Fighting Words

A battle in Berkeley over free speech shows how frenzied politics has become.

Julia, a writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, talks about the street-protest scene in Berkeley, Calif., this spring as if she had entered a war zone. “There are explosions happening everywhere. People are fighting. You’re not entirely sure who is an ally, who isn’t,” she says.

That’s part of the reason she won’t give her last name, since she fears that she will be targeted, harassed or doxxed like so many others who have had their identities attached to the blowups here. For a few days, the city’s mayor, Jesse Arreguin, even had to get himself security because of the threats he was receiving. “Our city is not going to be turned into a fight club,” he says defiantly, though no one is quite sure in this city of 121,000 long known as a test bed for the First Amendment.

As the far right and far left have clashed here over what kind of speech is permissible, Julia has tried to stake out new space created by the recurring violence. She helped found a group called Pastel Bloc, whose members wear disarming pinks in the streets as they provide water and support to other “antifascist” activists who might be engaged in more disruptive actions. Think of it as sort of a medic crew with fairy-dust slogans like “Resistance is Magic.” Anything to fight the growing sense of dread. “It’s getting scarier to protest,” she says.

The mosh pit started months ago at the city’s famous university campus, where militant left-wing activists “shut down” conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in February, setting fires, breaking windows, causing a campus-wide “shelter in place” order. Invited to speak by the Berkeley College Republicans–who have since filed a lawsuit against the school–the professional troll and self-described “dangerous faggot” never made it onto the stage. And as the story became national news, Berkeley again became a theater where a bigger battle over the rights and limits on free speech, dissent and respect all played out.

At their worst, the scrums have been belittling and violent, as grown men and women shout, punch and taunt one another or destroy property. But the questions many are fighting over cut to the core of the American democratic system. In a time when politics have turned toxic, are there ideas so repugnant and dangerous that they shouldn’t be allowed to be uttered in public? Do certain words amount to attacks and therefore justify violence in return? Or must all communities endure the speech they hate most, even when the point of the speech is to make others angry?

These are centuries-old debates, and freethinking Berkeley has seen countless protests over the decades. Yet city and university officials also say there is something unprecedented happening now.

Many on the left say the words free speech are now being used as a cover for spreading hate in America. Many on the right say the left has been reacting violently to mere words. And in an era when Americans feel tense and divided, some groups have zeroed in on Berkeley as “a stage for open melee,” as one conservative organizer put it, treating the town like a shrine to be captured or defended in a religious war.

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