How a migrant farmworker built generational wealth, penny by penny

These people are the true menaces to the democracy they crow about, not Trump. So (in a perverse way) we should be grateful to Wade and his numbskull arrogance for proving it beyond a shadow of a doubt. 

Columbia University announced Monday it is canceling its main commencement ceremony amid the campus protests over the war in Gaza. They're the latest school to change plans as the demonstrations continue. CBS News correspondent Elise Preston is at the University of Southern California, which also canceled its commencement ceremony.

Israel is warning civilians to evacuate parts of Rafah ahead of an anticipated military operation after saying for months it would invade the city in its effort to defeat Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel and Hamas are blaming each other for an apparent impasse over cease-fire talks. CBS News foreign correspondent Ramy Inocencio has the latest.

Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty ImagesAn Indian lawmaker whose party is allied with the country’s prime minister is believed to have fled to Germany amid allegations that he sexually assaulted or raped as many as 400 women, reports say.Prajwal Revanna, the grandson of former Indian prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda, allegedly fled after thousands of flash drives were left in public places including parks and bus stands last month in the southern state of Karnataka, where Revanna holds office. The drives contained videos allegedly showing the abuse which Revanna filmed himself, according to The Times.The Janata Dal (Secular) or JDS party, which is allied with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), last week suspended Revanna amid the allegations. A Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the claims has reportedly sought the help of Interpol in locating the 33-year-old, who allegedly left the country using a diplomatic passport.Read more at The Daily Beast.

At least 15 crates of live chickens were found in the streets of Brooklyn early Monday morning after falling off a poultry truck, according to police and videos taken from the scene.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem wrote in her book that she shot and killed her 14-month-old dog Cricket.

The campus protests against the war in Gaza are forcing some colleges and universities to change their plans for commencement ceremonies. CBS News national security contributor Sam Vinograd has more on some of the factors the schools are considering.

Scientists have found DDT in zooplankton and deep-sea fish off the coast of L.A., indicating the toxic chemical might be infiltrating the base of the food web.

The demonstrations over Israel's war in Gaza are intense. But how deep and long-lasting is their staying power in U.S. politics?

EXCLUSIVE: The Democratic National Committee paid Bragg prosecutor Matthew Colangelo thousands of dollars for “political consulting" in 2018, Fox News Digital has learned.

Lewis Hamilton is tied for a record seven Formula One World Drivers' Championship titles and has the most wins overall. "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King sat down exclusively with Hamilton at the Empire State Building to talk about his show-stopping stunt in NYC with Mercedes F1 team partner, WhatsApp, and winning another championship title: "Let's get back to where we belong."

From "Magnum, P.I." to "Blue Bloods," Tom Selleck has become a staple of American television and film. In his latest memoir, "You Never Know," Selleck shares insights from his journey in Hollywood and beyond.

Cedric the Entertainer gives an exclusive first look at tonight's season six finale of "The Neighborhood."

The moment I saw Andrew Dudum’s post on X, I instantly knew exactly how his next few days were going to play out:

Judge Juan Merchan said former President Donald Trump violated his gag order on April 22 when he commented on the political makeup of the jury.

Claiming a "new round of escalation" from NATO amid the war in Ukraine, Russia plans drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons.

China President Xi Jinping arrived in France for to discuss trade and the Ukraine war with French President Emmanuel Macron, just a month ahead of President Biden's own visit to France.

That's pretty rich.

The No. 1 priority for St. John’s this offseason was rebuilding its backcourt, and it landed a key piece in the endeavor on Monday morning.

Long-term care insurance can help you cover the high cost of care. Here are four moves to make before you turn 65.

The Prado Museum in Spain has confirmed the authenticity of a painting titled "Ecce Homo" by Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, previously thought lost.

Texas woman Savannah Kriger told her toddler's father, Brian Kriger, to "say goodbye to [his] son" Kaiden via text in the moments before she killed the boy in a murder-suicide on March 18.

