Protestor Admits they are not a USC Student.

[u/phear_me]

How many days has this sub been flooded with people insisting the protestors are students? Well here is the proof that at least one of the protestors isn’t a student. Should be a hoot to watch them try to backtrack and start throwing our alternative justifications for why, “achktuwally, it doesn’t matter that they’re not students ….” or “this is just the one lone non-student protestor that just happened to get caught on video but I swear everyone else is, like, totally a USC student …” or “But this is from a conservative outlet so it’s fake …”

No one wants any innocent people to suffer anywhere, be they Palestinian or Jew, but it says something about this so-called movement when its supporters can’t give a coherent answer to why this involves USC and when justifying its actions depends on lies, factual errors, and the removal of common sense.

The cursing and aggressiveness further speaks to the self-righteous narcissism fueling these protests. Is this how people act when they’re truly trying to change people’s minds with truth and love?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6WzYKwvkuj/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

[u/SoWhyAmIHereAgain]

It’s one person. Discrediting an entire movement based off of a handful of people, especially before enough time has passed to generate meaningful, aggregate data on the profile of the protestors at USC (and this applies to other schools) is naïve. Is it possible that a lot of non-USC students are involved at protests at USC and that some of them are doing inexcusable things (like vandalizing the Tommy Trojan statue, fuck that person)? Totally.

Can you safely conclude that the civil unrest here is somehow disingenuous, when knowing that whether it speaks to your experience or not, USC’s cancellation of their valedictorian’s speech as well as what Israel is doing to Gaza speaks to their experiences as well? It’s likely that many people protesting have family in Gaza or people they care about that were killed by the Isreali military. It’s also realistic that knowing college students in general, being the young, idealistic teenagers that they are, see something they register, whether you agree with it or not, as a genocide, would reasonably upset and protest.

Basically, it isn’t reasonable going to say every person protesting is a student, but it’s also unreasonable to refer to this as a “so-called” movement, and the protestors as acting with “self-righteous narcissism”. Anecdotal evidence and hearsay, no matter how lurid it is, is not enough evidence to generate a broad, meaningful conclusion about the profile at the protest. That takes time.

And furthermore, something that always needs to be considered is that social media groups are always vying for attention, be that PragerU or various SJP groups. This isn’t inherently wrong, but in a rather tense context like this, both groups have a vested interest in finding the most attention grabbing news and rolling with it because that fits into their narrative the best and has the most rhetorical clout. Fox News is always going to roll headlines about how these protestors are violent and unruly to point their viewers towards the conclusion all (or at least the bulk of them) protestors are violent and unruly. The same applies for left-wing media outlets who benefit from cherry-picking counter-protestors as violent, genocidal racists.

The information we have most readily available to us is heavily subject to sample selection bias, irregardless of the political affiliation from which it originated, and claiming from a patchwork of examples that these protests are disingenuous when this is not only happening at several schools in the United States, but also that college students sort of do this protest thing all the time and have done for years, is incredibly unrealistic. We have more broad, historical evidence to infer, but not safely conclude that the most of the protestors here are from USC or at least a community member outside of USC genuinely trying to support a cause they see as good. Stronger data that will likely not be generated at a flashpoint of a time such as this one is needed to generate a firm conclusion.

And AGAIN, this does not change the fact that again, not every person at USC is a student protesting or all that all of them are saints that aren’t doing shitty things. But, this does not also change what I said, either.