They went on the rampage in Berkeley, the poor, oppressed little buttercups. And aren't they lucky they have a hobbit like Robert Reich to give them cover?Reich, the former Secretary of Labor for the Clinton administration, was speaking to Don
This sacking and looting horde of "alt-right" white supremacists supposedly hired by Breitbart News—allow me to further indulge this fantasy—smashed windows, tipped over a generator-powered mobile light pole and lit it so it could create a huge diesel fire, crisping one of Sproul Plaza's 60-year-old London plane trees, tore down barricade fencing and used the sections as weapons, invaded the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center, and beat the bejezus out of those students who had assembled to hear the cancelled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos.
Yiannopolous is a "right-wing provocateur," according to the too-numerous press releases I've read. He is an editor at the aforementioned Breitbart News, so there's the link between the destroying barbarians and right-wing populism, as proscribed by the media and the Left. Exactly why Yiannopolous chose to end his "Dangerous Faggot" tour like this goes unexplained. The Left isn't known for providing details, just pretexts.
But who else is this man Milo? He's gay and very open about it. Yiannopolous is not latent about his homosexuality as anyone who's ever listened to his podcast can attest to. He is a devout Catholic who loathes third-wave feminism and does not hold back in his criticism of it and its defense of abortion and embrace of radical Islam. He's a foreigner in America, an Englishman of Greek heritage. Ethnically, he is also part Jewish. Finally, his boyfriend is a black guy. And don't give me that Milo probably exerts his "privilege" by being the top. That's none of your business. Stay out of people's bedrooms, liberals. Am I right?
So, we are to believe that this "white nationalist," as the press also loves to identify Mr. Yiannopolous, would take a black lover? Is this not insane? Why don't the liberals acknowledge the interracial openness of his relationship?
Furthermore, where's the Anti Defamation League to defend this ethnic part-Jew? Where is the Catholic church leadership and the Vatican itself in protecting one of its flock? Why has the LGBT community not got its brother's back?
Milo Yiannopolous is everything that the press and the progressives would normally love. Except he's conservative, anti-political correctness, pro-Trump and defies the extremist liberal narrative. Therefore, he must wear the white nationalist label according to these self-styled moral arbiters.
Morality to the Left is telling you to embrace diversity and take a "migrant" into your home while excusing themselves from having to do the same or even having them in their swank neighborhoods which are so bohemian—and lily-white. Some people are more equal than others, y'know. You're the ignorant sheeple and you will do what you're told. If you don't want to be regarded as naïve and uneducated, do as we say (but not as we do). There's the politics of the New Left—progressivism, socialism, Marxism, Communism, "opposing the man"—as we know it.
Just ask the people of Cuba who dream about liberty. Oh yeah, they're either stuck on the prison island itself or shanghaied in Mexico and Central American countries because Saint Obama got tough on their ability to emigrate to America. Nice one, Dear Leader. Level of outrage on the Left? Zero, zilch, nada, nothing. I guess allowing subjects of the murderous Castro regime to live free is "not who we are".
Alas, I digress. Robert Reich, currently a public policy professor at UC Berkeley, and who clearly chose to be an economist over a crowd-drawing spectacle in Barnum & Bailey's Circus, which given his dearth of verticality was likely his only other option in life, reported that he could not see any of his students among the rioters at Berkeley. Well, firstly, what were you doing there, Mr. Reich, when you should have been home sipping Napa Valley Chardonnay, and secondly, you must have incredible superpowers of observation if you can spot and recognize members of a student population of 38,204! I'm impressed, little dude. Reich could not have seen over my back, never mind that of a six-footer's. I wonder what his secret is.
"I was there for part of last night, and I know what I saw," Reich reported on the February 3 edition of CNN Tonight. "Those people were not Berkeley students. They were outside agitators. So Donald Trump, when he says Berkeley doesn't respect free speech rights, that's a complete distortion of the truth. There are rumors that they were right-wingers, they were part of a group that were organized and ready to create the tumult and danger you saw that forced the police to cancel the event."
The Left has a history of accusing their opponents, their enemies, of exactly the sort of things they themselves do. For instance, all we heard previous to the election was that if Trump had lost, his supporters would have rioted. Hillary Clinton lost instead, and what happened? Riots. And they haven't stopped. Yet neither Robert Reich nor Don Lemon nor any of these losers posing as journalists will make that point, will they?
Nor, now that I think about it, will they point out that for all the Right's supposed anti-environmentalism, Tea Party and Pro-Life marches leave the streets and parks cleaner than before these rallies take place. The recent "women's march," as with Obama's 2008 inauguration, as with every other traveling Leftie mass indoctrination event, created what you'd swear was a new landfill site. We certainly did not create the environmental near-disaster that is the Oceti Sakowin camp near the Cannonball River in North Dakota which is going to require a huge effort on the part of the federal government to clean up. Members of the local Sioux community are beside themselves at the sprawling litter containing various forms of detritus and jetsam that the Dakota Access Pipeline protestors left behind. Ask them if extremist liberals care about the environment.
I wish these inspired young people would spend more time organizing street, park and forest clean-ups as opposed to creating more CO2 in complaining about "climate change". They could literally change the world if they did that, but golly gee, it involves actual work, so we won't be seeing it anytime soon. The Right would do it, but alas and alack, we have jobs and our own families that take up our time. We have these things known as responsibilities. We do our part by trying to keep the bums who create these messes far away from our communities.
The thing I cannot get past is the Berkeley students who distanced themselves from the agitators the next day, citing Yiannopolous's free speech. The same ones who carried signs announcing "Trans Dykes Are Good" and "Bash the Fash" told stories about how concerned they were that the original home of The Free Speech Movement was the site of violent intolerance. A 20-year-old student, Russell Ude, told the press, "Berkeley has always stood for self-expression. Things like this discredit peaceful protest."
Legendary UC Berkeley professor John Searle noted that the cancellation of Yiannopoulos's speech was "an absolute scandal" and that "free speech has to be allowed for everyone." Dan Mogulof, a spokesman for the school, said that "it was not a good night for this campus. We are proud of our history and legacy as the home of the free-speech movement." The Associated Press reported that in the aftermath of the violence, the University of California at Berkeley "struggled with questions of why the violence spun out of control and what has happened to the open-minded Berkeley of the 1960s."
So why did a 1,500 strong group of reportedly peaceful protesters, who were exercising their free speech rights by denouncing Yiannapolous's "fascism," allow only just over 100 violent extremists to mar and disrespect their campus? Do the math—did they not have the advantage? I agree that UC Berkeley does have a proud and notable tradition of respecting free speech, but that has been on the slide as Black Lives Matter (Only When White People are Involved) and radical feminists and other assorted far Left rabble-rousers have put the kibosh on full freedom of speech and expression over the course of the past two years or so.
It was only this past October when radicals formed a blockade at one of the university's entrance gates, denying access to Sproul Plaza and refusing entry to white students but allowing transgender or non-white students through. White students had to traverse Strawberry Creek, which runs through the campus, in order to get to their classes as they could not cross the bridge spanning it.
UC Berkeley is a beautiful campus. Any alumnus of that university has a right to be proud of it. As a UMass-Boston alumnus, I can tell you that our small campus wasn't much, but it was lovely in its own way. There was an eerie beauty about the place, situated right by Boston Harbor, that I grew to love. Salty fogs would blanket the campus at times and then clear up to reveal an almost blindingly sparkling bay. It was a nice environment to attend university. And the majority of the student population would not have stood for radicals trying to burn it down.
I attended the school at a time when liberalism was on the uptick. Reganism was in retreat during the later years of the George H.W. Bush administration and Bill Clinton was rising in the polls. What I can remember during one contentious on-campus debate concerning the 1990 Massachusetts gubernatorial race between Democrat John Silber and Republican William Weld is that when some rally attendees tried to get confrontational, they were quickly put down. "Not on this campus, not here!" was one cry from the audience, assembled in front of McCormack Hall, that I heard.
Our newspaper, The Mass Media, was fiercely pro-free speech. I was the only conservative on the paper's editorial board. Yet, dominated by political/social liberals as our board was, we produced an editorial attacking the political correctness that was denigrating the "white, rifle-toting" Minuteman, the symbol of our larger sister campus in Amherst (where I had also attended prior to my matriculation at the Boston campus). This was in 1993, folks! I was so proud of my newspaper colleagues, these twenty-something liberals, and happy to identify myself with them, even though we disagreed on a lot. We worked together every week in the writing of the lead editorial and it was a fun life lesson in compromise and togetherness. We were as tight-knit as they come—and we positively relished free speech.
We recognized the horrors of authoritarianism. We were grateful that the Berlin Wall had come down and that the Soviet Union had been defeated in the Cold War and broken up. No-one would have ever thought to defend monsters like Fidel Castro. If you were looking for a challenge at UMass-Boston, that, mes amis, would have been the way to go about it.
Oh yeah, and as I recall, we regularly expressed our disgust at lush administrative salaries while working students struggled with tuition. Can you imagine any student newspaper, anywhere, discussing that now? Good grief, what has happened to our precious college campuses?
I know what it was like to be a Berkeley or Columbia student in 1969. Yes, I didn't have a questionable war to worry about being drafted into service for, but I do absolutely have the experience of defending, and reveling in, the right to freedom of speech. During the early 1990s, there was a bit of Sixties redux, especially on college campuses like UMass-Boston, and I was absorbed into it. There was, however, never any violence.
My biggest fear regarding this trend is that another Kent State-style massacre is bound to happen somewhere eventually and that's the last thing I want to see. Those "four dead in Ohio" in 1970 did not deserve their fate, but it's hard to feel sorry for these anarchists if that's indeed who they were. One of these days, and it'll be soon if this madness continues, it won't be rubber bullets being shot at students but lead or copper alloy ones.
I repeat, I DO NOT want to see this. But, unless the Left learns this history lesson and damn quickly, it'll be a case of them reaping what they have sown. As always throughout history, they will have plenty of blood on their hands.
God spare our college campuses and save them from the radical Islamists and their brainwashed defenders, illegal alien "students," and the anarchists and anyone else who cannot be reasoned with, and return them to the centers of learning, uncensored exploration and self-expression for young American citizens or legal foreign students that they used to be. They are too dear to lose.
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