Liberal Betrayal of America and the Tea Party Firestorm by William Davis Eaton - HTML preview

LIBERAL BETRAYAL of AMERICA
and the
TEA PARTY FIRESTORM
How the Student Riots of the Sixties Generated a Civil War to Destroy A Great Nation
WILLIAM DAVIS EATON
Copyright © 2010 William Davis Eaton
All rights reserved.
To Richard and Arlene Heath and Renée G. Eaton
Preface

On Income Tax Day, April 15, 2009, multitudes of people across the United States from all races, creeds, and political convictions, from cities, towns, and countryside, threw a Tea Party. This remarkable and spontaneous cross section of America came to express anger at their betrayal, and fear around the kitchen table. They see their American Dream dissolving into a nightmare of terrifying uncertainty. These Tea Party Americans want to how it is that an administration of proclaimed liberalism is systematically destroying fundamental American values and institutions. These loyal Americans have come to understand, reluctantly, and then angrily, that their own government is waging war against their liberty and everything else their country stands for and has shown to the world. The Tea Party firestorm is lit to shine the light of liberty on the truth of how deeply, how profoundly, the “liberals” now in power have turned against their country and their own ideals. It is to lay the foundation for their defeat.

Liberalism has both a political and an economic history. In both aspects liberalism has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last half-century or so. In his book The Liberal Imagination, published in 1950, American author and critic Lionel Trilling termed liberalism the only viable philosophical and literary tradition. Trilling, often cited as the preeminent cultural commentator of his time, saw liberalism as “a political position that affirmed the value of individual existence in all its variety, complexity, and difficulty.” Trilling called liberalism so understood “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”

The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith formulated the classic principles of economic liberalism in his book The Wealth of Nations published in 1776. These principles include private property, the rule of law, limited government, and the free market economy. Curiously, it was in the same year, 1776, that the American Declaration of Independence proclaimed the God given rights of all men to include the right to, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Two centuries later the 1976 Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman, shows in his book Free to Choose (1980) that the energizing elements of both kinds of classical liberalism are in steep decline. An “ever bigger government,” he warns, threatens “to destroy both the prosperity that we owe to the free market, and the human freedom proclaimed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence.” Finally liberalism, in both the political and economic sense, has behaved like a man performing a slow half-somersault who ends up standing on his head. Turned upside down liberalism has steadily emptied its pockets of America’s founding principles of economic freedom and individual liberty that once defined itself.

The rebellion of the new liberalism, some now call it progressivism, began the1960s riots against authority on hundreds of college campuses. As the original rebels of the sixties graduated into society, they and their progeny of the next generation began a radical ideological and political assault against the entire American tradition. They entered upon what is often termed their “long march” through American institutions. One of the more remarkable successes of this long march has been its gradual conquest of policy-making positions within the Democratic Party. From that stronghold “progressive” liberals have been able to radicalize the Party and to use it toward achieving their goal of power and domination.
Former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich sees the Democratic Party of the 21st century as a different animal from its former self: “It’s a hard-Left, AFSCME (public employee unions), trial-lawyer, teachers union party, and they play for keeps, unlike business.” Novelist Allen Drury perceives that liberalism itself has been transformed into a “rigid, ruthless, intolerant, and unyielding orthodoxy.” Author and Yale professor of computer science David Gelernter finds that the resulting confrontation between the rebels and American society “is turning into a full fledged war.” And so it has.

America is once again “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Fortunately this new Civil War is not marked (as yet) by such bloody battlefields so dedicated can long endure.” Fortunately this new Civil War is not marked (as yet) by such bloody battlefields 1865 the Confederates of the South fought simply for independence from the Union. There was no intent to transform the culture or structure of the North, as the new Civil War intends to do for the entire nation.

In its earlier stages what was to become a Civil War was commonly called a culture war, and had no centrally organized command or purpose. Each contingent attacked on its own front in its own way. But the separate insurgencies all shared the inherent goal of civil war, which is to weaken or dissolve existing social values and institutions and transform society.

Gradually the liberal assault against America has heavily infiltrated or captured the public schools, most of the print and broadcast media, the arts, the universities, the environmental movement, organized labor, leading elements of science, and much of the judiciary and the federal bureaucracy. The insurrection has destroyed or corrupted supporting ideals and institutions affecting religion, sexual relations, the family, the rule of law, how words are used, and patriotic loyalty. Underpinning the Civil War, and adding strength to it, are persistent efforts in core scientific disciplines to denigrate and even mock the value of human life.

