Berkeley Student Newspaper Publishes Essays Defending Violence

The Daily Californian, the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley, has published a series of op-eds defending the use of violence to shut down a lecture on campus by Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos last week.

The series is called “Violence as self-defense,” ostensibly on the premise that conservative speech is a physical threat.

UC Berkeley, a public campus once celebrated as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, now apparently celebrates the use of violence to suppress free speech and violate the civil right rights of guest speakers and fellow students. 

One essay, by Berkeley student Josh Hardman, celebrates the “plurality of tactics,” including violence, that suppressed Milo’s speech. Castigating the Berkeley administration for allowing the Berkeley College Republicans their “racist, xenophobic, sexist extravaganza” in the first place, Hardman argues that the right free speech does not include “hate speech.” He adds that violence in the service of shutting down violence may not really deserve to be classified as “violence” at all: “I urge you to consider whether damaging the windows of places like banks and the Amazon student store constitutes ‘violence’,” he writes.

Read more here: http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2017/02/07/berkeley-newspaper-publishes-essays-defending-violence/