New Jersey State Police announced that Trooper II Marcellus E. Bethea, died during training for an elite team, but they did not provide details.

Stewart made the remarks at an appearance at the Netflix Is a Joke Fest, which debuted on the streaming service on Friday.

Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via GettyA super PAC backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to sue Meta this week, alleging that the parent company to Instagram and Facebook “brazenly” censored a documentary about the candidate.Meta insists that American Values 2024 is being melodramatic. In a statement to The Daily Beast, a spokesperson said the film was “mistakenly blocked” and that the problem was “quickly resolved” after it was flagged. The company previously told The New York Times that the resolution took at most a few hours.According to a press release issued by American Values on Monday, many Facebook and Instagram users were unable to share the 30-minute, Woody Harrelson-narrated documentary about the candidate, Who Is Bobby Kennedy?Read more at The Daily Beast.

Jeannie Epper, the trailblazing stuntwoman who appeared in more than 100 films and TV shows, including 'Wonder Woman' and 'Dynasty,' has died at 83.

Condé Nast employees were set to walk off the job only hours before the Met Gala, chaired by company editorial director Anna Wintour.

In a new series, "Dear David," "CBS Mornings" lead national correspondent David Begnaud shares feel-good stories about regular people doing extraordinary things. In this one, a barista shares how a customer's unexpected $200 tip helped her honor her mother.

Robinhood Markets Inc. has received a notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission about alleged securities violations at its crypto division

"We went from feeling embarrassed to feeling really embarrassed."

Shocking video taken during a Pennsylvania church's Sunday service shows an armed man take aim at the pastor mid-sermon before parishioners tackled him.

Michael Aaron Jayne, 41, allegedly struck and killed a Santaquin police officer while trying to flee a traffic stop on Interstate 15 in Utah early Sunday.

