Today’s Campus Protesters Have Some Things in Common With the 60s Radicals of the Weather Underground

Today’s Campus Protesters Have Some Things in Common With the 60s Radicals of the Weather Underground

Of course, today’s radicals are coddled by the establishment but aside from that, there are similarities.

The Free Press reports:

When Students Become Terrorists

Last year, American universities exploded with protests over a war half a world away in Gaza. In solidarity with the perpetrators of October 7, keffiyeh-clad students covered campus grounds with “encampments,” took over buildings, waved the flags of terrorists, and menaced Jewish classmates.

As fall semesters begin this week, some major universities—from NYU to UCLA—have implemented new rules to protect Jewish students from the protesters who declared sections of campus no-go zones for “Zionists,” which often just meant Jews.

Nonetheless, the chaos appears to be returning.

A week ago, at Temple University, protesters marched in solidarity with Palestinian “resistance against their colonizers.” As students returned to class at the University of Pittsburgh, a man attacked a group of Jewish students with a bottle. Meanwhile, at the University of Michigan, four protesters were arrested during a “die-in.”

“The longer the war in Gaza, the longer the unrest in the Middle East continues, the greater the fertile ground for an escalation or expansion of protests,” Bruce Hoffman, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations and expert on domestic terrorism, told The Free Press. Hoffman believes serious violence is not out of the question, if campus encampments are dismantled and protesters become convinced they are the victims of an oppressive state bent on usurping their rights.

History teaches that a few true believers can do plenty of damage once they decide that boycotts and sit-ins aren’t making a difference. It’s therefore worth considering a worst-case scenario, in which a vanguard decides demonstrations are not enough. That’s what happened in the late 1960s when a small band of radicals moved from protest to violent resistance. They were known as the Weathermen, and like today’s student protesters, they emerged from the Ivy League and other elite universities.

Between 1969 and 1974, this small gang of violent, far-left intellectuals bombed Congress, police stations, courthouses, and the Pentagon. They changed their identities to avoid detection, dyed their hair, and lived off-grid, while working to destroy the “imperialist” country they detested. The Weathermen were motivated by their disgust with the Vietnam War, a war their generation was conscripted to fight. In their eyes, this great crime made the nation irredeemable.

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