Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [78]
Student radicals behaved like feral beasts not only because of the group dynamic of a crowd, but because they had no criticism. They never had a reason to pause, reflect, or repent because, between acts of violence, they were busy reading the press reports describing them as “idealists”—indeed, “the best informed, the most intelligent and the most idealistic this country has ever known,” as the Cox Report on the student riots at Columbia University put it.3 In a self-reinforcing circle, the mobs took their cues from the elites and the elites praised the “idealistic” mobs.
Far from rebelling, student radicals were perfectly in tune with authority figures in their lives, both at home and on campus. As political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out, because of the “enormous growth in the number of liberal Jewish faculty” in the post–World War II years, American universities went from being mostly apolitical to places with strong liberal views.4 The alleged radicalism of the students, Lipset says, was “approved by the community within which they operate.”
The alleged radicals weren’t even rebelling against their parents. Numerous studies at the time showed that left-wing students were “largely the children of left-wing or liberal parents.”5 Weatherman Eleanor Raskin attended protests at Columbia University and the Pentagon with her mother, who was “as militant as protesters one-third her age” and whose antics “seemed excessive, even unseemly.”6 The left-wing congressman from Boulder, Colorado, Jared Schutz Polis, elected in 2008, has childhood memories of being brought to anti-war rallies by his parents.7
To be sure, the conservative students tended to reflect the views of their parents as much as the liberal students did. Also like the liberal activists, politically involved conservatives had higher IQs than apolitical students.8 The main difference between the conservative and liberal activists, based on a comparison of SDS and YAF conventions, was that the conservatives came from less wealthy families than the liberals.9
In 1970, a violent student mob rampaged for three days at Kent State University, smashing store windows, breaking into a jewelry store, and starting street bonfires. The ROTC building at the university was burned to the ground, as hundreds of students stood around cheering. When the fire trucks arrived, the mob threw rocks at the firemen and slashed the fire hose. The riot had been instigated by Terry Robbins, the Weatherman leader who had sex with Bill Ayers and later blew himself up while assembling a bomb intended for soldiers at Fort Dix.
Day after day, thousands of protesters ran wild, throwing beer bottles, bricks, rocks, and smoke grenades at the police. Wielding baseball bats, golf clubs, and foot-long pieces of steel wire, they screamed “Bring the war home!” and “Death to pigs!” Even after the National Guard had been called in, for days law enforcement responded with nothing more than tear gas.
On May 4, National Guard officers were trying to disperse thousands of violent protesters in the middle of the campus. According to the recent reporting of James Rosen,10 the guardsmen were fired upon first, leading twenty-nine guardsmen to shoot back at the protesters, killing four students in thirteen seconds—Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder.11
If Louis XVI had been that decisive, 600,000 Frenchmen might not have had to die. As his grandfather, Louis XIV, had said: When war is necessary, it is a “grave error to think that one can reach the same aims by weaker means.” Though decried thoughout the land—and in a Neil Young song!—the shooting at Kent State soon put an end to the student riots.
Student radicals had never imagined anyone would fail to praise them, much less shoot at them. Taken in by the establishment, they were instantly commercialized, hailed as “idealists”—and then most of them headed off to law school and university jobs.