Busy day here on campus with my regular classes and hosting a terrific afternoon lecture by Yuval Levin. Things not quite back to normal. Driving up to campus I spotted several buildings that had been covered with graffiti reading “Kill Trump.” Okay, we can see where this is going. By the time I wandered back, clean up crews had cleared most of it:
The media was still out in force doing follow up stories:
Here are the repair crews swapping out the ATM machines that were smashed with sledgehammers. Still not clear to me how ATM machines are implicated in Milo’s supposed hate speech.
Here are the boarded up windows in the university’s Martin Luther King building (smashed up ironically on the first day of Black History Month):
A word should be said on behalf of Berkeley students. I am convinced that the violent rioters were not students from the campus, but were organized outside agitators from off campus that exploited the event. Most students today, even my left-leaning students (I have quite a few in class), were angry about what had happened, as they resented having their protest hijacked by thugs, and the victory it delivered Milo, who is the Kim Kardashian of political theater. Instead of speaking to 500 people in an auditorium last night, he spoke to perhaps 4 million on TV. I think the net present value of the protest to him, in increased book sales and media market value, is at least $1 million—probably considerably more. I’m certain Milo’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, doubled his print run this morning for his forthcoming book. Go Milo! You’re a true marketing genius when you can get the unhinged left to help promote you for free. Most people have to pay a lot for this kind of promotion.
On Sproul Plaza I came across a gaggle of students and campus citizens who had circled around two pathetic specimens from the local Communist book store (Revolution Books) trying to justify last night’s events. You can see most of the students in the circle were not having any of it. You can hear an elderly gentleman in the back of the pack in the last half of the clip saying, correctly, “Violence helps Trump.” Don’t expect the left to absorb this lesson any time soon. If this keeps up, Trump will approach a Nixon-level landslide in 2020 (about 40 seconds long).
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