Free Speech Group Warns UC-Berkeley After Student Activists Shout Down Google AI Chief
“This sends the message that one can easily thwart campus discourse they dislike simply by disrupting it.”
These protesters were shouting about ‘genocide’ in Gaza. It’s always these people.
The College Fix reports:
Free speech group warns UC Berkeley after student activists shut down Google bigwig’s speech
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sent a letter to UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons this past week regarding the disruption by student activists of Google A.I. Chief Jeff Dean’s speech earlier in the month.
The activists believe the technology is being used to “kill Palestinians,” and were shouting “UC, UC, you can’t hide, you are funding genocide.” They refused to leave when asked by campus police, and eventually Dean’s talk was shut down.
In its letter, FIRE’s Haley Gluhanich noted one of the activists jumped onto the stage with Dean and led his fellow demonstrators in the chant, “drowning out” what Dean was saying.
Gluhanich pointed out that despite the talk being a “ticketed” event, out of “free speech concerns” campus police did not prevent the activists from entering. Cops reportedly told event organizers they wouldn’t do anything “unless [the activists] turned violent.”
“[T]here can be no doubt that Berkeley knew it had not only the authority but the obligation as a public university bound by the First Amendment to use ‘bona fide efforts’ to stop event disruptions in order to protect the speaker and the audience’s expressive rights and ensure the event could proceed,” Gluhanich wrote.
By instead allowing the event to be shut down, the university ratified an impermissible “heckler’s veto,” putting campus speech at the mercy of those most willing to silence their opponents. Campus officials rewarded those seeking to silence Dean instead of protecting the expressive rights of Dean, the event organizers, and the audience. This sends the message that one can easily thwart campus discourse they dislike simply by disrupting it.
And contrary to the UCPD officers’ claim that nothing could be done to prevent disruptors from entering the event because of “free speech concerns,” disrupting an event is not protected expression, nor is attending a ticketed event without a ticket. Individuals do not have a First Amendment right to engage in unlawful, disorderly, or destructive behavior intended to silence their opponents’ expression. In fact, UC Berkeley’s own rules prohibit such conduct.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
“The activists believe the technology is being used to “kill Palestinians,”
They’re still recycling 60-year-old excuses.
I remember demonstrations outside Polaroid in Cambridge in the late ’60s. The claim then was that their “instant photo ID” technology was being used to genocide South Africans.
It turns out that you don’t genocide South Africans with photographs. You genocide them with machetes and iron bars. And astonishingly, they turn out to be white.
Actual genocides in the Sudan and Nigeria ongoing right now; crickets. Why because the free palestine crowd are racists and bigots, who don’t care about Africans. Here’s a new chant for them: UC students you can’t hide, your sad little brains rot from the inside. You know nothing but bigotry and fads, now take those credentials back to living w/ your mom and dad. Your dumb and hateful, can’t reason or think, go whine about your fears to your over priced shrink. The world will reject you, you have no skills, pay off that student debt you communist shills.
Best answer is to make sure everyone knows about this, and companies refuse to hire anyone from Class of ’26 UC Berkeley.