By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--February 2, 2017
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I don't want to get into wild conspiracy theorizing or pointing fingers but it's been noted by a number of people including Tucker Carlson at Fox News that the police presence did not seem to be particularly aggressive this evening and that's something that I witnessed and that my security detail witnessed too. There was a sort of sit back, let it happen approach. I was evacuated, really, at the first sign of trouble. Trouble did get a lot worse after I did leave so I think I'd've had to leave anyway. So this event may never have got off the ground. It seems as though the university and police didn't really want it to happen but the fact that on an American college campus, a place of higher education, a place of learning in America which I'd come to, as a visitor from the United Kingdom where we don't have a First Amendment, hoping that this would be somewhere where you could be, do, and say anything, where you could express your views, express your opinions, crack some jokes, make people think, make people laugh, free from violent responses to political ideas. I thought America was the one place where that would be possible. I am, of course, not the racist or the sexist or anything else that the posters that they put up claim that I am. They do that in order to legitimize their own violence against you. But even if I were, even if the things that they said about me were true, this still wouldn't be an appropriate response to ideas.The rioting is amply documented on social media. Twitter is overflowing with video footage from Berkeley last night showing rioters beating people thought to be conservatives or supporters of Yiannopoulos or President Trump with poles and spraying mace into their eyes. One video appeared to show an unconscious man lying face down in the street being beaten with a shovel. The rioters even provided a soundtrack to accompany their violence, giving the insurrection a rave-like quality as "We Found Love" by recording artist Rihanna was blasted out by loudspeakers. "Kill fascists" was spray-painted on a shop window. A Starbucks outlet was looted. ATMs at a Bank of America branch were smashed. Of course any students participating in the mayhem yesterday should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and expelled from Berkeley. Teaching and administrative staff may also have been involved in the violence and if so they too should be dealt with severely. But given the University of California system's full-throated embrace of lawlessness, don't hold your breath. Local authorities aren't much better. The mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguin (D), seemed to green-light the riots in a Twitter post. "Using speech to silence marginalized communities and promote bigotry is unacceptable," he tweeted, in a reference to Yiannopoulos. "Hate speech isn't welcome in our community." When things spiraled out of control, he backpedaled, tweeting, "Violence and destruction is not the answer[.]" And don't forget that the George Soros-funded slander shop, Media Matters for America, helped to lay the groundwork for the leftist violence surrounding Yiannopoulos in Berkeley and at other stops on his speaking tour. It has long urged colleges to prevent him from speaking, characterizing his mere words as harassment. Berkeley, interestingly enough, was the home of something that called itself the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. But that was a long time ago.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.