These sick fucking libtards have gone way past temper tantrums, it's now turning into pure terrorism.
<section id="article-header" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Disgrace: Oregon Parade Canceled Due to Violent Threats By 'Anti-Fascists' Against Republican Participants
Guy Benson
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Posted: Apr 27, 2017 10:20 AM
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</aside>As we covered yesterday, Ann Coulter has been forced to cancel her planned speech at UC Berkeley after university officials -- who previously tried to shut it down over security concerns -- could not guarantee the safety of the speaker or her audience. Coulter challenged the school to provide an "appropriate room" for her lecture, but administrators said they could not comply with the request due to the security challenges. Sponsoring student groups started backing away from the event amid threats of violence, and then the author and polemicist pulled the plug, too:
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UPDATE: Conservative commentator Ann Coulter says she has canceled her speech planned for this week at UC Berkeley
11:41 AM - 26 Apr 2017
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Thus concludes a pathetic spectacle in which a torch-and-pitchforks mob successfully stamped out an event featuring someone with controversial and acerbic viewpoints. It's remarkable watching lefties on social media gloating over the cancellation (other liberals have been critical), mocking Coulter and the groups who invited her as cowardly "snowflakes" who can't take the heat. This is a perversion of truth. Conservative speakers and their supporters are standing down in the face of credible threats from bona fide fascistic silencers who are confronting and stifling speech they find objectionable with physical violence. Threatening or violating other people's literal safety in order to protect an emotional safe space is actual snowflakery, not the other way around. This is now the third time this has happened at Berkeley since February. If the university is incapable of safeguarding the rights of its students and guests, leaders in Washington should consider withholding federal funds from the school.
Succumbing to Heckler's Vetoes incentivizes further violence, threats and disruptions -- a lesson that local "anti-fascist" (a misnomer if there ever was one) radicals have learned quite well. This is not acceptable. But the trend of organized left-wing violence and mob action is spreading. Beyond the growing list of campus examples, DNC-linked activists deliberately fomented a riot in Chicago that led to the cancellation of a Trump rally over the summer, and Trump supporters have been beaten and assaulted at other campaign events. Just yesterday, a pack of leftists stormed the Heritage Foundation's headquarters in Washington, DC. And now there's this shameful development out of Oregon:
The annual 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade in East Portland has been canceled. The parade, which is the first sanctioned event of the Rose Festival season, was scheduled for Saturday, April 29. Organizers said the event was canceled "following threats of violence during the parade by multiple groups." The Multnomah County Republican Party (MCRP), whose members were going to march in the parade, said threats were made against their group. According to the Oregon GOP, organizers of the parade received an email saying that a group would take their own initiative to make sure the MCRP didn't march in the parade if organizers let them participate. “We will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out as we will not give one inch to groups who espouse hatred toward LGBT, immigrants, people of color or others,” the email reads in part. The email, which the Oregon GOP posted on its website, further reads, “You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely.” The sender of the email cites two organized Facebook events to show the seriousness of their demands. One of the Facebook events is associated with Direct Action Alliance, a group "organized in response to the rise of fascism in America."
These left-wing fascists then had the temerity to express disappointment that their own threats and thuggery caused organizers to call off the event altogether -- an annual community rose festival parade, I'll remind you, in which the local GOP chapter has participated for years. "We intended to stand between them and those who they wanted to intimidate. We intended to block out their hate and shut down their violence," a leftist militia leader said in a surreally Orwellian quote. They were going to "shut down" perceived hate, violence and intimidation through genuine hate, violence and intimidation -- but it's the Republicans' fault that parade organizers got spooked. In End of Discussion, we argued that the Left's bullying outrage SWAT teams are making America less free and fun. That is demonstrably true. Since the publication of the book, these ascendant goons, who seem to operate with impunity within liberal enclaves, are also literally making America less safe. Their disgraceful, un-American tactics must not stand. I'll leave you with a few of my efforts to swat down some weapons-grade false equivalence and stupidity related to the Berkeley outrage:</section>
A Road Map for Dealing With Campus Radicals
By Mona Charen
Published April 28, 2017
Jonathan Haidt is a member of one of America's smallest fraternities — those who attempt to see beyond their own prejudices. In the left-leaning Chronicle of Higher Education, he notes that "intimidation is the new normal" on college campuses. The examples are well-known: The shout-down/shutdown of Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna College; the riots sparked by Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley; the experience of Charles Murray at Middlebury College, where he and professor Allison Stanger were physically assaulted by a mob. Stanger was sent to the hospital with injuries. She said she feared for her life. Haidt writes:
"We are witnessing the emergence of a dangerous new norm for responding to speakers who challenge campus orthodoxy. Anyone offended by the speaker can put out a call on Facebook to bring together students and locals, including 'antifa' (antifascist) and black-bloc activists who explicitly endorse the use of violence against racists and fascists. Because of flagrant 'concept creep,' however, almost anyone who is politically right of center can be labeled a racist or a fascist, and the promiscuous use of such labels is now part of the standard operating procedure."
