Ackerman Union at the University of California at Los Angeles is a five-story brick-and-cement structure that overlooks a large swath of the university. The view from the top of Ackerman is pretty—you can see the John Wooden Center to the west, as well as the intramural soccer fields and Pauley Pavilion. To the north is Bruin Walk, a sloping road along which college groups congregate to peddle their ideological wares.
Closest to Ackerman, though, is Bruin Plaza. The plaza itself is exactly what you would expect: an empty brickwork courtyard with a large statue of the college’s bear symbol to the northwest, and with a raised stage to the north.
On March 8, 2001, the plaza was packed with students. Rowdy and noisy, sloganeering and chanting, filling up the plaza with sound and bodies. Not just UCLA’s black and Hispanic students—junior high and high school students bused in to the university, presumably with their parents’ and teachers’ permission, to protest the University of California’s so-called Standing Policies 1 and Standing Policies 2 (SP-1 and SP-2).
SP-1 and SP-2 were policies adopted by the UC Board of Regents in the lead-up to California’s wildly popular Proposition 209, which banned preferential treatment based on race, particularly in college admissions. In short, Prop. 209 banned affirmative action in the UC system, dealing a heavy blow to the “diversity” fanatics who for decades had insisted that skin tone rather than merit be the leading criteria for a UC slot.
SP-1 and SP-2 were somewhat softer than the text of Prop. 209 itself. Those policies supposedly eliminated racial considerations in UC admissions. In fact, SP-1 and SP-2 guaranteed only that 50 to 75 percent of the incoming student body would be admitted based solely on grades and test scores; the other 50 to 25 percent could be admitted based on factors like “special talents” and “academic accomplishments in the context of disadvantaged circumstances.” These were not hardheaded color-blind policies, but softer variants.
The immediate effect of SP-1 and SP-2 was a drop in the number of “minority students” admitted to UCLA. This sent the multicultural Left into a frenzy. They immediately began to organize to fight for the repeal of SP-1 and SP-2, no matter the consequences for the intellectual level of the student body. In place of those policies, the Leftists wanted something vaguer, called “comprehensive review” —in essence, sob stories in admissions essays that could subtly signal to admissions officers the socioeconomic status of the applicants.
By 2001, their ire had reached fever pitch. In February 2001, UC professors largely endorsed the repeal of SP-1 and SP-2, releasing a petition decrying the policies, and stating that SP-1 and SP-2 “posted a huge UNWELCOME sign for all black, Latino, and other minority students who want to come to the UC.” They went so far as to call the policies “segregation” and “racial inequality … that [has] for too long poisoned our national life.” Those same professors announced that, on March 8, they would cancel classes, shift their normal courses to teach about the beauties of affirmative action, and tell students to attend rallies as part of a “Day of Action to Reverse the Ban Now.”
At the time of the rallies, I had just turned seventeen, and I was still deciding whether I wanted to be a political science major or a philosophy major. I had written a few popular conservative columns for the UCLA daily paper, the Daily Bruin (dissenting columns are a rarity at major universities), and I’d confronted some of my professors in class, but I hadn’t truly put myself in harm’s way. It was all fun and games, basic campus rabble-rousing.
I thought the March 8 rally would provide more of the same—entertaining banter and perhaps even some intelligible discussion.
Which is why I was standing atop Ackerman Union, overlooking Bruin Plaza, with fifteen hundred students standing below me, holding a giant homemade sign reading: MERIT BEFORE DIVERSITY: SAVE SP-1 AND SP-2.
At first, nobody noticed me—I was the only counterprotester. After a few moments, however, some of the members of the crowd—probably high school students cutting class to protest—looked up at me and started shouting. I couldn’t hear what they said, but it wasn’t hard to read the expressions on their faces. They weren’t happy.
Soon more members of the crowd began to turn in my direction, away from the stage. It was like watching a snowball gain momentum—first a few, then more, then many, then most of them looked up at me and started shouting. Now I could hear them.
“Look at that fool!”
“You son of a bitch!”
It was all talk to me—hell, I’d heard worse than that at my Jewish day school. And besides, the cameras were aimed up at the sign, and that was good—our cause only had me, and media attention would magnify the presence of the opposition disproportionately.
Then I heard someone shouting. And this time, I was scared.
“That asshole! Let’s go up there and push him off!”
At that point, I thought it wise to move off the roof of Ackerman. I remember thinking, “It’s one thing to stand up for merit—it’s another thing to be thrown off a roof for it.”
But I was seventeen, and I was too dumb for my own good. So I decided to confront the ralliers firsthand. I climbed down the four stories as fast as I could, then made my way out into the plaza. A reporter from KNX 1070 was there, and I dashed off a few quick thoughts. There was someone from UPN TV, and I spoke to him, too.
