One hundred bodies on Low Steps. Mostly faculty. Two years after Hamilton Hall and the Hind's Hall banner, the cadre that staged the Columbia operation is no longer protesting. It is governing. The crowds got smaller because the work is done.
"There is no bloodier dictator than the people" Unknown
By the time the sun came up over Low Library on April 30, 2026, the count was in. Around one hundred bodies on the steps. The Sunrise Movement and the Columbia Palestine Solidarity Coalition called it a student action. The video told another story. Most of the faces were too old to be undergraduates. They were faculty, organizers, paid staff, the people who actually run the operation. The riot class showed up to mark its own holiday.
đ¨ BREAKING: On the two-year anniversary of Columbiaâs Hindâs Hall occupation, Sunrise Movement says more than 100 âstudentsâ have taken over the steps of Low Memorial Library.
â Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) April 30, 2026
The footage raises an obvious question. How many protesters are students? A lot look much older. pic.twitter.com/itDfH62WFh
Two years earlier, the same operation looked like a movement. Hundreds of people occupied the South Lawn. In the early hours of April 30, 2024, masked actors stormed Hamilton Hall. They dragged metal gates in from the encampment perimeter, smashed windows, barricaded doors with furniture, terrorized the custodial workers who were inside doing their jobs, and dropped a banner renaming the building Hind's Hall. The custodians later said in court filings they feared for their lives. The mob held the building until the NYPD cleared it that afternoon.
âźď¸INTIFADA, REVOLUTIONâźď¸
â Within Our Lifetime (@WOLPalestine) April 30, 2024
đHind's Hall, Columbia University pic.twitter.com/7tdGuSVo2d
Standing outside Hamilton Hall, captured on video by The New York Times, was Lisa Fithian. She was 63 years old. She had no Columbia affiliation. The NYPD, on the record, called her a "confirmed professional agitator." Fithian had trained activists in Occupy, in Extinction Rebellion, in every left action of the last quarter century. She was paid for that work. The students did not invent the barricade choreography. Fithian taught it to them. The choreography was the product. The students were the cast.
The branding was the rest of the product. Hind Rajab, a six-year-old girl, died in Gaza in January 2024 under circumstances that have been litigated, contested, and propagandized by every party with an interest in the outcome. Whatever the full operational record shows, and we still do not have it, her name was claimed by people in Manhattan who had never met her and bolted to the front of a building they had just trashed. That is what manufactured rage looks like. A real death, stripped of its actual context, hoisted as a flag over an act of vandalism. The point was not to mourn a child. The point was airtime. Every viral clip, every keffiyeh on cable news, every faculty teach-in flowed from the same content cycle. The encampment was a TikTok set. Hamilton Hall was the season finale.
Students who try to protect Hind Hall at @Columbia are physically assaulted by the Pro-Hamas mob.
â The Persian Jewess (@persianjewess) April 30, 2024
What happened to respecting the âCommunity Guidelinesâ? đ¤¨đ§#AntizionismIsAntisemitism
pic.twitter.com/Nmyt0kTfHh
It worked. For two years, it worked. The cycle delivered exactly what it was designed to deliver. Network coverage. Sympathetic profiles. A new generation of activist influencers. And on the back end, the political payoff that justified the whole exercise.
Inside CUNY the same pressure was used to push Jewish faculty and Jewish students into smaller and smaller corners of campus life. Public Jewish identification became a liability in classrooms and in hiring. The pattern is now well documented and will be the subject of its own reporting in this space. Set it aside for now as one item on a longer ledger. The campus operation was never only about Israel and Gaza. It was about who gets to teach, who gets to speak, who gets to walk through the quad without being screamed at.
Behind the kids on the lawn stood the faculty. At Columbia the most prominent voice was Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Anthropology. Mamdani led teach-ins inside the encampment. He compared the protests to the South African anti-apartheid movement and the American civil rights struggle. He signed the faculty letter that described the October 7 massacre as a "military action" to be understood "within the larger context of the occupation of Palestine by Israel." When the administration brought in police, Mamdani called the response colonial. When the school launched an antisemitism task force, Mamdani called it terrorizing. He gave the kids their script.
Pro-Hamas of @Columbia has hung a banner stating âHind Hallâ above the entrance of Hamilton Hall. âHamas Hallâ seems far more fitting for the domestic terrorists of @Columbia.
â Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U (@CampusJewHate) April 30, 2024
About 60 students are reportedly inside Hamilton Hall and are claiming the building has now been⌠pic.twitter.com/ItMZe6KQXi
The kids gave him back a son in office.
Zohran Mamdani, the professor's son, DSA member, former state assemblyman, won the New York City mayoralty in November 2025 and was inaugurated in January 2026. He inherited an apparatus he did not build alone. The Muslim Brotherhood orbit in New York was, by multiple accounts, surprised by the speed of his rise. They did not have to do most of the work. The work was done by the campus cadre, by NYC-DSA, by CAIR-affiliated organizers, and by the so-called as-a-Jew auxiliaries. Jewish Voice for Peace. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. The IfNotNow alumni network. Their function in the operation is the function a defense attorney assigns to character witnesses. They show up on cue and provide cover. Look, they say, even Jews agree. The cover let elected officials and donors pretend the campaign was not what every honest observer could see it was.
Gene Goodwin
Now look at what he is building.
Mamdani's transition team recruited more than 400 people across 17 advisory committees. The administration received over 50,000 applications for city jobs. Chief of Staff Elle Bisgaard-Church is DSA. Senior appointments across agencies have been pulled from the same activist networks that staffed the encampments. Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia protest figure, has been hosted at Gracie Mansion. NYC-DSA membership now runs at roughly 14,000. The bulk of those members do not work in finance. They work in the public sector unions, in the public school system, in CUNY, in the nonprofit ecosystem. They write the curricula. They run the trainings. They sit on the hiring committees. They teach the kids.
Gene Goodwin
This is the deliverable. The lawn was the means. The students were the means. Hind's Hall was the means. The mayoralty, the appointments, the union desks, and the textbook your kid is reading at PS 158 next September are the ends. A mob can be cleared in an afternoon. A regime takes a generation to clear out.
The Department of Justice indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center on April 21, 2026, is worth reading in this light. The DOJ charged the SPLC with eleven counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The allegation is that the SPLC quietly funneled more than three million dollars between 2014 and 2023 to people inside the Klan, the Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Party of America, and the leadership chat that planned the Charlottesville rally. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche described it as manufacturing the extremism the SPLC claims to oppose. Whatever a jury ultimately decides, the underlying business model is the one we have been describing. NGOs raise money against threats. The threats turn out to be partly produced, curated, or amplified by the same NGOs. The donors fund the cycle. The cycle funds the staff. The staff produces the next cycle.
Columbia is the elite version of the same model. Activist faculty produce the framing. Foundation-funded NGOs produce the personnel. Student fronts produce the bodies. A captured press produces the coverage. International students brought in on the right visas produce the bench depth. The Marxist brigade running the humanities departments produces the next generation of recruits. And every cycle ends with another tranche of true believers rotating into the unions, the schools, the agencies, and the city payroll. The product is not protest. The product is the government.
MM got the inside view of Nerdeen's speech from the Hind's Hall art gallery teach-in. https://t.co/F3NQ00KIkd
â Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) December 3, 2024
Stand on Low Steps on April 30, 2026, and count the heads. One hundred. Mostly older. Mostly faculty and staff. Almost no undergraduates. The thinness is not weakness. It is the tell. The crowd does not need to be large anymore because the work is done. The mayor is in. The deputies are in. The chief of staff is in. The unions are in. The education schools are in. The future history teachers and the future principals are being trained right now in seminar rooms a hundred yards from the steps.
The lie they sold to win was that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. It is, and they knew it. The lie they sold to govern is that this was ever a student movement. It was not. It was a cadre operation that used students as scenery. The Hind's Hall banner was not a mourning ritual. It was a logo. The custodians inside Hamilton Hall were not collateral damage. They were a message to anyone who thought the institution still belonged to the broader public.
Gene Goodwin
Two years on, the cadre took its victory lap on the steps in front of the camera. The honest observer's job is the rest of the work. Name the operators. Map the money. Track the appointments. Audit the curricula. Sue, when the law allows. Vote when the ballot allows. Refuse the euphemisms. Refuse the cover stories. Refuse the as-a-Jew chorus. The crowds got smaller because the people running them no longer need crowds. They have offices now. The next anniversary will be smaller still.
By then, the schools will be theirs.
Unless someone moves first.
Gene Goodwin