Democrats Face a Long, Hot Summer of Protests in California, Nationally

Pro-Palestinian protesters gather in front of Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley, Calif., on April 22, 2024. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Commentary

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.

“Hundreds of pro-Palestinian University of Southern California students and outside supporters clashed with campus police April 24 as they occupied Alumni Park in the heart of the campus,” reported The Epoch Times. “A group calling itself the USC Divest From Death Coalition organized Wednesday’s demonstration and said it plans to continue the ‘Gaza Solidarity Occupation’ until the university meets its demands.”

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.”

These protests will grow and invade the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago Aug. 19-22. It’s theme: “Our Future Is Created Here.” They’re not going to like the future arriving in less than four months.

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.

“After a violent clash with campus and local police Monday night, students at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt have taken over a campus administration building and barricaded themselves inside, demanding that the university sever ties with Israel and any companies that support ‘the Zionist entity,’” reported the Sacramento Bee.

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As the last words indicate, some protesters are pushing anti-Semitic slogans. The earlier protests at Yale and Columbia universities led Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to tweet, “Anti-Semitism on campuses in the United States is reminiscent of what happened in German universities in the 1930s. The world cannot stand idly by.”

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.”

I posted a link to a video of him actually urging his Berkeley students to ignore California’s laws against using affirmative action in hiring. It’s this lawlessness that’s promoted across America’s university systems. No one should be surprised at a reprise of 1960s lawlessness.

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.

“The sound of buzzing surveillance drones over Gaza played from a loudspeaker on the steps of UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, on the very spot where Mario Salvo rallied for free speech in the 1960s,” reported Bay City News. “A student encampment of about 40 tents at the campus on Tuesday, up from 12 the night before, spanned the landing and sprawled onto the grass.”

Palestinian protesters set up a tent encampment during a demonstration in front of Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus on April 22, 2024. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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 New York Times in January asked, “What Is ‘Settler Colonialism’? A look at the academic roots of the idea, which has stirred fierce debate when applied to Israel.”

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.”

The radicalism even appears to have spread to what should be the objective science of medicine. USC’s Keck School of Medicine offers this: “The Fellowship in Continuous Learning for Antiracist Curricular Change (CLARCC Fellowship) seeks to create lasting antiracist curricular change through bringing together faculty and students in a process of facilitated self-reflection, peer learning, and culture change.”

Look through the curricula of any state school, and most private schools, and you will find thousands more examples like these.

It’s a version of Maoist brainwashing from the Chinese Communist Party’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. “We are seeing something similar now in America’s own cultural revolution,” wrote Habi Zhang in 2020. He became an exile two decades ago from communist China.

“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.”

The unrest and cultural revolution in America in the ‘60s is the cultural tide that informs today’s events. Anti-Vietnam protesters surround a police car outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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.

They’re also all connected on social media. President Joe Biden just signed a law banning TikTok, which has been accused of fomenting the unrest, unless it divests from owners with connections to the Chinese Communist Party. But that could take months. And his own campaign continues to use it.

In 1968, Mayor Daley’s Chicago police were attacked for conducting a “police riot” to keep order. When current Mayor Brandon Johnson won office last year, Politico reported his “victory signals a shift to the left from the already progressive governance of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration. ...

“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?

In May 1992, President George H.W. Bush sent the U.S. Marine Corps rumbling from Camp Pendleton to quell the Los Angeles riots. In 1967, President Johnson deployed the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, fresh from combat in Vietnam, to end the Detroit riots. Will that be the model for President Biden should massive student riots break out at his own 2024 Chicago nominating convention?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.