Arrests made after more than a thousand protest Ann Coulter speech

More than a thousand young protesters linked arms and tried to physically block people from entering a speech by the far-right pundit Ann Coulter at the University of California, Berkeley campus on Wednesday night.

Rows of students chanted “Go home Nazis!”, “Shame!” and “You’re not getting in”, while behind them, hundreds of law enforcement officers, many in riot gear, guarded the building where Coulter was slated to speak.

Despite the massive protest, the event’s organizers said hundreds of people made it inside to hear Coulter talk about her anti-immigrant views. Some of the attendees had to push and climb over student protesters to get into the building, sometimes with the help of security or law enforcement.

One protester who started yelling at Coulter inside the event “was handcuffed and dragged out”, a journalist for KPIX TV reported.

In all, there were six to seven arrests during the protest, and all but one of the people arrested would be cited and released, university officials said late Wednesday night, according to a reporter for Berkeley’s student newspaper, the Daily Cal.

A university spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Compared to the protests in Berkeley in early 2017, which included pitched street fights, and a campus event featuring far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos that was cancelled after counter-protesters shot fireworks, threw rocks, and set fires around the venue, Wednesday’s protest was largely peaceful.

However, several protesters who were blocking the entrances to the event described being assaulted by people who wanted to get inside to hear Coulter’s speech. One Berkeley graduate student said that an attendee choked him in his attempt to get inside and that, at a different moment, a law enforcement officer grabbed his neck and called him a loser as he helped someone across the barrier. Another Berkeley student said a man grabbed her wrist and would not let go when she tried to stand in his way. A third young man said that he saw an older man punch a young woman in the face, and that she was detained by law enforcement while he was allowed to continue inside the event. None of these protesters would give their names.

Two years ago, Coulter called off a planned appearance at Berkeley at the last minute, amid concerns her visit would spark new violent clashes between white supremacists and anti-fascists, who had battled on campus and in downtown Berkeley multiple times that year.

The many hundreds of students and other young activists outside Coulter’s speech Wednesday night chanted, yelled insults and stood in the way, but they did not throw punches. Often, they raised their hands in the air, emphasizing that they were not touching anyone. Hundreds of students stayed outside the speech for the duration of the event, ensuring that even latecomers would not be able to get in.

Coulter, a bestselling conservative author since the late 1990s, has used her large public platform to advance extreme anti-immigrant views, including some white nationalist conspiracy theories. Last November, she suggested that soldiers at the US border deal with migrants by shooting them. “You can’t shoot Americans, you can shoot invaders,” Coulter told a Fox News host.

Coulter has suggested that Trump’s speech calling Mexican immigrants rapists, which he used to launch his presidential campaign, was shaped in part by her book 2015 Adios America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third-World Hellhole, which was released weeks before Trump launched his campaign, and which includes multiple chapters about rapes committed by undocumented immigrants.

In 2018, Coulter referred to children weeping at the border after being separated from their parents as “child actors” and said that Trump should not “fall for it”.

Berkeley, one of the most famously progressive universities in the US, has more than 500 undocumented students enrolled on campus. Nearly 6,000 Berkeley students are Latino.

Coulter’s speech at Berkeley was sponsored and paid for by the Berkeley College Republicans, a student club. Ticket sales from Coulter’s speech would benefit the club, according to the group’s president, Matt Ronnau. The group was charging $45 to $75 for tickets for the general public. “Hopefully, we get a lot of money,” he said.

In an interview the day before the event, Ronnau, 21, said he hoped undocumented students would come listen to Coulter’s speech and then use the question-and-answer session to push back on her views.

“Ann’s not rounding people up and sending them over to Ice [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] at this event,” he said.

A spokesman for the College Republicans said that 450 people made it inside Wheeler Hall for Coulter’s speech.

A Berkeley spokesman could not immediately provide an estimate for how much security for the event had cost the public university. In 2017, it spent $800,000 on security for the campus appearance that Coulter cancelled at the last minute.

Among the people who had bought tickets to Coulter’s speech on Wednesday were two Berkeley juniors from Orange county, who said they believed in free speech and were frustrated by the university’s “hypocrisy” on the issue; Catherine, a San Francisco resident and wife of a police officer, who said she was Trump voter and had read Coulter’s books and wanted to see her speak in person; and Peter Kuo, the vice-chair of the California Republican party, who posed happily for a photograph by the barricades.

Inside, Coulter’s speech was briefly interrupted by protesters a few times, including twice when protesters stood and shouted at her, Lang said.

Not all the young people clustered outside the barriers in front of Coulter’s events supported the protesters.

One young man came over to apologize to an older man who had been surrounded by angry protesters, and say he was ashamed of the students’ behavior.

“This makes me want to join the Republican club,” said Landon, 18, a Berkeley freshman who would not give his last name. “It seems that the Republican club is the only group behaving themselves.”

Dave, a junior at Berkeley who did not give his last name, was one of the students blocking entry to the event. “I feel good about it,” he said. “People still obviously got in, but some we’ve prevented.”

While he understands the principle of free speech, he said, he believed that Coulter’s rhetoric has real, harmful consequences. For example, he said: “Ice raids.” Or the kids growing up now who are hearing that they don’t belong in the place they consider home.

Berkeley, a famously liberal university that was also the home of the student free speech movement in the 1960s, has been a popular target for rightwing activists.

Last year, the university settled a lawsuit filed by campus Republicans, who claimed its treatment of Coulter and others showed bias against conservative speakers.

In the past two years, the university has hosted a slew of controversial conservative speakers “without incident”, and without much media coverage, including Candace Owens, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, spokesman Dan Mogulof said in an interview in advance of the Coulter event.

Wednesday’s huge student protest against white supremacy at Berkeley came as college students at Syracuse University in New York continued to stage a sit-in to demand that university officials do more to address racist incidents on campus. The incidents included reports of several students having a white nationalist manifesto airdropped to them while they were in a campus library this week.