The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced this week that it is investigating the University of California, Berkeley, over the security arrangements for the Turning Point USA (TPUSA) event. Antifa and others threatened many entering or leaving the event, including reportedly blocking hundreds from the sold-out event to celebrate free speech and the legacy of murdered Charlie Kirk.
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon shared a letter to UC Berkeley Police Chief Yogananda Pittman, instructing her to “preserve all records” in her possession that are “relevant to the agency’s preparation, execution, and response to the Turning Point event.”
In my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how universities have used security issues to cancel conservative speakers as well as a lack of protection by both universities and cities. The result is that Antifa and other groups can easily disrupt events. The long-standing concern is that some university and municipal departments have been passive-aggressive in facilitating this “heckler’s veto” of speakers.
In the book, I call for the federal government to prioritize the protection of free speech events in the same manner as it has protected other rights, including civil rights. There should be a priority in protecting what John Stuart Mill called these “circles” where ideas are shared and debated.
The university fielded a sizable security force for this event and I am not making any assumptions about a lack of efforts by the university. However, there are allegations that the security allowed violent protesters to be in close proximity to people entering or leaving the event. The result is that many were threatened, spat on, and shoved by protesters. Many could not make it into the event.
The contrast was striking. These protesters were screaming threats and spitting on people who wanted to attend an event supporting free speech. It was intolerable for these protesters that opposing views could be expressed or heard on campus.
There were signature elements of Antifa at the event with black-clad extremists fueling violence and threatening anyone who wanted to hear the speakers.
Without prejudging the outcome of the investigation, the notice to Berkeley serves a valuable purpose in warning universities that their actions will be scrutinized in such controversies. Too often, universities allow hecklers to disrupt events, as when Stanford law students stopped Judge Kyle Duncan from speaking at the law school.
The TPUSA event was long planned, as were the protests. This was not some flash mob but an organized effort to try to cancel the free speech event. The preparations by the university do not appear to have been sufficient, but that does not mean that it was evidence of premeditated or passive-aggressive conduct. However, the review of the preparations is an important warning that, for the first time, universities will face inquiries over such breaches or failures in protecting First Amendment activities.
$250 million moving to scalpers. What a crushing blow to the Trump administration. I would also offer Mr Turley that the Tbill interest rates are the lowest in the land. Great article.
If we believe “Freedom of Speech” exists in America today, we may as well make the same statement made by Germans after WWII — “We were deceived” when the truth emerges.
The horror of the protesters who attacked and attempted to shut down freedom of speech through physical attacks and terror is hard to understand or accept – but is totally acceptable in these environments – just as we saw with the Brown Shirts of the German Republic prior to WWII.
1. The Main Stream Media showed and even identified the victim with a bloodied face as the cause of his attack when (after 2 days of letting that story and picture run) the last line of article/statement was only be corrected by a statement implying the police SHOULD HAVE arrested, tortured, and destroyed the victim of that crime with the bloodied face.
2. This “protection” of freedom of speech was headed by Yogananda Pittman – who has a past history of a series of omissions and miscommunications and keeping that information from reaching front-line officers as identified and reported by the bipartisan Senate investigation relative to the Jan 6 protests. We should expect those who have served by promoting hatred and bigotry will be given financially rewarding positions when dismissed for past performance of same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogananda_Pittman
3. Attacking and assaulting those who “deserve it” by today’s Brown Shirts in America as we saw in this New York incident, will be reduced to a misdemeanor, then dismissed when the statue of limitation expires by those inspired and encouraged by District Attorney Bragg. https://www.foxnews.com/us/da-braggs-office-drops-case-against-woman-who-allegedly-sucker-punched-pro-life-activist
4. Those who perform these actions will be protected through the withholding of information, perjuring of evidence, and outright attacks of their “political enemies” as seen in the attacks against conservatives (included a SCOTUS justice or her staff in doxing conservative justices.
