Education

The Cal Berkeley Student Newspaper PROMOTED Protest-Turned-Riot The Day Before Milo Event

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One day before violent demonstrators on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley forced the cancellation of a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, the school’s student newspaper published an op-ed inviting students to show up to protest.

“The Berkeley Against Trump coalition, previously known as the Berkeley J20 coalition, invites all solidarity-minded students and other members of the campus community to protest with us against far-right agitator Milo Yiannopoulos on Feb. 1,” the 694-word piece in The Daily Californian begins.

The author of the op-ed is Mukund Rathi, a first-year law student at the UC Berkeley School of Law. The publication date is Jan. 31.

“We will gather at 5 p.m at Sproul and show our unwillingness to allow our campus to be used to spread Yiannopoulous’s vile bigotry at this time when the forces of oppression are ascendant nationally,” Rathi’s pre-riot op-ed helpfully explained. “All those thousands who rallied with us on Sproul Plaza against the inauguration of hater-in-chief Donald Trump on Jan. 20 should join us to continue defending solidarity on our campus.”

“The campus belongs to the students, staff and faculty who run it, and in our numbers we will demonstrate exactly how we will run it,” Rathi’s Daily Californian op-ed declared.

“The culture of free speech” at UC Berkeley should not be a rationale to allow Yiannopoulos to speak on campus in 2017, Rathi wrote, because, back in the 1960s, activists were engaged in the civil rights movement and “taking on the racist hiring practices of California corporations.”

“The Berkeley Against Trump coalition calls on all solidarity-minded members of the campus to fight for this true legacy” of the free speech movement, Rathi implored. “The first step is coming out en masse to kick Yiannopoulous and his hateful bile off our campus.”

On Thursday, Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich, suggested, contrary to all evidence, that right-wing groups staged the violence that shut down the Yiannopoulous event at UC Berkeley. (RELATED: Famous Berkeley Prof Suggests That Violent Protesters At Milo Event Were Right-Wing Plants)

“There are rumors that they were right-wingers, they were part of a group that were organized and ready to create the tumult and danger you saw that forced the police to cancel the event,” Reich submitted.

The Daily Californian identifies Rathi as a writer “on behalf the Berkeley Against Trump Coalition.”

According to the website of the Berkeley Against Trump Coalition, the group is “a coalition of members from UCB student groups from under-represented (Black, Brown, undocumented, LGBTQQI, Muslim) communities, campus unions and campus staff, lecturers, faculty and Berkeley community allies, who have come together to build resistance against Trump and everything he stands for.”

Rathi’s Facebook shows that he belongs to several groups. Among there are Texas Socialists, Social Justice Action Coalition, FERGUSON SPRING and SF United Against Trump.

His single Facebook check-in shows he appeared at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota on October 30, 2016. The purpose of that visit seems to relate to the many demonstrations in recent months over the contentious Dakota Access Pipeline.

As The Daily Caller previously reported, a left-wing group called the Alliance for Global Justice helped organize the violent shut down of the Yiannopoulos event at Cal Berkeley on Wednesday. The Alliance for Global Justice is backed by a progressive charity that is in turn funded by George Soros, a major labor union and several large companies. (RELATED: Look Who Funds The Group Behind The Call To Arms At Milo’s Berkeley Event)

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