by Robby Soave
But this did not stop members of the left from defending—even praising—the antifa activists who struck Spencer. Natasha Lennard, an activist and journalist who participated in black bloc activities in D.C. that day, described the attack as “pure kinetic beauty” in The Nation.3 The window-smashing, trash-can fires, limousine-burning, and Spencer-punching “should be celebrated as an opening salvo of resistance in the era of Trump,” she wrote. Mob violence is only a problem “if you think there are no righteous mobs, or that windows feel pain, or that counter-violence (like punching Richard Spencer) is never valid.”
The most extreme members of the anti-Trump resistance have taken up the banner of antifa, a continuation—in their minds—of a movement that arose in Germany in the 1930s to counter the rise of Nazism. In the nearly one hundred years since, antifa movements have sprung up in a variety of countries, often opposing Nazis and Nazi sympathizers while also promoting general far-left politics of the Marxist and communist variety.
Modern antifa is decentralized and relatively leaderless; many of its members are anonymous and unknown. Though they are known for wearing black masks, bandanas, and black clothing and for committing acts of destruction, antifa itself is an ideological position and does not prescribe any specific tactics. One can be opposed to fascism without endorsing black bloc tactics, property destruction, censorship, or violence.
In practice, however, antifa groups tend toward illiberal means to achieve their ends—both historically and at present. In Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Mark Bray writes that antifa explicitly rejects “the classical liberal phrase incorrectly ascribed to Voltaire that ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’” According to Bray, “Anti-fascism is an illiberal politics of social revolutionism applied to fighting the Far Right, not only literal fascists.”
Thus antifa often must embrace violence. In their view, their enemies started it—by making statements that serve to further marginalize people who languish under some form of oppression. Caring about intersectionality means that an attack on one disadvantaged group is an attack on all. And if it is wise to stop people on the right from speaking against any member of the coalition, then it must occasionally be necessary to silence them when they try to speak. If they will not be silenced willingly, then violence is the only alternative.
“The inherent contradiction of antifa,” wrote Carlos Lozada in his fair-minded but ultimately critical review of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, “is that, if America is indeed so irredeemable and hypocritical that violence is the answer, then what exactly are you fighting to preserve?”4
Those who defend the validity of mob violence claim that it is justifiable to the extent that it unnerves the powers that be. But do the powerful really feel threatened by a smashed Starbucks window or Richard Spencer taking a punch? The evidence strongly suggests the opposite: when leftists resort to explicit violence, they make regular people more sympathetic to governmental authority and a conservative worldview. Princeton University’s Omar Wasow studied protest movements in the 1960s and found that violent upheaval tended to make white voters more conservative, whereas nonviolent protests were associated with increased liberalism among white voters. “These patterns suggest violent protest activity is correlated with a taste for ‘social control’ among the predominantly white mass public,” wrote Wasow in his study.5
This is something that President Richard Nixon understood quite well. In March 1969, he received a memo from an aide warning him to expect increased violence on college campuses in the spring. The president grabbed a pen and scrawled a single word across the document: “Good!” He knew something many activists failed to grasp: law-and-order policies become more palatable to the silent majority when leftists are punching people in the streets.
In contrast, “nonviolent movements succeed because they invite mass participation,” Maria Stephan, a director at the United States Institute of Peace, told the New York Times.6 Violent resistance, on the other hand, is incredibly divisive. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth produced a book, Why Civil Resistance Works, that found nonviolent resistance movements were twice as likely as violent movements to achieve their aims in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. “A campaign’s commitment to nonviolent methods enhances its domestic and international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based participation in the resistance, which translates into increased pressure being brought to bear on the target,” they wrote. According to Stephan and Chenoweth, governments have little trouble justifying brutal crackdowns on violent protesters, but nonviolent protesters engender greater sympathy from the public, reducing the likelihood of repression.7
Based on these findings, it’s hardly surprising that Spencer himself isn’t wholly opposed to violence. “The fact that they are excusing violence against [me] inherently means that they believe that there’s a state of exception, where we can use violence,” Spencer told the Atlantic. “I think they’re actually kind of right.”8
When asked by a fellow traveler, Gregory Conte, whether members of the alt-right should support free speech as a general principle for the long term, Spencer responded, “No, of course not.”
To drive the point home, I asked Spencer about his attitude toward free speech (and much else; read Chapter Eight for the rest of the interview). He told me he was certainly not for absolute free speech, and he thought the state should have “at least some involvement” in promoting a better society by suppressing dangerous ideas.
In any case, the idea that certain people do not deserve free speech protections is now as popular among the far left as it always was among the far right. But it didn’t used to be this way: leftists were once firm defenders of free speech for all, even for Nazis. In fact, when the Nazis came to campus in the 1960s, they did so at the left’s invitation.
That Was Then
Yes, you read that last part right: in May 1964, a progressive student group called SLATE brought the leader of the American Nazi Party’s Western Division, Ralph P. Forbes, to the University of California, Berkeley, to speak. According to Nathan Glazer, a sociology professor who taught at Berkeley at the time, Forbes spoke in the men’s gym, which was the largest indoor space on campus.