The rebels promote massive growth of government power at the expense of individual liberty. Knowing that its true intentions lack support, the rebellion is intolerant of opposing speech, writing, or broadcasting, which it seeks aggressively to suppress.

The culminating assault of the Civil War was carried out in the election of 2008, its true intent concealed behind a glittering facade of “Hope” and “Change.” When the political branches of the federal government were decisively captured in that election the insurgents achieved a centrally controlled national base for their revolution. In a sophisticated “bait and switch” maneuver the agents of this “full fledged war” against America moved rapidly from idealistic campaign rhetoric to the consolidation of raw power. Destruction of the America we have known—economically, politically, and morally—is well under way. It is the horrifying specter of America destroyed that ignites the firestorm response of the Tea Parties, and the millions more of true Americans that have been awakened to strike back in defense of liberty and country.

The engine that powers this assault against America was assembled and set in motion at American colleges and universities during the 1964-1965 academic year. A well-planned uprising led by a few thousand students was carried out on hundreds of campuses across the country. It was a rebellion calculated to challenge the legitimacy of authority on each campus attacked, and by extension the authority of society as a whole. The target selected for the first strike was the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

Liberalism today is anti-American revolutionaries on a tear, tearing down the structure of our democratic society and free enterprise economy. The true purpose of its leaders is their drive for power; the power to command and control the daily lives of the American people. The essence of the destruction being wrought, an understanding of how this has come about, a feeling for the horror of the intended results, and what might be done about it is the subject of this book.

I. A Declaration of War
1. Opening Shots
Revolution

In the summer of 1964 Clark Kerr, President of the multi-campus University of California system, received an alert warning him that radical student groups across the country were planning a concerted, nation wide uprising. There were to be protests and demonstrations on hundreds of campuses to challenge and disrupt campus authority during the upcoming 1964-1965 academic year. The Berkeley campus of the University of California had been designated as the leadoff target. The plan for Berkeley was to form a rebellion of overwhelming strength and support sufficient to force from office both the Chancellor of the Berkeley campus, Edward Strong, and University President, Clark Kerr. President Kerr and Chancellor Strong were accustomed to juvenile eruptions on campus and took the alert they had received to predict nothing more than the same passionate, idealistic, unfocused student radicalism they had seen before. It would be noisy, senseless, mostly harmless, and something that would die out of its own accord. Their judgment could not have been further off the mark.

On the morning of December 3, 1964, the campus administrative hierarchy gathered in the Chancellor’s Suite in Sproul Hall, the Berkeley campus administration building, to consider how to deal with an escalating student rebellion.

“Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!!
Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!
No Justice No Peace!
No Justice No Peace!
Savio! Savio!! Savio!!!”

The roar of thousands in the plaza below penetrated the walls and windows of the Chancellor’s suite with passionate intensity.

The University authorities had determined, even though they thought the summer alert to be needlessly alarmist, to damp down any such protests before they could gain traction. To limit the areas of potential protest the Berkeley administration activated rules prohibiting on-campus solicitation of money or support for off campus political purposes. The rules applied only on campus. On the public sidewalks or streets bordering the campus such protests would be free speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The campus radicals set up tables for distribution of literature and solicitation of money and membership on public sidewalks at the very borderline between the city of Berkeley and University property. To the surprise of no one, except perhaps campus officials, those tables and their associated activities gravitated onto University property. Campus authorities cited and disciplined students attending the tables for violation of the rules.

Prodded by the leaders of various protest groups, clusters of angry students began to form, accusing the University of violating their rights of free expression. As charges were repeatedly brought against student violators, leaders of the dissident groups began holding protest rallies in Sproul Plaza just outside the front doors of Sproul Hall. New accusations against alleged University abuses were shouted out almost daily. Growing larger by the week these rallies attracted increasing support for the protest movement.

“Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!!
Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!
No Justice No Peace!
No Justice No Peace!
Savio! Savio!! Savio!!!”
The roar of the crowd grew more ominous with each repetition.

The rebels adopted the bold and deceptive tactics typical of insurgent groups, including delay, exaggerated grievances, false claims of abuse, and impossible demands in order to inflame student reaction at the ever-larger noon rallies. What the rebels needed was a motif, a motto, a battle cry that would bring the various campus movements such as nudism, socialism, anti- Vietnam war, drugs, women’s rights, presidential politics, or free speech under one banner of unification. The growing rallies claimed ever more insistently that the students being disciplined were denied free speech. And free speech it was that became the catalytic issue around which to consolidate the various protest movements into one central organization. As the protests grew in number and emotional appeal, a coherent leadership emerged led by Berkeley philosophy major Mario Savio. The now legendary Free Speech Movement, the FSM, was born. The attack against the Berkeley administration intensified.

