Ezra Levant reports from May 1st outside Columbia University, where a two-hour NYPD raid cleared hundreds of encamped protesters—many "woke" activists—after weeks of violence, including vandalism and trapping staff. Footage shows protesters smashing windows and using bike locks to barricade buildings, mirroring Hamas’s hostage tactics in Gaza while university officials failed to enforce evictions despite trespassing. Ezra highlights Qatari funding suspicions, Biden’s weak stance on Israel, and Canada’s C63 censorship bill, questioning whether universities prioritize radicalism over safety. The episode reveals a pattern of organized, ideological protests displacing genuine Palestinian voices, with Jewish students facing threats amid police inaction. [Automatically generated summary]
Tonight, Marxists Gone Wild, the latest from Columbia University in New York City.
It's May 1st, and this is the Eslavant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, hi there.
I'm back in New York City in front of Columbia University.
This is the gate that we entered for a two-hour First Amendment window when we were here the other day.
That is from 2 p.m. till 4 p.m., they opened the gates for journalists.
And if you recall, there were hundreds of them in line to see firsthand the protesters inside the Hamas encampment.
I call them protesters because I suppose that is what they're doing.
But there wasn't a lot of talking from those protesters.
They were instructed by their leaders not to talk to journalists, not to talk even to friendly journalists, but rather to have hand-picked official spokesmen dealing with the media at large.
In fact, if any journalists tried to get in the actual encampment, they were blocked by a combination of students, but also teachers too.
I think it was yesterday that a eviction notice was given where they were told that if they didn't leave by, I think it was 2 p.m. or some particular time, they would start to be suspended.
Well, they did not go.
In fact, a ring of faculty surrounded the students that those students were threatened with suspension.
So the faculty blocked the students.
Things got out of hand, though, after dark when the pro Hamas protesters managed to break into various buildings and start smashing and trashing buildings.
Some very interesting footage from that.
Vandalism, of course, graffiti, but also reports that several maintenance staff, janders, other staff like that, were trapped in there.
A kind of hostage situation, if you like, which echoes what Hamas is doing in Israel and Gaza, I suppose.
They still have dozens of hostages.
It was interesting to me.
I saw an image of a maintenance worker at Columbia who probably makes less in a year than tuition is for a single student, that this maintenance worker loved Columbia and the physical plant of it so much that this maintenance worker was trying to stop one of these protesters from desecrating this beautiful university.
That maintenance worker caring more about the university than the university's own administration or security team.
Of course, it's private property and you can evict anyone from private property for any reason or no reason.
Now, if someone pays tuition, they have certain rights, but those are enumerated in what was called in my day the university calendar, which was a fancy way of saying the entire rule book.
If you are camping overnight, if you are engaging in various acts of trespass, if you are engaging in violence, vandalism, breaking and entering into buildings, obviously you're breaking the rules.
The university, however, to this day, lacks the courage to expel them.
Like I say, we're not allowed in there, but the protesters are still in there.
Of course, there are protesters on the street who are not members of the university and lack the ID necessary to get inside.
That's an interesting thing to me because the Columbia University is easy to steal off.
There's gates and fences all around it.
Other universities, including where I was yesterday, the University of British Columbia, so clearly have outside organizers.
But there was a tactic I noticed in the footage from Columbia last night that I recognized from elsewhere, namely antifa.
The complexion of the protesters is different in the various cities I've been.
As you may recall, a few months ago, I went to London in the United Kingdom, and I saw two main demographic streams from the protest.
You had about 10 or 15 percent who were typically old communists, socialist workers' party types in the UK, and some woke students.
But the vast majority of pro-Hamas protesters in London are recent immigrants, typically Muslim immigrants, to London.
It's just no doubt about it.
They are the voice of Pakistani Britons and Bangladeshi Britons, etc.
That's the UK.
In Canada, I think you have a fair bit of that too, especially since Justin Trudeau has emphasized immigration from countries with Muslim majority populations.
And there have been some woke professors and woke white kids from university thrown into the mix.
Here in the United States, at least at Columbia and the Fashion Institute of Technology that we visited last week, it is in the main woke, self-hating, white, Marxist communists.
I'm just describing what I see.
And I think that's just the demographic difference.
I overheard an official spokesman talking to a friendly journalist who didn't want to talk to me much, but I overheard this spokesman talking about how this is but a single chapter in a global revolution that they all want.
