In the early dark, among floodlit red and orange autumn trees and red-brick buildings, several hundred kids swarmed the main intersection of State College, Pennsylvania — home of Pennsylvania State University, aka Penn State — the placards brandished, hoodies and jeans ubiquitous, muscle boys in T-shirts, tall, tanned, WASP-y girls in shorts, a few in Goodwill (op shop) chic.
“This is not your place,” the signs read. “Whose campus?” “Our campus!” A megaphone bo-… megaphone person was up on a park bench, wrapped in a green coat and antifa black, their face scarfed, which made clear communication difficult. “Foov thamputh?” “Our campus!” more like. They demasked a little. “We’re going to move, but we’re going to move as one now! Everyone needs to stay safe!” Ohhhhhh, safe, I thought — here we go, bloody safety again. The little homunculus in my head raged. Safety? In my day demos were all about danger! We… oh, hang on: a “FASCISTS OFF CAMPUS” sign loomed in my face and reminded me that this was actually a demonstration against actual fascists. Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys had come to town.
News that McInnes, the coif-bearded hipster founder of Rebel Media, was coming to town had raced around the state a week or so earlier. The visit is part of the general fight for the state, the talk organised by a “student” group called Uncensored America — really a multi-campus, right-wing push outfit. McInnes was the ideal choice for what they want — which is maximum tension — because he can’t be ignored. This isn’t Jordan Peterson slumped over a lectern, telling you to make your bed, crying for his benzos, cling-wrapped steaks slipping out of his pockets. Peterson would be labelled “unsafe”, but he’s harmless. McInnes is actually, literally unsafe, a rabble-rouser who on Rebel Media plays a peekaboo game with racist “jokes”, anti-Semitic “stunts” and various bits of MRA malarkey.
That would merely be noxious, as would his various ruminations on the joys of violence, had he not also founded a group to carry it out. Where McInnes goes, various Proud Boys turn up — even if McInnes has now formally severed ties with the group — and, as often as not, beat people up. So your correspondent had no misgivings about this shut-down demo. If anyone has forfeited the right to a university platform, it’s McInnes. I was happy to join the demo as participant observer. That said, I’d got tickets to the thing, and had been planning to slip away, slip in and see what happened inside.
The demo was already slowly on the move when the megaphone ninja stood on a park bench again, and told the crowd “We’ve just had word that the talk has been cancelled.” Huge cheers. “We’re just trying to find out whether it’s true, or a trick by the administration.” Boos. “We’re going to close it down if it is.” Cheers again. Then another invocation: “Stay safe, stay together.” OK, OK. “This is important! Don’t get cut off. No one here tonight goes home alone!” This is what I’ve always understood the main purpose of student demonstrations to be; still, a guarantee from the organisers is an important innovation.
These dumb gags were unspooling in my head at about the time, I later found out, that a small squad of Proud Boys were pepper-spraying some protesters just around the corner. Demos like this are like the Battle of Borodino; you spend two hours as a part of bodies moving hither and yon, then go home and find out what actually happened on TV.
“The talk has been cancelled,” the megaphone announced, and half the crowd left immediately. The other half swarmed the exits to the building where the lecture had been set to occur. They’re so young, these kids — American undergrads look so young. They’re the same age as ours, but US high school really only gets you to a Year 10 level. Undergrad degrees are really high-school completion. Plus they can’t drink legally, so they don’t drink regularly, like we used to, ageing instantly, carried to 21 on a tide of bitter. But they were gutsy and resolute as they marched down the college’s main street, and gathered round the building entrances.
In this sea of fresh faces and small bodies, the 20 or so people who had gathered for the talk looked like… well, like me, middle-aged bearded bruisers in too much black. There were also a couple of the weird Valkyrie women who hang around these things. It was a weird and sinister atmosphere, as through the glass doors cops walked the halls of the building, and blue-suit/red-tie types — the student Republicans who’d cooked this up — barked into phones trying to work a way to get out of there. Outside, the meeja was vox-popping kids and I was trying not to listen (or harsh my solidarity buzz): “I think it’s not what Gavin McInnes does, it’s what he says.” “Like he’s trampling on my rights by what he says.” “So would you try and disrupt someone like, say, Ben Shapiro? Or Bill Kristol?” “Who?” the kid said.
Down a little, a 350-pound McInnes-ite was arguing belly-to-belly with a 350-pound protester, one in black, the other in a white “Maui Wowie” T-shirt. It was like Comic Book Guy in a funhouse mirror. “I just came to hear what he had to say,” the McInnes-ite said. “Oh, so you’re just this blank slate, you’re just this tabula rasa!’ said Maui Wowie guy.
The mood was alternating between edgy and violent, which is very much the mood of the country at the moment. Donald Trump, in a rally in Texas, looked forward to journalists being jailed and raped in prison; the Republican anti-abortion candidates now oppose abortion, even if the mother’s life is at risk; Kanye West is talking about the Jewish cabal, about killing Jews, and has just been dropped by Adidas — which takes some doing; President Biden has warned Russia not to use tactical nuclear weapons, like it was a trade dispute. On CNN that morning, a story on the sentencing of the Parkland high school mass killer was interrupted by breaking news about a high school shooter in St Louis. The latter killed a teacher and a student before police got him. He left a note saying he was lonely and isolated and had never had a girlfriend. He had also left 600 rounds in 12 magazines as ammo drops around the school he was about to shoot up. On it goes.
So it wasn’t surprising, I guess, when a paramilitary gang did turn up. And they had brought their horses. A dozen of them were suddenly there at the narrow link to the main square in front of the building, and then cops on foot — in armour — came. And came. And came. One hundred, 200 filled the space. The whole demo was running out of steam and would have been gone in another half hour, but the cops kicked it back into life. What could have brought them out so suddenly cough cough? Black kids from the nearby projects joining in cough cough? They were already on the move when they gave the disperse warning. “This is an incredible overreaction,” I said. “Do they always do this?” “They do it all the time. They got the cops out for Milo Yiannopoulos.” “Don’t worry!” someone yelled. “The horses can’t climb the steps!”
They climbed the steps.
They were on us. We broke and ran, and I had that moment I knew would come, a middle-aged man stumbling, and some 19-year-old’s hand suddenly under my elbow, pushing me up and forwards, and the mix of shame and age and gratitude and solidarity that came with it. We got clear of the horses and to the street and were saved by that most American of things: the impossibility of stopping the traffic.
Meanwhile, the college had put out a statement saying that “threats of violence” had caused them to cancel the lecture, neatly blaming protesters for their stuff-up in letting it be booked in the first place.
All of a sudden they were gone, and everyone dispersed, and the campus was itself again, in the floodlit night, the autumnal calm of the classic American campus, known to most of us only through movies. “A pledge pin?! On your u-ni-form?!” I shouted to no one in particular, reflecting that National Lampoon’s Animal House is a half-century old and, as it turns out, a document not of experience but hard-to-remember innocence of the republic.