That’s when some of the ralliers noticed that I was now in their midst. They confronted me quickly, stuck their fingers in my face. Congregated around me. Crushed me in.
Now, I’m no football linebacker at age twenty-six, and at seventeen, I hadn’t even finished my growth spurt. I was maybe five foot seven and a hundred and forty pounds. So, figuring that prudence was the better part of valor, I got out of there. But not before quickly calculating where the enormous crowd was going to march. Because, as I said, I was too dumb to know better.
I figured out that they were going to make their slow and steady way through the campus, and that eventually they’d have to walk by the inverted fountain (read: toilet bowl) located where the math/science and liberal arts buildings meet. So I sprinted there and set up shop. I wanted to force each and every one of those protesters to confront the fact that even at UCLA, there were those who would oppose their bully tactics.
Sure enough, about ten minutes later, the crowd came marching up toward the fountain. And there I stood, holding my sign, waiting for them.
At that point, even the rally organizers got scared. The last thing they wanted was footage of their entitlement-mentality thugs beating up a short Jewish kid. So they stationed members of their own rally around me, both shielding me from the crowd and protecting the crowd from my subversive message.
That didn’t stop members of the crowd from blustering.
“You racist pig!” one big burly fellow screamed in my face. “Don’t you worry, we’ll get you later.”
“You honky!” shouted another, oblivious to the irony of his racial slur.
In the end, I came away without a scratch, a fact that surprises me even now.
Two months later, the UC Regents bowed to the student, faculty, and staff pressure and rescinded SP-1 and SP-2, and a few months after that, replaced them with “comprehensive review.” The effect on the campus population was devastating—SAT scores were made a last priority rather than a first one, SAT-IIs, including Spanish, were elevated, and the victimhood essays (for which each reader was allotted eight to ten minutes per candidate) were made paramount. Unsurprisingly, for the class of 2006, admitted just after the adoption of comprehensive review, 191 students were rejected who had 1,500+ SAT scores, along with another 1,455 with scores 1,410-1,500. Meanwhile, 106 students were admitted with SATs of 810-900, another 412 were admitted with 910-1,000.
So I didn’t win.
But I did learn a valuable lesson: fighting makes you stronger. Pressure turns coal into diamonds.
Today’s young conservatives are better prepared than their parents, because they have to face liberal bullying on a daily basis, from the elementary-school level through grad school and on into their careers (particularly law, education, and Hollywood). To survive, they learn how to fight back. While their apathetic peers are off drinking beer and figuring out how to parrot arguments back to their professors in order to earn good grades, conservatives are learning liberal arguments inside and out—and learning how to counter them.
More than that, young conservatives are building the intestinal fortitude necessary to fight liberal bullying. The fact is that modern liberalism has fascist roots, and those roots have grown too large for the surrounding soil—the roots are now exposed for everyone to see. Liberals feel free to shut down debate with Alinsky’s tactics, slandering their opponents with insulting labels. And too many conservatives in positions of power cave.
Young conservatives don’t cave, because they’ve grown up facing down this tactical tyranny. They’ve seen it on a near-daily basis. And if they use their time “underground” to hone their skills, they come out of the process sharpened to a razor’s edge.
They need that edge, because the total dominance of liberalism in our education system and in our pop culture takes in all of the politically apathetic. It’s so easy for members of the apathetic crowd to embrace buzzwords like multiculturalism and diversity simply for the sake of getting laid or meeting new buddies. But that is why young conservatives do themselves a disservice not to enter the battleground fully armed. We do have the power to help inform the apathetic, and to fight the preconceptions being imbibed by those who simply don’t care enough to challenge them. We can’t convince our political opponents, but we can swing independents/apathetics into our column.
I know because I’ve seen it happen. One of the first classes I took at UCLA was called Geography 5. The professor, Joshua Muldavin, was an entertaining fellow who identified himself as a communist, and who said that the Tiananmen Square massacre had been a case of protesters standing up for communism and the Chinese government standing up for capitalism. Over the course of the quarter, I began challenging him in class. Soon there was a group of us willing to ask him tough questions. We all sat together, and he sneeringly called us “Republican Row.” By the end of the class, a large swath of the students agreed with us. That would never have happened if we’d been silent.
Young conservatives aren’t silent. They’re fighters. They stand atop buildings and hold signs and talk to the media. More than that, they look down the barrel of the Leftist revolver—the revolver loaded with bullets marked RACIST, SEXIST, HOMOPHOBE—and say “Go ahead, make my day.” Because young conservatives know that the Leftist ammunition, is, in essence, a chimera. Liberals have nothing except bully tactics. Until conservatives look down the barrel of that revolver, they’re scared; once they’ve forced liberals to fire, and once they come out unscathed, they’re battle-tested warriors.
So thank God for liberal thugs. They’re the people who are going to save this country, by forcing true conservatives to stand up for founding principles fearlessly, without regret, and without hesitation.