Take a listen to this snippet of a conversation that I overheard.
You know, it's not just something that has happened now, but it's been the foundation has been built a long time ago.
And I think students also realize that like this is not just one issue, but it's like this issue has become the center of the struggle, but it's not the end all be all.
You know, like our struggle doesn't begin and end with Palestine, but it ends and begins with the liberation of all people.
And we see that Palestine, like the freedom of the liberation of Palestine being crucial to the liberation of all people everywhere.
I think that's exactly right.
Because by far, the vast majority of protesters here at Columbia and at the Fashion Institute of Technology and other U.S. campuses, they are not Palestinian.
They are not Arab.
They are not Muslim.
In fact, many of them are old stock Americans, to use a phrase.
They're just woke.
And by woke, I mean they believe in critical race theory and critical theory in general and a Marxism that's transposed not just on gender and race, but on in general, the oppressed versus the oppressors.
And they see Israel as the oppressor and Palestinians as the oppressed.
And tomorrow it'll be a climate battle.
And the week after that, it'll be a transgenderism issue.
I think that what that young spokesman was saying is actually the true nature of the protesters here.
They are, for want of a better term, communists who want to tear down America and all its systems.
And Gaza just happens to be the excuse du jour.
The fact that Jews pay the price for that in terms of anti-Semitism.
Well, that's unfortunate.
Why am I here?
It's important for me as a Jew, also as an Israeli, to come out and just stand here in the face of evil, be a little bit of a light and show my support for my country and my people.
And I know that it's hard times for us all.
And so I just want all my friends and my family to know like they're not alone.
And this isn't going to, you know, scare us.
That's why it's important for me to be here.
I think a lot of people are scared.
I mean, it's daylight and there's a big cop right over there.
But have you ever been scared when it's not daylight, when there's not a cop there, when there have been Palestinian protesters?
Has there been a moment where you have been scared?
I don't get scared often, but you know, it is scary.
If I'm alone, I definitely have to consider where I'm going, what I'm wearing.
If I'm definitely alone, I'm definitely more a little discreet about who I am.
But I was here on October 8th.
Some man from the pro-Palestinian protest came and threw hot coffee in our face.
So it is scary, but I trust the police right now to contain the situation.
If they weren't here, I wouldn't be here.
Let's put it that way.
So are you a student here?
No, absolutely not.
Are you just walking by?
Walking by and here to support Israel.
So are you here today because of this protest or are you just walking by the neighborhood coincidentally?
Walking by because of this.
And are they still locked up in there?
We just got here a moment ago.
Yeah, I mean, they're walking by.
I mean, we all know this.
It's against Jews.
It's nothing to do with Palestine.
It's anti-Semitism at its core.
Well, here in New York, one of the most Jewish cities in the world, Columbia, a university in part funded by Jewish philanthropy, like it just seems very shocking that there would be such sharp anti-Semitism in a city that's really known as a Jewish city.
Well, unfortunately, it's not shocking.
It's a Kristallnacht 1939 all over again.
You know, till now, they tried to disguise behind different things, different agendas.
Now they're not ashamed of it.
Just walked by.
They walked past me.
And, you know, some people are walking by there with the LGTB flags and gay stuff, you know.
I don't even know if they know how it looks if they go into Gaza with that stuff.
You wear a Jewish yarmuk on your head visibly.
What kind of comments, if any, have you received for that?
Well, so far we haven't because we've been walking this way and they've been walking that way.
But I'm ready to receive the hate, but I'm not embarrassed.
I assume there's about 100 protesters still in there.
Is that about right?
That's what I've heard.
I've heard maybe a little bit more even.
And maybe out here there's, I'd say less than 100 in a city of New York.
That's not a ton.
I got to ask you, how widespread is this?
Are these just sort of a rent a mob protester who, if it's not Gaza this week, it's a climate protest.
And if it's not a climate protest, it's a Trump protest.
Like, are these just a rent a mob or are these dedicated Palestinian activists?
I'd say they might be rent a mob, but I'd also say that they're not pro-Palestinian activists or anti-Semitic activists.
They're not here to free Palestine.
They're here to terrorize Jews in the Western world and America.
That's what I believe.
I see a lot of prefab signs.
They're not homemade signs.
Who do you think is paying for those?
The IRGC, probably, I'd assume, or Hamas, that are super behind this.
