Are these students simply seduced by the controversy and mystery surrounding me and my lectures, or have I actually kick-started a full-scale revolt populated by disenfranchised young people who are fed up with political correctness, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and social justice?
This leg of the tour offered up magical moments beyond count. At the first new stop, in Houston, Texas, an Army Sergeant First Class gifted me his dog-tags. It was the closest I’ve ever come to shedding a tear. The Fort Sam Houston soldier told me, “You give a voice to us who have to be silent, who have to deal with having the political correctness shit pushed down our throats.” (He may have been referring to my politically incorrect report on the horror of women in combat.221)
By the end of the tour I’d gone all-out on the theatrics. I submitted myself to a college “hazing” live on stage at Dartmouth.
Sometimes, and even I must admit it, audience members stole the show. At the University of South Florida, a girl named Sarah Torrent, who fled a Muslim marriage in her home country, called on leftists and feminists to meet her outside “for an ass-kicking” if they still insisted on bringing her persecutors into the West.222
In Clemson, South Carolina, where the school banned references to the deceased gorilla Harambe and the internet meme Pepe the Frog over racism concerns (no, really), we discovered a budding James O’Keefe. Conservative student Caleb Ecarma spent months infiltrating an anti-Milo group on campus ahead of my visit, mapping out their connections to faculty members and monitoring their attempts to block my visit. I was amazed by the passion and devotion that my tour was inspiring.
As Anita the Fag Bus headed up the east coast, we began to encounter more protests. At West Virginia University, masked “anti-fascists” (they call themselves that, yet they seem awfully keen on political violence) appeared in ski-masks carrying placards. One of these said “MILO SUCKS.” Given that the statement was, frankly, perfectly true, I decided that I must possess the placard, and a helpful fan was able to obtain it for me during the grapple going on between protesters, attendees, and campus security in the hallway.
During a particularly bitter winter stop at Michigan State University, members of my crew and I thought it would be good fun to don our own ski-masks and join the protesters ourselves. It was a daring operation, which we made more exciting by the deliberate misspelling we put on our placards. Would anyone notice? Would our cover be blown? Thankfully, our tactic worked—the placards were so badly spelled that they must have assumed we were on their level of intelligence.
BERKELEY IN FLAMES
The protests on the east coast were tumultuous, but nothing compared to what lay ahead on west coast campuses. After their campus cryins, leftists moved on to throwing tantrums… extremely destructive tantrums.
The first signs of trouble were at UC Davis in January 2017, where I was due to hold a discussion with entrepreneur and Wu Tang Clan fan Martin Shkreli. The discussion never happened. Protesters rushed the venue around thirty minutes before my event was due to begin, overturning barricades and throwing them at campus police officers. Reports of protesters wielding hammers and smashing windows to gain access to the venue quickly spread. Meanwhile, outside the venue, an ABC10 reporter was attacked with hot coffee, while my own cameraman Matt Perdie was shoved and spat on.223 It was pandemonium.
Within minutes of the barricades being overturned, campus officials were on the phone to my team and the College Republicans, urging them to cancel the event. The Republican group later said they were intimidated by the UC Davis administration, who they said told them that they would be held “personally liable for property damage and injury to people and even death.”224
I was determined not to let UC Davis’s cowardly response, their intimidation of the College Republicans, and the thuggery of left-wing protesters result in a victory for censorship. So, the next morning, I led a protest march across campus in defense of free speech. The protesters returned, but didn’t dare attack anyone in broad daylight. I even took a few selfies with them. All was as it should be; violence and intimidation had not won the day.
But the tumult at UC Davis was just a warning, a sign of the far greater violence and destruction that was to come. The far Left had responded to Donald Trump’s victory with panic and fury, making dangerous analogies to 1930s fascism, Nazi Germany, and something they called “The Resistance.”225 A host of militant grassroots organizations sprang up, with threatening names like “Disrupt J20” (January 20th was the date of Trump’s inauguration) and “By Any Means Necessary” (BAMN)226 James O’Keefe, a legendary conservative journalist who specializes in infiltration and exposure, caught activists on tape threatening to “fight the police” and burn houses a few days before the inauguration.227
Inauguration Day saw protesters in D.C. torching trash cans, engaging in running battles with the police, and burning a limousine (ironically, it belonged to a chauffeur service owned by a Muslim immigrant). Elsewhere in the city, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer took a punch to the face while he was giving an interview, to the joy of left-wing commentators, who quickly set about turning “punch a Nazi” into a meme. “Do Punch Nazis,” wrote a columnist for Observer who argued that the “violent nature” of white supremacy made the punch an act of self-defense.228 Spencer actually rejected political violence in the very interview during which he was punched, proof that liberal journalists are a step beneath even white nationalists like Spencer.
Newsweek reported that many liberals had, through watching the video of the punch, rediscovered “the joy in life.”229 The Independent published a “supercut” of Nazis being punched in the face, with the Spencer punch featured alongside clips from Indiana Jones and Inglorious Basterds.