For a long time, having children has been a young person’s game. Although ancient records are sparse, researchers estimate that, for most of human history, women most typically conceived their first child in their late teens or early 20s and stopped having kids shortly thereafter.But in recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been starting their families later and later. Since the 1970s, American women have on average delayed the beginning of parenthood from age 21 to 27; Korean women have nudged the number past 32. As more women have kids in their 40s, the average age at which women give birth to any of their kids is now above 30, or fast approaching it, in most high-income nations.Rama Singh, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University, in Canada, thinks that if women keep having babies later in life, another fundamental reproductive stage could change: Women might start to enter menopause later too. That age currently sits around 50, a figure that some researchers believe has held since the genesis of our species. But to Singh’s mind, no ironclad biological law is stopping women’s reproductive years from stretching far past that threshold. If women decide to keep having kids at older ages, he told me, one day, hundreds of thousands of years from now, menopause could—theoretically—entirely disappear.Singh’s viewpoint is not mainstream in his field. But shifts in human childbearing behavior aren’t the only reason that menopause may be on the move. Humans are, on the whole, living longer now, and are in several ways healthier than our ancient ancestors. And in the past few decades, especially, researchers have made technological leaps that enable them to tinker like never before with how people’s bodies function and age. All of these factors might well combine to alter menopause’s timeline. It’s a grand experiment in human reproduction, and scientists don’t yet know what the result might be.So far, scientists have only scant evidence that the age of onset for menopause has begun to drift. Just a few studies, mostly tracking trends from recent decades, have noted a shift on the order of a year or two among women in certain Western countries, including the U.S. and Finland. Singh, though, thinks that could be just the start. Menopause can come on anywhere from a person’s 30s to their 60s, and the timing appears to be heavily influenced by genetics. That variation suggests some evolutionary wiggle room. If healthy kids keep being born to older and older parents, “I could see the age of menopause getting later,” Megan Arnot, an anthropologist at University College London, told me.Singh’s idea assumes that menopause is not necessary for humans—or any animal, for that matter—to survive. And if a species’ primary directive is to perpetuate itself, a lifespan that substantially exceeds fertility does seem paradoxical. Researchers have found lengthy post-reproductive lifespans in only a handful of other creatures—among them, five species of toothed whales, plus a single population of wild chimpanzees. But women consistently spend a third to half of their life in menopause, the most documented in any mammal.In humans, menopause occurs around the time when ovaries contain fewer than about 1,000 eggs, at which point ovulation halts and bodywide levels of hormones such as estrogen plummet. But there’s no biological imperative for female reproductive capacity to flame out after five decades of life. Each human woman is born with some 1 to 2 million eggs—comparable to what researchers have estimated in elephants, which remain fertile well into their 60s and 70s. Nor do animal eggs appear to have a built-in expiration date: Certain whales, for instance, have been documented bearing offspring past the age of 100.[Read: Why killer whales (and humans) go through menopause]This disconnect has led some researchers to conclude that menopause is an unfortunate evolutionary accident. Maybe, as some have argued, menopause is a by-product of long lifespans evolving so quickly that the ovaries didn’t catch up. But many women have survived well past menopause for the bulk of human history. Singh contends that menopause is a side effect of men preferring to mate with younger women, allowing fertility-compromising mutations to accumulate in aged females. (Had women been the ones to seek out only younger men, he told me, men would have evolved their own version of menopause.) Others disagree: Arnot told me that, if anything, many of today’s men may prefer younger women because fertility declines with age, rather than the other way around.But the preponderance of evidence supports menopause being beneficial to the species it’s evolved in, including us, Francisco Úbeda de Torres, a mathematical biologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, told me. Certainly, menopause was important enough that it appears to have arisen multiple times—at least four separate times among whales alone, Samuel Ellis, a biologist at the University of Exeter, told me.One of the most prominent and well-backed ideas about why revolves around grandmothering. Maybe menopause evolved to rid older women of the burden of fertility, freeing up their time and energy to allow them to help their offspring raise their own needy kids. In human populations around the world, grandmother input has clearly boosted the survival of younger generations; the same appears to be true among orcas and other toothed whales. Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, argues that the influence of menopausal grandmothering was so immense that it helped us grow bigger brains and shaped the family structures that still govern modern societies; it is, she told me, sufficient to explain menopause in humans, and what has made us the people we are today.[From the October 2019 issue: The secret power of menopause]Some researchers suspect that menopause may have other perks. Kevin Langergraber, an ecologist at Arizona State University, points out that certain populations of chimpanzees can also live well past menopause, even though their species doesn’t really grandmother at all. In chimpanzees and some other animals, he told me, menopause might help reduce the competition for resources between mothers and their children as they simultaneously try to raise young offspring.Regardless of the precise reasons, menopause may be deeply ingrained in our lineage—so much so that it could be difficult to adjust or undo. After all this time of living with an early end to ovulation, there is probably “no single master time-giver” switch that could be flipped to simply extend human female fertility, Michael Cant, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter, told me.Perhaps, though, menopause’s timeline could still change—not on scales of hundreds of thousands of years, but within generations. Malnutrition and smoking, for instance, are linked to an early sunsetting of menses, while contraceptive use may push the age of menopause onset back—potentially because of the ways in which these factors can affect hormones. Menopause also tends to occur earlier among women of lower socioeconomic status and with less education. Accordingly, interventions as simple as improving childhood nutrition might be enough to raise the average start of menopause in certain parts of the world, Lynnette Sievert, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me.[Read: Why so many accidental pregnancies happen in your 40s]Changes such as those would likely operate mostly on the margins—perhaps closing some of the gaps between poorer and richer nations, which can span about five years. Bigger shifts, experts told me, would probably require medical innovation that can slow, halt, or even reverse the premature aging of the ovaries, and maintain a person’s prior levels of estrogen and other reproductive hormones. Kara Goldman, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive scientist at Northwestern University, told me that one key to the ovarian fountain of youth might be finding drugs to preserve the structures that house immature eggs in a kind of dormant early state. Other researchers see promise in rejuvenating the tissues that maintain eggs in a healthy state. Still others are generating cells and hormones in the lab in an attempt to supplement what the aging female body naturally loses. Deena Emera, an evolutionary geneticist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, in California, thinks some of the best inspiration could come from species that stay fertile very late into life. Bowhead whales, for instance, can reproduce past the age of 100—and don’t seem to succumb to cancer. Maybe, Emera told me, they’re especially good at repairing DNA damage in reproductive and nonreproductive cells alike.Some women may welcome an extended interval in which to consider having kids, but Goldman and Emera are most focused on minimizing menopause’s health costs. Studies have repeatedly linked the menopause-related drop in hormones to declines in bone health; some research has pointed to cardiovascular and cognitive issues as well. Entering menopause can entail years of symptoms such as hot flashes, urinary incontinence, vaginal dryness, insomnia, and low libido. Putting all of that off, perhaps indefinitely, could extend the period in which women live healthfully, buoyed by their reproductive hormones.[Read: Women in menopause are getting short shrift]Extending the ovaries’ shelf life won’t necessarily reverse or even mitigate menopause’s unwanted effects, Stephanie Faubion, the director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health, told me. Plus, it may come with additional risks related to later-in-life pregnancies. It could also raise a woman’s chances of breast or uterine cancer, blood clots, and stroke, Jerilynn Prior, an endocrinologist at the University of British Columbia, told me. And putting off menopause may also mean more years of menstruation and contraception, a prospect that will likely give many women pause, says Nanette Santoro, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive scientist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.But several researchers think some tweaking is worth a shot. Even if menopause once helped our species survive, Goldman said, “it’s hard to imagine” that’s still the case. Evolution may have saddled us with an odd misalignment in the lifespans of the ovaries and the other organs they live alongside. But it has also equipped us with the smarts to potentially break free of those limits.

