Tom on the History of Political Protests

 I've been saying for some time that this year has certain similarities to 1968.  While there have been neither assassinations nor urban rioting, (It's only April), political discourse today is as poisonous as it was back then.  Your debate opponent is not misguided or reading the tea leaves differently than you might: She's evil.  And it's not one party that's guilty of such venomous invective. People tend to talk AT each other, rather than TO each other.  And, as if that wasn't bad enough, many of these dimwits seem to be incapable of any original thought.  Republicans hurl insults at Democrats that they first saw on a bumper sticker on some rattletrap of a pickup truck or some Fox News or Wall Street Journal comment section frequented by people with serious anger management issues and a taste for complicated conspiracy theories.  Democrats are just as bad, if not worse.  Whatever you might say about Republicans, many of them have not lost the ability to laugh.  People actually seem to enjoy themselves at Trump rallies.  Democratic gatherings are dour affairs where nobody ever smiles, every 'microaggression' is the political equivalent of a Mortal Sin.  :Progressive tend to view people as members of discrete"identity" groups, rather than as individuals, and their first impulse is to venerate the   group over any individual.

Since the late 60s, the identities of the offenders may have changed, but their foolish ways are familiar to anyone who remembers those fraught times.  One of the defining issues was the constant demonstrations.  Many of these demonstrations were against the Vietnam War, others were in support of the forces of Law and Order.  Pretty young women burned their brassieres as a protest against the patriarchal state, and long haired lads burned their draft cards in protest against the unpleasantness of the Vietnam Conflict.  Blacks protested racism and Southern Whites beat them like the proverbial 'Red-Headed Stepchild'.  Sometimes these packerhead even killed them and tossed their bodies into nearby swamps.  

Now the protests are taking place on college campuses nationwide.  This new wave of protests have been fueled by the Israeli-Hamas War.  While the majority of protesters are sympathetic to the so-called Palestinian 'Cause', most are just ignorant Muppets.  But some are malevolent towards Jewish students, who are conditioned by history to take such threats as promises.   And the Palestinian sympathizers have taken to establishing 'camps', on the grounds of some universities, including Columbia and Yale.  When those institutions took action against the protestors, (who had ignored repeated requests to leave), They were detained and processed, and many faced suspensions and loss of their dorm rooms and access to the university dining halls and other facilities. Some of these kids feel that they should face no consequences for their disruptive behavior, but a reckoning is long overdue.  For too long, militant progressives have exercised a 'heckler's veto' over appearances by those whose views on particular issues are insufficiently PC.  No university should ever tolerate this sort of behavior.  If you disagree with a speaker's viewpoint, whatever it might be, the way to deal with is to test your viewpoint in the marketplace of ideas, (NB: The term is a simplification in the dissent in the case Abrams v the United States, (1919) by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr..  Two men were convicted under the Espionage Act for the heinous crime of distributing anti-government pamphlets.  Holmes asserted that, absent an imminent threat, even seditious writings were worthy of First Amendment protection; that ideas should be debated, not met with a long term in prison.  Abrams and his co-defendant got 30 years in prison).