On Wednesday night a crowd of protesters turned out for a protest at the University of California in Berkeley against a speech that was to have been given by an editor at the Breitbart website. Things were more or less peaceful until a crowd of about 150 “masked agitators,” as they were described, showed up and began carrying out acts of violence.
According to media reports, the mostly black-clad “anarchists” were clearly intent on overt acts of violence. Rocks, molotov cocktails, and “commercial grade fireworks” were all thrown–and yet, as CNN reports, “no arrests were made throughout the night.”
I tried, by doing a search, to confirm CNN’s information about there being no arrests, but none of the news reports I turned up mentioned anything about anyone being arrested and taken to jail. And indeed, in the photo above, which I grabbed from one of the videos available today, you can see smoke from an exploding firework of some sort, plus a crowd of people on the sidewalk–and a group of police standing inside a building looking out and more or less just watching.
The absence of any police action to quell the disturbance is discussed in the video below, which features an interview conducted by Tucker Carlson of Fox News with Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor who was to have given the talk but who ended up being evacuated from the campus.
The violence that took place in Berkeley is symptomatic of the insanity sweeping America, but in my view, the insanity is on both sides of the equation–the social justice warrior protestors as well as Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, and Fox News.
While Wikipedia refers to Breitbart as “a far-right American news, opinion, and commentary website,” the reality is that if you go Breitbart you will be hard-pressed to find anything critical of Israel or its lobby in America–and in fact, in the video below, Yiannopoulos makes no mention of either.
Likewise, with the protestors. We have seen large protests over Trump’s refugee policies, but where was the outrage when neocon policy makers started the wars that destroyed whole countries and created the refugee crisis in the first place? We heard hardly a peep about it from the left.
So what we have here is a case of “everybody babbling about everything except for what matters the most.” Which in effect is mass insanity. And the fact that neither the left nor the right (or the “political center,” for that matter either) offers any solution to the real problems facing America suggests that the insanity epidemic is going to grow worse, not better.
Further aggravating the derangement is that college campuses, formerly bastions of free thought, have now become some of the most repressive environments in American society. Protestors in Berkeley last night carried signs reading, “No safe place for racists” and “This is war.”
The violent protesters tore down metal barriers, set fires near the campus bookstore and damaged the construction site of a new dorm. One woman wearing a red Trump hat was pepper sprayed in the face while being interviewed by CNN affiliate KGO. She was able to respond that she was OK after the attack.As the scene spiraled out of control, university police warned protesters to disperse and issued a lockdown for campus buildings.
Yes, they “warned,” but apparently did nothing else. I once lived in San Francisco and would occasionally attend protests across the bay in Berkeley. This was back in the 1990s, and I can tell you that in those days, Berkeley Police were not shy about making arrests. But apparently that’s different now.
In further evidence of the insanity, the U.C.-Berkeley administration issued a statement condemning the violence, yet at the same time essentially blaming it all on Yiannopoulos.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the violence and unlawful behavior that was on display and deeply regret that those tactics will now overshadow the efforts to engage in legitimate and lawful protest against the performer’s presence and perspectives,” UC Berkeley said in a statement.“While Yiannopoulos’ views, tactics and rhetoric are profoundly contrary to our own, we are bound by the Constitution, the law, our values and the campus’s Principles of Community to enable free expression across the full spectrum of opinion and perspective,” it stated.
Legally bound to “enable free expression,” yet it was the university which made the decision to cancel the speech and apparently also to call off the police.
President Trump responded to all this by implying the possibility of a cutoff of federal funding to the university.
If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?
In an article published a few days ago, The Saker expressed the view that a “color revolution” is currently underway in America. I think he’s probably right up to a point, and one could surmise certainly that the violent protestors who showed up Wednesday night in Berkeley were of the “protestors-for-hire” variety.
Yet I think there may be more to what’s going on than simply a color revolution against the Trump administration. It was back in 2001 when Ariel Sharon made the oft-quoted comment that “We Jews control America.” Yet the Zionist Jews who hold so much clout in America are of the neocon persuasion, for the most part, and as such they tend to be more “internationalist” in their outlook than the religious fundamentalists who now have power in Israel. Thus we have the neocons in America pushing for war with Russia, while Russia and Israel maintain not only friendly, but cordial relations almost. The rift between the neocons of America and the religious fundamentalists of Israel was perhaps most evident back in March of 2014 when the US pushed for a UN resolution condemning Russia for its annexation of Crimea–a resolution which Israel refused to support.
More recently, of course, we have seen neocons and other Zionists in America screeching about Trump’s immigration policies…while Netanyahu has praised Trump’s decision to build a wall and an Israeli company is reportedly seeking the contract to construct it.
One way to look at it, perhaps, is that the ambitions of the neocons are far greater than simply expanding Israel’s borders from the Nile to the Euphrates. They want the entire planet. The fundamentalists in Israel, on the other hand, are far more concerned with “the land” and with driving the Palestinians from it, and they view pragmatism, rather than open conflict with Russia, as the best approach in achieving their goals.
Now enter the Trump administration, which has sided openly with the fundamentalist Israeli faction–which may explain why we see so much anti-Trump vitriol, even still, from the mainstream media, despite the fact that Trump has been overtly pro-Israel. So while The Saker may be right in that someone (most likely the neocons) is instigating a color revolution against Trump, there is likely far more going on than just that.
At any rate, here is the video with the interview between Yiannopoulos and Carlson.
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian 
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