Yet we know those who use hatred, bigotry, physical violence and fear in their attacks against those they classify as individuals or in categories as those who deserve hatred and violence will be “justified” through propaganda deluged with falsehoods, gossip, and interpretation over citation. And thus those who commit it will not be accountable for the violence from their anger.
To paraphrase Katie Couric’s interview with Sen. Fetterman, “why are you defending him, we hate him and he deserved to die”. “This washed up idiot @katiecouric is an absolute ghoul,” Steven Cheung tweeted. “She tries to justify the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk. Disgusting people like Katie should be shamed and embarrassed forever.”
“This was not some flash mob but an organized effort to try to cancel the free speech event. ”
It was an effort to have the free speech event move somewhere else. It wasn’t to cancel it.
There were two reasons Kirk was there. The first is that the venue was free. He could have rented any number of theaters or meeting halls and invited people there, but what he had to say may not have been sufficiently compelling to get his followers to make even a short trip and he didn’t want to pay for an empty hall. The second is that he isn’t interested in free speech to the extent that he has some point to make or some position to take, but in public manipulation of gullible students. He could have said all he wanted for free in any public park, but
Call it what it is: the protection of making intentional misrepresentations for hire. An advertising campaign to lure the gullible as minions for the billionaires paying Charlie Kirk for the service.
“There were two reasons Kirk was there.”
And one gruesomely tragic reason he wasn’t there.
That comment is the most disgusting example of a fact-free smear I’ve ever seen.
Clearly you didn’t watch Trump claim the 2020 election was stolen and that the voting was rigged. That same claim cost Fox News nearly $1 Billion in the first civil suit on the matter; I haven’t heard about the outcome of the second, similarly sized suit. There were nearly 70 suits brought on behalf of Trump or by Trump that all failed.
Anyway, Kirk was paid $80 Million a year by a group of billionaires who could easily have paid for national network TV programming, but that would not have accomplished what they wanted, which was to gather suckers to the cause.
No, but I read how the Congressional Black Caucus — including the sainted John Lewis — voted to overturn the 2004 election, citing unproven claims of election irregularities such as computer voting machines that rang up votes for the wrong candidates. No voting machine maker ever sued them for even millions of dollars.
A national student organization should be barred from campuses?
How were the Antifa mobsters affiliated with UCB?
Charlie Kirk bragged that he had been to the White House “100 times”. And it’s widely known that Kirk was an informal advisor to Trump. One could say that Kirk was a ‘Trump enabler’. The students of Berkeley know that. They know that Donald Trump has made numerous attempts to silence media critics. They know Turning Point USA is totally tied to anti-abortion forces that want to limit the free speech of medical professionals. Therefore, to say these Berkeley protestors were ‘opposed to free speech’ is just a stupid lie!
Trump gets big mad when someone else presents alternative facts and tries to shut down the major media outlets.
And when 150 Black bloc clad Antifa thugs showed up at UCB in Feb 2017 to keep Milo Y. from speaking — during “Free Speech Week, no less — what excuses can you make for them?
Another dem-o-rat who love illegals more than Americans
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) accused a Senate staffer in Democratic Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s office of impersonating an attorney in an effort to spring a repeatedly deported illegal immigrant from federal custody.
DHS officials say the aide inserted himself into an active immigration case involving Jose Ismeal Ayuzo Sandoval, a 40-year-old Mexican national who has been removed from the United States four times and has a prior DUI conviction, according to a letter that Fox News obtained Wednesday. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Todd Lyons detailed the incident in a letter to Duckworth, saying that the staffer’s behavior crossed a line that
Now this is something the government needs to fix. After biden messed it up.
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Broken System: 500K People Get SNAP Benefits Twice, Plus 5K Dead People Are Still Getting SNAP
There are 40+ Million SNAP recipients, making that 98.75% accuracy rate. Faux Noose reporting that has a far higher error rate- it cost them a nearly $1 Billion judgement for not only being wrong on the election, but insisting on being wrong, knowing that there was no evidence to support their claims.
