I Got Invited to Speak at UCLA. Guess What Happened Next.

Back on April 15, I received an extremely courteous message from Matthew Weinberg, the chairman of the UCLA chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), inviting me to speak on campus in mid-May. While I was grateful for the invitation and immediately accepted, being invited to UCLA was the equivalent of getting a message from the dentist saying it’s time for a root canal: it’s painful and unpleasant, but necessary.

The pro-Hamas mob in the campus encampment, however, might not allow someone as dangerous as me to speak there. Yes, they’re the ones in charge.

YAF explained what is happening in a Thursday article: “In a meeting with the leaders of UCLA Young Americans for Freedom, Police Sergeant Roland Ruiz said, ‘I can say from the PD perspective, we can’t approve – we don’t know yet – how long the encampments will go on, and so we wouldn’t yet give our approval.’ He explained that unless the students pack up camp within the next 14 days, the YAF chapter’s permission to host an event is in jeopardy.”

You read that right: it’s up to the mob whether someone who opposes their point of view will be allowed to speak. Weinberg has been trying to get approval for the event and has submitted all the required forms, but has gotten no response.

He has tried to get meetings with UCLA Student Organizations, Leadership & Engagement administrators Kenneth Qian, Mike Cohn, and Kristopher Kaupalolo, but they have treated him as if he did not exist. After all, he is not a leftist, and so in their world, he doesn’t.

Finally, Weinberg threatened to take the matter to the chancellor, which made the UCLA wonks suddenly decide that they did want to meet with him after all. But UCLA Student Union administrator Pamela Lewis told Weinberg that “there is no timeframe” for the YAF chapter getting word on whether or not the event can go ahead.

Weinberg trenchantly noted the glaring double standard: “It sounds like we might not know [the approval status] until the very last minute and we won’t be able to promote the event, and that is an infringement of our First Amendment rights. The people in the encampments are frankly violating campus policy and nothing is being done about it. People are being physically assaulted, we just want a free speech event, and we’re being told no.”

Yep. For decades now, far-left professors have been bombarding students with lies, half-truths, and leftist fantasies, and telling them that those who think differently are demons in human form. I’ve experienced the results firsthand on many occasions.

At Stanford, far-left fascists and university administrators worked together to stage a walkout five minutes after I began speaking, and administrators refused to allow those who wanted to attend the event to enter the now-empty hall. At the University at Buffalo, I was screamed at by self-righteous leftists for an hour and a half; apparently the objective was to ensure that the attendees would hear as little of what I had to say as possible.

That’s how the left operates, not just on campuses, and not only in the U.S., but all over the world. A few years ago in Stuttgart, Germany, Antifa threw bottles and bags of manure at us on the stage while the police looked on idly. One young man sidled up to me and said, “If it weren’t for all these police here, I would have stabbed you already,” but it’s unlikely that the police would have cared very much. In Iceland, a couple of leftists slipped drugs into my drink after the event; although they were caught on video and the police report said convictions would be likely, leftist Icelandic officials declined to pursue the case.

And so on and on. UCLA officials hemming and hawing and hoping I’ll just go away and take YAF with me is actually a gentler treatment than I’m used to getting from the defenders of love and tolerance. What is happening at UCLA is the doing of its administration and professors, and so they’re unlikely to do anything to allow for a genuine free exchange of ideas.

As I told YAF on Tuesday, “UCLA officials are unsure of their ability to provide security because they are unsure that they want to provide security. The encampment is the result of their own inundation of their students with far-left agitprop, and their substitution of propaganda for the tools of critical thought. They have demonized and stigmatized opposition to the far-left perspective for decades and denied it a fair hearing. Now that the full results of their indoctrination efforts is becoming clear, they risk turning the wrath of the mob they have created against themselves if they allow the opposing perspective to be heard. Hence they are opting to take the easy way out and bow to the mob.”

This is the way it works in the elite American universities today. If you have children in them, it’s time to pull them out.