Normalizing violent protests

BloombergView.com

No serious violence broke out when conservative journalist Ben Shapiro gave a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, last week, said Megan McArdle. But the bad news is that Berkeley had to spend $600,000 to lock down much of the campus, fill it with police armed with pepper spray, and erect concrete barriers to keep the leftist “antifa” away from the event. Is this what it now takes “to maintain order in the face of...a speech?” Liberals who loathe President Trump fear that he will be “normalized,” but the deep rage and contempt this president has inspired has led to the normalization of lots of other bad things, including riots and the suppression of the right to speak and peacefully assemble. The radical Left believes that some people— ranging from white supremacists to ordinary Trump supporters to even mild, anti-Trump conservatives like Shapiro—“are too dangerous to have rights” and should be prevented from exercising their First Amendment rights, with fists and clubs and thrown bottles if necessary. So now we have to spend $600,000 to keep a rather ordinary speech from turning into a bloody riot. We cannot “become inured to how outrageous this is.” This is not normal, and it’s not American.