IT’S ALL ABOUT MUSCLE: Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard offers a guide to “understanding the campus unrest:”

The Obama administration—easily the most ideologically progressive in modern American history—has been accompanied by both liberal triumphalism and liberal outrage.

Three major protest movements have marked the Obama era: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the as-yet-unnamed campus protests that began at the University of Missouri and Yale and have now spread across the country. The Occupy movement failed utterly. The Black Lives Matter movement has been on a fast track to irrelevance, its only success having been to discipline Democratic presidential candidates to deny that “all” lives matter, while insisting that “black” lives do.

The campus protests are different. At one school after another, protesters have achieved the resignation and/or humiliation of high officials. They have extorted a great deal of money. They have tried to establish new conventions for the behavior of the media and have even intensified what may prove to be a serious debate about the future of the First Amendment. And in all of this it has become clear that the campus protests aren’t about race or privilege or safe spaces. They’re about power.

As Zombie noted in 2013 at PJM, “I used to wonder, ‘Why are you complaining to Obama? He agrees with you!’ Turns out that of course they all know full well that he agrees with them, that he and they are all on the same side. The purpose is not to change Obama’s mind, the purpose is to provide him with political cover to make bad or unpopular decisions, by fabricating hollow “popular uprisings” which he can then point to as indicative of overall public opinion.”