“No one deserves to be picked apart for what they look like," she wrote on TikTok. "But no matter who you are … Your beauty exceeds superficial measures."

The House minority leader says "MAGA Republicans" pose a threat to Social Security, Medicare and American democracy.

With just six months to go until the presidential election, former President Donald Trump spent the weekend courting donors and potential vice presidential contenders at a private retreat in Florida. CBS News campaign reporter Jake Rosen has more.

See hows the Post's experts see the Packers-Knicks series shaking out.

Prosecutors claim that Trump's valet had photos of classified documents on his phone.

Biden is ignoring the wave of protests by Indigenous people across the U.S. who see their land being destroyed by droughts, pipelines, and mineral mines.

The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial fined him for violating his gag order and warned the ex-president that additional violations could result in jail time.

At the United Methodist Church's General Conference, bans on gay clergy and same-sex marriages were removed. However, the denomination faces internal strife and declining membership.

This Eastern Conference semifinal between the Knicks and Pacers is going to come down to the Knicks looking for a slugfest and the Pacers wanting a track meet. 

The incident in Jingmen, Hubei Province, China, left onlookers stunned as the owner tried to revive the unconscious pig amid heavy traffic.

Gabrielle Berbey and Peter Balonon-Rosen are joining as producers. Andrea Kristinsdottir is joining as an audio engineer. Vox managing editor Natalie Jennings announced today that Gabrielle Berbey, Peter Balonon-Rosen, and Andrea Kristinsdottir are joining the site’s audio division. Berbey begins her role today, and Balonon-Rosen and Kristinsdottir will start May 13. Gabrielle Berbey is joining Vox as a producer on the forthcoming Future Perfect podcast. She is a reporter and producer whose stories have aired on narrative shows across public radio. Previously, she produced for WNYC’s More Perfect and The Experiment, a collaboration between WNYC and the Atlantic. She also led the production of a series on the history of Spam and how it shaped meatpacking’s labor movement. She began her career at PBS, where she helped produce Frontline’s investigative podcast and worked on Ken Burns’s series about Muhammad Ali. Her reporting has been featured on shows such as Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Planet Money, Latino USA, and 99% Invisible. Peter Balonon-Rosen is joining Today, Explained as a producer. He comes from Throughline, the NPR narrative history podcast, where he was most recently the lead producer on a series about the history and future of constitutional amendments. Before that, he was at Marketplace for six years, where he was the founding producer of This Is Uncomfortable, a narrative show about wealth and inequality. At Marketplace, he also worked as a producer/reporter on the Uncertain Hour podcast, where he reported a collaboration with Reveal about minor league baseball’s labor history. Peter is drawn to stories about inequality, culture, and racial identity. Andrea Kristinsdottir is joining Vox as an audio engineer. She is a Signal and Webby Award-winning audio engineer, composer, and sound designer. Some of her favorite projects from the last few years are Blind Plea, LeVar Burton Reads, The Paris Review, Storytime With Seth Rogen, and “Before Route One” for BBC’s Between the Ears. Hailing from Iceland, she has lived in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Japan, and several US states.

UFC president Dana White appeared to take a shot at Netflix for only giving him 60 seconds to roast Tom Brady during the former quarterback's special.

