Each stop was part Trump rally, part standup show, part PowerPoint deck, and part bigoted rant. Yiannopoulos, who claims to disdain identity politics but rarely forgoes an opportunity to call attention to his sexual orientation, spent much of 2016 and the early part of 2017 on what he called the Dangerous Faggot Tour, visiting dozens of colleges across the country. The Supreme Court’s most important First Amendment opinions often concern the lowliest forms of human expression: a burning cross, a homophobic slur, a “ BONG Hi TS 4 JESUS” banner. Yet this is precisely what makes them useful test cases. All of these figures hold views that are divisive, or worse. These are names that a lot of Americans would prefer to forget. 1 topic of the year.” Many college administrators were forced to devote their scarce time and money to securing on-campus venues for pugnacious right-wing speakers such as Ann Coulter and David Horowitz arch-conservative policy entrepreneurs such as Heather Mac Donald and Charles Murray and avowed racists such as Richard Spencer. In the 2017-18 academic year, Politico reported, an unusually large number of universities struggled “to balance their commitment to free speech-which has been challenged by alt-right supporters of President Donald Trump-with campus safety.” One expert on campus life called this “the No. In the process, he convinced his supporters that he should be a poster child for campus free speech, a principle that is universally lauded in theory but vexingly thorny in practice. Another word for “Internet supervillain” is “troll,” and, whenever too many news cycles passed without any mention of him, Yiannopoulos showed up somewhere unexpected, such as the White House press briefing room or a left-leaning college campus, hoping to provoke a reaction. A former Breitbart editor and a self-proclaimed “Internet supervillain,” he was known less for his arguments than for his combative one-liners and protean, peroxide-blond hair. Like the agitation throughout the country, the agitation at Berkeley had many long-roiling causes, but its proximate cause was easy to identify: a right-wing professional irritant named Milo Yiannopoulos. “Freedom of speech,” Mario Savio once said, “is the thing that marks us as just below the angels.”įifty-three years later, the mood on campus was distinctly less celestial. In the end, the students won, and some of them went on to join the next generation of professors and university administrators. Joan Baez went to Berkeley to show support for the students, singing “We Shall Overcome” from the steps of Sproul Hall. The students’ struggle, which became known as the Free Speech Movement, consumed the university’s attention for much of the academic year, and made minor national celebrities of the movement’s undergraduate leaders-especially Mario Savio, who was rakish enough to be a countercultural icon and articulate enough to be interviewed on television. ![]() ![]() The administration refused, citing rules against the use of school property for external organizing. ![]() Berkeley demanded the right to hand out antiwar literature on Sproul Plaza, the red brick agora at the center of the campus. “This café,” a placard read, “is an educational reminder for the community that the campus freedoms we take for granted did not always exist, and, in the democratic tradition, had to be fought for.” In the fall of 1964, left-wing students at U.C. Students at nearby tables chatted in Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and English next to me, a student alternated between reading a battered copy of “ The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Camus, and checking Facebook on her phone. One afternoon last fall, I sat in the Free Speech Movement Café, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, drinking a fair-trade, shade-grown coffee.
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