SOME HIPPIES ATONED BY VOTING FOR RONALD REAGAN.

Elizabeth "Anchoress" Scalia (via Insta Pundit) contemplates today's counterculture.

I wondered whether, 20 years hence, they would tell their children about how they went about, face wrapped in a keffiyeh, marching and calling for the eradication of an entire nation and race of people.

Because chanting horrible, genocidal phrases in a crowd is sort of thing you do when your brain is not yet fully developed and you’ve been trained in neither critical thinking skills nor the sort of nuance that must flavor authentic justice – when your reason is still malleable, and it’s so much easier to go along with a moment, particularly if you get to feel powerful and anti-establishmentarian as you do it.

I'm old enough to remember "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?" and "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win," and the oh-so-authentic "Lon Nol, U. S. stooge! Victory to the Khmer Rouge!"  It's surely an oversimplification to suggest that those campus protesters became Reagan Democrats en masse, and yet, with age sometimes comes maturity.

Someday, perhaps – if those students ever do learn to think critically; if they ever do discover that the world is much more about shades of gray than black-and-white absolutism, they may come to realize exactly what it was they were chanting for in 2023, exactly what they doing while standing, bravely face-covered in Harvard Square calling Jews “dirty, dirty animals” who “should be exterminated,” or cheering as Jewish students were locked away for their own protection at Cooper Union College, as threats against Jews canceled classes at Cornell, as Jewish travelers were being hunted down at a Russian airport.

They might even have the good sense to repent of it – to feel shame as they recall that all the cheers, all the chants, served a demon of chaos and mass murder.

There is a remnant who will. There are others who will not.  In the same way, though, that the aging hippie became a figure of fun in the late 1980s, the aging whatever this lot of protesters is will become a future figure of fun, that is, if we have a future to have figures of fun in.