People have a right to defend themselves. Right? Especially against rape and murder.
“This is not about free speech,” Yvette Felarca yelled to the crowd at the University of California-Berkeley, gathered weeks ago to “shut down” a scheduled speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, the controversial Breitbart editor.
Felarca, a national organizer for By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)*, the militant group with the incendiary name, argued that Milo wasn’t “interested in any genuine debate.”
She continued, “But what they’re really trying to do is they’re trying to assert their power, threaten us, intimidate us, rape us, kill us! This is real. This is life and death.”
Given such sentiments, it is hardly surprising that the protest turned violent — leaving people beaten, bloody on the pavement, and racking up $100,000 in property damage.
Not to mention causing the cancellation of the talk sponsored by the Berkeley College Republicans. Felarca called this a smashing success. Asked by reporters how she could justify violence to squelch speech, Felarca simply dubbed Milo “a fascist.”
Yesterday, in my Townhall column, “Hate Is Our Business,” I addressed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s just-released report, “The Year in Hate and Extremism.” The report continued the SPLC’s habit of calling entirely peaceful conservative and religious organizations “hate groups.”
The man who shot a security guard at the Family Research Council in 2012, but was thankfully blocked from further mayhem, used the SPLC’s “Hate Map” to target their office.
In its reports, the “progressive” SPLC completely ignores BAMN and violent left-wing groups. And by crying wolf in mislabeling non-violent organizations as “hate groups,” it provides the unhinged — BAMN, Antifa, and lone-wolf lunatics — very dangerous ammunition.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Ms. Felarca also has a day job, as a public school teacher at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in the Berkeley Unified School District. That has generated some controversy.