There's a reason why people won't talk to you on that side.
I'm not sure if you've been, but that's because they'd have no idea why they're even there.
So I'd say if they knew why they were there, they'd be open, willing to talk to you like I am.
But they're not.
And there's a reason for that.
Hey, let me interrupt myself.
That was me yesterday outside Columbia University in New York City.
I'm back in Toronto, and I wanted to interrupt to say hours after I recorded that, the NYPD, the New York Police Department, had a massive raid.
I think there probably were more than 1,000 officers involved, certainly in the hundreds.
Very well organized.
They had buses in place to take the protesters away.
They had specialized equipment.
They sealed off the entire area.
It was an enormous exercise completed in about two hours' time with no injuries.
And that's quite amazing.
So I had to update you with that.
You can see on the screen some of the incredible video.
It really was like a riot.
Speaking of riots on the other side of the country, take a look at this.
I'm going to play with the sound up for a minute.
This is from ABC.
It's incredible to me that they have this commentary.
Here is an actual riot at UCLA, University of California at Los Angeles, a very large school, probably the largest school in California.
And I think my point there is that the police and campus security didn't do anything to protect the kids.
And there was a Jewish girl who was actually beaten to the point of being made unconscious, excuse me.
So ordinary people in the community, including, I presume, some Jews, went to clear the encampment out themselves.
It was a melee.
Take a look.
And halfway through the quad.
Look at this.
Somebody is being beaten.
Somebody is being beaten with a stick and punches in the middle of the lawn.
Don't do that, do it.
Somebody is being badly beaten at the bottom of that brawl, right there.
Look at that.
Look at that.
Somebody is being dragged and beaten in the front of that plywood wall.
Just incredible.
Like, where are the police?
Where is security?
Where are these people?
Where are, where is authority here?
It is something I have never covered without any sign of enforcement, law enforcement, security whatsoever.
This has gone now on for over an hour and a half, and it is absolutely appalling, in my estimation, that we have not seen any response.
I've just never seen it.
You know, this may be a sign of things to come or this may be what society has become, but I have never seen it in my career.
I have never seen this level of violence without any response from any kind of law enforcement or authority whatsoever.
Oh, look at that.
Somebody just took a pallet to the head.
You know, you're right.
The plyboard, the plywood, excuse me, the boards of plywood are moving up.
They've been dislodged from that makeshift wall where they were set up with tripods almost.
And now you can see them manually be moved up into the crowd of counter protesters.
And you're seeing these scuffles break out one after another.
Lots of very heavy sticks, very heavy barricades, scooters, all types of things being employed to inflict harm on the other side here.
Of course, I don't support violent vigilante action, but the police basically abandoned it.
Role-Playing Famine00:02:46
I presume they were instructed to do so by UCLA, so the community did something about it.
Here is a shot from outside Columbia before the raid.
You just got to look at this.
This is incredible.
Take a look.
Why are the university obligated to provide food to people who've taken over a building?
Well, first of all, we're saying that they're obligated to provide food to students who pay for a meal plan here.
But you mentioned that there was a request that food and water be brought in.
Unless I missed an audience.
Allow it to be brought in.
I mean, well, I guess it's ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students.
Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?
If the answer is no, then you should allow basic, I mean, it's crazy to say because we're on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we're asking for.
Like, could people please have a glass of water?
But they did put themselves in that very deliberate thing in that situation and in that position.
So it seems like you're sort of saying, we want to be revolutionaries, we want to take up this building.
Now, would you please bring us food and water?
Nobody's asking them to bring anything.
We're asking them to not violently stop us from bringing in basic humanitarian aid.
They're stopping the delivery of food.
We are looking for a commitment from them that they will not stop it.
They haven't stopped it.
Well, I'm not, I don't know to what extent it has been attempted, but we're looking for a commitment.
She is at an elite school, privileged.
The amount of money it costs to go to that school in Canadian dollars is close to $100,000 a year.
But to her, the apex, the place that they all dream to be, is the top of the victim pyramid.
And my God, we're going to be dehydrated and starve if we don't get free food every hour.
Can you send us some DoorDash?
They actually did call for DoorDash.
Look at this.
They're doing some sort of role-playing, like they're starving in a famine in Gaza.
What is this other than play acting, or as the kids say, LARPing, live-action role-playing?
Take a look at this.
