Apathetic Administrators Are Endangering Much More Than Free Speech on Campus

As is often the case, you have to watch the videos to really get a true picture of what happened at University of California, Berkeley on Nov. 10. In the days that have transpired since the event, many newspaper accounts have made it sound like a tempest in a teapot, as if a couple of hotheads disrupted the otherwise quiet, if intense, protests at a Turning Point USA event on campus.

No. The videos reveal, in fact, a slew of violence: smoke bombs and glass bottles flying, fights breaking out, angry students pushing back on police in riot gear, screaming obscenities and threats while lunging and shoving at people attempting to enter the event.

None of this was a surprise to anyone. If the founder of the Turning Point movement could be shot dead two months ago at one of the most sedate campuses in the country, it was pretty much a given that push would come to shove at a university infamous for its out-of-control protests in the name of “free speech.”

Yet UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof somehow kept a straight face as he told reporters, “We believe it’s absolutely essential for a great university to have an open, robust marketplace of ideas.” And when Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on social media that the Department of Justice would be investigating what happened, the university doubled-down, saying, “There is no place at UC Berkeley for attempts to use violence or intimidation to prevent lawful expression or chill free speech.”

Actually, there appeared to be several places: Zellerbach Hall, Sather Gate, and various other streets and sidewalks around campus, all crowded with screaming, belligerent students.

“Efforts to prevent last night’s event did not succeed,” the university conceded, even while insisting, contradictorily, that the evening “proceeded safely and without interruption.”

Well, the 1,500 or so who attended the event didn’t feel especially safe and most certainly felt interrupted—which, of course, was the whole point. Intimidation trumps engagement. If you don’t know how to discuss a clash of ideas peacefully, try shoving somebody and screaming expletives and violent threats. Throw a smoke grenade. “That’ll teach the &#$@*! jerks to think for themselves!”

After the killing of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, everyone understands that attending a Turning Point USA event means taking your life in your hands. And, after the events of the last few years—blockading Ben Shapiro at Cal State Los Angeles and attacking Riley Gaines at San Francisco State, just to name two—everyone knows—especially those of us who work at Alliance Defending Freedom—that university presidents lack the will or the guts to do “thing one” to limit violence or protect any speaker who flunks the Left’s litmus tests.

Oh, they profess to want “peaceful dialogue,” but the platitudes are just for the press corps. What’s promoted—actively or passively—is violence. Our higher educators have zero interest in creating, presenting, or preserving an environment in which reasonable disagreement of any kind can exist, bloom, or prosper. And they’re just as unwilling to enforce the laws that protect those wanting to shop in that “marketplace of ideas.”

At some point, we’re going to have to get past this notion that “everyone has a right to be there,” when it comes to campus presentations. Because everyone doesn’t. People whose commitment is to violence, not reasonable discourse, have no place on our college campuses.

And that means using lawful force, if necessary, to keep these aggressors from accomplishing their brutal disruptions. We are willing to take serious steps—well in advance—to protect government officials when they attend public events. We should do the same for those who elected those leaders.

Again: These masters of the three R’s of modern education—rancor, rebellion, and riots—aren’t hiding their intentions. They’re not pursuing sincere debate and praying nothing gets out of hand. They are coming with every intention of brutally silencing people—and ideas—with which they disagree. Any means, they believe, justifies that end. (“Anytime, anyplace, punch a racist in the face” was one of the chants used at the Turning Point event.)

The government’s first responsibility is to enforce the law and protect its citizens—all of its citizens. Failure to do that threatens more than the members of one organization or religious group or political persuasion. It threatens the existence of government itself.

When “the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished,” Abraham Lincoln said, “the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and … thus become absolutely unrestrained. Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”

Inevitably, Lincoln added, “if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if [people’s’] rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the Government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.”

Sooner or later. And, as a survey of what’s happening on our nation’s campuses suggests, it’s later than university boards and administrators want to think.

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