Out of 40+ Million people between 1000 and 2000 die every day. So 5000 dead getting benefits represents a 3-5 day delay in getting the death certificate and notification by relatives.
What about the people getting it twice under the same name. Also the numbers are worse, as California and New York did not report
Trump the first pedo president
Yawn Try harder, You poor dems
The TDS runs strong in this one ⬆️⬆️⬆️
Trump Deranges Syndrome – where Trump supporters ignore how terrible a human being he is and how ineffective he is at doing the job, any job, that doesn’t involve stealing from others to enrich himself. By the way, he’s funneled $20 Million or so to his own businesses just by dragging the security team to Mar-a-Lago and making them pay premium prices for a flea-bag hotel.
No, I think it was Hair-sniffer Joe, who famously showered with his daughter, and whose obsession with the sexuality of Senators’ pubescent daughters is well-documented on C-SPAN.
If this were the 1920s, one of the victims of President Trump’s strikes on Caribbean-East Coast “drug boats” might have been the rum-runner, Joe Kennedy.
And that is relevant to the post how?
*. The “protests” at Berkeley were quite violent.
OT
Anything written by Bill Shipley is worth reading. Shipley has 22+ years as a federal prosecutor; eight years private practice; represented many defendants of J6 capitol riots accused by Biden’s DOJ
The Speed At Which Federal Judges Are Waging Lawfare To Stop The Trump Administration is Jaw-Dropping.
Nearly all the civil lawfare cases being brought by partisan interest groups seeking to block policy changes being adopted by the Trump Administration include efforts by the plaintiffs to secure immediate judicial intervention based almost entirely on the plaintiffs’ characterization of facts. With only a few exceptions, where the law did not give them a choice, the plaintiffs are using exclusively “friendly” judicial districts where nearly all – or in a couple of instances actually all — of the Judges are appointees of Pres. Obama or Pres. Biden. These liberal-progressive district judges are rushing to enter TROs that block the policy changes and thereby thrust the disputes into the appellate system at the earliest possible moment – and THEN the same judges begin the process of developing the actual facts while the appeals process grinds on. Missing from pretty much every case that I have followed is any effort to explore early settlement discussions, or an interim agreement that both sides can live with while they develop their cases.
In federal civil litigation I’ve been involved in over the years, the District Judge will often direct the parties to a Magistrate for early settlement conferences to see if any kind of accommodation can be reached that avoids a TRO or Injunction pending trial. This takes pressure off the District Judge with an entire docket full of cases that have been pending long before the politically charged case arrived. Each federal judge also had dozens – maybe a hundred or more – criminal cases that have much shorter timelines due to constitutional requirements as well.
Yet over and over again we see these liberal-progressive judges stop the globe from spinning while they devote tremendous time and resources to these partisan pollical lawfare cases designed to disrupt the Trump Administration. Here are four examples – among dozens – that typify this problem.
https://shipwreckedcrew.substack.com/p/the-speed-at-which-federal-judges
Estovir says Anything written by Bill Shipley is worth reading. Shipley has 22+ years as a federal prosecutor; eight years private practice;
I will second that. And the subscription fee to get inside the paywall is well worth the price. It isn’t free as Professor Turley’s blog here is – but Shipley, as a fellow member of the same Washington DC bar association as Professor Turley, doesn’t attempt to save their criminal Democrat fellow members of their bar association through faint criticism to provide cover for what they’ve been doing.
The abuses and felonies committed during their Arctic Frost “investigation” as one example. That came up in the news again yesterday, and Professor Turley hasn’t found it necessary to cover with one of his blog posts here.
Funny how that doesn’t work….
I like ship and have been following him for years now, but he is actually wrong on this issue the TROs issued are fully briefed on both sides before they’re issued, so it’s not as he is claiming, that only one side is giving/presenting the facts…