Cal free speech scrutinized over extreme security
Ben Shapiro, a conservative speaker headed to UC Berkeley on Thursday evening, hasn’t mocked feminists, as right-wing performer Milo Yiannopoulos has done. He hasn’t boasted of being a “mean-spirited bigot,” as far-right author Ann Coulter has done. And, unlike Steve Bannon, ex-adviser to President Trump, Shapiro doesn’t even like the president.
Yet the Harvard Law School graduate, author and political commentator has drawn unprecedented security measures at UC Berkeley for his sold-out speech at the campus’ many-windowed Zellerbach Hall, and Berkeley city police have received permission from the City Council to use pepper spray on any violent protesters who show up.
These defense measures around a standardissue conservative whose idea of provocative is to
call California a “nut-job leftist state” spotlight this question: How left must a speaker be to avoid causing a riot in Berkeley?
At a cost of at least $1.5 million, law enforcement from Berkeley, the university and surrounding cities have policed five rallies and demonstrations since Feb. 1, when masked leftwing anarchists rushed into UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, smashed windows and started fires, and forced the cancellation of an anti-immigration talk by Yiannopoulos.
“There is no counterprotest planned for Ben Shapiro,” said Meleiza Figueroa, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley whose protest cred dates back to the Occupy movement in 2011, when campus police struck her in the ribs with a nightstick as she linked arms with peaceful students hoping to set up tents.
Still, “black bloc” protesters, who have most often clashed with pro-Trump demonstrators this year, don’t always check in with students before striking.
And the left-wing group By Any Means Necessary — which has been active in several clashes with the right, including the peaceful anti-Yiannopoulos protest that preceded the campus riot on Feb. 1 — did not respond to several requests for comment about plans for the Shapiro talk.
As a security measure, UC Berkeley is closing off balcony seats at Zellerbach and allowed sales of only half the tickets. That’s still 1,000 seats, and Shapiro tweeted that those tickets sold out within 45 minutes.
Shapiro, 33, graduated from Harvard Law School in 2007, and from UCLA in 2004. He’s the author of about a dozen books, most of them condemning the political left and accusing universities of indoctrinating youth. The title of his speech on Thursday, “Say No to Campus Thuggery,” refers to his view that colleges quash conservative perspectives and keep students in a liberal bubble.
He edits the Daily Wire, a conservative blog, and hosts the online “Ben Shapiro Show,” where he’s called women who have abortions “baby killers” and said that “a man and a woman do a better job of raising a child than two men or two women.”
During a recent debate with progressive commentator Cenk Uygur, Shapiro criticized Medicare for all, impugned Keynesian economics, and declared himself “wildly disappointed” with the Republican Party.
“There’s a misconception on campus that we seek to invite provocateurs. It’s not true,” said senior Naweed Tahmas, of the Berkeley College Republicans, the student group that invited Shapiro.
Meanwhile, Yiannopoulos, Coulter, Bannon and anti-Muslim author Pamela Geller have been invited to UC Berkeley by a different student group, the Berkeley Patriot, later this month for a four-day “Free Speech Week.”
Although Shapiro has a different style, he’s still largely unpopular at UC Berkeley.
Anti-Shapiro posters have appeared in hallways and on lampposts, while pro-Shapiro posters have disappeared. In one development mocked by the right, the campus has offered counseling to students and employees whose “sense of safety and belonging” becomes compromised by Shapiro’s presence.
Sophomore Bradley Devlin of the Berkeley College Republicans tweeted recently that as he leafleted for the Shapiro event in August “a lib student took a flier & ATE THE FLIER. Not joking.”
Devlin’s group sued UC Berkeley and the University of California last spring, claiming bias against conservative speakers after campus administrators balked at letting the students host Coulter at the time and place of their choosing, citing fears of another riot.
Now, Shapiro has emerged as a test of the Republicans’ claim.
The extra security measures — shutting down five campus buildings and Sproul Plaza three hours before the event, requiring attendees to show identification, and surrounding the area with a massive police presence — may persuade protesters that trying to shut down the event isn’t worth the effort. But it doesn’t make them happy.
“It’s the right of the people to shut down speakers. Exercising disruptive protest is how people often start to pay attention,” said Sunsara Taylor, a cofounder of Refuse Fascism, who is flying out from New York to conduct a “speak-out” against Shapiro at UC Berkeley on Thursday.
Taylor doesn’t see Shapiro as an everyday conservative.
“We are organizing a speakout against white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia and fascism,” Taylor said. Referencing the theme of Shapiro’s talk, she said, “the problem is not campus thuggery — it’s intellectual fascist thuggery in the service of the Trump-Pence fascist regime.”
UC Berkeley’s new chancellor, Carol Christ, has argued that the best way to fight “hate speech is more speech.” By shouting it down, she’s said, “you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech.”
But for many protesters, the specifics of what the opposition says is not the point.
“It doesn’t matter what the guy’s going to say,” said Michael Heaney, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the sociology of protest movements. “He could talk about the joys of apple-picking. What matters is that the countermovement is trying to use the energy of the (event) to grow. This is an opportunity for them — and they are likely to seize upon it.”
So while no riot is guaranteed in Berkeley on Thursday night, neither is a welcome mat for Ben Shapiro.