During Thursday's episode of ABC's The View program, liberal host Whoopi Goldberg had strong words for the protesters who rioted at the University of California-Berkeley the night before and forced invited guest speaker and Breitbart.com Editor Milo Yiannopoulos to cancel his speech before being escorted to safety off campus.
“You know, I can’t say this strongly enough,” Goldberg stated. “You can protest any speaker you want to. But the minute you get violent …you say you’re protesting because you want to protect people and stuff and then you go and burn people’s stuff? What the hell, man?”
Referring to the rumor that outside agitators had provoked the violence, the comedienne then noted: “Whoever it is, it all happened in Berkeley. You can protest and say 'We don't want this speaker.'"
“Don't go hear him because the problem with you saying 'Stop. This person can't come' is the person you want to come then will be stopped by somebody else,” she added.
Fellow panelist Sarah Haines asked: “Wasn't it Martin Luther King that always talked about when you get violent, you betray the message of what you're trying to say? You lose your power.”
“You lose all your power,” Goldberg asserted.
However, Joy Behar claimed: “There were protesters and there were outside agitators, so the protesters did not do this.”
Goldberg then declared:
But we don't know who did this. That's the problem. Everyone gets lumped together, and the narrative becomes “all the protesters did this.”
So what I'm saying is: ”Listen, outside agitators, you're not helping because you're burning people's businesses. You are setting people back. What the hell, man? Protest all you want to. Stop messing with people's stuff.
“I think everybody has the right to speak,” Behar noted, “but basically, when I was in college, they really vetted people who were going to speak.”
“Maybe people like JFK (President John F. Kennedy) would come to the school, you know what I mean?” she asked. “It wasn't just some troll on the Internet, which is what this guy basically is."
Goldberg disagreed, stating that Yiannopoulos was invited to speak by the Young Republicans club on campus.
Behar stated: “I'm just saying I'm the first First Amendment person here. I really believe in it, but this guy. Why did they invite this guy? He's been banned from Twitter.”
Next, she read a definition of “Hate Speech” as “speech that offends, threatens or insults groups based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or disability. So he's a sexist. He's a racist.”
Goldberg then interjected: “Listen, that is not our thing to control. If they want to invite him, that's fine. You don't have to go see him, but … you can say 'we're gonna protest, we can protest outside,' but you don't have the right to destroy other people's stuff.”
At that point, Jedediah Bila joined the discussion by stating:
What's ironic about it is that Berkeley was the home of free speech, where the fight for free speech started.
If [the guest speaker] is a racist homophobe, if that's true, if he goes, the biggest objection you can have is not showing up, let him have an empty room of people.
“And they have the right to protest it,” Behar added. “They don't have the right to be violent.”
“The sentiment of 'everyone who disagrees with me should be banned' also is a problem,” Bila noted.
“Nobody's saying that,” Behar stated. “And what about (President Donald) Trump? The first thing he says is: 'We're going to withdraw federal funds,'” which she described as a “knee-jerk reaction" to what is going on.
“OK, that can happen,” Goldberg responded before stating that people in the government are “not allowed to do that because people are allowed to protest.”
“However,” she concluded, “you can protest anybody, and anyone can protest you.”
As NewsBusters previously reported, “an estimated 1,000 students came out to protest,” but “the crowd quickly turned into a mob when they began setting fires, throwing smoke bombs, breaking windows and punching Trump supporters while chanting against Trump and Yiannopoulos."
“But instead of accurately identifying the crowd as a liberal, left-wing mob, ABC, NBC and CBS went out of their way to avoid using any harsh labels or political ideology to describe the crowd. All three networks refused to describe the crowd as liberal, saving the 'conservative' and 'controversial' labels for Yiannopoulos.”
As if that wasn't bad enough, UC Berkeley professor and former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich used his stint as a guest on Thursday's CNN Tonight to promote a conspiracy theory that a group of right-wingers was responsible for the violent riots.
Rather than laughing off such a preposterous suggestion, liberal host Don Lemon actually seemed to treat the "rumor" as plausible.
