Rhetoric fails to match reality on campus

The Free Speech Movement of the 1960s was led by UC Berkeley students who protested the administration’s ban on campus political activities. Berkeley is once again a battleground, but five decades later two things are glaringly different: This isn’t a student movement, and it’s not about free speech. The masked antifascists and Trump supporters bludgeoning each other on nights and weekends aren’t solving complex math equations, debating Romantic poets or scheduling late-night study groups on weekdays.

It’s because most of the weekend warriors aren’t students.

The planned “Free Speech Week,” headlined by rightwing troll Milo Yiannopoulos, will attract the warriors looking for blood. But this isn’t a festival aimed at expressing and debating ideas. No, it’s just an attack on people — and the UC Berkeley campus.

For this contrived “free speech” movement, UC Berkeley is an open-air fighting arena, the most popular destination for a clown who needs a media circus to drum up business.

Among the announced events during “Free Speech Week” is “Feminism Awareness Day.” That’s when “speakers will be telling women what they’ve been doing wrong,” Yiannopoulos told The Chronicle this week.

And he’s bringing like-

minded compatriots Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon, who also push hatefilled, nationalist rhetoric, to the festival. The flagrant brand of bigotry — derogatory language about black and brown people, Muslims, LGBTQ persons, immigrants and women — will incite violence.

Still, Yiannopoulos would like his supporters to believe the violence is the fault of UC Berkeley’s intolerant students. He called it the “craziest campus in America.”

I went to campus Wednesday afternoon to see what “crazy” looked like.

Television satellite trucks were already parked on Bancroft, in anticipation of protests for Thursday night’s appearance by conservative speaker Ben Shapiro.

One camerman filmed students passing through Sather Gate and walking across Sproul Plaza as if they were extras on a studio lot.

Some students waved hello or goodbye to friends. Others, heads down, tapped on their phones. Many who were alone had 100-yard stares on their faces, the equivalent of a do-notdisturb hang tag.

They brushed past me and other reporters, because they’ve become inconvenienced spectators.

This isn’t their fight. It’s just happening in their backyard.

“I think everyone is over this campus being a media circus,” Nichole Bloom, a junior, told me. “The imagery has promoted this misconception of what Berkeley is.”

I watched the students from a bench with Bloom, a media studies major I met when I spoke to a journalism class. We were next to students scarfing down sandwiches before their next class.

We were outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union, the building where windows were shattered during a fiery protest on Feb. 1, the last time Yiannopoulos attempted to speak on campus.

There was an intermittent mist on the first day of jacket-over-sweatshirt weather of the semester. Bloom, 19, said the first big assignments of the semester were due soon, and midterm exams and projects are looming, which means students have more on their minds than watching their campus turned into a carnival of hate.

Some students, like those chasing applied math and computer science degrees, can’t be bothered with any of it, Bloom said.

“They don’t really have time to engage in student movements and politics,” Bloom, a former university tour guide, said. “Any STEM major doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

There was nothing crazy about watching people sign up for Imperfect Produce, a company that offers subscribers delivery of vegetables — carrots, celery, tomatoes — that would otherwise be tossed into the garbage because they are too “ugly” to stock in produce sections.

There was nothing crazy about talking about prayer with Liam Robles Walters, an 18year-old freshman who was passing out flyers for the 50th anniversary Mass and celebration for Newman Hall Holy Spirit Parish, a Catholic church on Dwight Way in Berkeley.

“It really leads to personal peace,” Robles Walters said about prayer. “When you pray often, that helps you develop good habits and also helps you feel at peace in your life.”

Will he be praying for Berkeley during “Free Speech Week”? “Yes, I will,” he said. The craziest thing I saw from a student was off campus. When I stopped to talk to Eliot Davis, he said he had just been refused service at the CVS on the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Carleton Street, about six blocks from campus.

He took the rejection in a very, very long stride. It’s because Davis was walking on stilts. The poles were covered in denim, which made it appear as if Davis, 21, was a super tall guy in bell bottom jeans.

The environmental economics and policy major was surprised when I told him about “Free Speech Week.” Still, he knew what to expect on campus.

“These protests arise, and then these small groups within the protest, that aren’t necessarily from Berkeley, create havoc,” Davis said. “And that kind of extrapolates to the way the UC Berkeley campus is viewed.”

He put his earbuds back in and clomped up Telegraph toward campus.