Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
Those tiki torch Nazis should have their next shindig on the Upper West Side. They’d certainly be welcome at Columbia University — and with Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Just throw on some keffiyehs and do your thing. No one will know the difference.
This week, Bragg dropped all charges against more than two dozen pro-Hamas rioters who “occupied” and trashed Hamilton Hall. Now, please imagine the reaction of the media if a mob of white supremacists had occupied and trashed a building at a Southern University after weeks of targeting black students. The event would be forever etched into national consciousness. The five-part PBS documentary delving into the trauma would sweep the Emmys.
Here, in the non-theoretical world, white supremacists are largely irrelevant, fringe attention-seekers, while Columbia’s pro-Hamas midwits will be headed to prestigious law firms, teaching in major school systems, writing for major newspapers, working in the State Department, and serving in Congress.
And the DA worked from the start to let the rioters (not “protestors”) that occupied Hamilton Hall — some students, some not — off the hook. The incident occurred after gutless administrators at Columbia University finally requested cops clear out an “encampment” that had shut down the campus and forced thousands of students to attend school remotely.
First, Bragg charged 46 of them with trespassing in the third degree, a class B misdemeanor, but subsequently let 31 completely off the hook. Then he offered to let 14 of the remaining trespassers walk if they avoided being arrested again in the next six months (a tall order apparently, since they refused Bragg’s offer).
The only Columbia riot defendant actually being prosecuted is 40-year-old James Carlson — not a student, just a privileged millionaire cosplaying revolutionary — who allegedly hit a 22-year-old in the face with a rock.
Despite all kinds of video proof, the DA cited a lack of evidence. So, no “novel legal theories” on this one, I guess.
Bragg is incentivizing pro-Hamas violence in the same way he does common criminality. The Soros-backed DA has been using “social justice reform” to bring NYC back to the glorious 1970s. The district attorney famously downgraded 52 percent of felony cases in 2022 to misdemeanors — losing those cases at a high rate when they do get to court.
While Bragg cooks up a case against Donald Trump for signing a legal nondisclosure agreement, he lets career criminals roam the streets. While Bragg coddles entitled Marxist brats, he charges innocent people like Jose Alba, an immigrant who killed a black attacker in a bodega in self-defense, with second-degree murder and requests bail be set at $500,000 while throwing him into the lockup on Rikers Island. If it weren’t for the pressure from the governor and mayor, Alba would probably still be in prison for defending himself.
Because like a Soviet-era functionary, Bragg uses his power to protect his friends and target his ideological enemies.