Jim Goad writes:
This month marks 50 years since Mario Savio stood atop a police car at UC Berkeley and gave an impassioned speech to throngs of young pampered radicals that launched what is now preserved in amber and lionized as the “Free Speech Movement.” Barefoot and presumably smelly, Savio famously orated something about the “machine”—apparently it was “odious”—and how you had to place your body in the machine’s gears to stop it from working.
And in a sense, it worked. But more precisely, the machine only shifted gears. The net result a half-century later on college campuses nationwide is that you are now permitted to say “fuck” but no longer allowed to say “nigger.”
Barbara Kay on the same topic:
The Free Speech Movement was never really about free speech. That was just a front. The real movement was to colonize the campus with authority figures who hated “Amerika.” The universities were never considered anything but infrastructure to support the left’s assembly-line indoctrination of the masses. Political progress necessitated free-speech regression.
Who in 1964 would have predicted the need for campus “free-speech walls” 50 years on? The answer is blowin’ in the Berkeley wind.
