I was punched over politics at Berkeley

Where’s the tolerance for conservative speech?

While recruiting conservative students at the University of California-Berkeley on Feb. 19, I was assaulted by a violent leftist. The event was caught on video. About a week later, I shook hands with President Donald Trump and addressed an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference about the importance of protecting free speech on our college campuses.

As a field representative for the Leadership Institute, I travel throughout California helping conservative college clubs recruit and train new members. I’ve seen the intolerance toward conservatives with my own eyes.

Conservative students across the country have suffered verbal and physical assault, social ostracism and even academic persecution for voicing their political opinions. This is because young liberals believe they are on the morally righteous side in a culture war and, in order to win, they must silence any dissent. They aspire to make it impossible to be a conservative in public.

America is well on its way to achieving this goal, based on the Covington Catholic High School incident. Wearing a red hat was enough for news organizations to label the act a provocation, and commentators worked aggressively to “dox” the students. By contrast, there wasn’t a similar rush to expose the identity of the man who was caught on video assaulting me.

Increasingly, leftists believe they are justified responding to ideas disagreeable to them with open hostility and even force. Students are commonly told that ideas they find offensive or disagree with are literally violent and can be responded to with physical force, as if they were being threatened.

My attacker was provoked by our sign that read “Hate Crime Hoaxes Hurt Real Victims,” a reference to Jussie Smollett, who was charged with filing a false police report about an apparently fictitious hate crime. My attacker said we were promoting violence, which, in his view, gave him permission to use any means necessary to shut us down. Ironically, the sign was intended to warn of the danger of jumping to judgment in an effort to confirm a narrative that our feelings tell us is true.

The search for truth is certainly relevant on campuses of higher education, where students are supposed to grow personally and intellectually by exchanging ideas. Growth cannot happen when speech is restricted — that’s not only a disservice to students but also a threat to our republic.

The Berkeley administration in particular has allowed a culture of intolerance and violence toward conservatives to grow. The College Republicans club has had its property vandalized, and critics have called for the members to be lynched. When Milo Yiannopoulos visited in February 2017, the campus became the site of violent riots. Some people even threw Molotov cocktails and fireworks, injuring students and causing $100,000 worth of damage. Berkeley police canceled the speech after “an apparently organized violent attack“forced them to evacuate Yiannopoulos for his own protection.

After I was assaulted, a university employee tweeted, “The MAGA people on UC Berkeley campus yesterday got punched in the face ... this makes me feel emotionally so much better.” And, since the arrest of the man who assaulted me, we learned he was once a student and employee of Berkeley.

Progress depends on the freedom of the human person to develop ideas and voice them. And we’re all better when this intellectual growth happens. The battle to protect free speech is one of the most important culture battles facing our nation today. The students fighting for their right to free speech don’t do it for recognition; they do it because they realize how imperative this right is and are willing to defend it.

Trump’s forthcoming executive action requiring colleges to protect free speech in order to receive federal funds shows that he agrees. I’m proud of our president and, as I head back out in the field, I draw strength in knowing that we have his support and the support of conservative students who continue to stand up for their political beliefs.