Despite all the coverage of the protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, it can be remarkably difficult to understand what the players are actually saying. On social media, partisans on both sides cherry-pick extreme comments or incidents, as a way to suggest that their opponents are comprehensively rotten. Others invoke broadly held values—free speech, peaceful protest, human rights—without explaining how they apply in specific circumstances. And many of the media stories have only worsened the confusion, by employing imprecise and euphemistic language that obscures more than it illuminates.As a result, the American public remains badly informed about both the war itself and the movement against it, a dynamic that has steadily grown worse as campus protests—and the rate of (sometimes violent) arrests—has intensified. This lack of clarity may be especially damaging to people who both oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza and who want to see long-term peace—a group long marginalized by Israel hawks and expansionists—but who may also find themselves surprised and troubled by the stated objectives of many of the groups leading the protests. And there is a growing risk, as the backlash to the protests grows both more violent and more litigious, that the extreme claims, demands for ideological purity, and rejection of nonviolence advanced by some of the protest leaders will undermine a movement that many liberals agree is morally urgent.Here is a sadly typical example of the phenomenon I’m seeing: The Washington Post recently published an article headlined, “They Criticized Israel. This Twitter Account Upended Their Lives.” The story, by reporter Pranshu Verma, looked at the organization StopAntisemitism, which, according to the Post’s summary, “has flagged hundreds of people who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza. Many were swiftly fired.”But that’s not actually an accurate description of the reality The Post is reporting. The people featured in this article did not simply criticize Israel or its actions in Gaza. One woman was fired from her job at a branding firm for a video in which she declared that “radical solidarity with Palestine means … not apologizing for Hamas.” (Refusing to say a bad word about a U.S.-designated foreign-terrorist group is undoubtedly not the way her firm wanted to be branded.) Another person, a therapist, was caught on video ripping down a poster of Israeli hostages. She subsequently promoted the conspiracy theory that the Israelis taken by Hamas on October 7 were actually kidnapped by their own country. (She said later that she hadn’t meant what she’d said, but that she’d torn down the poster because it used the term “Hamas terrorists,” which undermined the Palestinian cause. Her clinic, the Post reported, fired her.)[Iddo Gefen: What ‘Intifada Revolution’ looks like]The story mentions just two other people whose lives were “upended” because they “criticized Israel.” StopAntisemitism “has flagged people for a variety of statements the organization considers antisemitic,” the Post reported, “including a college instructor who called Israelis ‘pigs’ and a high school basketball coach who wore a shirt with a watermelon, a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, to a game.” The coach is the most sympathetic person in the story, although the Post fails to mention that he wore the shirt to a game in which his team was playing a Jewish school. Those who were—in my opinion, unjustifiably—angry about the shirt seem to feel that the symbol wasn’t a general expression of support for Palestinians, but targeted at a group of Jewish high schoolers. Either way, the coach was suspended, and apologized. The college instructor, who is no longer employed by her school, did not, but “called Israelis ‘pigs’” does not quite capture her comments, which included, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement,” and, “May they rot in hell.”The Post story raises important questions: Should these people, or others whose views are unpopular in a particular community or workplace, have been fired from their job? What are the ethics of reposting their social-media comments or footage of their public acts on an account devoted to making private citizens face personal or professional consequences? How much do we want to rely on viral social-media posts to police ugly behaviors and comments? But these questions are much more difficult to answer when the situations that gave rise to them are fundamentally mischaracterized.News outlets have a duty to both accurately report the news and include the context necessary for readers to understand it. The Post article not only casts the whitewashing of Hamas and the murders it committed as “criticism” of Israel, it also fails to explain Hamas’s aims—which include the complete destruction of Israel by any means, including the mass murder of innocent civilians. What happens to public discourse around the most controversial issues when media outlets don’t talk about what we’re actually talking about?Campuses across the country are seething over Gaza. On social media, in Congress, and in the media, debates rage over whether these protests are admirable, gatherings of idealistic young people voicing their dissent over a war that has reportedly killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, many of them innocent children and women, or whether the protesters are entitled, terrorism-excusing rule-breakers who should face consequences when they intentionally flout the law.Much of this conversation has been carried out in bad faith, such as when grandstanding Republicans decided to haul university presidents before Congress for a public dressing-down. And the decision of administrators at several schools—including Columbia University, NYU, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Austin—to ask aw enforcement to break up student encampments and demonstrations represented a dramatic, and inflammatory, escalation.Part of the debate turns on whether the protests are anti-Semitic. And it has been easy to find examples of blatant anti-Semitism, some of it from standard-fare lunatics and much of it from actual pro-Palestinian protesters; some of it on college campuses, and much of it part of other protests held off-campus and comprising many people who are not students. One problem, though, is that campus higher-ups and the broader public can’t agree on what anti-Semitism is. There are obvious examples: Yelling at Jews to “go back to Poland,” for instance. But the waters get murkier when it comes to anti-Zionism: Are chants calling for the