The situation at Columbia was not equivalent to the Capitol attack

The situation at Columbia was not equivalent to the Capitol attack

People of a certain age will recognize the argument offered by several prominent voices as a Monet. In the film “Clueless,” it’s how the protagonist Cher unkindly describes the appearance of another young woman. Like a painting by the French artist, “from far away, it’s okay, but up close it’s a big old mess.”

Comparing the protests at Columbia University — disassembled by New York police on Tuesday night — to the attack on the U.S. Capitol three years ago seems like it makes sense from a distance. Get in close, though? A rhetorical mess.

Here is the view from a distance, the things that occurred on both occasions: A group of people forcibly entered a building. They were part of a protest that included some proponents of extreme political positions. At one point, they had a confrontation with police.

And then we move in closer.

Let’s begin by considering the protests at Columbia University, protests that have been mirrored on other college campuses in the country. They are predicated on opposition to Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, opposition that in broad strokes mirrors the position of the majority of Americans. There are unquestionably elements of the protests that go further, walking or crossing the line between criticism of Israel’s actions and criticism of Jewish people. The focus, though, has been on asking schools (Columbia in particular) to pull investments from companies that profit from the offensive.

To pressure the school to do so, students camped out on a central part of campus for several weeks. After the university ordered them to disband earlier this week, some students broke into and occupied a campus building, Hamilton Hall. On Tuesday night, police swept onto campus, removed the tents that were part of the encampment and ousted the students from Hamilton. Several hundred people were arrested, with no injuries reported.

Then there were the events that unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The sitting president of the United States summoned people to come to Washington to participate in a protest that he promised would be “wild.” As the day approached, he touted the protests and planned a speech at which he encouraged attendance. The campus protest involved deliberate organization, certainly, but hardly the same call to action as Donald Trump urging his millions of supporters to show up at a specific time and place.

For months before and weeks afterward, Trump also stoked the false idea that the 2020 election had been stolen, demanding redress. It is fair to disagree with the Columbia protesters’ view on the war in Gaza and fair to note that some participants in the protests hold more extreme and, at times, objectively reprehensible views. But arguing for action in response to Israel’s military operation is an argument of opinion. Trump’s predicate for encouraging people to show up in Washington was a deliberate, obvious, objective falsehood. The Capitol riot had its participants with fringe beliefs, such as adherents to the extremist QAnon movement. But even the most passive participant in the Capitol riot was there in service to a demonstrably false claim.

A bit after 2 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Dominic Pezzola smashed a window of the Capitol, allowing people to enter. But this was not equivalent to the Columbia protesters breaking into Hamilton Hall.

Images from the Columbia campus show a protester using a hammer to break into Hamilton. Pezzola used a riot shield. He had obtained it because the entry into the Capitol occurred after the rioters assaulted and pushed past law enforcement officers guarding the building.

Yes, the Columbia students engaged with law enforcement — defensively, as police, following a request from the university, moved in to remove tents and clear Hamilton Hall. Jan. 6 rioters, on the other hand, removed barriers to gain access to the Capitol and then engaged in an extended, violent fight with police guarding the building. More than 100 police were injured. Multiple rioters died.

Pezzola was also a member of the Proud Boys, an extremist group that for weeks had developed plans for participating in the protests that day. For all of the talk from people like Trump (speaking to Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday night) and New York Mayor Eric Adams about “outside agitators” being part of the Columbia protests, it seems unlikely that any such evidence, if it emerges, would mirror what was demonstrated in investigations of the Capitol riot, including explicit participation by extremist groups.

The most important distinction, of course, is that Pezzola and those around him were not entering the Capitol to hunker down to extend their protest. They were doing so with the intent to confront legislators who were in the process of finalizing Trump’s 2020 election loss. They were pushing past a barrier to block the peaceful transfer of power. To compare the occupation of Hamilton Hall to the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is to fundamentally misrepresent the scale and intent of each action. It’s like equating a criminal entering a bank to slip police with one entering a bank to rob it. Or, really, entering the Federal Reserve to destabilize the American economy.

There are other differences here, too, of course. Thousands of people were involved in the Capitol riot, far more than at Columbia. Many of them attended the speech Trump gave that morning, a speech that stoked the anger of his audience before many started walking to the Capitol. Trump delayed asking people to end the protest for hours — making his disparagement of President Biden in his conversation with Hannity about the situation at Columbia rather ironic.

“Biden has to do something,” Trump said. “Biden is supposed to be the voice of our country, and it’s certainly not much of a voice. It’s a voice that nobody’s heard.”

Equating the two events is useful not as a bit of political commentary but as part of the long-standing effort to diminish the significance and scale of what unfolded at the Capitol. Up close, though, the comparison is a big old mess.