Accusations Fly Over Cancellation of “Free Speech Week” at UC Berkeley
“they didn’t intend to actually go through with it last week”
By now, you may have heard that a n event at UC Berkeley called “Free Speech Week” which was set to feature Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon has been cancelled.
All we really know at this point is that the school didn’t cancel the event, it was the student group which was hosting it.
NBC News reports:
‘Free Speech Week’ at UC Berkeley Canceled, Milo Yiannopoulos Blames School
The University of California, Berkeley, announced Saturday that a conservative student group has canceled the so-called “Free Speech Week” it was organizing with right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
The Berkeley Patriot’s four-day event was set to begin Sunday and would have been “open to all political ideologies, with speakers representing conservatives, libertarians, and even liberals,” the group said. Each day had a theme: feminism, Silicon Valley, Islam or higher education.
“It is extremely unfortunate that this announcement was made at the last minute, even as the University was in the process of spending significant sums of money and preparing for substantial disruption of campus life in order to provide the needed security for these events,” Assistant Vice Chancellor Dan Mogulof said in a statement.
UC Berkeley reportedly planned to spend nearly a million dollars on security for the event. Yiannopoulos’ appearance on the university’s campus in February sparked riots in which attendees threw rocks, fireworks and bricks. University police fired rubber bullets and tear gas in response, and Berkeley officials estimated the school suffered $100,000 in damage.
Milo is apparently planning to go it alone. The Times of Israel reports:
Right-wing troll pushes ahead with Berkeley rally plans
Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos vowed Saturday to hold a rally at the University of California, Berkeley, after a student group that planned a week of events with him called it off.
His announcement only added to a confusing turn of events surrounding “Free Speech Week,” a four-day campus event slated to begin Sunday featuring right-wing firebrands…
Yiannopoulos said he was blindsided and “personally irritated” by the news, but he insisted on holding a rally with fellow right-wing commentators Sunday on Sproul Plaza, the center of activity on campus during the 1960s Free Speech Movement.
“We are going to be hosting an event come hell or high water tomorrow,” Yiannopoulos said in a live video on Facebook. He made his comments from a hotel room after cancelling a news conference on San Francisco’s Treasure Island.
“We will be expressing our constitutional rights to free speech, free expression, on Sproul Plaza, the home of the Free Speech Movement, tomorrow as planned, with or without student help, with or without the cooperation of UC Berkeley itself.”
According to a report from the Mercury News, this was all a giant troll:
UC Berkeley’s ‘Free Speech Week’ officially canceled, appeared to be set-up from the start
A conservative UC Berkeley student group that had been working with right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to host a “Free Speech Week” on campus officially called off the four-day program on Saturday.
But the former columnist for the “alt-right” Breitbart News doubled down on his promise to go through with the event, leaving university and law enforcement officials wading into an unpredictable, potentially violent showdown on Sunday…
Still, it remained unclear Saturday who will show up to campus in the coming days, leaving the school facing exactly the type of situation administrators were hoping to avoid.
In an email chain obtained by the Bay Area News Group, Lucian Wintrich, one of the supposed speakers, told UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof Saturday morning that the event had been merely an attention grab from the start.
“It was known that they didn’t intend to actually go through with it last week, and completely decided on Wednesday,” Wintrich wrote.
Here’s a video report from the local CBS News affiliate:
Whatever the reasons for the cancellation, this seemed like a train wreck from the start. Berkeley definitely has a free speech problem, but maybe Milo Yiannopoulos isn’t the best person to fix it.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Yeah, I’m sure the University was eager to host it; certainly their track record would inspire absolute trust. /was that sarcastic?
The university’s eagerness or lack thereof is irrelevant, since it had nothing to do with cancelling the event.
Maybe, maybe not. Though the event was “officially” canceled by the student group hosting it, we do not have any information as to the reason for that cancellation. It may have been voluntary, on the part of the student group. Then again, there might have been undisclosed pressures brought to bear which caused the group to cancel. Too early to tell, at this point.
RE: “The university’s eagerness or lack thereof is irrelevant, since it had nothing to do with cancelling the event.”
It has EVERYTHING to do with this.
Especially since the Berkeley Administration is acting just like 1930s German Nazi.
Berkeley has a Damingly Serious PR Problem!
Milo explains all about the Berkeley Administrations Collusion in this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezbmC4ZkncU
A message to UC Berkeley from MILO and the Berkeley Patriots
“…While the administrators were ignoring over 20 calls and emails from the student group between Wednesday and Friday of last week, they were making calls to journalists, attempting to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt about whether Free Speech Week would proceed. UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof told the Los Angeles Times that the Berkeley Patriots had not filed the appropriate paperwork and maliciously hinted that the entire event might be cancelled, in a story published hours before the university’s abrupt and arbitrary deadline.
