Berkeley is the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement–FSM for short–and this FSMÂ involved a certain amount of hate, but also major uses of the F-word, the S-word the C-word, what Lenny Bruce called an “11 letter word”which I will not on even hint at (oh, all right, if you must know, it could refer to either Monica Lewinsky or Andrew Sullivan) and many other compound words like that. including, by the way, radical leftist uses of the N-word as a revolutionary act. See, for example The Student As [N-Word] by Jerry Farber and similar idiocies.
Well, it turns out that Birgeneau, [Email him] has sent out an email saying that the Arizona shooting was caused by a “climate in which demonization of others goes unchallenged and hateful speech is tolerated ” and this represents a safety threat on Berkeley's campus.
FIRE explains that “hate” (however defined) is as protected by the First Amendment as any other speech, and adds
“Even if someone on campus is truly so unstable and unsafe—a possibility in any institution as large as UC Berkeley—taking the steps necessary to ensure that such a person is never “set off” by speech he or she finds offensive would result in a campus that one would not even recognize as a part of America.”Instapundit adds
“It’s almost like that’s the goal.”Well, yes, that was the goal of the hippies and peaceniks in the first Free Speech Movement, and at Berkeley, at least, they've already achieved it.
