Violence at UC Berkeley

How I found myself in the middle of a student-led meltdown.

I was warned there would be trouble. Students and staff at the University of California at Berkeley have earned a reputation for intolerance. After I told some friends that I had agreed to speak on campus at a Turning Point USA event, at least three of them predicted that violence would ensue. One even suggested that I should withdraw. Naturally, I failed to heed the prophecies, even though we all know that the Cassandridae are never wrong.

Last Monday’s event had been initially planned as the final stop on Charlie Kirk’s tour, so tensions were understandably high and security had been ramped up accordingly. I was to appear on stage with the comedian Rob Schneider and the philosopher Peter Boghossian (whose excellent Substack is here). We made our way to Zellerbach Hall together in an SUV, where we were dropped off in an underground car park and found ourselves suddenly flanked by men with guns. We had arrived hours early to avoid the swarms. They came later.

With only an hour to go, waiting backstage, we were shown footage of the fracas unfolding outside. While ticket holders were attempting to enter the venue, protesters had descended on them to threaten them into leaving. One member of staff showed me a clip of what he said was tear gas being deployed (it turned out to be smoke bombs). Other images were quickly going viral: a car being deliberately backfired to simulate gunfire and deter audience members, a line of people calling on audience members and police to kill themselves and chanting ‘fuck your dead homie’ (a macabre reference to Charlie Kirk). One group was attempting to break through a barrier, and the ringleader was wearing a ‘fags against fascism’ patch. I’m a ‘fag against fascism’ too, I thought. Where’s the solidarity?

All in all, it was a surreal experience. At one point, two heavily armed campus police officers burst into our green room, apparently looking for other potential points of entry that might be breached by the zombie-like hordes outside. When we finally reached the stage and took questions from the audience, I found myself scanning the hall with a sense of bewilderment. Armed police were lining the stage and were positioned all around the perimeter, like that final concert scene in The Blues Brothers. And all of this because a conservative group had offered to share their ideas on campus and hear them challenged. What the hell was going on?

The political tribalism of our times appears to have emboldened the extremists on all sides. Untethered to reality, they spend their time squabbling with ghosts, secure in the belief that they are brave warriors in a righteous cause. It may be simply a failure of imagination, an inability to consider that there might be other ways of looking at the world. Some of us are more solipsistic than others, and it is all too easy to grasp at catch-alls like ‘fascist’ to explain those views that we find intuitively inexplicable.

These protests seemed to represent an inversion of reality, with groups determined to suppress free speech in the name of ‘anti-fascism’, and those who consider themselves to be ‘compassionate’ and ‘progressive’ celebrating murder and urging others to commit suicide. A man wearing a t-shirt bearing the word ‘Freedom’ was beaten bloody and racially abused (‘you’re bleeding, white boy’), presumably in the name of liberty and anti-racism. As a final touch, the man arrested for his assault was named ‘Jihad’.

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