On December 3, 1964 where there once had been hundreds at the noon rallies on the plaza below the Chancellor’s suite now there were thousands. As the noon hour struck the crowd (those above called it a mob) was immense, radiating anger, yearning to be led, eager for action against what they saw as an unjust and repressive University administration. Few would have predicted how far the events of that day, December 3, 1964, and the following day, December 4, 1964, would advance the rebels’ attack on the University. Even fewer, if any, would have predicted the inferno that this demonstration, and others to follow across the country, would set ablaze.

In the Chancellor’s suite, in addition to the campus administrative hierarchy, there were the Chief of the Campus Police, representatives of the Alameda County Sheriff’s department, and officers of the California Highway Patrol. The University had already experienced an embarrassing mob incident involving a captive police car two months earlier. Those aware of the danger did not wish to see a repetition of that event.

On October 1, 1964 police drove a squad car onto Sproul Plaza to arrest a member of the FSM for violation of the speech rules. A crowd of several hundred gathered around as police put the suspect into the car. Someone shouted “Sit down!” The crowd sat, and the police car could not move. The arrested student and the officers inside the car were held there while the campus administration struggled to manage the situation. There were discussions, charges and counter-charges, proposals and counter-proposals between campus officials and FSM leaders.

Law enforcement personnel, as well as a few faculty members, urged Chancellor Strong to take decisive action to break up the crowd and release the car, using force if necessary. The law enforcement officials cautioned the Chancellor that anything less would allow the rebellion to gather strength. Far more aggressive, perhaps violent action would be the result. Chancellor Strong, a former professor of philosophy, responded that he wished to take the longer more considered view. A candid dialogue, an honest exchange of views, he felt, would allow the students to state clearly what they really wanted. Their grievances could, he was convinced, be resolved in mutual consultation, and peace would return to the campus. The University sought a compromise over the police car incident. The FSM demanded that the trapped student be released and freed of all charges.

Talks continued as lack of resolve by University officials drained the hours away. The captive student and his police captors sat in the car for 32 hours. Finally a “settlement agreement” was reached and the FSM leaders announced its terms to the crowd sitting around the car. Their message was also directed to the much larger number assembled to see the spectacle, and to an expectant media, by then always on hand at Berkeley.

The University had capitulated.

The student in the car was absolved of all charges and released to the victorious roar of hundreds of ecstatic rebels and increasingly sympathetic onlookers as the police car made its ignominious escape. Though the police car incident had occurred by chance, the FSM had been handed a perfect recruiting issue that was instantly and expertly exploited by the leadership. Throughout the months of October and November the rallies grew larger and more intense. Anger and outrage against the University was intensified by clever oratory, false charges, and increasing passion. Mario Savio solidified his leadership as a glib and charismatic orator. The rebels worked to gain off campus support as well. That proved not difficult since the noon rallies always appeared on the evening news, more frequently than not with a slant favoring the protesting students. Fortified by widespread support, not only from the students, but also from many on the faculty as well, and assured of sympathetic media coverage, the FSM prepared for a major confrontation.

“Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!!
Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western Civ Has Got to Go!
No Justice No Peace!
No Justice No Peace!
Savio! Savio!! Savio!!!”

Chanted over and over by a chorus of thousands the litany had about it a hypnotic effect that insinuated itself even into the atmosphere of the Chancellor’s conference.

The officials gathered there had urged the Chancellor take decisive action before the thousands packed into the plaza got out of control. The camps Police Chief advised the Chancellor that units of the County Sheriff’s riot control squad and officers of the Highway Patrol had been put on standby and were awaiting his orders.

The Chancellor smiled and re-lit his pipe. No orders were given.

As the crowd multiplied and tension tightened the Chancellor explained the situation to those around him so eager to use force against the students. Despite the noise and bluster the uprising was nothing more than the usual generational rebellion against authority, as President Kerr had repeatedly assured them. The Chancellor was reminded that those in the Plaza were the same people he had tried to reason with in the police car incident back in October. Pressed with his defeat in that confrontation, the Chancellor retained his philosophic approach. Nor did it disturb him when it was pointed out that the hundreds in the October incident had become thousands, angrier by the day.

“No Justice, No peace!
No Justice, No peace!
Free speech!
Free Speech!
Free speech!
Savio!! Savio!! Savio!!”

A speaker on the steps of the building, exciting the crowd to ever-higher ecstasy, extended his arms as though to embrace the thousands waiting in explosive anticipation. A dozen campus police guarded the doors to Sproul Hall behind the speaker.

