National Review senior editor Charles C. W. Cooke, on today’s episode of The Editors, called the anti-Israel student protesters at various U.S. universities the “dumbest, silliest people in the world” and said they’re doing little more than “cosplaying.”

“The key point . . . is that they are cosplaying because they’re not following through their rhetoric to its logical conclusion,” Cooke said. “If you occupy a building, you can’t ask to be fed by the people from whom you’ve taken the building. This is now how it goes.”

Cooke pointed out the hypocrisy of the protesters, who “claim that the institution that is being targeted is illegitimate. Is evil. Is on the wrong side of history. It shouldn’t exist. If it does exist, it should be changed irrevocably. And in the second statement, there is an appeal to the humanity and values of that very institution.

“These people,” Cooke said, “are playing. . . . These people, because of the way the universities have been set up in the last 60 years, are not, as they insist, operating outside of the university or against the university, but within it. They are playing a game whose rules have been written by the people they are pretending to disdain.”

Cooke laid out how this is embedded in the makeup of modern universities, and said, “That’s why the camps aren’t moved. That’s why we’ve seen inertia. That’s why this has spread in the way that it does, because this is what university is.

“It’s not an aberration. It’s an endorsement.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.