Alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled appearance at the UC Berkeley Student Union was canceled after campus protests turned violent. A lighting fixture set up for the event was lit on fire, which then spread to a nearby tree. Several windows of the student union were smashed.
A self-styled advocate for hate speech masquerading as free speech, Yiannopoulos is best known for his misogynist and racist Twitter campaign against actress Leslie Jones, his virulent Islamaphobia and his establishment of the privilege grant, a college scholarship created in response to affirmative action and available exclusively to white men. He has also become something of a stand-in for President Donald Trump as he tours college campuses (or attempts to, anyway).
This marks the second time within a month that a scheduled appearance of Yiannopoulos at a California college campus has been canceled. Previously, in January, he was driven from UC Davis, where protests likewise prevented him from speaking.
Inevitably, the right has tried to paint the protest and its aftermath as some sort of attack on free speech. “The left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down,” said Yiannopoulos, who widely advocates hate and/or violence against women, minorities, feminists, Black Lives Matter protesters and pretty much anyone he disagrees with.
“Denying white supremacists a platform at the time and place of their choosing is not a violation of free speech,” wrote Sean McElwee, a policy analyst at the Demos think tank. “This really isn’t hard.”
“Weird how [they] never acknowledge how he’s a fascist who outs trans people [and] has fans who shoot people,“wroteSarah Nyberg on Twitter, referencing a recent incident in Seattlein which an antifascist protestor was shotby an ardent Yiannopoulos supporter.
“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
