Unbelievable: I was censored at Berkeley

David Horowitz

The freedom to speak is inseparable from the freedom to hear. The UC Berkeley administration is hostile to both these freedoms. 

I know this by personal experience. The College Republicans invited me to speak at Berkeley on April 12. I had hired bodyguards and was ready to go into the lion’s den. But in a death of a thousand bureaucratic cuts, UC administrators placed such harsh restrictions on the event that it had to be cancelled the day before my appearance. 

The administration feared a repeat of the February leftwing riot on campus when masked leftwing thugs prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, and caused $100,000 property damage as well as physical violence to bystanders. The UC Police Department did nothing to stop or arrest the rioters who as a result would not have to think twice before rioting again, at my event or at Ann Coulter’s which is scheduled to take place at the end of the month. The UC administration used their own cowardice at the Yiannopoulos event as an excuse to silence me. 

Everyone is by now familiar with the left’s desire to gag its political opponents. The university is the left’s playground because it can count on administrators like UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor Stephen Sutton, desperate for what all appeasers seek — peace in his time — to place crushing burdens on conservative students who want to hear other opinions. 

In my case, the administration insisted that the speech take place at 1 pm, when most students are in class, and at a site a half mile away from the campus itself. But that wasn’t enough. UC Campus Police Chief Yao, in a moment that called up Lewis Carroll as well as Kafka and Orwell, told me that College Republicans could announce the event but not tell people where it would take place. 

But the administration wasn’t through. Two days before the event, the College Republicans were summoned to a meeting with Vice Chancellor Sutton and UCPD Captain Yao to be told that in addition to the other burdens their club was going to be charged $5,778 for “security” and an additional $2,000 for rental on the room that was half a mile from campus. 

The birthplace of the Free Speech Movement once again spit in the face of free speech. 

This entire episode is another disgraceful chapter in the nationwide story being written every day of the university’s sycophantic capitulation to the totalitarian left and its collaboration in the left’s attack on ideas it doesn’t agree with. 

At the same time UC Berkeley and universities like it gag me and other conservatives, they open their arms to racist organizations like Black Lives Matter and anti Semitic hate groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, providing them with offices and money and ample opportunities to present their rancid ideas at the times and places of their choosing. 

I know the reason that the Berkeley bureaucrats killed my speech was that they knew I would attack their criminal policy of providing a “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants, thus putting our students and our society itself at risk. And they knew I would attack too their support for Students for Justice in Palestine, a front group for the Hamas terrorists. The cowardly UC administration believed it was more important to appease leftist thugs it has given free reign than it was to protect and defend the principle of free speech and a true diversity of ideas on campus. 

I will continue to appear universities across the country and I will continue to embarrass administrations like UC Berkeley’s that degrade our constitution by trying to silence me. 

I hope you will stand behind me by supporting my Freedom Center in its battle against the left on our campuses. Its evil can succeed only if good people do nothing. 

Sincerely,

David Horowitz