Ship of Fools by Tucker Carlson

Author:Tucker Carlson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Free Press

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By the winter of 2017, when writer Milo Yiannopoulos arrived to speak, Berkeley had become the mirror image of its former self. Students were still willing to commit acts of civil disobedience, but this time they protested in order to silence a speaker. Activists at Berkeley accused Yiannopoulos of being a “racist, misogynistic demagogue” who “notoriously riles up a lynch-mob mentality in his audiences” with the aim of “promoting violence.”

Jesse Arreguin, the mayor of Berkeley, agreed with the students. “Using speech to silence marginalized communities and promote bigotry is unacceptable,” Arreguin tweeted hours before the scheduled start of Yiannopoulos’s event. “Hate speech isn’t welcome in our community.”

In order to show their disapproval of hate and violence, Berkeley students rioted. Protesters lit fires, smashed windows, and threw rocks, committing at least one hundred thousand dollars in property damage. Six people were injured, including a woman who had come to see Yiannopoulos speak. She was pepper-sprayed in the face while giving an interview to a local news crew. Local police, ordered by the city to do nothing, refused to act. Yiannopoulos fled for his safety with security guards in an unmarked car. He never gave his speech.

A few months later, at a forum on “progressive mayorships,” Jesse Arreguin argued that people like Milo Yiannopoulos shouldn’t be allowed to speak in public. “Public safety is our top priority,” he explained. “And that actually, I believe, takes precedence over freedom of speech.”

It wasn’t just Berkeley where Yiannopoulos found himself under attack. At DePaul University in 2016, a College Republicans event featuring Yiannopoulos was shut down when students stormed the stage and seized his microphone. Campus security staff did nothing to intervene or restore order. Afterward, school administrators released a statement affirming the value of free speech, but they didn’t mean it. When the College Republicans sought to have Yiannopoulos return to campus, their request was denied on the grounds that the school couldn’t provide adequate security for Yiannopoulos’s “inflammatory speech.”

At least one school avoided a violent suppression of speech by simply refusing Yiannopoulos a platform in the first place. New York University canceled a Yiannopoulos event, claiming there were safety concerns because the proposed venue for the speech would have been physically close to the school’s Islamic Center and LGBTQ Student Center. Somehow, Yiannopoulos and his supporters were a threat to NYU’s gay community, even though Yiannopoulos is himself a gay man and has never used his speeches to promote violence.

Yiannopoulos is particularly loathed by the campus left, but he’s hardly the only speaker who’s been silenced. When author Ann Coulter tried to give a speech at Berkeley a few weeks after Yiannopoulos, university administrators cancelled her appearance on the grounds they couldn’t provide sufficient security to protect her from protesters. And then they blamed her for it.

“This is a university, not a battlefield,” chancellor Nicholas Dirks declared, as if Coulter’s insistence on speaking out loud was responsible for the rioting. The New York Times agreed, claiming without evidence that UC Berkeley had “become a target for small, militant and shadowy right-wing groups.

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