Big (blue) city mayors like Eric Adams in New York and Muriel Bowser in Washington, D.C. act as though they are in a difficult situation quelling rioters who have taken over colleges and universities in their towns.
Heaven forbid they offend radical extremists who break the very laws these officeholders were sworn to uphold.
Sending in law enforcement to arrest professional agitators and soon to be unemployable college students they co-opted, is a visual Democrats seemingly try to avoid.
But even in the bluest of cities, where progressive prosecutors refuse to do their jobs, the residents want law and order.
In short, they want genuine leadership, not flaccid lip service.
Progressives have been pushing the same bad social ideals and ideas since the 1960’s.
Using easily manipulated college students to take over college buildings and public spaces became popular in California in the latter part of that decade.
Unfortunately for the burgeoning "hippie" movement, it also gave rise to a solution: Ronald Wilson Reagan.
In 1966, while Reagan was campaigning for governor of California, students at the University of California-Berkley were going beyond merely protesting the Vietnam War, and exercising their First Amendment rights.
Reagan got it, that such demonstrations had little to do with war and peace or the lives of a foreign people thousands of miles away.
They were being waged to weaken authority, dismantle institutions, and create havoc overall.
Need proof?
These college students had a prized college deferment.
As long as they remained in school, they did not have to go off Southeast Asia and fight.
Only poor Black and white boys had to do that dirty work, and did so in disproportionate numbers.
Courageously, when Robert F. (Bobby) Kennedy was running for president in 1968, he campaigned against the unfair system of college deferments, and did so even on college campuses.
Reagan promised to put an end to student protests, and hold both students and faculty who inspired and supported them responsible. The people of the Golden State responded to his message of law and order and elected him governor.
Once elected, Governor Reagan took active steps to ended the lawlessness overtaking California’s schools.
He appointed new regents to oversee the University of California system and fired UC Berkley’s president Clark Kerr who was sympathetic and lenient with the troublemakers.
Dismissing university presidents allowing, if not de facto (or otherwise) encouraging and encourage campus unrest is a great place to begin, especially today.
In 1970, when visiting UC Riverside, a group of students tried to prevent the governor from entering campus and assaulted police officers.
Those students were arrested and suspended from school.
Reagan referred to them in the press as "cowardly little fascist bands who are trying to prove that our system cannot work."
The zero tolerance policy for destruction and mayhem made him more popular with Californians, the vast majority of whom wanted an end to these types of riots.
Americans want to view their colleges as a place where learning, reason, and sanity blossom and prevail.
The new radicals who roamed the halls of California college campuses are now elder statesmen in academia.
While the rest of the world has moved on, they can only exist in the vacuum of colleges where socialism can exist on paper but not in practice. Additionally, they're affinity for the 1960s remains wholly entrenched within them.
They can't let go.
As a result, their tools of creating chaos by being shocking and closing college buildings briefly help to recruit new members and garner attention from sympathetic media.
But . . . never result in actual policy changes they claim to want.
Fortunately, the solution to end this plague on our institutions of higher learning can also be found in the past.
It takes strong leadership that will side with law and order to protect its citizens to end it.
These anti-establishment protests of the 1960’were being organized as a means to try to destabilize our country, just as Joe Biden, his administration, funders and woke left billionaires are doing today.
Craig Shirley is the Chairman of Citizens for the Republic, as well as a Ronald Reagan biographer and presidential historian having written six books on Reagan. He's also written The New York Times bestseller, "December, 1941" and also published the companion book, "April, 1945." He's also the author of the book "Mary Ball Washington," which won the People’s Choice Award from the Library of Virginia. His book on the 1980 presidential campaign, "Rendezvous with Destiny" was named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the five best campaign books of all time. Shirley is also the author of the newly released bestseller, "The Search for Reagan" and is now writing a book about the 2024 Trump campaign tentatively entitled, "Comeback." Read Craig Shirley's Reports — More Here.