And the point of all this was what exactly?
Milo Yiannopoulos billed his return to UC Berkeley on Sunday as a test of the willingness by the left-leaning “craziest campus in America” to let him deliver his right-wing views there, months after rioters shut down his first speech.
UC Berkeley let him have his say. But out in Sproul Plaza without a microphone, Yiannopoulos said little that anyone could hear, and nothing of substance.
So what was his highly promoted visit all about?
If Yiannopoulos’ idea was to bring attention to himself, he achieved his goal, said David Meyer, a professor of sociology and political science at UC Irvine who studies protest movements.
“He did well,” Meyer said, referring to the
hundreds who showed up at UC Berkeley to support him, protest, or just peer curiously at the spectacle. “If someone in Berkeley who would have otherwise been gardening or studying, or gone out grocery shopping, had their afternoon taken up by Milo’s whims, then Milo is winning.”
Yiannopoulos used his time in the public eye to pray, shoot selfies, sing the national anthem and sign autographs.
He originally advertised the event as Free Speech Week, from Sunday through Wednesday. It was to offer more than a dozen right-wing speakers. The line-up was to include standard-bearers of the right, including Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former White House adviser; author Ann Coulter, another right-wing provocateur; and David Horowitz, founder of a think tank devoted in part to anti-Muslim activities.
But the small, conservative student group that had invited them withdrew the invitation just one day before the extravaganza was to begin, as speaker after speaker dropped out or revealed that they had never even intended to come. The students also said they feared for their safety and had received messages threatening to attack them if the event went on.
Yiannopoulos said he was coming anyway.
The former news editor from the opinion site Breitbart News was a far-right rock star on Feb. 1, when he showed up at UC Berkeley to deliver an anti-immigration speech. Student Republican clubs across the country had invited him to their campuses for a postTrump-victory speaking tour. Yiannopoulos framed the appearances as a backlash against what he called coddled, politically correct leftists who dominated American universities. On campuses, he insulted women and black people, and targeted one transgender student by name in Milwaukee.
But soon after rioters prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking at UC Berkeley in February, the right wing also kicked him out of their realm when video clips surfaced in which he appeared to defend pedophilia. Yiannopoulos lost a book deal, his job at Breitbart, and an invitation to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Now, Meyer said, “He’s not selling anything but himself.”
If Yiannopoulos is intent on resurrecting his image and leading a new social movement — the rise of the political right on college campuses — what happened Sunday suggests “the support for his cause is just not there,” said Michael Heaney, a University of Michigan professor who studies the sociology of protest movements.
“Most of what you see in social movements is people trying to get attention and failing,” Heaney said. “What makes people like Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King so extraordinary is that they were able to mobilize people.
“Most people try and fail,” he said. “Milo Yiannopoulos is par for the course. He’s an activist who has failed to galvanize people for his cause and that makes him typical.”
He said Yiannopoulos has more in common with Abbie Hoffman, founder of the shortlived, 1960s-era street-theater group called the Yippies, than with King, Chavez, Parks — or Mario Savio, whose name today is a symbol of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
The Sproul Hall steps where Yiannopoulos stood Sunday are named for Savio, who spoke eloquently from those steps against a ban on students’ political activities imposed by the UC regents.
On Sunday, Yiannopoulos lamented, “I didn’t get to say much.”
During his brief appearance, about 150 people surrounded him in Sproul Plaza, and hundreds more never made it through the single metal detector set up at Shattuck and Telegraph avenues. For about 30 minutes, a Chronicle reporter watched police halt the line leading to a holding area where people were screened before walking through the metal detector. Only after Yiannopoulos concluded his 15-minute visit did police briefly allow the line to move again.
UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo Bennett said police never halted the line but only slowed it down.
Among those unable to get into the plaza were members of the Berkeley Patriot, the conservative students who invited Yiannopoulos in the first place.
Their withdrawn invitation cost Yiannopoulos the student sponsorship needed for him to be allowed to use sound amplification for his speech. He blamed the university for the loss of the sound system, and for the security that kept so many people out of Sproul.
“It was chaos, because that’s how it was designed to be by UC Berkeley and the police,” Yiannopoulos told The Chronicle. “I was denied any kind of amplified sound, so no one could hear anything I was saying.
“There were protesters screaming into my face,” he said. “It was absolutely impossible to proceed, and the entire audience was being held outside. Then I was told antifa was showing up and I was being evacuated. It was impossible to deliver the speeches we had planned.”
And yet, “UC Berkeley did permit him to speak,” Heaney said. “The fact that he did basically force Berkeley to allow him to speak, that is a positive development I would say.”
A public university, UC Berkeley can’t bar speakers from campus unless they threaten violence. Nor can the campus stop student groups from inviting whom they please, although different speakers require different levels of security.
UC Berkeley’s new chancellor, Carol Christ, said she considers free speech to be an exchange of ideas where people from opposing views can listen to and challenge each other.
On Sept. 10, she led a faculty panel on free speech to kick off what she has called the Year of Free Speech on campus.
But she told The Chronicle that in light of the four-day Free Speech Week originally planned, in which several speakers were expected to come and deliver hate speech unopposed, she will consider limiting the number of successive events that can be held at one time, setting aside a finite budget for security, and limiting events that would require exceeding it.
As for Yiannopoulos, he remains dissatisfied with the way things went.
“I’ll be back,” he promised. “We will keep showing up. See you back in Berkeley next year.”