The Berkeley Revolution: A digital archive
revolution.berkeley.edu
revolution.berkeley.edu
Keep Berkeley weird!
The hippies all own expensive houses now and will do ANYTHING to keep the town from changing - specifically, to prevent the construction of affordable housing. As a partial result, there is a massive homelessness problem and the town is very expensive for young people.
Meanwhile, rather than campaigning for serious political and economic change, the current local protest movement is pretty singularly concerned with countering the "alt-right" (who are non-existent among the actual residents of the town) and rioting over "offensive" speech.
I was a fairly long time Berkeley resident but I had to get out. Berkeley rules but it has some pretty serious problems that it refuses to address.
Another way of looking at it is that political movements are coalitions. Sure, people who are really concerned about the environment and people who are really concerned about poverty and the welfare of the poor are both on the left of the political spectrum in America, but they are not really natural allies; those in poverty use a lot less resources than they would if they had middle-class incomes, and things like organic food are massively less efficient, meaning that choosing organic food, to the extent that it crowds out inorganic production, is raising the price of food, something that is largely irrelevant if you primarily care about the environment, but central if you primarily care about the poor.
(Of course, there is some agreement, I mean, the price of farmland forces the issue, but 'sustainable farming' is important for all; you don't want another dust bowl, but that's a problem that, from my understanding, is largely solved, outside of, say, cattle grazing on public land. No farmer wants to destroy the production capability of his or her land. )
I mean, I'm certain that was a biased example, but my point is just that there are a lot of competing interests within a particular political coalition, so quite often, apparent hypocrisy is simply the fact that different people and different sub-groups within a broad political movement have different and sometimes conflicting priorities and values.
I feel we're at a complex historical moment in terms of not just US politics but global trade relations, questions about the future of finance and economics, the pressing problem of climate change, and competing but radically different philosophies of national and global destiny.
The social/political change they've been managing to make happen is normalization of left-wing radicalism, exponential broadening of the definition of "nazi" and generous application of violence to said "nazis".
They're also bringing back gender and race segregation under the PC-approved expression "safe space".
Definitely it's social and political change they're after.
However, you might like to reflect that right wing commentators have been complaining about 'Feminazis' for 30 years (1) and equating liberalism with fascism for 10 (2), so there has been plenty of effort invested in normalizing right-wing radicalism for quite a long while now. Complaints about the fact that the far left has decided to come off the sidelines of political discourse seem a little facile.
Nor do I understand why you brought up 'punching nazis'; nobody has even mentioned that in this discussion.
You found the town was proud of its past and hypocritical about the present, and not the school?