Everywhere I hear the sound of marchin’, chargin’ feet, boy ’Cause summer’s here and the time is right For fighting in the street, boy ... Hey, think the time is right for violence, revolution.
— “Street Fighting Man,” the Rolling Stones, 1968.
As in 1968, so in 2024. The kids are marchin’ on the campuses. Protests broke out this week at the University of Southern California, University of California, and other schools around the state and country.Demands included “ending what they call war profiteering and investment in genocide, a complete academic boycott of Israel, protection of free speech on campus and full amnesty to students, and no policing on campus.”
Although it receives billions of dollars in funding from U.S. and California taxpayers, USC is a private school. So it has leeway on shutting down protests. Public schools, such as the University of California and Cal State systems, as public entities will find it much harder to regulate protests.
Again: What Did They Expect?
In my Nov. 3 Epoch Times article about some earlier protests, “Berkeley Law Dean ‘Stunned’ by Students Radicalized at Schools Like Berkeley,” I wrote, “What did he expect? Erwin Chemerinsky helped radicalize three generations of law school students. Now, he’s shocked! Shocked! They’re holding far-left, antisemitic protests around the country.”Berkeley was the site of some of the biggest 1960s protests against the Vietnam War and the military draft. Today it’s revived that radicalism.
Teaching Radicalism
Let’s look at what kids are learning today. In 2017, UCLA held a “A Conference on Race, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism.” At Berkeley, current Prof. Peter Nelson’s research themes include “Indigenous Archaeology, Indigenous environmental studies, settler colonialism, community-based participatory research.”The answer: “The term ‘settler colonialism’ may combine two words that are very familiar. But in combination, the term can land as a moral slander—or worse.
“Those who call Israel a settler-colonial enterprise see a country formed by waves of Jewish arrivals who pushed Arab inhabitants out to create an exclusive ethnostate. To others, that is a gross distortion that redefines refugees as oppressors and ignores the long history of the Jewish diaspora’s attachment to its ancestral land—as well as the continuous existence of a Jewish community whose ancestors never left.”
Look through the curricula of any state school, and most private schools, and you will find thousands more examples like these.
“The American left constantly redefines common language to muddle thinking and extort moral commitment out of citizens. Justice is infinitely repackaged as ‘social justice,’ ‘racial justice,’ or ‘reproductive justice,’ and the list goes on. America’s traditional admiration for equality is transmuted into the more demanding, if not totalitarian concept of equity. Equity requires reparation for past wrongdoings and perceived ‘injustices,’ with special attention given to how systems propagate oppression.”
A Long, Hot Summer
In the 1960s, the campus protests exploded into a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. That occurred in a country still mostly conservative. Democratic leaders such as President Lyndon Johnson and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley were liberal on such things as LBJ’s Great Society welfare programs and enacting Medicare. But on most social issues and campus radicalism, they were more conservative.For six decades, progressives have promoted a Maoist Cultural Revolution on America’s campuses. But now that it has reached maturity, they’re surprised they’ve become the main targets over their own policies. The kids are young, brainwashed, and full of exuberance.
“Early in the campaign, videos emerged of a 2020 interview in which Johnson described defunding the police as an ‘actual, real political goal.’ The comments followed him throughout the campaign. He initially pivoted from answering to them and later said he would not defund the police if he were elected but would fund a more ‘holistic approach to public safety.’”
What happens if many thousands of student protesters show up for the 2024 convention, ready for street fightin’ as they did in 1968? What happens this time if many Chicago police come down with the “blue flu,” staying home from work? What will left-wing Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker do with the state’s National Guard?