The only word I'd quarrel with is "new." America's campuses have been down this road — and worse — before.
At San Francisco State, it began with a fire in a dormitory. Hundreds of students awoke to a screaming alarm and rushed from their rooms in bathrobes as smoke and flames rose 30 feet from the roof. That no one was killed or injured was a miracle. The three-alarm fire left the social room of Merced Hall a smoking ruin. The year was 1967. The following year, the campus would be host (and I use that term advisedly) to the longest "student strike" in history. Dozens more fires were set, and radical students were able to shut down the entire campus for four months (there was even an attempted bombing). The college administration, in the face of law breaking, beatings and intimidation by radical students, backed off like cowards.
Dr. Thomas Sowell was a professor at Cornell University in 1969 when bands of armed black militant students forced visiting parents out of a campus building and then "occupied" it until their demands were met. Sowell wrote:
"The armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall was about reprimands — mere reprimands — received by some members of the Afro-American Society for previous disruptions and violence on campus. It was a demand for exemption from the authority of a duly constituted faculty-student disciplinary body that had dared to slap them on the wrist. Apparently existing de facto double standards were not enough, though such double standards were so well established that, when a parent, evicted from William Straight Hall by the students taking it over, phoned campus security, the first question he was asked was whether the students who had evicted him were white or black. When he said they were black, (he) 'was told that there was nothing that could be done.'"
At Columbia University, students took faculty members hostage, occupied the office of the university president (David Shapiro was photographed smoking a cigar in the president's chair) and took control of Hamilton Hall. Radicals shut down the entire campus and then battled the police, with one student permanently disabling a police officer by breaking his back when he leaped onto him from a second story window. And yet the administration and large numbers of faculty, rather than denounce the student thugs, praised and flattered them. University presidents from Yale (Kingman Brewster), Columbia (Grayson Kirk) and Cornell (James Perkins), among countless others, responded with pusillanimity to the radicals' absurd demands and tactics.
But not at San Francisco State. Two presidents in quick succession had resigned rather than confront the students who were disrupting campus and committing violent crimes. And then came a third. A seemingly unprepossessing professor of semantics named S. I. Hayakawa was appointed acting president. As the radicals were chanting, drum beating and refusing to disperse, he jumped up on one of the sound trucks and pulled the plug on their speakers.
Instantly, he became a national hero, a celebrity status he was able to parlay into a seat in the U.S. Senate from California.
Hayakawa had no trouble rejecting the cant and cowardice all around him. Asked why, being of Japanese extraction, he didn't side with minorities, he said he certainly did, but the radical activists did not speak for the majority of blacks or anyone else. They were media creations, he said, adding that TV news suffers from an excess of "show business values."
There's an opportunity awaiting someone, anyone, on today's campuses, too. Stand up to the social-justice warriors, tell the truth, and you may find yourself a household name.
By Mona Charen
Published April 28, 2017
Jonathan Haidt is a member of one of America's smallest fraternities — those who attempt to see beyond their own prejudices. In the left-leaning Chronicle of Higher Education, he notes that "intimidation is the new normal" on college campuses. The examples are well-known: The shout-down/shutdown of Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna College; the riots sparked by Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley; the experience of Charles Murray at Middlebury College, where he and professor Allison Stanger were physically assaulted by a mob. Stanger was sent to the hospital with injuries. She said she feared for her life. Haidt writes:
"We are witnessing the emergence of a dangerous new norm for responding to speakers who challenge campus orthodoxy. Anyone offended by the speaker can put out a call on Facebook to bring together students and locals, including 'antifa' (antifascist) and black-bloc activists who explicitly endorse the use of violence against racists and fascists. Because of flagrant 'concept creep,' however, almost anyone who is politically right of center can be labeled a racist or a fascist, and the promiscuous use of such labels is now part of the standard operating procedure."
The only word I'd quarrel with is "new." America's campuses have been down this road — and worse — before.
