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The protesters gathered 2,000 strong, demanding the crowd shut down a talk about immigration by right-wing commentator Ann Coulter at UC Berkeley this week.

Some wore black. Some marched in a circle, yelling anti-Coulter chants. Some waved signs calling Coulter a racist who supports fascism, ethnic cleansing and white supremacy. In diverse and liberal Berkeley, the student and community protesters were particularly riled up by Coulters anti-immigrant slams in her 2015 book, Adios America! The Lefts Plan to Turn our Country into a Third World Hellhole.

But Coulter came. She spoke. She left.

And it all occurred without major problems the kinds of violent protests that shut down a 2017 Berkeley appearance by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, drew national headlines and prompted President Trump to threaten to cut off the universitys federal funding.

What was significant ... was what didnt happen, UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said Thursday. We did not see the sort of violence, mayhem and property destruction that attended to the event with Milo Yiannopoulos.

Police arrested five people, including three students for resisting law enforcement. One person was injured during a scuffle with a protester. There was no property damage during the talk, attended by about 400 people.

Matt Ronnau, president of the UC Berkeley College Republicans, which invited Coulter, said as many as 100 students may have been blocked from attending by protesters who linked arms as a human barricade near the entrances. He also said a few students reported that knives were pulled, but Mogulof said police have received no such reports.

Ronnau, however, said the event went well overall and praised UC police officers for their work.

The rank-and-file ... always does a fantastic job, he said. If not for them, we could have had a very bad situation similar to Milo in 2017.

Mogulof said protesters were passionate and agitated and that many came determined to end the talk. But this year the campus was ready after Chancellor Carol T. Christ, who took the helm in 2017, began working with UC police to improve crowd control methods and launched Free Speech Year with panels to demonstrate how to exchange opposing views in a respectful manner and learn about the 1st Amendment.

At the Coulter event, Berkeley kept control thanks to the extraordinary professionalism of police, crowd control lessons learned from the 2017 protest and students who followed rules for campus events, which were modified last year, Mogulof said.

Police forces from nine UC campuses, along with backup from the California Highway Patrol, stood at the ready.

Mogulof declined to provide details about how many police were deployed but said all undergraduate campuses except UC Santa Cruz sent officers. UC campuses almost always prefer to use their own police, Mogulof said, because they are specially trained in protest management and best understand the university systems priority on public safety and free speech rights.

Since the Yiannopoulos protest, he said, Berkeley has spent more than $4 million on security measures and made changes in how law enforcement gathers information, deals with outsiders coming to campus, deters plans to stir up violence and secures the speaking venue.

Berkeley has cracked down on the wearing of masks, for instance, in line with a longstanding state law barring them to avoid detection by police. The university toughened its policy after many Antifa members and other protesters wore masks while storming the campus during the Yiannopoulos event. On Wednesday, those wearing masks were asked to remove them, Mogulof said.

Another change that has helped keep the peace, Mogulof said, is that student organizations are now closely adhering to a policy that spells out the process for holding major campus events, including requirements for advance notifications, deadlines and planning meetings. The policy was modified last year to clarify the responsibilities of both the campus and student organizations as part of a legal settlement with conservative students who complained the campus arbitrarily threw up barriers to their proposed events, impeding them from hosting speakers.

Since the Yiannopoulos event, the College Republicans have held campus forums with a host of conservatives, including Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Rick Santorum, Charlie Kirk and Sean Spicer.

Every single one of them went off without incident, without trouble of any sort whatsoever, Mogulof said.

The Coulter talk drew the most protests since 2017, however. The event was chronicled in detail on Twitter by The Daily Californian news reporters as well as members of the Berkeley College Republicans.

After her talk, Ronnau described Coulter as one of the nicest people Ive met who is the farthest thing from a white nationalist and Nazi.

She told students she supported a wall on the southern border to stop illegal immigration and a moratorium on legal immigration so the nation could first take care of its own people who are facing homelessness and crime-ridden neighborhoods, Ronnau said.

Ronnau, a senior majoring in statistics, agreed that Berkeley has significantly improved its climate for free speech.

Its definitely improved and were very grateful for that, he said.

Originally posted here:
UC Berkeley keeps a lid on 2,000 protesters, allowing conservative commentator Ann Coulter to speak - Los Angeles Times

The Drudge Report is still the king of conservative aggregator websites, but its rivals are gaining ground.

Five right-tilting upstarts Whatfinger News, Liberty Daily, Rantingly, NewsAmmo and Gab Trends increased their average monthly traffic and engagement, as measured by average visit duration and average pages per visit, from September-October 2018 to 2019, according to SimilarWeb, which shared its data with The Washington Times.

At the same time, the marketing-intelligence company found traffic to the Drudge Report during that period declined by 15%. From July to October, Drudge dropped from 96 million total visits to 77 million, prompting recent headlines such as True Pundits Drudge Bleeds Out as Conservatives Flee.

The Drudge Report has stoked alarm on the right for appearing to pivot on its support for President Trump, increasingly linking to stories that are critical of the administration and to media websites that are accused of having an anti-Trump bias such as CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The same cannot be said of Whatfinger, the largest of the Drudge rivals, which favors links to conservative news and opinion websites such as Fox News, Breitbart, Daily Signal, Daily Wire, Western Journal and WorldNet Daily.

Whatfinger grew by 40.8% year-over-year, increasing its traffic from 2.23 million to 3.2 million. The next largest site, the Liberty Daily, grew by 72% as its average monthly visits grew to 1.72 million, according to SimilarWeb.

