The white moderate's message today: I am the adult in the room. Unfortunately for the rest of you, however, I did not bother to read the room.

That being said, the rhetoric of the white moderate is a significant cut above the sort of nonsense coming from the mouths of "elected" representatives and those who speak for the owning classes.

Today's white moderate is Frederick Lawrence, whose academic specialty appears to be hate crime law, the type of law that is currently being twisted around to suppress Constitutionally-protected free speech today. Lawrence is firmly connected to the oligarchic consensus. I will review three things he said at the beginning of this interview, which he was gracious enough to hold on Democracy Now.

1) "Universities have to begin with first principles. We exist for the purposes of creating and discovering knowledge. This requires free expression and protection for free expression."

Unfortunately for our esteemed white moderate, however, this is merely an explanation of how universities market themselves. As David F. Labaree pointed out, universities exist today mainly for the purpose of selling credentials. Since their appetites for money are boundless, they are led by presidents who obey the whims of trustees, who satisfy the institutions' boundless hunger for money and who are therefore the real force motivating the suppression of protest in America and around the world today.

2) "... intervention sooner to protect the violence that was going on at UCLA..."

I'm sure this was a mere misstatement, but that's precisely what the cops did at UCLA: protect violence.

3) "You have to build relationships, you have to know who these student leaders are and student groups are, so that the kinds of conflicts we're seeing now don't happen the way they're being presented happen in a much more productive way for all concerned."

Unfortunately for our white moderate, the kinds of conflicts we're seeing now are not resolvable by building relationships or knowing who the student leaders and student groups are. Rather, resolution can only come by addressing the primary issue of the collective dispute, which is to say complicity in what the IDF is currently doing in Gaza.

And that's what you need to know about today's white moderate.