destruction of Israel anti-Semitic, or merely anti-Zionist? What about chants cheering on Hamas? Who gets to draw the line: Jewish students who say they feel threatened, observers who are upset and offended, protesters (some of them Jewish), or critics who say feelings aren’t facts and even stringent anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism?The question of anti-Semitism is an important one, especially because colleges and universities have long made it their business to police on-campus bias and discrimination (and are obligated under federal law to ensure that all of their students can access an education). But it is not the only relevant question. More salient, and less explored even by major media outlets, is this: What do the protesters actually stand for?According to some news outlets, the protests are best characterized as “anti-war.” And that’s true insofar as the groups leading e the protests do oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, and no doubt many of the demonstrators show up because they’ve watched horror after horror unfold, sympathize with a long-oppressed population that is now being killed by the thousands, and want to voice their desire for the violence to cease. But the protests—both on college campuses and those led by broader, noncampus groups—have articulated demands and ideologies. News outlets have a responsibility to report what those are, and are largely failing.Many of the protest groups agree with that critique of the coverage. National Students for Justice in Palestine posted on Instagram, “Do not cover our protests if you will not cover what we are fighting for.” On-campus demands vary from college to college, but generally include that the university divest from companies doing business with Israel, cut ties with Israeli universities and academics, offer amnesty to all student and faculty protesters who have broken laws or campus rules, and implement total transparency for all university investments and holdings.[Michael Powell: ‘We want all of it’]But those demands are not the sum total of the protest groups’ aims. Two of the student groups coordinating the encampments at Columbia, for example, published a guide answering the question “What principles must one align with in order to sign onto our coalition?” and clarifying “the cause we are fighting for.” The core principles include the Thawabit, originally published in 1977 and characterized as nonnegotiable Palestinian “red lines” (albeit ones from which many advocates for peace and statehood who actually live in Palestine have since deviated). Those include a right to Palestinian statehood, making Jerusalem the capital of Palestine, the right of return, and the right to resistance, even armed resistance, or “struggle by all available means.”These groups have also routinely refused to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7 that led to the Israeli incursion, even while they have found time to condemn far less egregious acts. (An October 12 statement from Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Jewish Voices for Peace lambasted those calling for peace and issued five separation condemnations of Columbia, including two for emails that voiced sympathy for Israelis without sufficient recognition of Palestinian suffering.) Some protest leaders and professors have explicitly said that they will not condemn Hamas, or that requests to do so are a distraction; others have overtly embraced the organization.Similar ideologies and goals have taken center stage at off-campus protests as well, with banners pledging to secure Palestinian freedom By Any Means Necessary and chants cheering on Hamas and rejecting a two-state solution in favor of the end of Israel (“We want all of ’48”). Protesters should be free to gather and make their demands of course, but these particular demands are not, by any reasonable definition, “anti-war.” Protesters who endorse these ideas are against Israel’s war in Gaza, but do not seem to be opposed to bloodshed if it’s in the service of extinguishing the world’s only Jewish state. (What else does “by any means necessary” connote if not an embrace of any means necessary, no matter how vicious?) These groups are not calling for all combat to end. Too many support any self-styled “resistance” group that, like Hamas, uses violence against civilians to achieve its ideological and theological aims.This does not make every protester a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer, as some have claimed. Contrary to what National Students for Justice in Palestine itself argues, showing up at a protest does not and should not require pledging allegiance to the maximal demands of its organizers. Nor do those demands, in my view, negate the moral urgency of the protests, which in the aggregate—if not at their organizational core—are about ending a bloody war. And although there are no polls or data on what the many protesters who are not aligned with the major pro-Palestinian groups think, my personal sense is that the majority are horrified by the brutality they see Palestinians enduring and believe this war is a moral atrocity. They protest because they want to see it end—not because they have any sophisticated understanding of the “intifada revolution” the organizers often champion, or because they are “pro-Hamas,” as so many conservative outlets claim.If the public is to understand the protests, then journalists need to give a sense of proportion, and at least attempt to cover what average demonstrators think and why they show up. But they also need to do exactly what protest organizers ask, which is to clearly articulate those organizers’ demands and positions. And for people who are horrified by the war but do not support Hamas or like-minded groups and who do not champion the destruction of Israel (or the mass expulsion and murder of millions of Jews that they fear would come with the end of the state), it’s especially important to understand and take seriously what protest leaders are saying.If you disagree with the organizers—and I imagine a lot of people who oppose this war, including many who are protesting, do—then the decision becomes whether to participate anyway because the stakes are so high, sit it out because the disagreements run so deep, attempt to wrest control and put forward goals that are much more popular with the American public, or attempt to make the existing movement a big-enough tent to allow in “Zionists” who oppose violence of all kinds and support an independent Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one.None of that is possible when conservative news outlets