
It is to Ed Meese’s “old law school” that John Yoo has returned after a stint in the Bush Administration. There would be many ways to respond to this, but let me counter an anecdote with an anecdote. The building was cleared and a potentially dangerous situation was defused.Īnd then I participated in prosecuting them. I believed restoring order was important and necessary. I told Governor Brown that if the radicals were allowed to stay there would be another mob scene, even bigger, the next day.
#Famous edwin meese speech free#
These people, calling themselves the Free Speech Movement, were actually interested in creating a mob scene. They plunged a great institution into a crisis unprecedented in American higher education. Let me tell you about my experience with the 60s radicals.Īt my old law school, the University of California at Berkeley, an alliance of radical students, hippies, and street thugs got together with a view to destroying so much of what you and I value.

So much of what’s wrong in our country has its roots in the 60s revolt at our colleges and universities. Levine” letter that I recently received from good old Edwin Meese III, on behalf of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It would help if we put communications from various ideological groups into the public domain so that what they said to their own constituencies could become part of a diverse public deliberation.

As a result, there are large, passionate, but completely separate political conversations going on in America. It pays to send a core constituency of like-minded people a message that will make some of them angry enough to write you a check. I used to worry about such tactics when I worked at Common Cause: our mailings, while not partisan, weren’t exactly fair and balanced. One of the worst things about modern American politics is the use of inflammatory mailings to raise money.
