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MSNBC host Alex Wagner and guest New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg reacted to the NYPD’s crackdown on anti-Israel protesters on the city’s college campuses. The hosts fear that the backlash to the student riots may usher in a new era of Conservatism — Reagan Era 2.0.

Wagner and Goldberg discussed the backlash over footage of the NYPD clearing out Columbia’s Hamilton Hall.

“Michelle, the — Hamilton Hall is — for people who are not familiar with the Columbia campus: in April of 1968, 56 years ago, hundreds of students seized the building during protests over the Vietnam War.  I do not think that was lost to the people who stormed Hamilton Hall. After a week- this is, again, in 1968, police entered through underground tunnels and cleared them out. Over 700 people were arrested,” Wagner explained.

“Right, and that’s remembered as a really dark chapter in Columbia’s history, which is why it’s so breathtaking to see them repeated,” Goldberg added.

“The country feels catastrophically divided on every — on every issue from basic facts to an actual policy vision,” Wagner added. “Echoes of 1968 and I just wonder, you know, it’s hard to imagine that this is — that this imagery of the NYPD storming Columbia in this — in this moment is not going to reverberate in ways that we cannot yet see across the political divide.”

“I think we should remember what the kind of images of protest disorder did in the late 60s. Because even as the Vietnam War became increasingly unpopular, so did the antiwar protests. And it was in part the backlash to that as well as to urban crime that gave us not just Richard Nixon but kind of un — except for a four-year oasis of Jimmy Carter, unbroken Republican rule until Bill Clinton,” Goldberg said. “And so I would expect that we are already seeing the backlash to this, but I would expect it to be ferocious.”

“The late ’70s were a period of retrenchment. And then 1980 saw Ronald Reagan and a conservative agenda that was fiercer, more focused and more effective than maybe any other conservative agenda in ways that we are still grappling with to this day,” Wagner complained, taking the comparison a step further. “I mean, it’s the establishment. The Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society. Any number of right-wing organizations. A master plan to retake the judiciary. I mean, what we saw in the aftereffect of the Vietnam War was really a brand of conservatism, a new Right that the country had never seen before.”

X users reacted to the clip — and they were excited about a new era of Conservatism.