And it's Berkeley, so the rioters get their way.
Left-wingers riot, destroy property because a conservative speaker is invited to UC Berkeley
We talked about this a l
ittle bit yesterday, the whole idea that the left deludes itself into thinking it's winning with stunts like this. Yay. You destroyed the town and silenced the evil right-wing guest speaker. You won! Except that the rest of the nation saw what you did, and wasn't too impressed.
The only potential saving grace for the rioters of Berkeley would be for the mainstream media to ignore what happened. But
Reuters didn't play ball, cooperating with the rioters only to the extent that they were willing to label Milo Yiannopoulos "far right." Otherwise, if the rioters thought they were going to get protection from the media, they're out of luck:
Hundreds of protesters at the University of California at Berkeley on Wednesday smashed windows, set fires and clashed with police as they forced a right-wing speaker to cancel his appearance at the liberal-leaning institution.
Two hours before far-right Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos was to give a speech at the student union, protesters tossed metal barricades and rocks through the building's windows and set a light generator on fire near the entrance, footage from news outlets showed.
Police ordered protesters to disperse as the school put the campus on lockdown. Protesters also tossed bricks and fireworks at police in riot gear who fired rubber pellets back at the crowd, according to SFGate.com, a news outlet in San Francisco.
"We shut down the event. It was great. Mission accomplished," a protester told CNN.
Some 150 "masked agitators" were responsible for the violence during the otherwise largely peaceful protest of about 1,500 people, the university said in a statement, noting that the school "is proud of its history and legacy as home of the Free Speech Movement" in the 1960s.
Mission accomplished, eh? Yiannopoulos doesn't get to speak. Liberalism wins and conservatism loses
So . . . mission accomplished, eh? Yiannopoulos doesn't get to speak. Liberalism wins and conservatism loses. Couldn't be clearer than that, right?
Except that it's clearly not like that at all. The notion of intolerant left-wingers in their campus safe spaces has spread beyond the traditional right-wing talking circles. The general public is starting to notice that the left's favored tactic of the moment is simply to burn everything down lest a point of view they don't like be expressed. And as we talked about in
yesterday's column about the Reuters/IPSOS poll, the left isn't persuading anyone on the matter of Trump's immigration order. They may be losing their minds while the media cheers them on, but the public is in Trump's camp 49-41.
So is the public behind Trump in spite of the protests? Or because of them?
I'm convinced the left is screwing itself while totally embracing the delusion that it's winning. And it started on Inauguration Day and carried over to the "women's march" the following weekend. The public saw protesters breaking other people's windows and burning cars. They saw # hats. Now they're seeing Berkeley snowflakes fly into a violent rage because someone dares to show up on their campus who doesn't think the way they think.
The way the left sees it, Yionnopoulos is a peddler of "hate" or whatever, so the effort to shut him up is righteous and no tactic is too extreme. The way most people see it, these fools can't handle being intellectually challenged, and the way they react when it happens not only destroys their personal credibility but tars their entire ideological side by association.
By the way, Yiannopoulos is openly gay. Why is Berkeley homophobic?
I keep wondering when someone on the left is going to stand up and say to the rest of them, look, I get that you're upset, but this is not the way to go about things. Obama would seem like the obvious guy to do it, but so far he doesn't seem so inclined. Maybe it's really not just the snowflakes who have decided violent hissy fits are all they have left.
Yiannopoulos appeared on Tucker Carlson's show last night to talk about what happened. Here is the full interview via Fox News:
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