Hours after peaceful protests morphed into violent clashes on campus, sparking fires and injuring half a dozen protesters, President Trump tweeted an implied threat to the University of California-Berkeley to cut its federal funding.
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President Trump also commented on the matter, implying that he would take away funds from the college.
A protest of controversial Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley on February 1, 2017 in Berkeley, California.
Later, on a Facebook Live video, Mr. Yiannopoulos addresses his fans from a hotel room, ironically referring to Berkeley as “the home of the free-speech movement” and saying that left-leaning campus groups are trying to suppress conservative views. Trump wrote on Twitter at 6:13 a.m. EST (1113 GMT).
“This is what tolerance looks like at UC Berkeley”, Mike Wright, a Berkeley College Republican member, told The San Francisco Chronicle.
“The first is student financial assistance in the form of Pell grants and federal loans”, he said of the federal subsidies.
That attitude, and the attitude of the protesters that forced the event to be canceled Wednesday betrayed the very essence of the “free speech” movement that began on campus at Berkeley decades ago.
Trumps tweet confused some UC officials, who stressed that the university was committed to ensuring that the event would proceed, as long as the well-being of students were not in jeopardy. “It’s a student’s right”.
Reich, who teaches at Berkeley, explained that he knows the students on campus and those that he saw tearing up the city were not students. “When will all the fools who are still supporting Trump realize what is at stake?”
Among them was William Morrow, president of the Associated Students of the University of California, who said the cleanup “was a real statement that the students of this campus care about this campus – about the buildings, the people, about maintaining a campus atmosphere that’s inviting to the rest of the world, so it can engage with it”. “You would be hard-pressed to convince Congress to do that”.
“It’s a shameful retreat from the ideals of this country and I denounce it in the strongest possible terms”, said Republican Senator Ted Gaines of El Dorado Hills.
That doesn’t mean major universities aren’t at risk of seeing a reduction in federal funding, however. It may be hard for Trump to cut off this money, as much of it is awarded through a competitive process that evaluates projects based on scientific merit. As a result, the CDC stopped funding research into gun violence.
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Yiannopoulos is not the only homosexual whose homosexuality did not pass the leftist litmus test at UC Berkeley.
