Remembering the Same Old, Same Old Protesters—Now and 50 Years Ago. Part One

Victor Davis Hanson

Americans have viewed a lot of recent demonstrations against ICE turn violent.

They have watched leftists disrupt commemorations for the late Charlie Kirk, and harass Turning Point, USA information tables on campuses.

Occasionally leftists find where Trump officials are walking, eating, or speaking and try to urge followers to “get in their faces”—in the manner that both Barack Obama and Rep. Maxine Waters once urged their followers to do to opponents.

All this is not new.

True, the particular causes may have changed. The people may look a bit different from those of the 1960s and 1970s. But the methods and mindset of the boutique Left remain the same.

It all reminds me of 1971, when I first set foot on the campus of UC Santa Cruz, which had only opened a few years prior as a supposed California coastal copy of the Oxford college model—or so my parents thought.

At that point, the anti-war protests of past years had begun to die down, given the draft lottery was already two years old. The vast majority of us who had just turned 18 a few weeks before enrolling or were older did not have numbers subject to call-up.

Indeed, by the spring 1972 semester, troop levels were falling radically in Vietnam. And so, there were likely little more than 10,000–20,000 ground troops engaged in combat support of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.

So, the huge draft evasion movements of the mid-1960s were long over. And by my junior year, the lottery draft itself was over.

I remember only one student in 1971 having a low draft number and getting a notice to report somewhere. But there were fewer than 100,000 draftees nationwide that year, and the vast majority, like him, were not headed to Vietnam.

Nonetheless, the demonstrations continued on campus, mostly over the prior ground invasion of Cambodia.

I had just turned 18 when I got to campus in late September 1971 and had only been out of Fresno County on my own once before—the prior summer when three of us 17-year-olds drove to Lake Tahoe and back.

I was also curious what a real “protest” was like. So I and fellow small-town yokel followed at the rear of a massive “walk-out” from campus, as hundreds of students and staff, chanted and marched down to the Santa Cruz County courthouse to demand official condemnation of the Cambodian interlude.

I and this other guy from the San Joquin Valley (there were a few of us at UCSC from the Valley) tagged behind, curious what a real, big-time demonstration was like. We also had a bet on who could see the most of our professors.

So, as we walked, we would point out each our profs who walked ahead: “Hey, that’s Brooks in Psych,” and I’d reply, “But I’m 2-1 ahead of you—look over there, that’s Williams and Scott from History of Conscious.”

We were both shocked that our “teachers” were yelling the loudest (as teens we noticed too that they were followed by the prettiest of the girls, who in their casual, anti-establishment wear somehow revealed more flesh than the mini-skirted beauties I remembered a few weeks earlier at high school. But I found that disconnect weird too: UCSC hippie girls made fun of “plastic” girls with make-up, nylons, and mini skirts. But I was discovering that in reality they were more prone to dress provocatively in their understated and politically correct fashion.).

I also thought at the time that there was something more to these protests than genuine pacifism or radical politics, since everyone seemed dressed in “protest” gear—as if it was some sort of half virtue-signaling, half strange performative art show.

Some anarchist proto-Antifa types tried to “free” the cows that were grazing in the college pastures as they walked by. But somehow, they never figured out how to push down the barbed wire fencing, and the cows had no desire to get anywhere near the mob anyway.

There was also a lot of chanting…

To be continued.