At San Francisco State, it began with a fire in a dormitory. Hundreds of students awoke to a screaming alarm and rushed from their rooms in bathrobes as smoke and flames rose 30 feet from the roof. That no one was killed or injured was a miracle. The three-alarm fire left the social room of Merced Hall a smoking ruin. The year was 1967. The following year, the campus would be host (and I use that term advisedly) to the longest "student strike" in history. Dozens more fires were set, and radical students were able to shut down the entire campus for four months (there was even an attempted bombing). The college administration, in the face of law breaking, beatings and intimidation by radical students, backed off like cowards.
Dr. Thomas Sowell was a professor at Cornell University in 1969 when bands of armed black militant students forced visiting parents out of a campus building and then "occupied" it until their demands were met. Sowell wrote:
"The armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall was about reprimands — mere reprimands — received by some members of the Afro-American Society for previous disruptions and violence on campus. It was a demand for exemption from the authority of a duly constituted faculty-student disciplinary body that had dared to slap them on the wrist. Apparently existing de facto double standards were not enough, though such double standards were so well established that, when a parent, evicted from William Straight Hall by the students taking it over, phoned campus security, the first question he was asked was whether the students who had evicted him were white or black. When he said they were black, (he) 'was told that there was nothing that could be done.'"
At Columbia University, students took faculty members hostage, occupied the office of the university president (David Shapiro was photographed smoking a cigar in the president's chair) and took control of Hamilton Hall. Radicals shut down the entire campus and then battled the police, with one student permanently disabling a police officer by breaking his back when he leaped onto him from a second story window. And yet the administration and large numbers of faculty, rather than denounce the student thugs, praised and flattered them. University presidents from Yale (Kingman Brewster), Columbia (Grayson Kirk) and Cornell (James Perkins), among countless others, responded with pusillanimity to the radicals' absurd demands and tactics.
But not at San Francisco State. Two presidents in quick succession had resigned rather than confront the students who were disrupting campus and committing violent crimes. And then came a third. A seemingly unprepossessing professor of semantics named S. I. Hayakawa was appointed acting president. As the radicals were chanting, drum beating and refusing to disperse, he jumped up on one of the sound trucks and pulled the plug on their speakers.
Instantly, he became a national hero, a celebrity status he was able to parlay into a seat in the U.S. Senate from California.
Hayakawa had no trouble rejecting the cant and cowardice all around him. Asked why, being of Japanese extraction, he didn't side with minorities, he said he certainly did, but the radical activists did not speak for the majority of blacks or anyone else. They were media creations, he said, adding that TV news suffers from an excess of "show business values."
There's an opportunity awaiting someone, anyone, on today's campuses, too. Stand up to the social-justice warriors, tell the truth, and you may find yourself a household name.
Berkeley didn't birth 'free speech' but seems intent to bury it
By Jonah Goldberg
April 28, 2017
Demosthenes, the Athenian rhetorician and champion of liberty, pointed out around 355 B.C. that residents of Athens were free to praise Sparta's regime, but Spartans were banned from praising Athens.
In 1689, the British passed a law guaranteeing freedom of speech in Parliament. A century later, French revolutionaries incorporated into law the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which established free speech as a universal right. Two years later, the Americans ratified the First Amendment, which guarantees that the state shall not infringe on the right to free speech. Roughly a century and half later, in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression...."
I mention all of this because every time I read or hear about the pathetic state of affairs at the University of California, Berkeley -- where conservative speakers and rabble-rousers alike are banned from speaking lest they be assaulted by a mob -- journalists and other commentators insist on pointing out the irony that this is all happening "where the Free Speech Movement was born."
Yes, I know there was a thing called the Free Speech Movement. And, yes, its members and leaders talked a good deal about free speech.
But the movement for free speech is thousands of years old and runs like a deep river across the landscape of Western Civilization.
Indeed, I can't help but get the impression that a lot of people don't realize that the Free Speech Movement in this context is a brand name. I can tell you that the "mockumentary" band Spinal Tap was born in a 1979 TV skit for ABC. But that is not the same thing as saying the medical procedure -- aka the lumbar puncture -- was born in the same skit.
Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, was committed to free speech. But so was Berkeley at the time. In the years before Savio's movement, Berkeley had hosted speeches by Communists, Nazis (invited by leftists to cause a stir), and political and literary speakers of every stripe.
Whatever perfunctory regulations of free speech existed, then-Berkeley professor Nathan Glazer explained in his 1965 Commentary essay "What Happened at Berkeley," went "back to a time when no political activity of any kind was allowed on campus." Even presidential candidates were barred from politicking because, "as a state university it was not supposed to be involved in politics." But by 1964, these rules had already been loosened a great deal.
