’t know why we need to give these people the benefit of the doubt. They haven’t earned it.
They all celebrated on Oct 7? You sure are making bold sweeping claims without a single citation here.
It's pretty difficult to get accurate polling for this kind of thing. Like, it's been over a decade since OWS and it's still unclear what the general thrust of that movement even was.
A lot of the videos of these student protests show the students being extremely hostile to any outsiders trying to record their activities or enter the encampment. So we're dealing with a population that actively resists analysis.
I mean I was occupy-adjacent, so that's a separate convo. (They wanted a bunch of things, but "let's deal with worsening income and wealth inequality, and let's not let the bankers rip us off any more" are pretty close to the central nubs, though... as good lefties, they had a pretty wide grab-bag of asks. As here.)
I'm optimistic that good reporters could get a good sense of what the participants at a particular protest believed, even if "do a 200 person poll" and "stick a camera in everyone's face" aren't effective strategies.
I mean you can also just go and talk to them lmao theyre normal people
"we're protesting because the wrong genocide is being committed"
This is exactly it. What do people think "from the river to the sea" actually means?
Ceasefire: Hamas fires and Jews cease.
A cease fire for who? Is only one side firing guns and rockets? Am I missing something?
Wow, an antisemite who calls people who disagree with him "racist"?! ya dont say!