From UC Berkeley to Washington, Radicalism Prevails

“In a democracy like ours, perception is reality, and the predictable outcome at Berkeley (and other places) was groupthink and radicalization because a fact-based discourse failed to materialize.”

The type of behavior displayed on the national stage in Washington, DC during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process—from senators being accosted as they walked through the halls of Congress to an angry mob banging on the doors of the Supreme Court—has been commonplace for years on college campuses whenever so-called “controversial speakers” show up. University of California, Berkeley has been an epicenter of this. As a student at Berkeley, I have witnessed full-fledged riots when Milo Yiannopoulos came to speak, Antifa attacks on conservatives at a number of mainstream gatherings in town and a school administration that, rightfully or wrongfully, imposed hefty security fee burdens on conservative organizations whenever they invited those “controversial speakers.” So, perhaps we should be grateful for the extent to which our political leaders were finally made aware of this issue that has been brewing on college campuses for a while now.

As the nomination controversy captivated millions and Kavanaugh quickly became a household name nationwide, students in Berkeley engaged in their own form of activism by parading around with signs referring to Brett Kavanaugh as a sexual predator and protesting in front of the DKE fraternity house at Berkeley. (Kavanaugh was a member of the Yale chapter of DKE.)

Until the Left leveraged their dominance in media, entertainment, and academia to institutionally silence and mock other political viewpoints, civil society used to function by allowing all opinions, especially unpopular ones, into the sphere of public debate for examination. The problem in the dystopia of modern college campuses is that supporting the presumption of innocence and due process was considered controversial, whereas taking a mere allegation (without any corroboration or evidence) and turning all its contents into stipulated facts was not. The result was an intensifying echo chamber where nobody dared to question the incensed Left over their character assassination of Judge Kavanaugh.