Meet The People Arrested Outside Shapiro’s Berkeley Speech (Updated 18.09.2017)

Among the nine arrested protesters was Fremont resident Hannah Benjamin, 22, who was taken in near Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue for “Battery on a Police Officer and carrying a banned weapon”:

In response to the outright hysteria seizing activists, faculty and administrators alike at the University of California Berkeley over the appearance of Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro, The San Francisco Chronicle asks a poignant question: “How left must a speaker be to avoid causing a riot in Berkeley?”

The Chronicle‘s Nanette Asimov begins the piece by noting that the 33-year-old Harvard grad, whose presence on campus for two hours has triggered extraordinary security measures from the university and local law enforcement, is not some white nationalist or far-right provocateur, or even a Trump supporter — he actually just espouses in a clear and direct manner “standard-issue conservative” views:

Ben Shapiro, a conservative speaker headed to UC Berkeley on Thursday evening, hasn’t mocked feminists, as right-wing performer Milo Yiannopoulos has done. He hasn’t boasted of being a “mean-spirited bigot,” as far-right author Ann Coulter has done. And, unlike Steve Bannon, ex-adviser to President Trump, Shapiro doesn’t even like the president.

Yet the Harvard Law School graduate, author and political commentator has drawn unprecedented security measures at UC Berkeley for his sold-out speech at the campus’ many-windowed Zellerbach Hall, and Berkeley city police have received permission from the City Council to use pepper spray on any violent protesters who show up.

These defense measures around a standard-issue conservative whose idea of provocative is to call California a “nut-job leftist state” spotlight this question: How left must a speaker be to avoid causing a riot in Berkeley?

The answer to Asimov’s question — as the nation is learning over the last year — is as radical left as the perpetually outraged social justice activists and their violence-embracing Antifa forces. Unless a speaker fully embraces the far-left’s views of intersectionality, anti-free speech codes, ubiquitous white supremacy, America as the enemy of all that’s good, etc., that speaker is now at risk of feeling the full force of the SJW/Antifa mob.

Asimov notes that the cost of law enforcement for the event is a stunning $1.5 million. As The Daily Wire has highlighted, both the university and the police department are implementing extreme measures, including shutting down multiple buildings and parking lots, creating a “concrete wall” around parts of the campus, offering free walking escorts for those who fear they might become victims of (left-wing) violence, and setting up safe spaces and prepping their counselors for anyone who is traumatized by the presence of a conservative with the guts to speak his mind on a college campus in 2017.

Why all of these extensive, unorthodox measures for a conservative Orthodox Jew speaker? Because Berkeley has witnessed firsthand what damage the social justice left can do to those they deem “fascists,” law enforcement, and public and private property.

Asimov cites one person who’s studied the far-left movement who notes that what Shapiro actually believes and says doesn’t actually matter to the radicals:

“It doesn’t matter what the guy’s going to say,” said Michael Heaney, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the sociology of protest movements. “He could talk about the joys of apple-picking. What matters is that the counter-movement is trying to use the energy of the (event) to grow. This is an opportunity for them — and they are likely to seize upon it.”

Heaney is exactly right. Shapiro’s speech is a means for the radical left to keep the “counter-movement” growing.

Watch the livestream of Shapiro’s talk here.

And here’s the live blog of the event.