Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro said Wednesday that it’s “imperative” for conservatives to continue speaking at UC Berkeley and other liberal schools to send a clear message that America will not be silenced.
“One of the reasons that it’s imperative that conservatives go to Berkeley is to demonstrate that this is not going to be a fascist town run by people like antifa. I mean it’s a free country. Berkeley’s still part of the United States and the First Amendment still applies,” Shapiro said on “Fox and Friends.”
Berkeley’s school newspaper wrote that the university was “deeply concerned” about Shapiro’s visit, and encouraged students to take advantage of the school’s “support services.” Shapiro called this behavior unbalanced and didn’t think his speeches should trigger a need for therapy.
“If you feel like you need counseling for my speech you probably need psychiatric help in some way. So I guess that’s appropriate,” he said. “I talk about the fact that violence in political settings is not appropriate, which you would think would be basic civics 101. I also talk about the idea that in America you’re living in the freest country in the history of the world, and there aren’t people out here trying to stop you.”
Shapiro also called out the hypocrisy of antifa for lumping him in as a white supremacist, despite being Jewish, and said calling him part of the Trump administration is “absurd.”
“Antifa and the hard left are calling me a white supremacist. I mean, I’m an orthodox Jew who is literally the number one target of the so called alt-right white supremacists in 2016, according to the anti-defamation league,” Shapiro said. “They’re saying that I was some sort of part of the Trump fascist regime. First of all, Trump is not a fascist, but beyond that, the notion that I was a part of the Trump administration is absurd.”
Shapiro said the reason he gets such large crowds at liberal schools is because most students are starved for a different point of view, even if they disagree with it.
“If you’re on the left you never hear anybody with a different point of view,” he said. “So you come up with this notion that has been imbibed wholesale by the Democratic Party that everybody on the right … must be a Nazi and Nazis are worth punching.”
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