Pulitzer Prize Potential00:11:43
Yeah, they'll have to do some grown-up stuff now that they're facing criminal charges.
I read the police charges as outlined by the NYPD: trespass, burglary.
There was another one in there I can't recall off the top of my head.
There were some organizers, clearly, who were worse than others, a lot of followers, as I've been demonstrating.
There have been some acts of patriotism.
Take a look at these.
This video goes pretty quickly.
It's UNC Chapel Hill.
That's University of North Carolina.
There were some counter-protesters, some Jewish kids who brought a Star of David flag, and some frat kids who defended the American flag and wouldn't let it fall.
look.
That is heartwarming to see that there are still some patriotic kids in And I found that when I went to Columbia, you might have seen that I bumped into those twin brothers, by the way, who said that they don't believe in what's going on.
In addition to actual students, there are some very sophisticated professional organizers.
And I want to show you an example of that.
Some of the protesters barricaded themselves into various halls at Columbia.
But look at this move here.
I don't think an ordinary person would have thought of this.
Smashing the windows and using a bike lock to lock a building so it couldn't be open with a regular key.
By the way, at least three people said they were held hostage, effectively kidnapped by this kind of activity.
But take a look.
This is not an ordinary skill.
take a look.
Would you know to smash windows like that and use a bike lock like that?
I just don't think ordinary people typically would.
Very interesting to me.
And I want to show you one more thing that Andy No, a friend of ours, has brought to public attention.
It's out there in Oregon, in Portland, where, of course, Antifa is the dominant street gang.
And they have used the excuse of Gaza to occupy a multi-story university library, which looks like a tremendous and valuable and lovely place.
They've occupied it.
They've turned it into an autonomous zone, as you may recall, that happening a few years ago with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, the Chaz, and that was in Seattle.
And Andy points out that he doesn't think that Portland's police have the resources to liberate that building.
I mean, as we showed you a moment ago, in New York City, there were hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand police, very specialized, lots of equipment, operating in a very well-organized extraction process.
Two hours, the whole thing done without injury.
Andy No, who knows a lot about Portland, says he doesn't think Portland has the resources.
They've been defunding their police.
had ties cut with neighboring police forces.
He thinks that, I guess, theoretically they could go in there and extract them all, but that would take basically all the police in the city.
So incredible things happening overnight since I recorded that on the streets of New York.
All right, back to my pre-recorded show from New York.
Hey, I was walking by and I noticed the name Pulitzer, or Pulitzer as it's sometimes pronounced, on the wall here.
There's a lot of buildings that are named after philanthropists, and you probably know the name Pulitzer, the Pulitzer Prize.
It's a leading prize for journalism.
And Pulitzer was, it was actually the, Columbia is very famous for journalism, the Columbia School of Journalism.
I think someone could win a Pulitzer if they did investigative journalism into who is funding and organizing these protests.
I saw earlier a bunch of pre-fabricated, pre-printed corporate-style placards for the Palestinian side indicating that they themselves didn't homemake them.
Someone made the signs for them.
As we can see, there's a lot of these protesters who are not students on campus.
Who are they?
In Canada, we know that there are hundreds, 700, in fact, Iranian agents working freely in the country, fomenting anti-Semitic hatred, including for years they've done the annual Al-Quds Day hate festival in Toronto.
I think someone could win a Pulitzer for connecting the dots.
Who's behind this?
Who's behind the matching green tents?
If you said to students, hey, bring a tent to school, you would have all sorts of different kinds of tents, either that the kids had at home or that they went out to buy.
But when you see dozens of identical matching tents, you know that someone bought them.
Who?
When you see an organization that tells its cult members not to speak, but to direct all inquiries to the leaders, well, who's training them?
Who's giving them their talking points?
I think you could win a Pulitzer for that.
But I guess the one last thing I would say about the Pulitzer Prize is the man after whom it was named, won't surprise you to hear this, was a Jew.
Born in Hungary, came to America, loved the freedom of the place, donated back to the university in thanks for the help it gave him.
That's the story of so many of the buildings, not just here at Columbia, but also at the Fashion Institute of Technology that we visited last week.
I wonder what Mr. Pulitzer would have to say about the Jew hatred emanating from inside the university.
How would you rate the response by different authorities?
I'm going to ask you about the university administration.
I'm going to ask you about the New York Police Department.
I'm going to ask you about the mayor, and I'm going to ask you about the president.