The University’s attempt to deny the Berkeley Patriot access to Wheeler and Zellerbach is not the only bureaucratic obstacle the University has thrown in front of the event. Earlier this month, UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof leaked a preliminary speaker list, which included author Ann Coulter and former chief strategist to the President Stephen K Bannon, to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“The most charitable explanation is that UC Berkeley was trying to drum up opposition to the event. Actually, the university deliberately gave a heads-up to domestic terrorist organizations like Antifa, which got a month-long head start on Berkeley police,” said MILO….”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn5Xgak1zzA
According to an open letter the attorney for the Berkeley Patriot, the organizers of Free Speech Week, sent to UCB the university is entirely responsible for the cancellation of the event.
http://kutv.com/news/nation-world/berkeley-patriot-speaks-out-after-cancellation-of-free-speech-week
According to the letter the university administration and its employees were openly hostile to the group and obstructed it at every turn. The university set impossibly short deadlines for various arbitrary requirements, then refused to communicate with the group. The last straw came after somebody put up posters and chalked sidewalks with messages like “Berkeley hates free speech,” “Berkeley is run by thugs in black masks” (antifa), “[Expletive] your commie trash,” and “mean words are still legal words.”
Separate from the attorney’s open letter to the university, the UCB chancellor personally announced she has directed the campus police department to investigate whether those messages constitute hate crimes. Apparently she can’t move fast enough to demonstrate that every single allegation the attorney made against the university administration is true. Obviously if the university considers a chalked message “Berkeley hates free speech” a hate crime then it does hate free speech. Berkeley is run by thugs in black masks. Per the First Amendment mean words are legal words. Per the UCB chancellor they are hate crimes. As far as the obscenity about their commie trash, antifa and and their leftist allies have left more obscene messages when conservative speakers spoke on campus. I’ve seen video of the messages the thugs in black masks left outside the venue where Ben Shapiro spoke last week. Not once has the university hinted that those messages constitute hate crimes. This is clearly viewpoint discrimination.
The university is also threatening to retaliate against individual members of the student group The Berkeley Patriot by penalizing them with various punishments up to and including expulsion. That, according to the attorney, was the last straw that forced The Berkeley Patriot to cancel the event. The attorney says she has filed “a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, claiming that UC Berkeley’s administration engaged in ‘a pattern and practice of systematic suppression’ of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.”
The UCB chancellor’s reaction to these harmless messages lends credence to the student group’s charges against the administration. Several other events over the past few months lends further credence to these charges. The federal government has designated antifa a domestic terrorist organization. Yet both the university and city administrations are clearly coordinating with antifa to shut down these events. If they aren’t antifa themselves. I say that with good reason which I will shortly make clear.
http://cernovich.com/berkeley-police-chief-antifa/
I don’t know who this guy is, but he cites three sources; the AP, the Fresno Bee, and Berkeleyside (links both embedded in and at the bottom of the article). I didn’t see the AP report but I had seen the Fresno Bee report on the February anti-Milo Yiannopolous riots and the quotes he attributes to that newspaper are accurate according to my memory. Unfortunately the Fresno Bee and AP articles have been taken down. The only link that works is Berkeleyside, and he accurately quotes from that source. So this post is accurate to that extent. Both the UC and city of Berkeley police chiefs admit they told their forces to stand down so as to not to “escalate” the violence. The dumb broad running the UCBPD actually has the the arrogance to claim that anyone who thinks that they should have intervened to stop the violence, per Berkeleyside “Our campus has never experienced what it went through on Wednesday,” is too stupid to understand riot control.
Do you want to know who she’s claiming is too stupid to understand riot control? Any experienced police officer. I’m not an experienced police officer, but I was trained in riot control as part of becoming a member of various Auxiliary Security Forces (ASF) in the US and bases abroad. This dumb broad is almost as accidentally as honest as that dumb broad who’s the mayor of Baltimore who let the mask slip when she said she told the police to give the rioters “space to destroy.” The whole logic behind the Navy even having an ASF is that when a crowd control situation is threatening to get out of hand or is turning violent you can muster several hundred trained personnel to augment the Security Police. The key to riot control is overwhelming force. Any experienced police officer knows this. Which is why when the peaceful attendees at the cancelled Milo Yiannopolous event last February approached police officers for help, the officers were visibly disgusted and tersely told them they couldn’t and would have to ask “those who gave the stand down order.” When the dumb broad told her officers to stand down, she escalated the situation, predictably contradicting her stupid words that by standing down she was deescalating the violence. She, like the Baltimore mayor, was simply giving the rioters “space to destroy” and every police officer at the scene knew it. As the attorney for the Federated University Police Officers Association put it, “When these rioters saw that there was no action taken against them, it emboldened them into acting more aggressively.” Duh!
Actually the dumb broad and bastards who run the UCBPD and the city and police department of Berkeley knew it would happen; it was the desired result.
