Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [77]
So it was either the manifesto of the New Left or a cheap imitation of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Written mostly by Tom Hayden, the manifesto pompously drones on about “the emptiness of life.” This from a man who married Jane Fonda, whose most important career move was getting breast implants. But Hayden’s nails-on-a-blackboard, Valley Girl gibberish was hailed as the voice of the new “Youth Culture.”
In no time, a series of student riots erupted on college campuses based on rumors and hyperbole, following the French pattern. Students would create chaos and tumult, and then the college administrations would promptly capitulate to the student mobs and their incomprehensible causes. Nathan Glazer said that the student protests all came down to the argument that “any mob is right as against any administrator, legislature or policeman.”1
The Berkeley “Free Speech” movement kicked off the campus riots in 1964. There were protests, sit-ins, even Joan Baez singing folk songs to demand “free speech.” (Liberals supported free speech until they realized, years later, how bad speech is for them and began demanding hate crimes legislation, speech codes, and sexual harassment laws restricting speech.) After days of protests, the Berkeley faculty responded forcefully by passing a resolution calling for no discipline for the students.
Shockingly, this did not bring the protests to a screeching halt. Vagrants and professional protesters joined the party. Putting their love of speech on hold, the thugs firebombed buildings and hurled rocks at the police. Soon the free speech protests turned into rallies for cop-killer Huey Newton, even though murder wasn’t exactly speech either.
Seeing how well total capitulation had worked in the past, college administrators tried it over and over again. A few years later, student and nonstudent protesters objected to a new dormitory building at Berkeley. They wanted a “People’s Park” so they would have a nice place for more demonstrations. Students, homeless people, and recently paroled criminals occupied the university-owned property and violently attacked the police with rocks, bricks, and pipes. Protesters painted graffiti saying “Yanqui go home”—to demonstrate their solidarity with the Third World against “Amerikkka.”
During one of the brick-throwing melees, a twenty-five-year-old nonstudent, James Rector, who had heard about the riots and come to join the fun, was on a roof above the clash heaving debris on the police. Rector was hit with police buckshot, from which he later died.
Governor Ronald Reagan ordered the National Guard to shut down the violent student protests throughout the state. He blamed Rector’s death on “the first college administrator who said it was all right to break laws in the name of dissent.”2 Appalled by their first-ever glimpse of manly force, the Berkeley faculty and administration were soon demanding that Reagan call off the Guard. Hirsute counterculture girls gave the guardsmen LSD-laced juice and brownies, requiring some to be taken off duty. These were the “idealists” the faculty was protecting.
Eventually, the protesters prevailed when the college administrators refused the protection of the National Guard and surrendered to the students—as they had always planned to do. The “People’s Park” was established and to this day remains a picturesque quadrant where criminals, drug dealers, and homeless people congregate.
This was the basic set piece for all the university protests of the sixties. The students would cook up some synthetic “cause” that seemed to link them to Third World people, and law enforcement would move in and restore order. Then college administrators would demand an immediate surrender to the drug-fueled protesters while heaping praise on them as the most idealistic and brilliant generation in all of human history. It was the perfect incubator for creating the Worst Generation.
Would the herd of individualists on college campuses in the sixties have been so brave without