“And now, comrades in Justice, brothers in peace, the time has come, the message you’re waiting for, our leader, our… ”

“Savio! Savio! Savio!
Justice! Justice!
Free speech!
Free speech!
Free speech!
“Savio!! Savio!! Savio!!!”
The crowd clapped, roared, stomped their feet, and raised clenched fists toward the upper story of the building.

The Chancellor was advised once again that riot police were at standby stations awaiting his orders. He persisted in his belief that by patient dialogue with the students he could ascertain what it was they really wanted, and that a resolution based on honest exchange of views could be reached. He proposed that a delegation be appointed to consult with the FSM leadership.

No orders are issued. On the plaza below Mario Savio walked slowly through the crowd as it parted like the Red Sea for Moses to allow him to pass. He walked with studied confidence up the few steps to the podium. His back to the crowd, Savio stared at the upper windows of Sproul Hall for several moments. He slowly extended his right arm, closing his fist in calm defiance. The crowd roared. As Savio lowered his arm and turned to face his audience, the assembled thousands became eerily silent. Their leader looked over a sea of glistening eyes, as though to catch each one eye-to-eye, to assure his command, and to prepare them for what he was about to say. The crowd’s deafening ecstasy, transposed into reverential adulation and awe, stood in utter silence. As Savio began his speech he waved his left arm back toward the administration building behind him.

“We have an autocracy which runs this university, that manages it like a business firm.” He let the odious image sink in for a few moments. “The Board of Regents is its board of directors, President Kerr is its Chief Executive, and the Chancellors of the nine campuses are his managers. Now I’ll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material; we’re here to be turned into whatever products the corporations and their rotten system say they want. But we are a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be made into any product, and we don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! Because we are human beings!!”

Wild applause, shouts, and slogans. After a few moments one hand, palm toward the crowd, quiets them.

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Prolonged shouts and growls of approval. Savio holds up both hands for silence. The crowd, intoxicated though it is, obeys.

“We have a plan. It is to be massive, and it is to be peaceful. Remember that. No violence. Don’t allow yourselves to be provoked. That would play right into their hands. Now, no more talking. We’re going to march in singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Slowly; there are a lot of us. That way. Into the building and up the stairs.”

Singing “We Shall Overcome,” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are-a Changin’,” some eight hundred to a thousand protesters marched up the steps of Sproul Hall, gently forcing the few guards aside, and began to fill the building.

Those in the Chancellor’s conference room, advised that the mob was breaking in and coming up the main staircase, were ushered down a back way and taken by police vehicles out of harm’s reach. The University informed the few employees who remained that the building was closed and they should go home. The FSM leaders designated various areas for specific activities: one for movies; another for a Spanish class; one for quiet study; and an area for square dancing.

State law enforcement officers advised California Governor Pat Brown, by law a member of the University Board of Regents, of the situation. The Governor authorized police action to clear the building. But the action was not to begin until after dark to minimize public or campus reaction.

At around midnight, as law enforcement contingents moved toward the campus, the Chancellor appeared with a bullhorn outside Sproul Hall. He looked up at the bright lights in his suite, and raised the bullhorn to speak. He urged the students to evacuate the captured building, to be reasonable, to speak frankly with him about their grievances. He waited. It was a last, desolate attempt to breast the tide of his rapidly vanishing authority. There was no response from inside the building. He spoke again of honest dialogue and peace on the campus. Again there was no response. The Chancellor looked up once more at the bright lights of the building. This man a quirk of fate had named “Strong” dropped the bullhorn to his side, turned back toward his residence.

Chancellor Strong did not understand that what he faced was a revolution; and that revolutions do not play by the rules. Their very purpose is to break the rules and impose new ones.

At approximately 2:00 a.m. some six hundred California Highway Patrolmen and Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputies cordoned off the building and began to arrest the protesters. The FSM leaders advised their followers to resist by going limp so as to make the arrests more difficult, also more likely to lead to minor injuries to be exploited later. Each protester was identified, booked for trespassing, and taken away in a patrol wagon. Those who went limp were charged with resisting arrest as well. The resistance was designed principally to draw out the process till the next day when students and faculty arriving for class, as well as the ever present media, would see what was happening.

They did see. Students and faculty alike were shocked and angered at the spectacle of massed law enforcement officers in riot gear arresting hundreds of students, dragging off by their heels some who went limp to lengthen the proceedings. It was a tedious process not completed until mid-afternoon on Friday December 4, 1964. A total of approximately 800 were charged and incarcerated, the largest mass arrest ever in the State of California.