tar all of the protesters as pro-Hamas, while more liberal ones suggest they are merely anti-war.This same failure has emerged in the coverage of the counterprotests. Just outside the Columbia gates, well-known Trump-affiliated Christian nationalists were among the organizers of a pro-Israel rally—if you can call a group whose apocalyptic religious aims require the return of Jews to Israel so that they might all convert or die when Christ returns “pro-Israel.” And there has been remarkably little reporting on the ideologies, affiliations, and goals of the counterprotesters, despite reports that they have also been making threats and shouting bigoted comments, including “go back to Gaza.” At UCLA, counterprotesters are widely reported to have fomented serious violence against the pro-Palestinian activists in an encampment and to have brutalized student journalists. Are these demonstrators, who seem to have grown more aggressive in recent days, really merely “pro-Israel”? Or are their more expansive ideologies, and perhaps other connections, at play?[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]Although many observers and commentators invoke the right to protest or the right to free speech, the student protesters seem disinclined to make free-speech or assembly claims to justify their actions, perhaps realizing that many of the tactics they are using are outside the First Amendment’s protections. And even as student protesters stand accused of making their fellow students feel unsafe with their anti-Zionism and with their allegedly anti-Semitic behaviors, those same protesters do not shy away from claims that their safety is being threatened by people whose ideas they oppose, or from demands that those people be removed from campus. To try to parse the protests using generally applicable standards of free speech or content-neutral campus rules is to misunderstand what many of the protesters are asserting, which is less about any particular norm and more about moral clarity. Israel, many protesters argue, is conducting a genocide, and they need to stand in opposition. It could not be clearer.The protesters’ simple argument is that their cause is righteous and should therefore be supported, and that their schools should enable their protests. These schools are communities, as administrators continuously remind them. Non-righteous causes and individuals, the protesters believe, should not be allowed. A community’s norms are set not only by the law, but by what that community deems acceptable, moral, and desirable. But, from the other perspective, college campuses that receive federal dollars are required to ensure that all students can access an education safely and without discrimination—an obligation that some Jewish students and political leaders say is being compromised by anti-Israel protesters.And so the protests also raise a question of content, not just one of content-neutral norms. Or at least, this has been the position of the protesters, who do not believe that content-neutral time-place-manner restrictions on protest should apply to them. If these protests were about a less popular campus cause—say, in opposition to Donald Trump’s criminal trials, or to petition their schools to end affirmative action, or to demand that their school do more to support Israel’s war in Gaza—it is hard to imagine such a full-throated demand that students be permitted to violate generally applicable protest rules. But the rules seem to be considered broadly irrelevant here, in light of the stark moral claims.In the protesters’ defense, they do have a stark moral claim in their generalized opposition to a grotesque ongoing war. And their actions echo those of Vietnam War protesters, who also took up a righteous cause, shook the nation, used unpopular and disruptive tactics, and were widely criticized, before being ultimately vindicated in their belief that the deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam was tragic, immoral and unnecessary. One has to wonder if that movement, and the leftist movements that developed in its aftermath, would have been more successful in achieving a variety of goals had it not devolved into the maximalism of chanting “One side’s right, one side’s wrong, victory to the Vietcong,” engaging in bombings, and offering support for the murderous Khmer Rouge.Of course, one does not have to wonder if college administrators feel proud of their decision to call in law enforcement. In the Vietnam era, when they did so, some students were killed, many were arrested, and schools, including Columbia, have for decades considered their response a badge of shame.Today, a clear line of argument has emerged from many progressive commentators: First, the overwhelming majority of the protesters are peaceful and not anti-Semitic. Second, it undermines and mischaracterizes a vital movement to focus on a few bad actors who spout anti-Semitic vitriol, or to emphasize a few chants that glorify Hamas or call for the destruction of Israel. Third, the obsessive coverage of these protests is coming at the expense of the much more important story, which is the war itself. And in many respects, this is a sensible position. A war costing tens of thousands of lives, conducted by a key U.S. ally following a horrific terrorist attack, is a much more important story than whatever college students are doing in the United States. The violent crackdowns on these protests strike many, myself included, as far more troubling than the protests themselves. And it isn’t fair to conflate what a handful of protesters do or say with a much broader movement.But again, many news outlets, journalists, and commentators are sidestepping the content of the protests and the demands of the protesters, both on and off college campuses. The content and demands shouldn’t have any bearing on whether the police are called in (or on whether the National Guard should be called in—an appalling and deeply illiberal and authoritarian suggestion). But progressives who oppose violence on all sides should have a clear sense of what those who claim to speak for this movement are advocating, so they can decide where to participate and where to push back—protest movements are dynamic things, and can be reshaped by those invested in their outcome. And the public should understand protesters’ demands and aims, as well as those of the counterprotesters. The only way that happens is if media outlets forgo euphemism and are clear on what individuals and leaders actually say. And on that much, at least, even the protest organizers seem to agree.

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