Students Crashed College Republicans' Meeting at UC-Santa Cruz, Demanded Shutdown
Fascists do not deserve the right of assembly or free speech, protesters claim.
Activist students at the University of California at Santa Cruz reject the "right of assembly" and "right of free speech" when it comes to white supremacists and fascists. In their view, this includes the College Republicans.
And so, the students crashed a CR meeting in the basement of a campus library earlier this week. The CRs attempted to have a dialogue with the protesters, but the protesters maintained that "dialogue is violence" and that the CRs' mere presence in the library was an explicit threat against marginalized students and act of violence. The protesters even asked library staff to evict the CRs from the building, according to Campus Reform.
After two hours, the police involved themselves, and three of the protesters were arrested. The CRs have also asked UC-Santa Cruz's student government to sanction the protesters, since two of them were in fact members of the student government.
Campus Reform obtained some video footage of the incident. In the clip below, CRs and protesters are heatedly arguing with one another. There's nothing wrong with that, of course—they appear to be having the exact kind of dialogue the CRs claimed they wanted and the protesters claimed was violence. But my favorite part of the exchange happens toward the end, when one of the students—presumably a CR—accuses the protesters of selection bias.
"If this was any other group, if it was a communist group, or socialist group, if it was a Democratic group, if it was a centrist group, nobody would be here saying anything," said the student. "But because the title says Republicans, and because that's connected to Trump…"
"Because communists aren't fucking racists," a protester interjected.
Communism has killed and impoverished millions, but it's arguably true that communists committed these murders irrespective of the race or ethnic origins of their victims. That's what really matters, it seems.
