Blind hatred of America is so yesterday. It’s shadowboxing an opponent who has exited the ring. Activists on college campuses today, whether agitating for Hamas, BLM, or Occupy Wall Street, are fighting a caricature of America from the 1950s and ’60s, an America that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s the America of Bill Ayers and Richard Nixon — the radicals versus the squares and the capitalist pigs. They are obsessed with a phantom that faded away years ago.
A movie called The Music Never Stopped tells the story of a young man named Gabriel, who left home just before high school graduation in 1968 after a fight with his father over his views on America and the Vietnam War. Set in 1986, his parents haven’t seen him in 18 years, until they learn he is undergoing brain surgery to remove a benign tumor. The tumor is large, and its removal affects his memory processing, making it difficult for him to form new memories and trapping him in the familiar environment of the ’60s.
As Gabriel recovers, he asks about his friend, Mark, whom he had last seen when Mark got his draft card. His father tells him Mark died in Vietnam, and he cries out, “That bastard Nixon!” Gabriel is still fighting the bogeyman of yesterday in 1986. Today’s leftist protesters have a similar tumor on the brain, planted there by their university faculty. Like the character in the movie, they are all fighting yesterday’s enemy.
America today is far removed from the unreconstructed America that student radicals in the ’60s hated. From the boardroom to the stock room, America is now almost entirely woke, groveling in abject and continual apology. Diversity and inclusion are enshrined in our national life, despite the constant lectures on race. Movies and television are full of “people of color.” Our national sports heroes are almost all black. Mixed-race couples dominate our national advertising. (Fortunately, we have an army of grievance professionals available to interpret the “systemic” racism in our every word and gesture, which they will do for large sums of money.)
In addition, marriage redefined is the law of the land. Gay pride is celebrated for the entire month of June. Homosexuality is mainstream. On transgenderism, parents in some states are still trying to establish their right to stop their minor children from being sexually mutilated without their consent. We’re woke, okay? The jury has spoken.
Nonetheless, leftist radicals take today’s events and jam them into the Procrustean bed of a 1960s worldview. College students with their Hamas sit-ins follow a playbook right out of the ’60s. Fight the power! Hillary Clinton, the student radical who insulted Republican senator Edward Brooke to his face while she addressed her graduating class at Wellesley, and Barack Obama, acolyte of radical organizer Saul Alinsky and Weatherman Bill Ayers in Chicago, would approve.
But the war is over. The left fought for and won on civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual freedom. It’s time to accept victory.
Young people are beginning to sense that white supremacists, uptight Christians, and big business aren’t really the problem anymore. The problem today isn’t the “establishment” making life miserable for people who want to live the way they want to; today, the establishment is the government. It’s the government’s power over their lives that young people should be fighting. The outdated ideology forced on today’s young people is pointing them at the wrong targets. An executive order forcing radical transgender policies on high schools and universities or a border policy allowing criminals and terrorists to flood into the country is much more likely to make an impact on their lives.
The radicals from the ’60s who wrote the playbook on campus activism went into the propaganda business at American colleges. But the young radicals they trained who are coming out of college today aren’t true believers. Their commitment is half-hearted, as demonstrated in their lack of understanding of the issues they protest, most recently the Hamas/Israel war.
Marxist radicals from the ’60s can’t accept that they didn’t carry the day back then, and they think they are poised to win now. But they’re wrong. Although the “vanguard” has expanded exponentially thanks to their campus indoctrination, the proletariat ain’t what it used to be. That’s why young people and minority voters are flocking to Trump.Fifty years ago, young people were radicalized by the Vietnam War and the cultural changes roiling America after World War II. The Baby Boom gave that generation heft, and changes in American society created anxious young people acting out their anger against their square parents and an unjust war.
Similarly, black Americans were emerging from Jim Crow in the South and fighting for their rightful place in American society. But that’s not the case today. America is more diverse and integrated than ever before, despite what today’s DIE “experts” tell you, and people know it. Meanwhile, technological change has created a higher standard of living for all, and mindless entertainment on our smartphones makes it difficult to generate the raw anger required for revolution.
It’s not hard to see why the professional activists in the Hamas protests got more pushback than traction. America today is not fertile ground for Marxist revolution, despite all the funding being poured into it by George Soros and others. The George Floyd riots were an Antifa-fueled COVID lockdown phenomenon, not likely to be repeated. With little buy-in from the young generation, the ’60s playbook for revolution that leftist professors are pushing isn’t going to accomplish much.
Young people in this country are happy to be Americans, although they are worried about the future. In the Hamas demonstrations, the crowds have a smattering of students, but they are largely professional anarchists like Antifa, antisemitic anti-Israel groups, Muslim supporters of the Hamas terrorists, and homosexual and transgender activists like Queers for Palestine. (The cognitive dissonance of Queers for Palestine should give anybody a brain cramp.) University students might come out briefly because the university propaganda machine trains them to respond, but real support is thin.
Widespread and vigorous activism among young people should be percolating today, both on college campuses and in the streets. But it should be led by conservative activists, not radical leftists. What should they be agitating about? How about the national debt, which grows like a cancer, destroying the hopes and dreams of this generation, or Biden’s open border policy, bringing in wage competitors and criminals, or the looming threat of World War III, courtesy of our overseas military adventure in Ukraine.
If young people want to hit the streets this summer, grab a placard and do it for issues that will really affect your lives. If activists could channel their energy into something other than the perpetual grievance machine, who knows what might come of it? They might make the world a better place, instead of just complaining about it.
