“I have been punched. I have been spit on. I have had my personal information posted online,” Naweed Tahmas, a Berkeley College Republican who helped invite Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus, told the media. He says that since the riots another student yelled in his face, accusing him of exercising “white privilege.”

Tahmas is actually a Persian-American, not a European-American, but that hardly matters for the purposes of racist shaming of conservatives.

Tahmas said that the Oakland police have received a death threat against the president of Berkeley College Republicans, warning “You can protect Milo, but you can’t protect [name of College Republican].”

Milo Yiannopoulis, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is a performance artist and a provocateur who’s become a folk hero to campus conservatives with his fearless (and incredibly vulgar) “Dangerous F****t” tour. What Milo says is sometimes repulsive, but it is protected by the Constitution. If only the authorities would enforce it.

In two of Milo’s recent appearances at taxpayer-supported public universities, violence broke out. The story in Seattle at the University of Washington has been weirdly underreported in national media. At a rally against Milo, a protester was shot. The student (or former student: it’s still not clear) who shot him turned himself into the police, yet has not been charged, strongly suggesting police have evidence that he was defending himself from physical attack by an anti-Milo, anti-Trump protester.

At Berkeley, home of the Free Speech movement in America, Milo’s appearance was cancelled when a riot broke out among the protesters. This was not just a case of feelings getting out of hand though: It was yet another appearance of “Black Bloc” protesting, a new technique encouraged by the socialist Left.

Masked, Hooded Democrats with a Racialist Agenda

As Inside Higher Education reported, amid 1000 or so peaceful demonstrators some 150

did come to start fires, break windows and hurl rocks at police officers. … They wore black and concealed their faces with masks. They brought — and used — bats, metal rods, fireworks and Molotov cocktails to get their message across. In the process they undermined “the First Amendment rights of the speaker as well as those who came to lawfully assemble and protest his presence,” said a spokesperson for Berkeley.

Yet afterwards the college newspaper published at least five commentaries from Berkeley students and alums condoning the violence on the grounds that letting Milo speak is an act of violence. “Violence helped ensure safety of students,” an essay by one Berkeley student was headlined.

Yvette Felarca, a public middle school teacher, defended the Berkeley violence both to the LA Times and on Fox News:

“It wasn’t just people dressed in black who were acting militantly and everyone else is peace-loving Berkeley hippies,” said Yvette Felarca, a political organizer of By Any Means Necessary, an immigration and affirmative action coalition that seeks to build a mass militant movement,” reports the LA Times. “Everyone cheered when those barricades were dismantled. … Everyone was there with us in political agreement of the necessity of shutting it down, whatever it was going to take. It shows we have the power.”

Jake Shields, a World Series of Fighting welterweight, was not so enthusiastic. Emerging from a nearby restaurant where he says he watched a group of black masked men chasing a lone citizen while police stood by and did nothing. “That’s when I had to intervene, because no one is helping the guy, including the police,” Shields said. “Dude, you guys have your faces covered, you’re attacking people, you’re being f***ing fascists,” Shields told one of the masked assailants.

Violent men in masks with a racialist agenda, who are defended by the powerful, while police stand by and refuse to defend the innocent … America has been down this ugly road before. I’ll go ahead and say it: The “Black Bloc” seems to have learned from the horrifying success of the Ku Klux Klan, which for decades silenced dissent in a dozen American states.

Fascism in Canada

Things are even worse in Canada. Law enforcement there is close to declaring open season on intellectual and political dissent. Conservative students organized a panel at the University of Toronto to discuss threats to free speech on a wide range of issues, ranging from politics to climate change. The event was disrupted by thuggish protestors with profane chants, threats and false fire alarms. As the campus newspaper reports:

According to the event organizer, what [protestors] tried to do was called “no-platforming”, which is “an anti-high-fascist tactic, aimed at, if someone is trying to spread hate speech or fascism or violent rhetoric, […] you deny them the platform to actually express those views,” said the protest organizer, who further explained that the protesters joined outside the conference room when Levant started his speech.

The chants included “F*** white supremacy,” “F*** Climate Change Denial,” as well as chants against Trump and a “fascist USA.”

One of the invited speakers silenced by the protestors was publisher Ezra Levant. He responded:

“None of those words apply to me — I’m not American, and I’m not a fascist,” wrote Levant… in reference to the chants. “But the people dressed in black, wearing handkerchiefs over their mouths, carrying sticks, flipping over tables, and threatening a peaceful meeting on campus — those are actually fascists by definition.”

Levant says the Stormtroopers called his reporter Jay Fayza (who is black) a “white supremacist.” The Canadian Broadcast Company then ran a whole segment calling his media company, The Rebel, hateful and racist. Nora Loreto, a journalism union boss (yes they have journalism unions in Canada) tweeted out, “I’m getting closer and closer to publicly advocating camera smashing when people see The Rebel goons out and about.”

Levant, who left the mainstream media to found his own company, says he must now hire bodyguards for his reporters: “I know, it’s insane. This is Canada, not Russia or Venezuela. But that’s what life is like under Justine Trudeau and Rachel Notley and Kathleen Wynne,” he said. He called the protestors “anti-Semitic cowards don’t want to go on the record as Jew-bashing, gay-bashing racists. They’re ashamed of themselves. Same reason they wear masks at their riots.”

