Berkeley rioters are the answer to Click's call for 'muscle'
The 2015 University of Missouri uprising is widely considered a watershed moment for campus protests, and the rhetorical (and in some cases physical) aggression has only increased with the rise of Donald Trump.
In fact, just a few short days after the now-infamous incident in which Mizzou communications professor Melissa Click berated and assaulted a student journalist—calling for some “muscle” to forcibly remove him from campus—students at Dartmouth College raided their school library, chanting “Fuck you, you filthy white fucks” at their studious peers, and even pinning one girl up against a wall for failing to display sufficient enthusiasm in support of their cause.
A few short months later, conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos stepped onto the scene, triggering hysterical reactions among social justice-oriented students and even prompting one student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to disrupt one of his events while demanding that he “keep [his] hate speech off this campus.”
The moment earned her the less-than-charitable nickname of “Trigglypuff,” a portmanteau of “triggered” and “Jigglypuff.”
Less than a month later, a group of Jewish students at the University of California, Irvine was forced to cut an event short after members of the Muslim Student Union hijacked the event, chanting “intifada, intifada, long live the intifada!”
Then, hardly a week later, another Yiannopoulos lecture at DePaul University was commandeered by a group of rowdy protesters as the security guards he was forced to pay for watched it all unfold.
At this point, all the pieces were in place for another year of college-student outcry as students at the University of Texas at Austin protested a campus carry measure by strapping dildos to their backpacks, a gimmick that attracted nearly 10,000 participants.
The 2016-2017 academic year started out as expected when a Young American’s for Freedom meeting was overrun by a group of protesters who shouted in the faces of the conservative students and accused them of participating in white supremacy.
Then at Berkeley, where the story eventually culminates, a massive group of student protesters barricaded a key bridge on campus, forcing white people (even the elderly) to cross by way of a stream underneath.
With a rowdy protest at Towson University along the way, in which students threatened to physically assault Trump supporters after his upset victory, things reached a boiling point Wednesday night back at Berkeley when protesters, so furious with the mere presence of Yiannopoulos on campus, literally set fire to their school, tear-gassing conservative students and beating one Trump supporter unconscious with a metal pole.
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