Columbia U Punished Custodians, Not the Students Who Kidnapped and Assaulted Them

AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura

What do you call an organized, violent mob of antisemitic hammer-wielding bullies who assault people, break things, shout slogans, and draw Swastikas on everything?

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Brownshirts, of course, unless you are a Leftist. Then you call them social justice warriors, and all the smart set are in love with them. 

Such a mob of Brownshirts took over Columbia University for quite a while last year and are still quite active there today. Aside from their "occupation" for much of the year, they conducted a number of violent raids, including the assault on a campus building that resulted in massive damage and escalated to the point where the mob assaulted and kidnapped two custodians who were there cleaning off all the Swastikas the mob has earlier tagged the building with. 

Our elites have entered the "let them eat cake" phase of the aristocrats looking down on the hoi polloi. While the Columbia administrators no doubt were frustrated by the Brownshirts disrupting their Ivy League garden peace, when forced to choose between future donors and their current donors' children, they threw their employees under the bus without a second thought.

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Lester Wilson and Mario Torres were forced to clean up the Swastikas left behind by the toddlers cosplaying as Brownshirts in keffiyehs. While doing so they were assaulted, injured, kidnapped, and...thrown under the bus by their employers. The New York authorities looked the other way, and the Biden administration tut-tutted and looked the other way. 

Not so the Trump administration, which has opened an EEOC investigation into the matter. It turns out that not only is kidnapping a crime, but an employer punishing its employees for complaining that they were kidnapped and assaulted is not grounds for punishment, even if that employer wants to engage in a coverup. Especially if they are engaging in what amounts to a coverup of illegal activity. 

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Columbia's administration had allowed students to harass its employees for months, ignoring their concerns, forcing them to enable the continued occupation by cleaning up the mess daily while working overtime. The custodians felt unsafe, told the administration they did, and their concerns--which turned out to be entirely justified--were brushed off

Custodians are not soldiers who volunteered to be peacekeepers in a war zone. They are people doing a job, and their employers have a duty to ensure their well-being as best they can. But Columbia felt it could afford to punish the custodians, and the thought what the students were doing was admirable, or at least excusable. 

It is not fully clear when the EEOC commenced the probe, but records seen by The Post show that the agency was working on the investigation last month.

Wilson and Torres, who had worked at the school for over five years, were both left injured as well as traumatized from the scourge of anti-Israel unrest that engulfed the Ivy League school and have since been unable to return to work as a result, according to the complaints they filed last October.

“Hours after President [Minouche] Shafik issued her statement [that the university had become ‘unsafe for everyone‘], an antisemitic mob assaulted two janitors inside Columbia’s historic Hamilton Hall, calling them ‘Jew-lovers,'” the two complaints for both men recalled of the Hamilton Hall takeover in April last year.

“Columbia had indeed become unsafe for everyone, including the two janitors who were trapped inside Hamilton Hall. And for these two men, Columbia had for months been a hostile environment in violation of Title VII,” the complaints added.

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Reprimanding your employees for reporting vandalism and Nazi activism--both prohibited by Columbia's rules--should not have resulted in a reprimand but in action to punish the perpetrators. But noticing that future lawyers, hedge-fund millionaires, and other potential donors is a big no-no, so the administration took aim at the messengers who brought it to their attention. 

“Mr. Wilson recognized the swastikas as symbols of white supremacy,” Wilson’s complaint alleges. “As an African-American man, he found the images deeply distressing. He reported them to his supervisors, who instructed him to erase the graffiti.”

“No matter how many times Mr. Wilson removed the swastikas, individuals kept replacing them with more.”

Wilson lost track of how many swastikas he had to scrub, but his colleague Torres, who is Latino, pegged it in the dozens and eventually reached a point where he had enough, his complaint said.

The two maintenance workers argued that Columbia University could’ve prevented the chaos if it had taken action earlier.James Keivom

“They were so offensive, and Columbia’s inaction was so frustrating, that he eventually began throwing away chalk that had been left in the classrooms so vandals would not have anything to write with,” Torres’ complaint alleged.

“However, Mr. Torres was reprimanded by his supervisor for doing so.”

Given the fact that Columbia University requires an electronic ID to gain entrance to Hamilton Hall, which is nestled on the school’s Morningside Heights campus, and the fact that the building was equipped with security feeds, the two janitors felt the authorities could’ve tracked down the perpetrators.

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Columbia officials told these men that the students had First Amendment rights to destroy property and threaten people, which is patently absurd. To call what these men faced a "hostile work environment is such an understatement that I don't have words to describe it. 

Columbia chose the side of the students, not their employees, who after all are members of the wrong class. 

”I’m going to get twenty guys up here to f— you up,'” one masked rioter who had “violently” shoved Torres threatened, per the complaint. “Mr. Torres pulled a fire extinguisher, which was within arm’s reach, off the wall to defend himself and replied, ‘I’ll be right here.’”

During that confrontation, Torres was repeatedly struck on his back by other rioters. After repeatedly navigating to blocked-off exits, he eventually found a way out that had been blocked by zip ties and a bike lock. Following his pleas, one of the rioters cut the zip ties and let him out.

Wilson had been separated from Torres during the havoc and had quickly tried to escape after determining the rioters were taking over. During his scramble to get out, rioters smashed furniture into him and pushed him repeatedly, per the complaint.

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The Trump administration is finally doing something about it, and predictably enough, all the Democrats and their Leftist allies are outraged! They are destroying academia! Freedom of thought and speech! Leftist Brownshirts count more the Brown employees who never went to Ivy League schools. 

They are puppets of the Zionists!

None of this will stop until outsiders stop it. The elites have been running all our institutions, and this is the result. Blue-collar workers are being beaten up by mobs of students given carte blanche because they are of the right class. 

That's why everybody in the elite are rallying around Mahmoud Khalil, one of the protest's leaders. He matters, while blue-collar workers do not. 

Institutions don't reform themselves, especially when they have degenerated so far that this behavior is the new normal. Civilized people recoil at such behavior. But our elites smile. 

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