As for Savio, his mission was broader than merely wanting to allow vigorous debate. He wanted students to be able to participate as much as possible with the civil rights movement, which, obviously, was a very political movement. He was on the right side of that argument.
But Savio was also a passionate leftist. (When he got married to his fellow FSMer Suzanne Goldberg, The Daily Worker's Mike Gold asked him what they wanted for a wedding present. "All that we really want is for President Johnson to withdraw all our troops from Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Very little would make us happier.")
Savio had a romantic hatred -- in the tradition of Rousseau -- for liberal democratic capitalism. His most famous statement came in his speech at Sproul Hall in 1964:
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
Whatever legacy Savio has for the cause of free speech is dead, but this mindset lives on. The rioters and goons -- along with their pusillanimous enablers in the administration -- are carrying on this tradition. It is a tradition that says this is our sacred place and anyone not loyal to our faith must be resisted, rejected and renounced. All the talk of "hate speech" is clever marketing -- like the label the "Free Speech Movement" itself.
What these petty, secular theocrats despise is heresy speech. And they will throw their bodies into the gears to silence it.
By Jonah Goldberg
April 28, 2017
Demosthenes, the Athenian rhetorician and champion of liberty, pointed out around 355 B.C. that residents of Athens were free to praise Sparta's regime, but Spartans were banned from praising Athens.
In 1689, the British passed a law guaranteeing freedom of speech in Parliament. A century later, French revolutionaries incorporated into law the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which established free speech as a universal right. Two years later, the Americans ratified the First Amendment, which guarantees that the state shall not infringe on the right to free speech. Roughly a century and half later, in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which says, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression...."
I mention all of this because every time I read or hear about the pathetic state of affairs at the University of California, Berkeley -- where conservative speakers and rabble-rousers alike are banned from speaking lest they be assaulted by a mob -- journalists and other commentators insist on pointing out the irony that this is all happening "where the Free Speech Movement was born."
Yes, I know there was a thing called the Free Speech Movement. And, yes, its members and leaders talked a good deal about free speech.
But the movement for free speech is thousands of years old and runs like a deep river across the landscape of Western Civilization.
Indeed, I can't help but get the impression that a lot of people don't realize that the Free Speech Movement in this context is a brand name. I can tell you that the "mockumentary" band Spinal Tap was born in a 1979 TV skit for ABC. But that is not the same thing as saying the medical procedure -- aka the lumbar puncture -- was born in the same skit.
Mario Savio, the leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, was committed to free speech. But so was Berkeley at the time. In the years before Savio's movement, Berkeley had hosted speeches by Communists, Nazis (invited by leftists to cause a stir), and political and literary speakers of every stripe.
Whatever perfunctory regulations of free speech existed, then-Berkeley professor Nathan Glazer explained in his 1965 Commentary essay "What Happened at Berkeley," went "back to a time when no political activity of any kind was allowed on campus." Even presidential candidates were barred from politicking because, "as a state university it was not supposed to be involved in politics." But by 1964, these rules had already been loosened a great deal.
As for Savio, his mission was broader than merely wanting to allow vigorous debate. He wanted students to be able to participate as much as possible with the civil rights movement, which, obviously, was a very political movement. He was on the right side of that argument.
But Savio was also a passionate leftist. (When he got married to his fellow FSMer Suzanne Goldberg, The Daily Worker's Mike Gold asked him what they wanted for a wedding present. "All that we really want is for President Johnson to withdraw all our troops from Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. Very little would make us happier.")
Savio had a romantic hatred -- in the tradition of Rousseau -- for liberal democratic capitalism. His most famous statement came in his speech at Sproul Hall in 1964:
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
Whatever legacy Savio has for the cause of free speech is dead, but this mindset lives on. The rioters and goons -- along with their pusillanimous enablers in the administration -- are carrying on this tradition. It is a tradition that says this is our sacred place and anyone not loyal to our faith must be resisted, rejected and renounced. All the talk of "hate speech" is clever marketing -- like the label the "Free Speech Movement" itself.
What these petty, secular theocrats despise is heresy speech. And they will throw their bodies into the gears to silence it.
I found the lawsuit quite telling. Typical Liberals with their double standards and hypocrisy. It's rather long, but if you just listen to the first 6 minutes, you'll get the idea. The gist being that Free Speech is only important if it spouts a Liberal viewpoint. Otherwise, not so much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJJZrx1OmyU&feature=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJJZrx1OmyU&feature=youtu.be
