Storming colleges with riot cops to keep them 'safe' should scare America about what's next [View all]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/campus-free-speech-crackdown-riot-police-20240428.html

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The moral insanity of America’s long war in Vietnam — protested by 1960s kids who were on the right side of history, even if the grown-ups didn’t see it in real time — came to be defined by the unnamed U.S. major who told journalist Peter Arnett after the particularly deadly 1968 battle of Bến Tre that “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, gratingly. As a new generation of young people speaks out against attacks on women and children halfway around the world — this time in Gaza — college administrators from Boston to L.A. are racing to call in heavily armored riot cops to shut down protest encampments at campuses they’d sold to applicants as bastions of academic freedom, open expression, and historic demonstrations that had changed the world.

They are destroying the American university in order to keep it “safe.” In a week when decades happened, the lowest moments in what became a nationwide assault on college free speech by militarized police veered from shock to tragicomical irony.

At the University of Texas in Austin, right-wing authoritarian Gov. Greg Abbott ordered a large helmeted brigade of state troopers to march through the heart of his state’s flagship campus and shut down a pro-Palestinian protest that he’d branded as violent and antisemitic even before the event had actually started. Prosecutors later dropped all criminal charges against 57 UT students and others arrested by Abbott’s army, saying the arrests “lacked probable cause.” The riot cops were photographed marching past a UT promotional sign, “What starts here changes the world …”

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