Milo Yiannopoulos speech at UC Berkeley canceled after campus protests

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/01/milo-yiannopoulos-speech-at-uc.html

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At least none of his supporters shot anyone this time.

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Isn’t that kind of like scheduling Beelzebub, Prince of Hell and Lord of the Flies to speak at Bob Jones University?

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I don’t understand how universities keep inviting him to speak. Never mind the argument that nazis have the right to free speech, the fact that he deliberately attacked a trans student at the U of Wisconsin to encourage harassment against her should be enough reason to refuse him a platform to potentially do it again.

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People are pretty scared about the apparent rise of fascism just now so it’s really easy to rile 'em up and scare up some publicity. Honestly, it’s like taking candy from a baby, I hardly even have to raise my voice any more. And so what if I contribute to a little fascism? People should listen to people like me. Especially me.

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College Republican Clubs do it. They’re the future of the party, but they only really know 4chan. This is the upshot of that.

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This probably bears repeating for the precious little snowflake:

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Isn’t it a crime to order a bunch of people to attack, harass, and intimidate a private citizen?

Why isn’t he serving time? Or at the very least tied up in lawsuits?

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We had to destroy the free speech to save it.

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The right of free speech ONLY means that the government can’t punish you.

It has nothing to do with people hating you for what you say, and people refusing to afford you the privilege of using their platforms and resources.

Just because you have a right to bear arms doesn’t mean you get a free gun, or that you are allowed into MY house with your gun.

Milo can have all the free speech he wants. He has no right to anyone else’s audience or microphone. And to argue that he shouldn’t be criticized on free speech grounds is the weakest argument ever. That’s like saying I can’t criticize the Catholic Church because freedom of religion. Or the KKK because of the right to free association. It’s fucking weak-sauce, and the only political party in the US that shows a strong interest in limiting free speech by using governmental power just had their president elected.

In short:

  1. Milo is a douchebag with disgusting ideology
  2. Milo is an insufferable whiny shitweasel who basically says people should listen to him and like what he says because it's legal for him to talk.
  3. He's a hypocrite who belongs to a movement currently at work to dismantle the greatest exerciser of free speech in the US: the press.

Edited as I developed my rant.

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Edited for accuracy.

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Maybe scheduling a racist fascist ideologue to speak on the first day of Black History Month in a building named for Dr. Martin Luther King wasn’t the smartest idea. Those College Republicans, always up to their antics LUL

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So this awful man, this is his business model pretty much.

You know who might not like having every public meeting they have protested? His now non-anonymous college republican club supporters.

Every member of the college republicans at these universities are now public financial supporters of this professional troll.

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It’s student groups who do it. And honestly? Folks, I follow sites like Breitbart just to know how these assclowns think (or rather, don’t.) If you find out that Milo is speaking at your school, or Ben Shapiro, or whoever, the best thing you can do is nothing. The absolute worst thing you can do is hold a protest that they can construe as being violent.

Yes, really.

Because a violent protest is exactly their intent.

Or, if it’s a state university, being disinvited is what they want. Why? Because they claim it’s a Constitutional violation. And then they use it as a reason to write op-eds about the regressive left suppressing free speech.

And then there are those times that the school will say, all right, fine, you can come, as long as you pay for security. Then the lawyers come out. Why? Because the SCOTUS found that requiring a public speaker to pay for security is a Constitutional violation.

So yeah, if you can keep yourselves from it, just let it happen, and find a way to characterize your campus Republicans as a bunch of whackadoodles. Which, by and large, they are.

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Could you cite a case? Why would a very unpopular speaker on a private campus be entitled to whatever extra security is necessary because of their presence for free? I’m honestly curious here.

That’s not the same. If you go to Breitbart, that’s you making a choice to visit on their own turf. If an abhorrent speaker is invited to campus, (by the way, they’ll be paid with the tuition fees that you’ll be likely paying back the loans for, for the rest of your life) why shouldn’t you peacefully protest?

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This is going to sound hella rude, but I’m about to head to bed so if I remember to do it tomorrow I will. As an example of how much of a trolley Milo is, he’s the one who cited a very real case where a KKK rally’s organizers were told they’d have to pay for security, and it was found that having to pay for security was a First Amendment violation.

There’s the real key, and the real problem. When the shooting happened recently, Breitbart went with the story that a Trump supporter was shot.

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Sounds like an interesting case. I’ll keep looking for it. That it was about the KKK is a lead.

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At UW the college republicans paid $7000 for security, according to a newspaper story in the school paper. They claim to have chosen this guy over another because he charges no speaking fee (again, business model).

Just guessing, i can see a judge ruling that you have to treat every speaker the same. So the requirement wouldn’t actually be ‘you must pay for security’ but ‘you must treat this group the same’. If a school doesn’t usually pay for security, or has some preset policy limit on what it will provide its probably fine.

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