Even more shocking, the students promoted the event by donning Nazi uniforms and handing out leaflets at the entrances to campus. “The young Nazi-clad figures were not really Nazis, but adherents of the liberal-progressive Slate, who had hit upon this as a clever way to publicize the meeting,” wrote Glazer.
SLATE also invited a member of the far-right John Birch Society to campus. Malcolm X, Communist Party leader Albert J. Lima, and conservative commentator William F. Buckley spoke as well. Hosting these speakers was a way for students—including the very liberal students of SLATE—to assert their “absolute belief in free speech,” according to Glazer.
Neither the administration, the rest of the student body, nor the people who actually showed up for the talks tried to shut down controversial speakers. Even Forbes, a literal Nazi, enjoyed a well-behaved audience.
“They were greeted politely,” wrote Jo Freeman, a feminist scholar who studied at Berkeley during the 1960s. “Malcolm X was applauded. Capt. Forbes heard silence relieved by occasional laughter. At the end of their talks, the audience dispersed. What these people said, not whether they should have had a University forum in which to say it, dominated student bull sessions for days.”9 Imagine that: young people arguing about a speaker’s actual message rather than whether letting him speak was a form of violence.
Note that these were not quiescent students. They were true leftist radicals. Many were sympathetic to communism. Others were leaders of the civil rights and anti-war movements. They were passionate about left-wing causes. But they viewed free speech—even for Nazis—as one of those causes.
According to Freeman, appearances by objectively offensive speakers such as Forbes produced “neither riots nor mass conversions to politically unaccept
able ideas.” The students were emotionally capable of inviting harmful people to campus, considering their ideas, and then rejecting them as they saw fit.
Free speech rights were so important to students at Berkeley in the 1960s that they formed a movement uniting people of all ideological stripes for the purpose of pressuring the university administration to stop coddling them. Indeed, Malcolm X, Lima, and Forbes were permitted on campus only after student activists successfully convinced administrators to rescind paternalistic policies that placed strict limits on who could say what at Berkeley.
Chief among these policies was the unofficial “speaker ban,” which came into existence during the reign of Robert Gordon Sproul, who served as president of the University of California from 1930 until 1958. No outside group or person was allowed to speak on campus without the president’s approval, and Sproul retained the right “to prevent exploitation of the university’s prestige” by denying a platform to any person with whom he disagreed. In practice, the policy was most often used against communists, though not exclusively. Since any and all outside political activity was unwelcome at the university, political figures Richard Nixon and Adlai Stevenson both were denied speaking opportunities on campus in the 1950s.
Ironically, Nixon later commented favorably on the speaker ban, and made it a feature of his 1962 campaign for governor of California. Nixon vowed to expand the ban to exclude more undesirable perspectives from public university campuses if elected governor. (Modern-day student leftists’ position on free speech is arguably closer to Nixon’s position than to the position of their radical forebears.) But Nixon was defeated by incumbent Democratic governor Pat Brown, who supported the efforts of Sproul’s successor, University of California president Clark Kerr, to end the ban entirely. Those efforts came to fruition on June 21, 1963, when the California Board of Regents voted 15–2 to open the campuses to controversial speakers.
But the speaker ban was just one onerous restriction on students’ free expression rights. Another was the university system’s prohibition against on-campus political activity of any kind. Students were not allowed to organize for the purposes of political activism, set up tables, or hand out flyers in support of political causes. In theory, this ban applied not just to communists but to all political organizations, including the Young Democrats and conservative students.
Indeed, it was an incident involving the College Republicans that kicked off the official Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley in the summer of 1964. According to Freeman, moderate Republicans were working to recruit students to oppose the archconservative Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who was running for president. They were doing this in a small plaza, Bancroft Strip, which was believed to be city property but was actually owned by the university. This meant the recruiters, as well as many others who had placed political flyers on the pillars in the plaza, were technically violating the campus ban on political activity, which irked a vice chancellor.
Both President Kerr and Berkeley chancellor Edward Strong were away from campus at the time, so the vice chancellor appealed to the dean of students, Katherine Towle, to enforce the ban. But student organizers, primarily but not exclusively those involved with the progressive group SLATE, refused to leave the Bancroft Strip. The sudden enforcement of the rules against organizing made strange bedfellows of various student groups, with both left-leaning and right-leaning activists joining forces to oppose the administration.
The police eventually arrested one person, a Berkeley alumnus and civil rights activist, and gave everyone else twenty-four hours to leave the area or face arrest. Brown and Kerr intervened, and the demonstration ended peaceably. It was, however, just the opening salvo in a war to liberalize Berkeley.
On October 3, the students—now led by a charismatic twenty-one-year-old from New York City named Mario Savio—officially formed the Free Speech Movement. “In the person of Savio, the movement speaks with a voice that has been heard in America since the beginning, the voice of an exalted, quasi-religious anarchism,” wrote Henry F. May, a historian who taught at Berkeley.
