A Kennedy named Robert is running for president while ostensibly “anti-war” activists attending Columbia have begun to hijack university property illicitly. While the layout of the Left in 2024 may contain shades of 1968, really, the pro-Hamas movement commandeering the contemporary Democratic Party is channeling the spirit of Charlottesville, Virginia, circa 2017.

While today’s antisemites may have traded ill-fitting button-downs and tiki torches for keffiyeh cloths and Palestinian flags, the message is the same: Not only do these Ivy idiots agree that “Jews will not replace us,” but they also tell Jews to “go back to Poland” (insinuating greater hopes of genocide) and that “we don’t want no Zionists here” — in this latter case, overtly calling for the eradication of the Jewish state.

Where 2024 and 2017 dovetail with 1968 is that the man in charge of the progressive movement has a choice. President Joe Biden can either continue to cower to the far-left fringe of antisemites in New York’s Morningside Heights and Dearborn, Michigan, or he can call for a crackdown on terrorist sympathizers holding highways and university life hostage and bring an end to the infantile and ignominious tail wagging the dog.

To his credit, the president used his Passover statement on Sunday to acknowledge and condemn the latest spate of antisemitism on campus.

“The ancient story of persecution against Jews in the Haggadah also reminds us that we must speak out against the alarming surge of Antisemitism — in our schools, communities, and online. Silence is complicity,” Biden said in a written address. “Even in recent days, we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous — and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country. My Administration will continue to speak out and aggressively implement the first-ever National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, putting the full force of the federal government behind protecting the Jewish community.”

It’s a good beginning — but it’s far from a compelling conclusion to this madness.

While Biden has slowly spun away from his historic alliance with the Israelis in recent months as he tries to pay lip service to a Gaza ceasefire, Iran’s first ever (and, crucially, failed) direct attack on Israel this century should have woken the White House up from its reverie. Not only is placating the pro-Hamas Left’s call for a ceasefire an electoral loser, but Iran and its proxy powers, including Hamas itself, will continue to reject any real attempt at a lasting peace.

Still on the table for a Middle Eastern strategy? Furthering negotiations with our Sunni allies such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, which revealed its real preferences in assisting the American, British, and French forces in foiling the attempted attacks by Tehran.

At the United Nations Security Council, the Biden administration may need to whisper these actualities, but to privileged nepo babies camping out on campus as they threaten and assault Jews, the White House can vociferate: Should local authorities refuse to authorize the New York Police Department and state law enforcement to clear out illegal occupation on campus entirely, the White House will deploy the National Guard.

Over on Twitter, Yale associate and Charlottesville resident David Austin Walsh has delivered not a warning, but a threat that the only way to avoid a redux of what happened at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago is “a fundamental shift in U.S. policy in the Middle East *and* the easing of the hysteria over campus protests. (Not a crackdown, which will only make things worse!).”

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Walsh is right that the DNC risks ever-escalating odds of hosting violent conflict, but he is dead wrong on the solution. Biden must combat lawless protest and overt threats to American Jews with the full force of the law and the federal government’s endorsement of such action. Appeasement, not anti-racism, will only achieve the chaos that Biden was elected precisely to bring to an end.