Image Credit: Jack Petocz / X
By Lisa Schiffren – Assistant Editor [The College Fix] –
Details have emerged regarding one of three Vanderbilt University students arrested for allegedly assaulting a security guard amid raucous anti-Israel protests inside an administration building late in March.
All three students who were arrested have reportedly been expelled from the university.
Moreover, one student protester was suspended and 22 students were put on probation, the Vanderbilt Hustler student newspaper reported, citing social media posts by the student activist groups, as campus officials have declined to state specifics, citing privacy laws.
A security video published by the Tennessee university shows protesters forcibly entering Kirkland Hall, pushing past a security officer who tried to prevent them from entering.
Petocz, a freshman, is a veteran activist, even at such a young age. He justified his actions, and blamed the school for its actions, in a stream on X. He said he believes the school was wrong to arrest and suspend students “for peacefully protesting the genocide in Palestine.”
The 19-year-old is a semi-professional agitator, according to Red State, which described him as an instructive exemplar of “the various astroturf protests around the country.”
Petocz began his activism in 2020, after his family came down with Covid. He was irritated by a local school board member whom he thought was “recklessly tweeting COVID misinformation.” He started the Recall Flagler County School Board movement, “but quickly turned his focus toward advancing radical agendas,” Red State reported.
By fall of 2021, Petocz was busy protesting against local school board members who wanted to ban sexually charged books from the high school library. His activism led to attention from the New York Times, which featured him in a January 2022 front page article about the left wing response to conservative pressure on school boards.
As an outspoken gay student, he fought specific book bans on gay male literature.
“As a gay student myself, those books are so critical for youth, for feeling there are resources for them,” he said, noting that books that portray heterosexual romances are rarely challenged. “I felt it was very discriminatory.”
When the “‘(manufactured) hubbub’ over Gov. Ron DeSantis’s alleged ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill erupted in Florida, Petocz jumped right into the fray, organizing a statewide walkout in Florida high schools (around 30 schools participated, according to an interview Petocz gave NBC News),’” Red State reported.
Petocz was suspended for his efforts, including for passing out 200 pride flags for the rally after being asked not to by his principal.
Despite the suspension on his permanent record, Petrocz was given a prestigious award for free speech by PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization. After a fawning profile in Teen Vogue, he was invited to the White House to meet President Joe Biden and attend the signing ceremony for Biden’s Executive Order on Advancing Equality for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Individuals. He got his picture taken with all the party bigwigs.
Red State reports that he took a position with Gen Z For Change, a radical activist group he worked with to try and defeat DeSantis in the Florida gubernatorial election in 2022. Then he finished up high school, and went off to Vanderbilt, having visited the White House a couple of more times in the interim, according to his social media posts.
Naturally, as a freshman at Vanderbilt, Petocz joined Students for Justice in Palestine in time for this past fall’s protests against Israel. Now he has been expelled from Vanderbilt for protesting in favor of BDS, or the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement.
This is a new route of the evolution of a radical leftist in America in the 2020s: from gay politics against the parent movement to radical pro-Hamas politics against Israel. It remains to be seen what Petocz does next.
*Note: Article Republished on The Tennessee Conservative by express permission from The College Fix.
8 Responses
Bless his poor heart. They hurt his feelings.
Oh BooHoo
He must think he’s special, if he went to Gaza he’d be thrown off a building for being homosexual
Or beat and enthusiastically abused in prison for just thinking he had free speech rights
What a useful pawn he is
The best course of reaction to this twit is to give him a one way ticket to Palestine with a letter of reference to Hamas that he is an activist who supports gay rights and Hamas.
Great idea, see how fast they throw him off a building! The idiocy of the left knows no limits!
Proof all these rioters are nothing more than paid agitators who know NOTHING about what they claim to be protesting against. I believe they are, what is called, “USEFUL IDIOTS” that are the same BLM/ANTIFA dystopian youth that Soros has on his payroll, throw in a bunch of new illegals that hate our country and you have FAKE PROTESTS to distract people away from the fact that our own Gov’t is purposely trying to destroy it’s own citizen’s and the country into a communist hellhole. Wake up to the astroturf that is the prog left brownshirts.
George Soros rent a rioters, it’s past time congress put a stop to this, bring-
Ing Marxist rioters in to disrupt cities and universities!
Clearly these Antifas have no knowledge of the Middle East nor do they even care. They’re not genuinely protesting. Just disrupting.
Having said that…. God forbid anyone would dare criticize Israel for being the Christian hating Messiah murderers they actually are. In Israel the Jews spit on Christians in the streets. I’m sure many have conveniently forgotten the USS Liberty and her brave victims. Nevermind the Christians in Gaza the IDF has joyfully killed during the present hostilities.
Hamas are terrorists. So are the Israelis. To hell with them both.
You may wish to use Gaza and not Palestine.
Palestine has often been called the birthplace of Christianity.
How come the Jewish Community is still silent over the attacks toward and oppression of the Catholics, Christians and Orthodox Christians around the World? Also, their houses of Worship.
There is a lot of truth to what Harry Cannon states. Am very surprised Harry mentioned the USS Liberty.
Perhaps, Harry also knows of the Communist Revolution of Lenin, Lev Bronstein and Jacob Schiff of Wall Street.