You gotta be old enough to remember what took place in the sixties and into the seventies with regard to protesting. In 1970 when I was bathing in and drinking the Camp Lejeune water, we were selected to be trained in riot control. JIC the protestors, the student protesters were a bit rambunctious in Washington D.C. All the better we were not called out. Still the same fears we are seeing today on college campuses. Similar right-wing dialogue by government officials and groups advocating for retaliation on protestors. And today’s reactions to protests on campuses? Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations.
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You gotta be old enough to remember what took place in the sixties and into the seventies with regard to protesting. In 1970 when I was bathing in and drinking the Camp Lejeune water, we were selected to be trained in riot control. JIC the protestors, the student protesters were a bit rambunctious in Washington D.C. All the better we were not called out. Still the same fears we are seeing today on college campuses. Similar right-wing dialogue by government officials and groups advocating for retaliation on protestors.
And today’s reactions to protests on campuses?
Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.
The above sounds similar to me and a few years ago?
On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep Trump in power by occupying the Capitol and preventing a joint session of Congress counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
Where were the right-wing politicians and groups then?
Giving fist bumps to the crowd on January 6 and then racing down the halls to safety from the January 6th rioters.
Nick Lehr. The Conversation
With police called in to crush protests and hundreds of students arrested, the scenes this past week on college campuses from coast to coast were eerily reminiscent of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.
Last year, historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd published a book detailing how conservative activists in the 1960s and 1970s exploited those anti-Vietnam War protests to punish students, attack university administrators, empower campus police and shape higher education policy.
Now Shepherd sees those same forces coming to the fore, with right-wing activists and politicians using the pro-Palestinian protests to smear all activists as antisemitic, while depicting college students as “coddled elitists” set out to “sow discord” and “destroy America.”
“The purpose then, as it is now, is to intimidate administrators into a false political choice,” she writes. “Will they protect students’ right to demonstrate or be seen as acquiescent to antisemitism?” Nick Lehr
College administrators are falling into a tried and true trap laid by the right, the conversation, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd.
Interrogations of university leaders spearheaded by conservative congressional representatives. Calls from right-wing senators for troops to intervene in campus demonstrations. Hundreds of student and faculty arrests, with nonviolent dissenters thrown to the ground, tear-gassed and tased.
We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.
They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.