When Milo Yiannopoulos came to UC Berkeley to finish off his “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” angry liberal protestors led by the anarchist group Antifa threw rocks, set fires to properties, and attacked conservative students. The Breitbart editor was forced to cancel his event, and the message they took away was violence works, and free speech can be silenced.
As of Wednesday, Berkeley’s school newspaper The Daily Californian released a series of opinion pieces called “Violence as self-defense,” which condoned the use of violence to silence free speech.
The sidebar of Berkeley’s student paper right now. pic.twitter.com/UdEk7zBFXR
— Ashley Rae (@Communism_Kills) February 8, 2017
Juan Prieto, an illegal immigrant who attends Berkeley, wrote an op-ed titled “Violence helped ensure safety of students,” which thanked the violent protests caused by Antifa.
“Well, I’m here to thank the radical measures the AntiFas took to ensure my safety. It has been reported by numerous sources that Breitbart’s mascot planned on launching a campaign against undocumented students and sanctuary campuses,” Prieto wrote in his op-ed. “My campus did nothing to stand between my undocumented community and the hateful hands of radicalized white men — the AntiFas did. A peaceful protest was not going to cancel that event, just like numerous letters from faculty, staff, Free Speech Movement veterans and even donors did not cancel the event. Only the destruction of glass and shooting of fireworks did that. The so-called ‘violence’ against private property that the media seems so concerned with stopped white supremacy from organizing itself against my community.”
Berkeley alum Nisa Dang wrote in her op-ed that no protest is truly non-violent. She stated that those attacking Antifa for assaulting people and destroying property were speaking from a place of privilege.
“To people with platforms who decide when a protest should and should not be violent: You speak from a place of immense privilege,” Dang wrote. “As I recently wrote in a tirade against this brand of idiocy, asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act. Putting #LoveTrumpsHate at the end of a post is a privilege that many of you take advantage of, especially when there are those of us who know that our grandparents and parents survived hate only through the grace of violent action. No offense.”
Other op-eds published include a “Black bloc (Antifa) did what campus should have done,” “Condemning protestors is the same as condoning hate speech,” and another article about how freedom of speech should not be extended to what they consider as hate speech.
Anyone who thought that the progressives took away the lesson that mob rule and violence were bad is seriously mistaken. To these liberal activists, violence is good because it works.
