Trump threatens Berkeley as protests target far-right firebrand
LOS ANGELES: President Donald Trump threatened Thursday to withdraw federal funds from UC Berkeley after violent campus protests forced the cancellation of a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a firebrand editor of right-wing news site Breitbart.
The disturbances were a fiery reminder of the university’s history as a cradle of the 1960s anti-war movement — and a sign of the sharp tensions pitting the country’s mostly left-wing student body against a far-right minority.
Hundreds of students and other protesters chanting ‘ shut him down’ marched at the University of California campus. Masked protesters, said to be outsiders, smashed windows, set wooden pallets ablaze and threw fireworks and rocks as police in full riot gear responded with tear gas.
The university was placed on lockdown as the sold- out appearance by Yiannopoulos, a conservative provocateur and self- proclaimed internet troll who styles himself on Facebook as ‘Dangerous Faggot’, was cancelled late Wednesday.
“If U C Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Trump wrote on Twitter Thursday.
About half of research at Berkeley is funded by the federal government, according to the university website. Berkeley, however, has been struggling in the past years with budget shortfalls and spending deficits.
Trump’s top political advisor Stephen Bannon is the former chairman of Breitbart News.
Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said that the peaceful student protest “was invaded by more than 100 armed individuals clad all in black who utilised paramilitary tactics to engage in violent, destructive behaviour designed to shut the event down”.
Because of the violence campus police “concluded that the speaker had to be evacuated from campus for his own safety,” thus ending the event.
Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s technology editor, is a flamboyant fi rebrand reviled by his critics as racist and misogynistic but who casts himself as a gay crusader against ‘political correctness’.
He is often portrayed as a leader of the so- called alt-right — a white nationalist extremist fringe that has found a home on Breitbart’s pages — although he has sought to distance himself from the movement. — AFP