Much of the national conversation around student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza has centered on elite campuses at coastal universities.
News outlets gave daily coverage to Columbia University after administrators called in the New York City Police Department to arrest the student protesters. There was comparatively little attention to another savage crackdown just uptown at the City College of New York, even though students at the working-class public university received harsher charges than those at the Ivy League school.
Across the country, in another coastal megacity, media fixated on an attack by supporters of Israel against a student protest at University of California, Los Angeles, a school considered a top-flight “public Ivy.”
Student demonstrators held protests for Gaza in 11 out of 13 states in the Appalachian region, as well as in every state in the Rust Belt.
A narrative took…