“What we are witnessing now is the birth of a new political order.”
(Steve Bannon to the Washington Post )
Before Twitter. Before Facebook. Before cable news. Before the worldwide web. Before the “information age,” we had newspapers, national magazines, broadcast television, mainstream AM/FM radio, public libraries, and a relatively simple roadmap that informed our vision of world events as we engaged in heated but civil discourse on all matters political and religious.
In 1965, as a law student at the University of California, Berkeley, I wrote a statement, signed by many of my classmates, in support of the Free Speech Movement. The FSM was tearing the campus apart and drawing national attention. Last week, 52 years later, the campus was again the scene of riots and destruction. As before, it was based on the right of students to listen to a controversial speaker advocating a set of unpopular views. We were observing another Berkeley-esque challenge to the First Amendment.