So let's start with the university administration.
How have they handled things?
Well, you see what goes, what's going on in Texas or any Midwestern states.
If they want them gone, they can have them gone.
They can have them gone today.
It's a couple of hours of cleanup.
They obviously don't care.
And there's obviously a bigger agenda behind this.
And I wonder if Qatari money is part of that.
I mean, I mentioned Jewish philanthropy, which has been an important part of American charitable life for 100 years.
But now the OPEC dictatorship of Qatar is one of the largest funders of American universities.
Maybe the administration is following the money, and they say there's more money from Qatar than from the Jews.
Well, the only thing I can answer is always follow the money.
Now, how about the NYPD?
I have a high regard for the NYPD as a police force.
I'm guessing they're just following instructions from the brass.
How have you felt about the work they have been doing?
I mean, I guess from one point of view, that's not really their turf.
They're not going to go in there and enforce a trespass rule if the university doesn't ask them to, right?
What do you think of the NYPD?
Honestly, I wouldn't be able to answer that because I don't know.
But.
How about the mayor?
We all know the answer to that.
I don't.
There's always people behind the scene that they answer to, which we don't know.
So how's this going to end?
I mean, here at Columbia.
I mean, I know they were given an ultimatum or whatever, but then the professors all went to the front.
Do you know the status of things?
We just got here.
I don't know the status of it yet, but hopefully, you know, who knows?
Who knows?
There's going to be an end to it eventually.
These guys can only last for so long, you know.
On the one hand, I mean, these guys are on the sidewalk.
they're not stopping classes i guess i'm not as no classes going on on campus Not even virtually?
It's all virtually, so that means they don't have to be here.
From what I heard, the campus is also closed, and so we can't get on either.
I mean, I would imagine that there's a lot of rules that the campus could use, trespass.
I mean, there's a lot of rules.
Follow the rules.
These guys don't follow the rules.
Well, the university could enforce the rules if they really wanted to.
Why are they not?
If they wanted to.
But, you know, I think there's a lot of theories going on, but they want to allow the students to have free speech.
I think there's a line where you just draw the line, you say no more, and this is already past that line.
So I don't know.
I hope they can do more for the Jewish students.
And not only for the Jewish students, it's unshame that there's also non-Jewish students here who will have to stop their education.
Their graduation is threatened.
And it's just because of these people who might not even be going to the school.
And I'd assume these guys don't go to the school because they're not on campus.
Right, if they were going to the school, they could get access.
Maybe some of them are wearing masks for hygiene reasons, but I think a lot of them are wearing masks just to hide their identity, don't you think?
Yeah, they're definitely not.
These people don't care about hygiene.
But, you know, we get to see their faces once they get arrested.
So that's interesting to see who's behind these masks.
And how about the federal government?
I mean, Joe Biden claims to be a friend of the Jews and of Israel.
I think he's in the mold of Obama, which is he actually wants to undermine Israel, promote Iran, and he doesn't want to upset genuine rock-solid anti-Semites because they're part of his electoral base.
I think Joe Biden is trying to thread the needle here, including in states like Michigan, we have a large Muslim population.
That's my view as an outsider, but I'm not an American.
What do you think?
Absolutely.
Joe Biden will do whatever he has to do to appeal to his voters.
And unfortunately, his voters here, the only one he can appeal to are the far left.
And the far left is part of this entire protest and agenda.
Joe Biden's Dilemma00:01:18
So he has to do what he has to do to be able to stay relevant.
But he's an absolute disgrace to Israel.
There's no question about it.
Not only is he not sticking up, he's kind of bluntly coming out against them.
Well, I was actually down in New York today because I did an interview with John Stossel, the great American journalist.
He is an independent shop right now, but he used to be in places like ABC and Fox Business.
Just an outstanding freedom-oriented journalist.
And I'm very proud to have spent an hour with him talking about freedom of speech in Canada, including Justin Trudeau's threats to it, specifically C63, Trudeau's latest censorship act.
So it's down in New York City for that.
Delighted to have the platform.
I really think it's important that people around the world know what's going on in Canada, not just Canadians.
And I thought, well, I've got to stop by Columbia University to see what the latest is.
And there's really not a lot to report from the outside because they've locked the whole thing in.
The inmates are locked in the asylum, though.
They have not been ejected yet.
So that's my update from New York.
I'm going to be back in Canada tomorrow, of course.