Almost Live from San Francisco, It’s the APSA!

A lot of people have been asking if I was present in Berkeley for last weekend’s Antifa riot as I was for the Milo riot on Feb. 1, and the aborted Ann Coulter appearance in April. Happily I was not. So you’ll want to read Matt Labash’s first hand account in the Weekly Standard, A Beating in Berkeley.” I can report that things are very tense on campus as the new semester begins, and as Milo promises to return to campus in a few weeks. Stay tuned for details of two free speech events that I’ll be part of in coming weeks on campus.

Things are also very tense across the bridge in downtown San Francisco, where I am attending the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Yes, you’ll just have to contain your excitement. I’m scheduled to speak on a panel this afternoon about executive power along with John Yoo, and I would have invited readers to attend except that the APSA has closed all panels this year to anyone not registered for the conference. APSA has had to do this because of threatened protests specifically directed at panels sponsored by our friends at the Claremont Institute, and the APSA has deployed extra security to make sure panels with Prof. Yoo are not disrupted or worse. Yesterday’s panel that included John did indeed attract a protest, though there was no disruption—just a lot of signage. Keep in mind that everyone in the nearby photos is a professor registered at the APSA.

Edukators in aksion.

Now, if you want to talk about real torture, you could have come along with me yesterday to the panel entitled “Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Legitimacy: 8 Months in Trumplandia.” I was curious as to what happened to “class” in the title of the panel. Isn’t “class” supposed to be at the center of everything? Unfortunately I never did find out.

I’ll let you know if we experience a similar protest at this afternoon’s panel. We’ve cleverly decided that John will speak last, so that the protestors will have to stand through the presentations of several other conservatives on the panel.

Meanwhile, it is good to see that the APSA is with it when it comes to hastily arranging some gender-neutral bathrooms in San Francisco’s famous old hotels. A band of merry pranksters is going around leaving all the toilet seats up.

John Yoo, in action yesterday.

Photo credit: Brad Watson!

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