Berkeley protest
Far-right editor’s appearance causes backlash
SPEECH — Milo Yiannopoulos’ presence at UC sparked outraged.
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Does everyone have the right to say what he or she wishes and defend it by invoking freedom of speech? What if that person is known for his rude, provocative and inappropriate statements?
Students and the administration of UC Berkeley grappled with these and similar questions when the Berkeley College Republicans invited Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversial far-right editor of Breitbart News to speak at the university.
Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter last summer for his racist and sexist comments about African-American actress Leslie Jones.
Although UC Berkeley’s administration received pressure to cancel the event, they decided to allow the event to take place because the Berkeley College Republicans are “a separate legal entity from the school itself,” according to a Rolling Stone article.
Angered that Yiannopoulos would still be allowed to speak, around 1,500 students gathered to protest the event.
According to USA Today, they intended for the protest to be peaceful, but anarchist agitators dressed in black soon joined them and “within minutes, the group of 100-150 agitators had smashed half a dozen windows with barricades, launched fireworks at police and toppled a diesel-powered klieg light, which caused it to be burst into flames,” a Los Angeles Times article said.
Their violent protesting resulted in around $100,000 in damage to university property, according to CNN.
Due to the protests school authorities cancelled the event two hours before it was scheduled to occur and issued a lockdown.
The Rolling Stone article said that amidst the chaos, Trump supporters were attacked and beaten.
A statement from UC Berkeley said that two members of Berkeley College Republicans were attacked the next day as well.
“In this case, with the goal being to absolutely shut down a central target, it made sense to employ these means to ensure that the University understands there are consequences for enabling fascism,” an anonymous agitator told Rolling Stone.
“The demonstration had less to do with stopping one particular right-wing narcissist than it did combatting the movement he is part of.”
Responding to an uncivil and abrasive person with incivility and abrasiveness does not show that the agitators are any better than the “far-right narcissist” they are attacking.
In fact, I believe that it does the exact opposite.
While the rhetoric Yiannopoulos and others of the far-right employ and the ideas they advocate are concerning and dangerous, cancelling their speaking engagements and attacking their supporters is equally problematic.
If Yiannopoulos and others like him are unable to voice their opinion or state their beliefs, then people strongly opposed to them have no right to voice their opinions.
How can someone truly know what he believes if he does not hear from people with multiple perspectives to shape his own views?
“This could have been a teaching moment for our students: that it is legitimate for people with views you find abhorrent to speak, and to debate them, and to do so with a superior argument,” Jack Citrin, a political science professor at UC Berkeley told Rolling Stone.
“Instead, it ends up a moment where this provocateur gets exactly what he wanted.”