Believe Them When They Tell The Truth

I've had some Facebook discussions with college students, some even at Berkeley itself.  "Oh, we don't support the rioting, that's all outside agitators," they say.  "The students participated in peaceful protest."

Bull.

Many students participated in the rioting.  Many supported the rioting.  Many (most?) conflate Milo Yiannopolis' words with real, genuine violence, thereby justifying their own actual violence.

How do I know?  Because in column after column in the school's paper, The Daily Californian, they tell us so:

The University of California – Berkeley newspaper The Daily Californian published a series of columns Tuesday that praised the riot that shut down Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos’s speech last week.

Headlined as “Violence as Self-Defense,” the series was intended to give a voice to those who thought the multiple assaults and serious property damage committed in the name of cancelling Milo were 100 percent right.

The first op-ed, written by UC Berkekely (sic) alumna Nisa Dang, lectured critics of the riots to “check their privilege.” Dang claimed that Yiannopoulos’s views amount to “violence,” and that in turn legitimized violence against them.

Criticisms of the riots are not just wrong, in her opinion, but also constitute “violent acts” against minority students...

The next column, written by an illegal immigrant student named Juan Prieto, argued that the riots actually ensured the safety of students. Prieto claims that Yiannopoulos having a chance to speak would make all illegal alien students subject to violence...

In the following article, former student columnist Neil Lawrence identifies himself as one of the “black bloc” rioters and pushed back against the idea that his fellow demonstrators were outside agitators. (RELATED: Famous Berkeley Prof Suggests That Violent Protesters At Milo Event Were Right-Wing Plants)...

The next columnist, Desmond Meagley, also supported the use of violence to challenge the alleged violence of Yiannopoulos’s views and claimed there were many students among the black bloc rioters...

The final op-ed in the series, written by Berkeley student Josh Hardman, took the most moderate stance of the bunch as it didn’t fully endorse last week’s violence. However, Hardman argued that Yiannopoulos’s “hate speech” should not be covered by freedom of speech and he was pleased he was not allowed to speak.

This is how bad our education system is in this country.  We have done such a poor job of teaching that these students at a flagship university think those arguments are valid.  Our culture is sunk if the above is what passes for intellect anymore.

It sickens me that my tax dollars are paying for their so-called education.