America 2017: Berkeley cancels Ann Coulter speech because it can’t guarantee her safety
by Allahpundit at HotAir:
“After the Charles Murray fiasco at Middlebury, I wrote that “We’re getting closer to the inevitable moment when someone is literally murdered on an American campus because a right-winger tried to speak.”
Berkeley’s administrators agree. In canceling Coulter’s speech next week, they made no bones about the fact that there are now so many fascist “anti-fascist” animals running around campus that Coulter herself or someone in the audience literally might not leave it alive. And after what happened when Milo Yiannopoulos tried to speak in February, that’s a perfectly reasonable fear. You call the local police in Berkeley if you want to arrange “symbolic arrests” at the sit-in you’re organizing for your pet cause, not to stop rampaging leftists bent on smashing store windows and skulls because a thoughtcriminal has arrived in town.
She says she’s going to show up anyway. Who’ll secure the speech to make sure that the “heckler’s veto” doesn’t silence her? The mayor? Jerry Brown? Trump?
UC Berkeley officials say they were “unable to find a safe and suitable” venue for the right-wing provocateur who was invited to speak by campus Republicans on April 27.
In a letter to Berkeley College Republicans sent Tuesday, Vice Chancellor Scott Biddy said officials made the decision in consultation with campus police who determined they could not ensure the safety of Coulter, audience members or protesters expected at the event…
University spokesman Dan Mogulof said that posters went up on campus last week threatening disruption of the event and officials discovered “targeted threats” on various websites indicating the possibility of planned violence.
We’ve reached the point now in American academic culture where the risk of “active security threats” needs to be weighed when scheduling someone to come to your campus to talk immigration. According to Coulter, the university tried to get her to back out of the speech “voluntarily” by imposing some demands on her — the speech had to be held in the afternoon (since rioters are more likely to come out at night), only students would be allowed to attend (to make sure local agitators can’t get in), and the venue wouldn’t be announced until the last minute (presumably so that “protesters” couldn’t shut down the building before Coulter showed up). Her sponsor, the Young America’s Foundation, advised her not to agree. But she did agree, on the condition that Berkeley met two demands of her own:
1) That the University of California chancellor request that the Oakland chief of police refrain from telling his men to stand down and ignore law-breaking by rioters attempting to shut down conservative speakers, as he has done in the past; and
2) That UC-Berkeley announce in advance that any students engaging in violence, mayhem or heckling to prevent an invited speaker from speaking would be expelled……..” There’s more below:
Filed under: Atheism, Barack Obama, Black Racism, Censorship, Communism, Corruption, Democrats, Education, Fascism, Feminism, Gay Fascism, Intolerance, Media Bias |
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