Surrendering to Antifa

Berkeley, Calif., Mayor Jesse Arreguin has a special request for UC Berkeley: Cancel campus conservatives’ Free Speech Week next month because . . . antifa.

Don’t “provoke” the hundreds of goons with opinions they oppose, for fear they’ll again turn out and smash things.

“I don’t want Berkeley being used as a punching bag,” said Arreguin. “I am concerned about these groups using large protests to create mayhem.”

To be fair, the city has faced months of problems — with some out-of-the-area right-wingers also coming in to mix it up with the antifa thugs. But antifa is now raging even when there’s no organized opposition, managing this past weekend to destroy a peaceful Rally Against Hate.

The Free Speech Week in late September expects to host righty provocateur Milo Yiannopolous, perhaps plus other verbal bomb-throwers such as Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon and perfectly conventional conservative Ben Shapiro.

Yiannopolous’ last effort to speak at Berkeley inspired antifa to do $100,000 in property damage and injure two College Republicans — which canceled the February event. The prospect of more assaults then prompted the cancellation of the Coulter and Shapiro speeches.

Arreguin says he “obviously believes in free speech, but there is a line between freedom of speech and then posing a risk to public safety.”

Right — except that he’s basically letting extremists’ proclivity to harm public safety limit others’ freedoms.

At this point, Berkeley-area antifa is a criminal conspiracy. Arreguin ought to be pushing local law enforcement to break the gang, not rushing to give it what it wants.