Steve Bannon to join Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter at Berkeley 'Free Speech Week'
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Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon says President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey was the “biggest mistake in modern political history.” Nathan Rousseau Smith (@FantasticMrNate) reports.
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Breitbart News executive chairman and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon will join far-right commentators Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos at an event later this month in Berkeley, Calif., Yiannopoulos announced in a statement Tuesday.Â
“He’s the voice of a nationwide rebellion,” reads a post on Yiannopoulos’ website. “The man who terrifies globalist and leftist culture warriors like no other. Steve Bannon joins MILO at Free Speech Week.”Â
“Uncle Steve was the force behind Trump’s election victory and much of his initial policymaking,” Yiannopoulos said of his former Breitbart editor. “Nothing could be better for the leftists who oppose Trump so vehemently than a lesson in the logic behind Trump’s actions, direct from the architect of his policies.”
Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart in February after video surfaced in which the controversial figure appeared to condone sex between men and underage boys as young as 13.
The right-wing firebrands were invited to speak at the University of California at Berkeley by the Berkeley Patriot, a conservative campus group. Berkeley Free Speech Week is planned as a four-day event from Sept. 24-27 with speakers organized around a different theme every day. Bannon is scheduled to speak on the final day of the event.Â
The right-wing rally at the famously liberal campus is almost certain to draw counter-protesters. There is concern that members of anarchists and anti-fascist, or “antifa”, groups will seek to violently stop the speakers.Â
Both Yiannopoulos and Coulter were scheduled to speak at UC Berkeley earlier this year, and both were forced to cancel due to security concerns related to demonstrations. The protests against Yiannopoulos’s appearance turned violent, resulting in a campus lockdown.Â
Related:
Ann Coulter didn’t show up at UC Berkeley, but protesters did
Milo Yiannopoulous’ speech at UC-Berkeley canceled over protest
Last month, black-clad attackers assaulted at least three people at a “Rally Against Hate†event in Berkeley, Calif., in response to a planned right-wing protest.
Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin has urged UC Berkeley to cancel Free Speech Week out of a concern that those violent incidents could be repeated.
“I’m very concerned about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and some of these other right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus, because it’s just a target for black bloc to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street,” Arreguin said, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.Â
In August, UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ stressed that the law requires a public university like Berkeley to allow invited speakers to appear “without discrimination in regard to point of view.”
“The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university,” Christ said. “Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.”
And although students can expect the university to give them a safe, physical space, the school would be doing the students a disservice if “we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous,” Christ said.Â
Read more:Â
Uncanceled: Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos now heading back to Berkeley
Three takeaways from Steve Bannon’s Hong Kong speech
Steve Bannon: Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are trying to ‘nullify’ Trump’s election
Steve Bannon left the White House, but Trump aides can’t escape him
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