The Liberty Daily makes no bones about its rivalry, cheekily billing itself as The Conservative Alternative to the Drudge Report.

B.J. Rudell, associate director of the Center for Political Leadership, Innovation and Service at Duke University, said the growth of Drudge rivals reflects a polarized climate in which news-seekers want to read what they already believe.

Trumps approval numbers havent changed much in the past year, Mr. Rudell said. But Drudges editorializing of Trump has. So its reasonable to expect that some conservative Drudge readers those who have stuck by Trump would look elsewhere.

At Rantingly, the banner headline Tuesday was Bloomberg Hopelessly Compromises His Media Company and linked to a New York Post article. The website grew year-over-year by 316%, increasing from 61,000 monthly visits to 255,000.

NewsAmmo, founded last year by a few friends who live in Texas and Nebraska, had the lowest traffic numbers but the highest growth, logging 12,700 monthly visits in September-October.

The youngest site, Gab Trends, part of the right-wing social-media network Gab, launched last month and has already built its average monthly traffic 67,400, said SimilarWeb.

Drudge Report founder Matt Drudge did not respond to a request for comment.

He has yet to comment publicly on reports of his shift, but theories for the pivot include, his friendship with anti-Trump conservative Ann Coulter or a possible loss of confidence in Mr. Trumps ability to execute a conservative agenda.

See the article here:
Exclusive: Rivals to Drudge throne gain ground amid aggregator's anti-Trump shift - Washington Times

1. 5 arrested protesting Anne Coulter speech  New York Daily News
2. Hundreds protest Ann Coulter event at UC Berkeley, some arrests made  East Bay Times
3. 5 arrested at rally against Ann Coulter speech in Berkeley  The Associated Press
4. Protesters Arrested As Conservative Author Ann Coulter Makes Berkeley Appearance  CBS San Francisco
5. Arrests made after more than a thousand protest Ann Coulter speech  The Guardian
6. View full coverage on Google News

Read the original here:
5 arrested protesting Anne Coulter speech - New York Daily News

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 Youre 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 events 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 on Wednesday night, according to a reporter for Berkeleys student newspaper, the Daily Cal.

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

Compared with 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, Wednesdays 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 Coulters 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 Coulters 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 cant shoot Americans, you can shoot invaders, Coulter told a Fox News host.

Coulter has suggested that Trumps speech calling Mexican immigrants rapists, which he used to launch his presidential campaign, was shaped in part by her 2015 book Adios America: The Lefts 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.

Coulters speech at Berkeley was sponsored and paid for by the Berkeley College Republicans, a student club. Ticket sales from Coulters speech would benefit the club, according to the groups 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 Coulters speech and then use the question-and-answer session to push back on her views.

Anns 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 Coulters 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 Coulters speech on Wednesday were two Berkeley juniors from Orange county, who said they believed in free speech and were frustrated by the universitys hypocrisy on the issue; Catherine, a San Francisco resident and wife of a police officer, who said she was Trump voter and had read Coulters 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, Coulters 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 Coulters 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 weve prevented.

While he understands the principle of free speech, he said, he believed that Coulters rhetoric has real, harmful consequences. For example, he said: Ice raids. Or the kids growing up now who are hearing that they dont belong in the place they consider home.

Berkeley, a 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 the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, spokesman Dan Mogulof said in an interview in advance of the Coulter event.

Wednesdays 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.

Read more:
Arrests made after more than a thousand protest Ann Coulter speech - The Guardian

Conservative commentator and author Ann Coulter claimed she was embarrassed to be a WASP after watching the Foggy Bottom witnesses with cush jobs during the first day of the impeachment hearings against President Donald Trump last week.

These Democrat witnesses have to stop thinking this is Queen For a Day.I dont mean in the indictment sense, I mean an old TV show even before my time where women would come on and tell sad stories and then win, like, a washing machine. Its all these sad stories, declared Coulter in a video for the Daily Caller. The first day of impeachment, to paraphrase Michelle Obama for the first time in my life, I was embarrassed to be a WASP. Oh my good lord, these Foggy Bottom We dont need foreign emissaries We dont need ambassadors!

It used to take three months to sail from New York to London. We have telephones now. We have the internet. Really dont need them, they get these cush jobs, just eliminate the whole thing. Theyre wrong about everything. They didnt know about 9/11, they didnt know Iraq was about to invade Kuwait. They famously said the Shah was just fine, five minutes before he fled the country in the middle of the student revolution that took hundreds two hundred Americans hostage, she continued. They have never seen anything coming. Never, never, never, We just pay them to go around and be these great poobahs. They think the inter-agency runs foreign policy. Um, no, check the Constitution. The president does.

But that isnt my main objection to Marie Yovanovitch or whatever her name is. She begins with her Queen For a Day story, saying she came here and became a nationalized American citizen from the Soviet Union at age 18, Coulter complained. Fantastic! Lets bring in a lot of people from other countries, with ancient ethnic grievances, and put them in our State Department so they can, you know, take revenge on their ancient rivals. Lets get the Turks and Armenians going too. No! Were America. America It used to be that to be in Army intelligence you could not have a parent born in a foreign country. Foreign countries including Canada.

Coulter concluded, This is the whole problem with putting immigrants, first generation, second generation, into government positions. They are pursuing ancient ethnic rivalries that have nothing to do with America.

Watch above via the Daily Caller.

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Original post:
Ann Coulter Rips Impeachment Hearing Witnesses For Telling Sad Stories: They Made Me Embarrassed to be a WASP - Mediaite