I met a few nice college kids when I infiltrated the Atlanta “Stop Cop City” training and protest last weekend.
I say nice because, one-on-one, several of them were nothing but personally polite. We chatted about school, and their majors. I used to teach freshman composition, until I realized I could earn more with my Ph.D. at a Taco Bell. I have a fondness for youths feeling their way towards adulthood. These kids were, as usual in such protest movements, the children of the elite, attending good Georgia public universities or very expensive private ones. They had manners. It was easy to differentiate between the trained, well-paid, professional agitators and the local youth who were drawn to the training and “non-violent but violent” march because they were excited to be part of something “revolutionary.” I say “nice kids” even though they were involved in an evil enterprise because they’re still malleable: some of them might be saved.
I was.
The political atmosphere was very different when I was a high school and college student in the Seventies and Eighties. Apathy, after a decade of chaos, defined the zeitgeist, but even then, the true believers found me. The late Seventies and early Eighties were the nadir of radical leftist organizing. Someone like me, who cared even the least bit about politics and vaguely wanted to “help the poor” was targeted as early as high school by the Communist Front groups Grey Panthers and International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, through the Clearwater Sloop Committee and other front groups hiding out in upstate New York. I even met Maggie Kuhn. I started getting phone calls on our one, avocado green kitchen wall phone from strangers with names like “Red” who claimed to be a victim of government repression and a former Weatherman. But we only had the one phone in the house back then. My mother, bless her, monitored my calls and told “Red” never to call her under-aged daughter again.
Luckily, I was too naive to really understand the politics of the groups that were trying to groom me, so a lot of their efforts simply rolled off my back. I was raised middle-class by people who had fought hard to be in it; I read a wide range of books; I was blessed with a few refugee college professors from Nazi and Communist countries who could only get high school teaching jobs here, and I always had a pretty quotidian mind. My parents let me participate in a few events, but my dad would sit in our Volare stationwagon doing the New York Times crossword puzzle outside the radicals’ Victorian mansions near Vassar College (socialists and communists always have the nicest homes), as I stuffed envelopes for them, and they tried to stuff my head full of nonsense. My parents thought they were just nice elderly Democratic ladies: looking back now, I know they were something very different.
I graduated from Spackenkill High in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1983, and New College of Florida (yes, that New College) in 1988. I more or less took a year off in college after a much-released serial rapist, later turned serial killer, broke into my house the night before my senior year classes started. He sexually tortured and strangled me for hours. So it wasn’t the usual “break year” to hitchhike through Europe or intern with some hip nonprofit: I spent the year getting to know and trust the police; despise defense attorneys and leftist judges; working at my three part-time jobs; going to police line-ups where the inmates masturbated at the two-way window; sleeping at night in a pile of blankets on my closet floor, and cringing as my idiot boyfriend — a relative of Dick Gephardt — whined that it was too upsetting for him to take me to line-ups because his grandfather had been a raaacist. He even had the gall to write poetry about it, which we workshopped down by the bay in New College’s beautiful pink marble mansions. I sat there numbly and went home and made him dinner.
That year broke me. But I dared say nothing. I didn’t personally care whether I was raped by a white or black man, and neither did anyone among the police, but my liberal boyfriend and several classmates cared, and even back then, I knew I had to defend my rapist’s skin color more than I had to defend my own experience and survival. Darkness was descending in my mind in the world around me, the darkness as Arthur Koestler put it in Darkness at Noon. I had two wise college professors — one the father of a friend, one my poetry teacher, who had been around a few blocks an bucked me up. I survived by talking to the always-polite police and detectives and became a project for my small school’s beloved and grizzled campus cops, who had seen the hard terrorist times in New York City in the Sixties and Seventies and told me about them as they drove me home in their police cars. I endured the sadistic abuse of defense attorneys who whispered in my ears during line-ups.
That was a real education in many things, including the saying: “the police catch ’em, and the court lets ’em go.” Henry Malone was cut loose several times before he got me, and at least once afterwards, before he got his life sentence for fist-raping an elderly cancer patient into an early grave. Then the life sentence was overturned on a paperwork technicality by the ACLU. He’s still inside, but I check every week — for decades now — to make sure he hasn’t been released yet.
They found “trophies” of missing women in his apartment.
One of my rapist’s attorneys was an older New College graduate, Adam Tebrugge. Even other defense attorneys avoid him. One contacted me and told me that they avoided him because he was stimulated by his sickest clients. Adam was the honored speaker at my college graduation, so I had to sit through my own graduation grinding my teeth as he prattled on about how his clients were innocent victims of society, and how he felt like Atticus Finch defending them from evil, lying white women. My poor father, who knew of none of this, and never could afford to go to college himself, cried with pride in his Montgomery Wards Members Only windbreaker as he watched his daughter accept her diploma on the stage next to the man trying to call her a liar in order to set her rapist free. Again.
11-year old Carlie Brucia was another victim of Adam Tebrugge’s periennial clients. My website used to include several posts of the women Smith previously attacked and tried to kill and was acquitted by Sarasota juries, but the posts have been hacked and removed. We are working on it.
I offer this background because I have spent years thinking about how the radical Left lures otherwise nice and empathetic kids into their terrorist actions, sick empathy for killers, and hatred of cops. With less reading, or less luck, or less good police friends, or less decent middle-class parents, or my stauchly conservative older brother, or less rapin’, I might have become one of them.
So when I entered the Quaker Church in Decatur, Georgia that was hosting the anti-cop terrorist training last Saturday, I knew that there were two types of people in that room : those who might still be made to understand what they were doing was wrong, and the well-paid radicals who knew exactly what they were doing was wrong. I spent some time in a bathroom line talking to some nice kids, including a girl who told me she was getting top surgery (breasts removed). She clearly felt insufficient unless she could achieve some desirable minority status. I told her to wait a while. I told her that her arm muscles would be damaged. Then I cringingly listened to two willowy, beautiful girls ahead of us, mean girls, debate whether or not it was politically correct if they used the empty men’s room because they “identify female.”
Jesus wept. When I was their age, it was entirely normal for a girlfriend to stand outside the men’s room and say, “my friend’s in there,” and the men would wait until the woman came out. It wasn’t this complicated. It wasn’t political. It didn’t involve irreversable surgical body mutilation.
It was just peeing.
The Quaker Center, of course, had virtue-signaling signs up everywhere telling people to use the “bathroom which aligned with their gender identity.” This is supposed to be open-minded, but in effect is the opposite: those girls who responded this messaging were confused and being led down a road many of them would regret later. It was demoralizing in the ways it lures lonely, misfit females to seek solace in politicizing the surgical desecration of their own bodies.
But there are two bright points: a lot of these kids can be saved, and there weren’t many of them to begin with. The protest was an abject failure. Atlanta is sick of them.
If you’re the mom and dad of the slightly chubby Asian guy wearing his Emory sweatshirt while chanting about killing Jews, without, I hope, really understanding what he was saying: intervene. Now. This is nothing to fool around with. Especially at five-figure tuition per year.
Here is a video of what the professional activists pulled the college kids into. But it’s still not too late for all of them.