Punching Nazis sounds almost reasonable—but only almost—until you recall that the Left considers anyone to the right of Jane Fonda to be racist, fascist, neo-Nazi, or some combination of the three. If that sounds like an exaggeration, remember what prompted their violence: the election and inauguration of Donald Trump, a social liberal from New York who took Ted Cruz to task because the Texas Senator was opposed to Caitlyn Jenner using women’s bathrooms. I also face the same ludicrous allegation that I’m a jackbooted white supremacist. If this is what counts as a Nazi in 2017, we’re all going to get punched—the act of reading this book is enough to label you a Nazi, apparently.
Extreme political violence from the Left became more and more apparent as I travelled up and down the west coast, where the temper tantrums and physical attacks escalated. When I arrived at the University of Washington in Seattle, on Inauguration Day, I was greeted by a banner that urged onlookers to “STAB MILO.” University officials took it down, but it was a portent of the violence that would take place later that night. I was, after all, in the city that hosted the “Battle in Seattle,” an outbreak of left-wing violence in 1999 in which 40,000 protesters and more than 200 thugs from the “black bloc”—black-masked left-wing anarchists known for their love of political violence—caused massive damage. (Ironically, the 1999 rioters were there to protest globalism, the very ideology that Donald Trump is busily fighting in Washington, DC.)
Rehearsals for my Seattle show had barely begun before a huge mass of protesters arrived on campus, throwing buckets of paint and burning things in front of rows of riot police. The police helicopters buzzing in the sky—a first for me—testified to the seriousness of the situation. Outside the venue, my cameraman was assaulted yet again, taking a punch to the face and having his equipment broken.230
Soon we heard an even more sinister report from outside the venue. Someone had been shot. I was in the middle of my talk and decided to carry on with it, refusing to be canceled by violence. After the show, police evacuated attendees through an underground car park, telling them to remove their Make America Great Again hats. By now, the anti-Milo protesters had been joined by anti-inauguration protesters from elsewhere in the city, and the crowd swelled to over a thousand. As the critically injured man was rushed to hospital, reports emerged that the police had confiscated wooden poles, heavy pipes and other weaponry from the black-clad protesters.231
The precise circumstances of the shooting were (and remain) murky, but it was clear that things were getting out of hand. I continued to preach more speech as the only appropriate response to ideological disagreement.
The final stop on the Dangerous Faggot tour was UC Berkeley, perhaps the most famous left-wing college in America. In the 1960s, Berkeley was host to Mario Savio’s Free Speech Movement, which fought against the administration’s restrictions on political activities on campus. Savio was an ardent left-winger, yet he operated at a time when the Left fought against censorship rather than in favor of it.
A shy, chronic stutterer, Savio understood the importance of speech. It was no accident that he founded a movement that stressed the value of free speech as inherent to human dignity.
I wrote earlier in this book that conservatism is the new counter-culture. The inversion of beliefs that has taken place on American college campuses makes my point for me. Once again, Berkeley would be the site of free-speech protests, only this time, it was the protestors calling for censorship.
As at UC Davis, protesters showed up around 30 minutes before I was due to speak. As at the University of Washington, they were well-organized, obviously privately funded, armed, clad in black masks, and determined to cause mayhem. They seized barricades and used them as battering rams to smash windows of the Martin Luther King Student Union, showing ironic contempt and disrespect for King’s revered teachings on civil disobedience.
These weren’t sporadic, disorganized outbreaks of violence. The black-masked protesters arrived in a single group and attacked as a single group, storming the building as a unit before melting back into the crowd of “peaceful” protesters, who happily concealed them. Attendees of the event caught outside were treated mercilessly: one man appeared on camera with a bloody face. A girl wearing a “MAKE BITCOIN GREAT AGAIN” cap was pepper-sprayed in the middle of her interview with a local news channel. Later in the evening, video footage emerged of a man lying unconscious on the ground while protesters surrounded him.
The rioters—let’s dispense with “protesters”—were not satisfied with the cancellation of my event. After word spread that my speech would not happen, the thugs marched into the town of Berkeley itself, where they proceeded to vandalize businesses, including four local banks and a Starbucks (irony level 1,000). The final estimated crowd size was 1,500 and the total damage was estimated at $100,000 on campus and $500,000 in Berkeley itself.232
The response of city and campus officials was depressingly predictable. The police did not lift a finger to stop the ongoing riot. They did not even form a shield-wall as they had done at the University of Washington. John Bakhit, a lawyer for the union representing the UC system’s police force, later complained that the police officers “weren’t allowed to do their jobs.”233
“UC Berkeley’s attitude amounts to this,” wrote The San Francisco Chronicle. “We’d rather deal with broken windows than broken heads.”234 The article recalled the lawsuit that had emerged from the Occupy protest at UC Davis in 2011, in which the University of California had to pay out $1 million in a legal settlement after a university police officer pepper-sprayed a passive protester. The fires and smashed windows, by contrast, cost UC Berkeley around $100,000. It’s not hard to do the math, although it remains unclear who issued the order for police to stand down.
The Mayor of Berkeley, Jesse Arreguin, was similarly feeble in his response. Arreguin started the evening by condemning me, tweeting that, “Using speech to silence marginalized communities and promote bigotry is unacceptable,” and that “hate speech isn’t welcome in our community.” The idea that speech can somehow “silence” others is an insidious progressive meme used to justify censorship.
As violence broke out, Arreguin returned to Twitter to half-heartedly proclaim, “Violence and destruction is not the answer.”235 The following morning he put out a statement condemning the violence, while also condemning me as a white nationalist. My lawyers forced him to retract and apologize.236 Turns out, Arreguin is Facebook friends with Yvette Felarca, that wonderful little Asian teacher who is the face of the “resistance” movement, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary).