“As conservative radio host Ben Shapiro spoke at the University of California Berkeley, protesters swarmed outside chanting various slogans. . . . Berkeley police said there were no reported injuries due to violence and no reports of any damage to property Thursday, as the crowd swelled to nearly 1,000 people.”
— CNN
Probably none of those Berkeley protesters would get the headline allusion to Hunter S. Thompson. Even if you explained it to them, they’d still be offended, because college students are offended by pretty much everything nowadays. Last night’s speech by Ben Shapiro didn’t provoke a riot in Berkeley, and some people are probably disappointed, considering the intensity of headline hype that preceded the event.
Berkeley braces for visit
by right-wing speaker Ben Shapiro
The University of California, Berkeley will seal off large parts of its campus like a fortress with a closed perimeter and a “very large” visible police presence Thursday, when the birthplace of America’s free speech movement faces its next potential clashes.
City and campus authorities anticipate demonstrations at a speech by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, and are preparing for possible violence with a variety of new strategies and tightened security.
For the first time in two decades, officers will be armed with pepper spray after the city council modified a 1997 ban at an emergency meeting this week.
The tactics to boost security are the latest indication of growing frustrations in Berkeley and other liberal cities that have become targets of violent political protests since the election of President Donald Trump and battlegrounds for extremist groups that support and oppose him.
“We have seen extremists on the left and right in our city,” said Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin, a Democrat who backed the police request to use pepper spray. “We need to make sure violence is not allowed.”
This reminded me of the wrestling hype HST wrote in his youth:
There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…. At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted “press releases” that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
It was a wonderful gig, in retrospect, and at times I wish I could go back to it — just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of conscience, things like: “The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been canceled and Chief Bloor is said to be drilling his men for an Emergency Alert situation on Friday and Saturday nights — because those are the nights when ‘Kazika, The Mad Jap,’ a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his first — and no doubt his last — appearance in Fish-head Auditorium. Local wrestling impressario Lionel Olay is known to have spoken privately with Chief Bloor, urging him to have ‘every available officer’ on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap’s legendary temper and his invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly called him a ‘yellow devil.’”
“Kazika,” as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who once played third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 100 miles away — but on the fish-head circuit he had no trouble passing for a dangerous Jap strangler, and I soon learned that pro wrestling fans don’t give a f–k anyway.
Indeed, and like pro wrestling fans on the fish-head circuit, the naive young “progressives” at Berkeley don’t care whether Ben Shapiro is actually a “far-right” personality or not. He once worked for Breitbart, and because Breitbart is connected to Trump (via Steve Bannon), the Antifa dimwits figure Shapiro must be a dangerous white supremacist.
Or maybe they just don’t give a f–k whether this is true or not.
Do Berkeley students think name-calling is an adequate substitute for argument? "I'll just call you a white supremacist. There — I win!"
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) September 14, 2017
What matters to the Left, and to their cheerleaders in media, is the myth that Republicans are the suit-and-tie facade of a “far-right” movement determined to turn America into a vast concentration camp, a dystopia where everybody who doesn’t conform to some Eisenhower-era model of bourgeois suburban respectability lives in a state of perpetual fear.
This is a paranoid delusion. Even in the (alleged) Bad Old Days of “McCarthyism,” there were still plenty of beatniks, socialists, homosexuals and dope-addled jazz musicians living in urban bohemian enclaves like Greenwich Village and, of course, Berkeley. (Roger Kimball’s book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America is the best introduction to the beatnik-era counterculture.) Because the Left now controls both the education establishment and the journalism industry, however, the Eisenhower era has been re-imagined as the Dark Night of Fascism in America, to which the “right-wing” extremists are forever scheming to return us — and they certainly will, if you don’t VOTE DEMOCRAT!
It’s really that simple.
All the fish-head circuit wrestling hype portraying Ben Shapiro as a Dangerous Right-Wing Menace is inspired by the crude partisanship of Democrat operatives with bylines, who wake up every morning, have a cup of coffee, then go to work making up lies about Republicans.
If only the demonized right-wingers would do something to justify all this fear-mongering! Ben Shapiro running amok, tearing the spleens out of ringside spectators who called him a “Zionist dog” — now that would be a spectacle worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra security required to protect Shapiro in Berkeley. However, like the former Florida State tackle billed as a “dangerous Jap strangler,” Shapiro is scarcely the menace the Berkeley leftists imagine him to be. The paranoid fear-based ideology of the Left requires symbolic enemies who can serve as the focus of their hatred, and any conservative who comes within their field of vision will do. Shapiro turned it right back on them:
“Thanks to antifa and the supposed anti-fascist brigade for exposing what the radical left truly is,” Shapiro said in his speech, referring to anti-fascist, or “antifa,” activists.
“All of America is watching because you guys are so stupid. It’s horrifying, I am grateful, and you can all go to hell, you pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses,” he said.
Shapiro noted that campus officials had said increased security measures had cost the school more than $600,000.
“That is not due to me, it’s due to the antifa, hard-left morons who are out there breaking windows,” he said. . . .
Shapiro slammed protesters who had previously rioted when right-wing speakers visited the famously liberal campus and who had put up signs and posters condemning his speech Thursday, while praising law enforcement.
“These are the folks that stand between civilization and lawlessness,” Shapiro said of the police, saying “the only people who are standing between those ATMs and the antifa are the police, and all they get from the left is a bunch of crap.”
In the Trump Age, hyped-up fears of “fascism” and “white supremacy” lead to ridiculous behavior and rhetoric from the Left. Shapiro didn’t even vote for Donald Trump, and is against the so-called “alt-right.”
Facts don’t matter to Democrats. Their cult mentality (and liberal media bias) insulates them from reality. Obama’s presidency was, for them, an eight-year vacation which they expected to continue under Hillary. When Trump unexpectedly won, Democrats surrendered to Fear and Loathing, and their nightmare delusions of a Nazi revival are so deranged that they can imagine Ben Shapiro as Hitler in a yarmulke.
WATCH: Ben Shapiro drops MASSIVE truth nuke on abortion fans during Berkeley Q & A https://t.co/W4L5OrBzfO
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) September 15, 2017
