Show of force works as Ben Shapiro delivers speech to UC Berkeley audience

The violence and destruction that accompanied Milo Yiannopoulos’s unsuccessful attempt to deliver a talk at UC’s Zellerbach Hall was thwarted last night at the same venue, thanks to the widely-reported expenditure of $600,000 on installing jersey barriers, and positioning large numbers of police, authorized to use pepper spray. The antifa warriors were not up for fight with superior forces.

Inside Zellerbach Hall on Thursday night, conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro delivered his speech as planned to an engaged, respectful audience of about 600 to 700 people. Police were present inside the hall, but not highly visible, and no hecklers disrupted the hour-and-half-long event.

Outside, as many as 1,000 people were gathered — some protesters, others onlookers — and a group of up to 50 students occupied a breezeway at the ASUC Student Union, where they’d put up a sign, “Students Against Fascism and War,” and interacted with the crowd. They exited the building calmly just before the Zellerbach event ended at 9 p.m.

“There’s a sense of relief and satisfaction that the event was able to go forward without disruption, that those who chose to protest did so in largely nonviolent ways and that, overall, things went as well as could be expected,” said UC Berkeley Assistant Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs Dan Mogulof, at a media briefing later that night.

UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo Bennett said the event was “orderly,” attended by people who were “respectful and interested” in the speaker and that it concluded peacefully.

No arrests were made by campus police until around 9 p.m., when a woman not affiliated with the university climbed over a barricade on Upper Sproul Plaza. Earlier in the day, police had set up a closed perimeter around Zellerbach Hall

It just seems so horrible that to allow a US citizen to be offered the Constitutional right, i.e., the first amendment, to deliver that right of free speech to a willing and respectful audience by requiring the use of force, or appearance of it, is not what this country was ever designed to be.

And, unfortunately, the only way to make sure it happens that way is to make it more painful than they really want to go to disrupt or harm someone.

We, the taxpayer, paid for that show of force to protect a basic right. One many do on a street corner, if you are for the right “side.”

Maybe it’s time to start inflicting more. Define it as terrorism, and make it a fine so big that organizations can’t pay for it. Run it through homeland security thus making it a federal crime with the possibility of federal prison time. Make it nasty. People who harm other’s rights and try to dissuade people from exercising them, are nothing short of terrorists. Treat them like that. And we’ll see how much their freedom means to them.

rwood

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