The Nation Praises Thuggish Attacks While Cops Cower

Meanwhile back the U.S., the mainstreaming of violence by the Left continues apace. On January 22, The Nation published a piece praising Black Bloc violence: “The transcendental experience of watching Roger Federer play tennis, David Foster Wallace wrote, was one of ‘kinetic beauty’… what Foster Wallace saw in a Federer Moment, I see in a video of a neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face.”

Here is for me the most disturbing news from Berkeley: With a violent masked mob of 100 to 150 people creating as much as $600,000 in property damage, just one person was arrested. This was no accident. This was a deliberate police policy: “At Berkeley, the police officers felt that trying to get in the middle of the crowd would’ve sparked more violence and resulted in more severe injuries. They chose not to try to arrest the black bloc protesters, because they felt it would have compromised the safety of their students,” Inside Higher Education reported.

Other college law enforcement officials praised that approach: “It always could be worse,” University of Maryland College Park Police chief Mitchell said. “The property damage was disappointing and absolutely unlawful, but that certainly could’ve been worse as well. I applaud the way they handled the incident.”

I, on the other hand, applaud the way the NYPD handled Black Bloc protesters who tried to violently disrupt an NYU speech by libertarian Gavin McInnes the day after the Berkeley riots. Cops immediately moved in and arrested 11 people.

The Berkeley violence is clearly not a one-off — they are part of an increasingly organized and highly privileged Left’s plan to silence conservative dissent where it is most vulnerable: on college campuses.

Organized mobs are throwing firebombs to disrupt speech, destroy property, and endanger bystanders. When the authorities refuse to stop them they endanger us all. (For more from the author of “Will College Campuses Give Rioters a License to Firebomb?” please click HERE)

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After the election of Donald Trump as president, a professor at Orange Coast College in California, Olga Perez Stable Cox, went into an extended hate rant against the president-elect. Among other things, she described Trump’s election as an “act of terrorism,” labeled him a white supremacist and called Vice President-elect Mike Pence “one of the most anti-gay humans in this country.”

And this wasn’t even a political science class in which one might expect political talk, no matter how irresponsible. Cox is a professor of human sexuality.

When a student who recorded the diatribe posted the recording on social media, the professor’s union, the Coast Federation of Educators, AFT local chapter 1911, said on Facebook: “This is an illegal recording without the permission of the instructor. The student will be identified and may be facing legal action.”

According to the union, the recording “violated the professor’s course syllabus, the Coast Community College District Code of Student Conduct, and the California Educational Code (sic), section 78907, which (exists) to provide a robust, learning environment for all students irrespective of their opinions.”

The aforementioned California Education Code section states, “The use by any person, including a student, of any electronic listening or recording device in any classroom without the prior consent of the instructor is prohibited.”

The American Association of University Professors has long opposed unauthorized recording and public posting of what professors say in classrooms.

As it happens, I taught for two years at Brooklyn College. I recall students asking me whether they could record my lectures. And I remember thinking, “Why on Earth would I say no?”

I wanted whatever I said in a classroom to be heard by more than 50 people. “Who wouldn’t?” I wondered.

Here, then, is my theory as to why most professors who object to their class lectures being recorded do so: They fear having what they say exposed to the general public.

Our colleges and universities (and an increasing number of high schools and elementary schools) have been transformed from educational institutions into indoctrination institutions. With the left-wing takeover of universities, their primary aim has become graduating as many leftists as possible.

The vast majority of our colleges have become left-wing seminaries. Just as Christian seminaries exist to produce committed Christians, Western universities exist to produce committed leftists. Aside from the Christian-leftism difference, universities differ in only one respect from Christian seminaries: Christian seminaries admit their goal, whereas the universities deceive the public about theirs.

Thus, in the “social sciences” — disciplines outside the natural sciences and math — a large number of college teachers inject their politics into their classrooms. And if they are recorded, the general public will become aware of just how politicized their classroom lectures are.

But there is another reason.

Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights.

Students therefore need to understand that when professors object to being recorded, it is a statement of contempt for them. The professors are, in effect, saying to their students: “Listen. I can get away with this intellectually shallow, emotion-based propaganda when you are the only people who actually hear it. You aren’t wise enough to perceive it as such. But if people over 21 years of age hear it, I’m toast.”

All rules governing the recording of conversations without permission should apply to a professor meeting privately with a student.

But when professors stand in front of a class, they are in the public domain. Moreover, the public pays at least part of these professors’ salary at virtually every university. We therefore have a right, and even a duty, to know what professors say publicly in classrooms.

In fact, I would encourage every student who cares about truth and intellectual honesty to record what their professors say in class. I would also encourage every parent to find out for what they are paying. And I would encourage professors to record themselves in order to protect themselves against doctored material.

Any professor who is not ashamed of what he or she is saying in class should welcome being recorded.

And any student taking a class with a professor who objects to being recorded should know that this objection is almost always equivalent to the professor saying: “I want you to hear what I say in class because I’m quite confident that you can’t differentiate between instruction and indoctrination. But if what I say goes public, people who do know the difference will expose me as a propagandist.” (For more from the author of “Why Professors Object to Being Recorded” please click HERE)

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