The University of California, Berkeley, formerly known as the birthplace of the free speech movement by older generations of American liberals, has taken on a new identity in the minds of our nation’s younger generations. For an exponentially growing number of millennials, the Bay Area college town is now the place where free speech ends and violence begins.
Back in February, America watched on in horror and disbelief as a mob of almost 2,000 turned out to “protest” a Milo Yiannopoulos event on campus. Fights were had, weapons were used, and fires were set. Ultimately, the rioting shut down the free-speech rights of Yiannopoulos and his team when the event was cancelled in a city built on the foundations of First Amendment freedoms. How’s that for irony?
When the smoke cleared, approximately 1,500 Berkley students, self-named Antifa “activists” (short for Anti-Fascists – yes, more irony) and “Black Bloc” anarchists were blamed for more than $100,000 in damage done to the school and community – all because they didn’t want someone with differing opinions to have a platform on their turf.
One female wearing what appeared to be a red Make America Great Again-style hat was attacked with pepper spray by an anarchist coward as she gave an interview with the media. Epitomizing the complete senselessness of the “protests”, the hat worn by the victim turned out to not even be a Trump campaign hat, but rather a clever play on the iconic headwear that read “Make Bitcoin Great Again.” As you can see, I use the word “turf” because this was less of a protest than it was a gang of thugs wreaking havoc in their own neighborhood at the sight of an outsider wearing the wrong colors.
Of course, the university tripped all over itself in its response. By blaming the entirety of the violence on a group of 150 “Black Bloc” anarchists based out of Oakland, Berkeley denied their own Dr. Frankenstein role in creating such a significant number of intellectually-intolerant monsters within the student body.
A strict diet of extreme-left wing and communistic indoctrination has turned Berkeley away from its classical liberal roots and towards a revolutionary third-world Che Guevara fantasyland. Being that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, Berkeley has established itself as ground zero for the cultural war now taking place.
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T.B. Lefever is an OpsLens Contributor and active police officer in the metro Atlanta area.
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