If you didn’t live through the antiwar protests of the Sixties, you may well not have heard of Daniel Berrigan or his brother Philip, activist Catholic priests (the former a Jesuit, the latter a Josephite). But to my generation they were heroes of a sort. Passionately antiwar and devoted to social causes like civil rights and the abolition of nuclear weapons, they were most famous for invading the Catonsville, Maryland Selective Service office on May 17, 1968, absconding with draft files, and then burning them with homemade napalm in the parking lot. That’s shown in the photo below, Philip is on the left and Daniel on the right. Seven other Catholic activists were arrested along with them—the so-called “Catonsville Nine.”

This got all of them three years in prison. After sentencing, Daniel became a fugitive (not a good move for one practicing civil disobedience), but was soon caught and served two years in prison. Over the years, he and Philip were arrested many times for their activities, including trying to damage nuclear warheads. Philip, who secretly married a Catholic nun, died in 2002, but his older brother Daniel, it was announced today, died yesterday at 94 in a Jesuit infirmary in New York. So passes a left-wing icon.

Here’s an image that really brings those times back: Daniel Berrigan, on the right, with his radical attorney William Kunstler after the Catonsville trial. Kunstler was most famous for his defense of the “Chicago Seven“, a radical group indicted for antigovernment activities in 1968.

Daniel was something of a polymath, author of more than fifty books, including works of poetry, and taught at several universities, most notably Fordham. His and Philip’s actions of course angered the Catholic Church, though the brothers said that their political acts derived directly from Catholic teachings.  Archbishop Spellman of New York, a conservative Catholic, exiled him to Latin America, where of course Berrigan became even more radicalized. After he returned, he continued his activism right up to his death.

If the word “social justice warrior” has any positive meaning, it applies to Daniel Berrigan, who did much more than talk about activism, and certainly did not flaunt his moral purity, but took risk after risk in service of his views. I didn’t always agree with him—he flirted with bombing and kidnapping, for instance—but let’s hand it to him: this is the kind of civil disobedience priests would do if they really, truly believed in the ideals of their church.  Are there any Catholic activists like him and Philip still among us? If there are, I don’t know of them.

h/t: Michael

Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor of the right-wing website Breitbart, is a professional provocateur. He’s a gay man who goes around criticizing not only the student “offense culture,” which is a good thing to do, but also feminism, which is a bad thing to do. He doesn’t distinguish between different brands of feminism, but simply dismisses the whole enterprise as “a cancer,” as he did in a recent speech at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I disagree with that, and wouldn’t go to see him were he speaking on my campus. But if I did, I’d sit and listen quietly, and then discuss his views either on this site or during the Q&A period.

But Yiannopoulos is also savvy, and has embarked on a tour of American colleges. As his views are a flashpoint—a “trigger”—for authoritarian Leftist (AL) college students, their reaction is predictable. The conservative and sexist elements in his audience applaud him, but they’re drowned out by the noises, hoots, whistles, and demonstrations of the AL students, who repeatedly shout out to interrupt Yiannopoulos and create demonstrations that, in the end, do nothing but reinforce the stereotype of ALs as spoiled brats, increasing the opprobrium of people who might otherwise hear them out.

Here’s an video of Yiannopoulos speaking about “safe spaces” at Rutgers in New Jersey, whereupon a group of ALs shout, whistle, and finally smear themselves with fake blood while having a mass conniption. Who wouldn’t be turned off by such demonstration?

The whole canny psychology of this tour is described by New York Magazine. Its commentary is pretty accurate—save for one thing (I’ve put it in bold):

Here’s how it works: Yiannopoulos goes to a college. He says dumb and offensive trolly things. Students react with outrage and sadness, either during the talk itself or in gatherings afterward. Inevitably, some of them either freak out or burst into tears, because college students are college students. Breitbart and other right-wing outlets then trawl for student-paper coverage, footage of angry students, or both, and then cover these reactions as “proof” that everything Yiannopoulos says about colleges and modern society — something something free-speech SJWs feminazis lesbians — is true.

Here’s the part that’s troublesome: “because college students are college students.” That’s not necessarily true: college students are usually over 18, which means they’re adults. By that time they should have learned to sit quietly and listen to a speaker, and not suppress the speaker’s words through interruptions, demonstrations, and the like. They should have learned some civility. They should have learned that the best way to combat the ideas of such a speaker is by questioning them at question time, writing posts on their website or Facebook, and even demonstrating outside the venue. That is what we did when I was in college—a time of great ferment about civil rights, the Vietnam War, and so on. It’s simply a fact that the civil disobedience and nonviolent protests of the civil rights movement carried over to general student unrest, and most of us would have found it unthinkable to make such a ruckus during an opponent’s speech.

Let me tell you a story. At my graduation in 1971 from William & Mary, most students wanted a left-wing graduation speaker. Instead, the administration, almost to slap us down, chose Thomas Downing, a conservative and undistinguished member of the Virginia Legislature. (The administration was quite conservative then.) Did we go to graduation and shout during his speech? We didn’t even consider that. Those of us who were leftists wore black armbands over our graduation gowns, and some put peace symbols on their mortarboards. As valedictorian, I was called out from the stage to stand up and be recognized. I did, but made the “black power” fist when I stood up. (I’m not necessarily proud of that now, but that’s all I could do, and I got a lot of flack from the College for it.)

I say this not to demonstrate our left-wing credibility, but the fact that, at least among those leftist students I knew, the idea of disrupting such an event was unthinkable. Yes, it did happen sometimes, but it was a rarity. Instead of disrupting, we made a quiet protest, and later had a “counter-commencement” with our chosen speaker being Charles Evers, brother of murdered civil right leader Medgar Evers.

The lesson is this: if you want any respect for your ideas, you can’t act like spoiled brats. Protest in a civil, dignified, but passionate way, and if you must disobey the law, do so like the civil rights protestors did: civilly and without resistance. (This only works in a democracy, of course: civil disobedience of the Jews against the Nazis would have failed miserably.)

Students like the entitled whingers above only discredit their own leftist ideas—and some of those ideas are not only worth hearing, but worth adopting. When New York Magazine says “college students are college students”, it must be referring to the arrogant and self-absorbed Snowflake Students of the past five years. It is, in effect, trying to excuse the students’ behavior on the grounds of their youth.

But it’s not inevitable that students must behave in such a stupid way. I hope they realize that if they really want to spread their ideas, this is not the way to do it. You don’t win a debate like this by refusing to let the other side speak. When you do that, as AL students have been doing repeatedly—and not just in response to Yiannopoulos—they lose in the court of public opinion.

These students, deeply marinated in identity politics and virtue signaling, are playing right into Milo’s hands. They aren’t really trying to change minds, but trying to censor others while demonstrating their own moral purity. Their actions have an effect directly opposite to what they say then want: they let the conservatives, the sexists, and the Trump-ites win.