The events of December 3 and December 4, 1964, achieved the immediate goal of the FSM, the plan about which the alert to President Kerr had warned. Chancellor Strong was forced to take indefinite “sick leave” early in the new year of 1965. Not long thereafter the Board of Regents terminated the services of President Clark Kerr as well, who mused, “I leave as I arrived, fired with enthusiasm.”

Having seen the FSM uprising as a standard juvenile protest against adult authority, upon reflection by then exPresident Kerr later termed it a “protest and outrage” that was “fresh and meaningful.” He confessed that its intensity “took us completely by surprise.” The same can be said of college and university administrators across the land, as blind to the power and import of subsequent revolts on some 300 other campuses as those at Berkeley had been. They did not believe that the events unfolding before their eyes and pounding into their ears were of great significance, and had no effective response. They had no tools, no concepts, and no resolve to deal with what was happening. A few observers did see that the nation wide uprising had within it the seeds as well as the words of a true revolution. Their warning was futile against the inertia of bewildered and benumbed authorities.

The speech of Mario Savio is a composite of several versions as recorded at the time by members of the Free Speech Movement and news organizations. The essence of the speech, though taken by some as a demand for redress of legitimate grievances, is a radical manifesto. Savio denies that a great public university has any obligation, or even any right, to prepare students to participate in the democratic structure and the free economy of their society. To do so would be selling themselves as “products” of a corrupt educational system to “consumers” of a corrupt economic system. So the solution is to “put your bodies” on the gears and wheels and levers of the “apparatus” and “make it stop.”

Savio’s speech, full of hubris and puffed up importance, transcending reason and common sense, even silly, seemed to be much as President Kerr had expected. But Savio’s speech and hundreds like it across the land were Marxist based exhortations to destroy the politics, culture, and values of American society, beginning in the colleges and universities. Savio’s speech was a declaration of war against the entire American nation until the whole “apparatus” is made to “stop.” The radicals of Berkeley and the rest of academia, in similar results in the years following, believed in what the speech said, and went forth into the nation to make it so.

How did the FSM capture the thousands who seemed to follow Savio’s radical purpose? Did they understand, in the rapturous flow of his soaring rhetoric, what he was saying? Did they agree? Who were the masses that supported the rebels, and what did they “really” want?

One morning on her way to campus during the height of the uprising a visiting professor of psychology gave a ride to a hitchhiking female student. The girl carried a placard on a stick that read, “Strike for What You Believe.” The professor, puzzled by the intensity of the movement and curious as to its motivation, asked the student what the uprising was all about. What did she believe that she was striking for? The student talked with animation about the FSM, oppression, free speech, and the alleged brutality of the “pigs” (their term for police) who were called from time to time to preserve order on campus.

Arriving at the place where the student wanted to be let off the professor stopped the car, and turned to look directly into the student’s eyes. She asked what her deepest motivation was, why such intensity, why the boiling hatred in the speeches, what did she truly want? The girl’s eyes blazed with an even brighter passion and she replied without hesitation: “Freedom!” The professor thought for a moment and, as the student opened the car door to get out, asked if it had occurred to her that she already had so much freedom she didn’t know what to do with it. A face that had been flushed and exuberant was chalk. As she got out of the car the student managed a barely muttered “Thank you,” picked up her sign and backpack and fled. The visiting psychologist paused to observe the young woman as she ran off to her rendezvous with reassurance.

The Berkeley riots were surely in some part a generational rebellion against adult authority, as President Kerr had analyzed it. But it was a rebellion far deeper than that; the rebels themselves perhaps only half conscious of its reach and destiny. It was a rebellion not only against parental authority, but also at its base a repudiation of the civilization for which their parents had fought World War II against fascist tyranny. The heroes of that “Greatest Generation” had given their children lives that were safe, free, and comfortable. But for the children, so dull and boring. They were privileged, idealistic, and restless. Their bountiful lives, together with their youthful innocence, had released them from reality. They were free to fantasize, to find fault with the workaday world, to yearn for a life more meaningful than being “sold” as “products” of the university to the highest “corporate bidder.”

In the daily rallies following their success in deposing the top authority, both at the Berkeley campus and University wide, the FSM grasped for some coherent idea of how to keep the movement alive and to define its mission. The noon tirades in Sproul Plaza continued, laced with obscenities to spice up a fading cause, and broadcast over loudspeakers that shook half of Berkeley. Free Speech was the only slogan that had seemed to stick. But since there was no longer any respon