During the summer, Savio had gone to Mississippi to help register black people to vote. He returned to Berkeley in the fall, intending to help raise money for liberal causes—and was livid that the administration had decided to crack down on such activities. Savio was possessed of an absolute faith in reasoned argument to win debates, if only advocates were permitted the right to make their case. He wasn’t afraid of contrary opinions; he was afraid of what would happen if the administration held the power to punish them. Savio agreed with the Greek philosopher Diogenes that the most beautiful thing in the world was freedom of speech. “Those words … are burned into my soul,” said Savio.
“Mario Savio supported the right of speakers from all political perspectives to speak on campus,” wrote historian Robert Cohen in The Nation. “Rather than ban speakers he disagreed with, Savio debated them, whether they were deans, faculty, the student-body president, or whoever.”10
This was what the leader of the Berkeley activist movement in the 1960s looked like. This was the model leftist ideologue: someone wholly dedicated to free expression.
And Savio wasn’t alone. On December 2, six thousand students attended a rally in the plaza in front of Sproul Hall in protest of the administration’s efforts to punish FSM leaders, including Savio. Some eight hundred of them followed Savio inside Sproul Hall and engaged in a sit-in. While the administration had agreed to let students organize on campus, officials were unwilling to grant full freedom of speech. The sticking point was this: administrators wished to continue to deny students the right to advocate in favor of any activity that was illegal off campus. FSM’s leaders rejected this compromise, and Savio warned fellow activists that they should all be prepared to go to jail.
Over the course of twelve hours, the police proceeded to arrest everyone occupying Sproul Hall. A general student strike followed, and within a month, Berkeley’s new chancellor, Martin Meyerson, granted full free speech and political organizing rights to all students. The activists had won, and free expression was saved.
What motivated these students to risk expulsion and jail time? Above all, a unifying respect for, and belief in, the First Amendment. Savio thought that only this law, as interpreted by the courts, could be used to judge him. He did not favor free speech just for the safe, or the innocent, or the uncontroversial.
“The First Amendment exists to protect consequential speech,” wrote Savio a semester later. “The Free Speech Movement demands no more—nor less—than full First Amendment rights of advocacy on campus as well as off: that, therefore, only the courts have power to determine and punish abuses of free speech.” It couldn’t be any clearer: he thought the only authority with the power to curb speech was the courts. Not administrators, or police, or other students.
The students’ stand for free speech continued to irk authoritarians and busybodies for years to come. In June 1965, the California State Senate’s Subcommittee on Un-American Activities released a report that concluded: “It is our considered view that to throw wide the portals to any controversial speaker who wishes to utilize the opportunity to harangue a college audience, is to put curiosity and entertainment above the educational process, and to appeal to the morbid and emotional rather than to the scholarly and the intellectual.”
The above statement could have been written by a campus official in defense of shutting down the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, something Mario Savio certainly would have protested if he were alive today (he passed away in 1996, though his widow, Lynne Hollander, has defended Yiannopoulos’s First Amendment rights). But half a century after the successes of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley activists are the ones most concerned about “controversial speakers who wish to harangue a college audience”—and are willing to use violence to stop them.
This Is Now
All is not well at Berkeley today. When I visited the campus, I found the st
eps where Mario Savio initiated the Free Speech Movement walled off by police barricades.
This was the fall of 2017—the day of Yiannopoulos’s planned return to Berkeley—and perhaps a hundred police officers patrolled the nearby area. No one could gain access to Sproul Plaza without first passing through a metal detector. Women with purses were turned away, as were men with backpacks. No bag of any sort was allowed through. I met up with a friend and fellow journalist; she had packed a bag stuffed with the tools of a true millennial reporter—spare cellphone, battery pack—and we had no choice but to ask a student to watch our stuff while we entered the plaza. (My friend offered money, but the student, who was an employee of a nearby copy shop, kindly agreed to stash our bags for free.)
The line to enter the event was long. The man standing in front of me, a Trump supporter and fan of Yiannopoulos, carried an American flag; the police told him he couldn’t bring it into the plaza because it could be used as a weapon. They also made him leave his studded motorcycle gloves behind.
Indeed, the university purportedly spent more than $800,000 on security measures for the Yiannopoulos event, which were so cumbersome that by the time Milo appeared, only about twenty people had actually made it past the barricades. Instead of speaking, he signed autographs—and at least one fidget spinner (a spinning toy for children that is increasingly popular with Zillennials because it’s, bafflingly, intended to reduce stress)—for a few minutes and then disappeared. Whether or not such security measures were actually necessary, there is just one reason the university put them in place: antifa, whose promises of violence impose a steep cost on institutions that are duty-bound to secure the physical safety of unpopular speakers. This is the explicit rejection of the values the previous generation of radicals worked so hard to enshrine. In another era, Berkeley activists fought to protect the free speech rights of every single person against the aggressions of authority figures. Now free speech needs protection from the activists.
