Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday mocked pro-Palestinian protesters who broke into Columbia University's Hamilton Hall last week and made “a list of their comrades with vegan dietary restrictions.”
“University administrators caving to the mob only validates the performative tactics of wannabe revolutionaries, like [those] whose first order of business upon breaking into a campus building last week was to post Maoist revolutionary slogans and make a list of their comrades with vegan dietary restrictions,” the Republican from Kentucky said in a speech on the Senate floor, “and the doctoral students specializing in ‘theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxist lens,’ who became their spokesperson and demanded that Columbia administrators provide violent trespassers with food and water so they could persist in lawlessness. What deluded nonsense.”
McConnell also criticized protesters at Columbia University as “Meatless Marxists,” and deemed New York University protesters “jihadists.”
A group of protesters had broken into Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which houses some administrative offices. They barricaded the entrances and unfurled a Palestinian flag out a window after the university started suspending students for not clearing out an encampment on campus. Police later cleared out the encampment and protesters from the hall, arresting about 300 people.
