Although most activists on the Left believe they’re the liberal “good guys” fighting “evil, fascist forces” for nothing other than love, peace and understanding, that hasn’t stopped some of their numbers in recent years from adopting the measures of physical violence they typically decry with their whiny protesting.
On college campuses, multiple flashpoints have been experienced ever since an incident in 2015 at the University of Missouri when football players at the school announced they would boycott their sport’s season until the school complied with a list of specified demands, which included increasing “the percentage of black faculty and staff members campus-wide by 10 percent” by 2017 and creating and enforcing “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff and administration.”
At a protest in support of the football players, an assistant professor in the school’s communication department named Melissa Click was caught on video intimidating and having physical contact with student journalists reporting on the protest. The student journalists, Tim Tai and Mark Schierbecker, were merely trying to take some pictures of the protest when Click called for “some muscle” to remove them and was seen grabbing at their cameras.
Schierbecker filed assault charges against Click shortly afterward. Nearly simultaneously, the school’s Chancellor R. Bowen Loft and President Tim Wolfe resigned from their positions. Republican lawmakers in the state have urged Click’s resignation as well.
“The fact that, as a professor teaching in the communication department and school of journalism, she displayed such a complete disregard for the First Amendment rights of reporters should be enough to question her competency and aptitude for her job,” they wrote in a letter released to the public.
“It should be evident that these actions are inappropriate, illegal and unacceptable for a faculty member of the University of Missouri.” It later emerged that much of Click’s recent research at the university revolved around readers of the book 50 Shades of Grey and the social media actions of Lady Gaga fans.
Protests in solidarity with the actions of the University of Missouri students flared up at campuses around the country, including Northwestern University, Binghamton University, Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the University of Southern California. Many of these protests folded in events speaking out against the campaign of presidential candidate Donald Trump and against speeches by conservative author Milo Yiannopolous.
At the University of California at Berkeley recently, a protest against Yiannopolous turned violent, as masked demonstrators set fire to parts of the campus, destroyed ATM machines and looted a university Starbucks.
It seems that a little outside funding may be all that’s necessary to put the “war” in social justice warriors, as we’ve seen violence against police, authority figures and even innocent bystanders escalate over the course of the last year when deep-pocketed donors such as liberal billionaire activist George Soros get involved.
And the violence by protesters hasn’t stopped just because the election is over. As if to further legitimize this stance and ingrain young the hearts and minds of new Leftists in it, many progressives around the country are openly saying that they are justified in using physical violence to cower and silence any voices from the right they disagree with.
One of the uglier videos circulating on social media right now is a clip of discredited Alt-Right spokesperson Richard Spencer being sucker-punched by an unknown assailant in the midst of giving an interview on a Washington, D.C. street corner.
Not only have progressives flaunted this violent clip, in a sick twist, they’ve actually set it on repeat to an electronic music beat for people to laugh at and make light of; this is the current state of what passes for liberals’ entertainment.
At the University of Central Florida, a group calling itself the “Knights of Socialism” recently held a workshop to teach students how to “Bash the Fash” — shorthand for “fascists” — whom they accuse conservatives and supporters of President Donald Trump of being. This so-called “Leftist Fight Club” openly declared that everyone “except Republicans” was welcome to learn hand-to-hand combat techniques to counter “Donald Trump and other Alt-Right Neo-Nazis.”
“In response to the record number of hate crimes against Latins, Immigrants, Muslims, Women, the LGBTQIA+ community, Jews, African Americans and other minorities since the rise of Donald Trump and other Alt-Right Neo-Nazis, Knights for Socialism has decided to host a series of self-defense clinics for anyone that wants to learn how to BASH THE FASH,” read the event’s Facebook page.
After an instruction period, students would be given the opportunity to spar with one another to test out the skills they acquired. The Knights apparently felt that women, in particular, would want to attend the workshop. “Ladies: The Commander in Thief is a sexual predator and rapist,” the description reads.
“He has normalized sexual assault and it is expected that sexual violence against women is going to skyrocket in the next 12 months. Please join us! There will be other women there for you to spar against!”
There were also expectations that eventually standard protection would be left behind: “We will have gloves and pads, no bare-knuckle yet ;).”
For some conservative students on campus, the workshop was just further proof that the arguments of the Left cannot hold water; therefore, its members must resort to other methods to defend their beliefs. As Scott Benton, a self-declared Republican at UCF, said, “if you can’t hang with someone on a debate stage, then you resort to other means to try and justify your cause.”
All of this has made some students feel less secure while walking on school property. One unnamed student wrote to Dana Juntunen, the school’s Dean of Student Conduct, alerting her to the scheduling of the Knights’ event. Juntunen responded by thanking the student and telling them, “I have notified the appropriate campus administrators, and they will be looking further into this.”
The chair of the UCF College Republicans group, Karis Lockhart, commented that “the fact that the description of the event says ‘everyone except Republicans’ means they don’t want to hold an educational discussion about the issues; they just want to whine.” This lack of inclusion also flies in the face of liberals’ supposed policies of openness and acceptance of different people who are likely to hold a wide range of diverse views.
Indeed, at UC Berkeley, it was noted that the campus was the center of protests urging “Free Speech” a half-century ago, but today, it seems as if the Leftists on campus seem determined more than ever to crush free speech violently when it offends them. Some Trump supporters at Berkeley were teargassed by the anti-Yiannopolous protesters and one was beaten unconscious with a metal pole.
Some commentators such as Alex Jones of Infowars have warned that a resort to violence could lead to social unrest in the country as violent Leftists encounter right-wing defensive groups and police forces, who are more heavily armed, to say the least.
An angry Jones was seen on the network inviting Leftists to “take the gloves off” and estimating that their chances of winning battles with conservative-aligned elements were approximately zero.
President Trump also has weighed in on the matter of the violence at universities, tweeting that federal funding for schools such as UC Berkeley could be cut off. In Berkeley’s case, those funds could amount to more than half of the school’s annual budget.
Meanwhile, at UCF, the aforementioned Knights of Socialism group is promoting a “Whack-a-Trump” piñata event where students can “Come vent this Friday on the Free Speech lawn in a celebration of the Mexican and Latino culture that makes America and Florida so great! …Come take a swing at Trump and his cronies! Let the traitorous Republican party know what you really think of them! We’ll have multiple piñatas ready to bash!”
Lockhart of the school’s Republican group was unhappy about the gathering, saying, “An event like this, following their Leftist Fight Club training, shows a pattern of violent behavior that’s not conducive to campus life here at UCF.”
