The free speech threat in the US
Glenn Reynolds writes:
They told me if Donald Trump were elected, voices of dissent would be shut down by fascist mobs. And they were right!
At the University of California, Berkeley campus, for example, gay conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos had to be evacuated, and his speech cancelled, because masked rioters beat people, smashed windows, and started fires. Protesters threw commercial fireworks at police.
According to CNN: “The violent protesters tore down metal barriers, set fires near the campus bookstore and damaged the construction site of a new dorm. One woman wearing a red Trump hat was pepper sprayed in the face while being interviewed by CNN affiliate KGO. . . . As police dispersed the crowd from campus, a remaining group of protesters moved into downtown Berkeley and smashed windows at several local banks. No arrests were made throughout the night.”
According to CNN, the protests caused over $100,000 in damage.
Yiannopoulous wasn’t the only victim of silencing efforts. At Marquette University, conservative speaker Ben Shapiro faced efforts by Marquette university employees to silence him.
The Young Americas Foundation obtained Facebook comments by Chrissy Nelson, a program assistant for Marquette’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies, encouraging people — at the behest of “one of the directors of diversity” — to reserve all the seats for the hall and then not show up. The purpose of this was “to take a seat away from someone who actually would go.”
So students who wanted to hear a speaker with alternative views would find themselves unable to get a seat, because a university employee had made fake reservations. All, apparently, in the name of “diversity.”
Likewise, when conservative Gavin MacInnes (a founder of Vice.com) appeared to speak at New York University, he was met by an angry mob that forced him to cut his talk short, while a woman who identified herself as an NYU professor urged police, whom she said were “protecting the Nazis” by keeping the crowd away from MacInnes and his entourage, to “kick their ass” instead of protecting them.
The totalitarian left get stronger on campus after campus.