Many conservatives see higher education as a threat to their reactionary and corporate oriented interests and would like to defund higher education, privatize it, eliminate tenure, and define the working conditions of faculty to something resembling the labor practices of Walmart workers.

America is at war with itself because it's basically declared war not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it's declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. And we see it with the war on public schools. We see it with the war on education. We see it with the war on the healthcare system.

I think, at some level, we see young people all over the country mobilizing around different issues, in which they're doing something that I haven't seen for a long time. And that is, they're linking issues together. You can't talk about police violence without talking about the militarization of society in general. You can't talk about the assault on public education unless you talk about the way in which capitalism defunds all public goods. You can't talk about the prison system without talking about widespread racism. You can't do that. They're making those connections.

Young people refuse to be defined exclusively as consumers rather than as workers, and they reject the notion that the only interests that matter are monetary.

The issue is not about raising taxes. The issue is, how do we allocate the wealth that we have? We spend trillions of dollars on a military industrial complex. The United States accounts for 38% of all the military armaments produced in the world. 38%. This is a huge amount of money. People want and need services. They want roads, they want healthcare.

What has changed about an entire generation of young people includes not only neoliberal society's disinvestment in youth and the lasting fate of downward mobility, but also the fact that youth live in a commercially carpet-bombed and commodified environment that is unlike anything experienced by those of previous generations. Nothing has prepared this generation for the inhospitable and savage new world of commodification, privatization, joblessness, frustrated hopes and stillborn projects.

Everywhere we look we see the encroaching shadow of the police state.