Ronald Reagan, fifty-five and as spruce as a groom, ran for governor of California in 1966. On the stump, he complained about undergraduate “malcontents,” and, as Election Day neared, he made a point of denouncing invitations issued by students at the University of California, Berkeley, to two speakers: Robert F. Kennedy, who was slated to talk about civil rights, and Stokely Carmichael, who had been asked by the Students for a Democratic Society to deliver the keynote address at a conference on Black Power. “We cannot have the university campus used as a base from which to foment riots,” Reagan warned. He urged Carmichael, at that time the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to decline the invitation—a clever way to guarantee that Carmichael would accept.
“This is a student conference, as it should be, held on a campus,” Carmichael, twenty-five, lean and grave in a suit and tie, told a crowd of ten thousand on October 29th. Regulation of speech, he added, amounted to a struggle over “whether or not black people will have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction.” Days later, Reagan won the election, and the conservative movement claimed its first major victory, fuelled by inciting opposition to the Free Speech Movement.
This September, a planned Free Speech Week at Berkeley flopped. Sponsored by a conservative student group, the event was the brainchild of Milo Yiannopoulos, who may have expected that the university would call it off. In February, the university cancelled a talk by him after protesters rioted and more than a hundred members of the faculty signed a letter, stating, “We support robust debate, but we cannot abide by harassment, slander, defamation, and hate speech.” In response, Donald Trump tweeted, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view—no federal funds?”