Pro tip: fire hoses work really well in crowd/riot control situations. Fire hoses will definitely keep rioters on the pier away from the ship.
But I digress. At least one of those thugs in black masks at that February riot has been identified as a university employee. He was bragging about his assault activity under the twitter handle Eugene V. Dabs and the anonymous user name @teen_archer. He even took a pic of one of his victims that he pushed over a bicycle and assaulted while the guy was on the ground. It turns out his real facebook page under his full name is linked to his anonymous user name teen_archer as well. His facebook page gives his location as Berkeley and much more personal information that leads to his occupation. He’s a data analyst for UCB. I won’t give his exact job title or full name, but the deliberate misspelling of Eugene V. Debs’ last name is a play on his own middle name, Dabney.
When the sleuths asked the university was aware of his affiliation with antifa, his violent criminal activities, and his current location all the university claimed to know was that at the time he was visiting New York. While in New York the guy gave an interview to the New York Daily News under his real name placing him at the scene of the riot.
As far as I know this idiot remains “under investigation.” But at least, according to the university’s press statement both the campus police and FBI are investigating this guy. In fact, the FBI had as of February opened a major investigation into the anti-Milo riot, including both an investigation into the identities of the antifa rioters and the mayor of Berkeley for ordering his police to stand down and allow the violence to escalate. At this point I should note that the University has confirmed the true identity of Eugen V. Dabs, confirming that they are aware of the allegations against that individual. What the university refuses to confirm is whether or not he’s an employee. It is true that the online sleuths (in the course of only 15 minutes of effort so incompetent was this data analyst/antifa thug at concealing his actual identity!) were able to access unsecured UCB pay records via the employee directory but only up to 2013. But it’s odd the university would know that the guy took off out of town to New York for a visit when he lives in Berkeley if he was not, at least a the time of the rioting, a current employee.
So clearly the FBI needs to widen the investigation to include the university administration and all staff members including professors.
The bottom line: UCB is just as much fully responsible for forcing The Berkeley Patriot to cancel its Free Speech Week as it was fully responsible for allowing antifa to riot freely on its campus. And I believe this chancellor was working hand in glove with the communist mayor of Berkeley to make sure if The Berkeley Patriot didn’t back down to make sure that the antifa rioting was so overwhelmingly violent no one would ever think of holding any other such event.
but maybe Milo Yiannopoulos isn’t the best person to fix it.
If he’s the only one willing to go through with it, in the face of opposition by both UC Berkely and the Brownshirts, then maybe he is the best man for the job.
Touche!
Just as in the 1930s Churchill was the only public figure in Britain calling out the Nazi (Democrat-Socialists of Germany) for what they really were.
FREE SPEECH WEEK PRESS CONFERENCE IN BERKELEY
Full(?) half-hour press conference about this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezbmC4ZkncU
Sounds like two “cat’s paws” working together. Either way, Berkeley looks bad like the red liberal cowards they are.
Mike LaChance says: “All we[Mike LaChance] really know(s) at this point(THROUGH HIS DILIGENT SCOURING OF LEFTIST NEWS SOURCES) is that the school didn’t cancel the event, it was the student group which was hosting it.
Why didn’t Mike LaChance before he posted this article check sources other than his trusted Leftwing MSM Sources and also additionally check with those that were part of the Free Speech Event? If Mike LaChance checked Saturday he would have been able to reference among other things, the letter from the Law Offices of Melo and Sarsfield LLP representing the Berkeley Patriot students that were sponsoring the Milo event. Mike LaChance by looking for information from those that were involved would have read:
Since announcing their intent to host the event, the student group has been subjected to extraordinary pressure and resistance, if not outright hostility, by the UC Berkeley administration and your employees.
[…]
Your employees have insinuated in meetings that our clients would be morally and legally responsible for any acts of violence committed against them, or members of the public, by students and faculty opposed to our clients exercising their First Amendment rights during “Free Speech Week.”
[…]
Your employees have refused to allow our clients to attend meetings with legal counsel present and issued arbitrary deadlines with impossibly short times to comply.
https://www.facebook.com/myiannopoulos/posts/1017212978416597
Is this a trend that I am seeing on articles posted at LI? Can LI flag articles that are basically Leftwing News Summary without analysis?
I am really annoyed that diligence seems to be lacking here and in other articles. This story could have actually been researched and come up with the additional sources that I am aware and I am sure my fellow LI readers are also aware but escape this article’s writers ability or willingness to find.
Thanks Paul.
RE: “Since announcing their intent to host the event, the student group has been subjected to extraordinary pressure and resistance, if not outright hostility, by the UC Berkeley administration and your employees.”
The first rule of modern life now is:
“Never believe any source from the Lie-Stream MSM.
The point of the extravagant security measures for Ben Shapiro was to be able to claim that free speech is too expensive to support.
Wait and see if that claim isn’t made.