Analysis: Milo Yiannopoulos wins by capturing spotlight

Milo Yiannopoulos showed up to Sproul Plaza to speak despite his “Free Speech Week” being canceled. He stayed for just minutes. The cost for security is north of $800,000.

Media: KTVU

Milo Yiannopoulos billed his return to UC Berkeley on Sunday as a test of the willingness by the left-leaning “craziest campus in America” to let him deliver his right-wing views there, months after rioters shut down his first speech.

UC Berkeley let him have his say. But out in Sproul Plaza without a microphone, Yiannopoulos said little that anyone could hear, and nothing of substance.

So what was his highly promoted visit all about?

If Yiannopoulos’ idea was to bring attention to himself, he achieved his goal, said David Meyer, a professor of sociology and political science at UC Irvine who studies protest movements.

“He did well,” Meyer said, referring to the hundreds who showed up at UC Berkeley to support him, protest, or just peer curiously at the spectacle. “If someone in Berkeley who would have otherwise been gardening or studying, or gone out grocery shopping, had their afternoon taken up by Milo’s whims, then Milo is winning.”

Yiannopoulos used his time in the public eye to pray, shoot selfies, sing the national anthem and sign autographs.

He originally advertised the event as Free Speech Week, from Sunday through Wednesday. It was to offer more than a dozen right-wing speakers. The line-up was to include standard-bearers of the right, including Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former White House adviser; author Ann Coulter, another right-wing provocateur; and David Horowitz, founder of a think tank devoted in part to anti-Muslim activities.

But the small conservative student group that had invited them withdrew the invitation just one day before the extravaganza was to begin, as speaker after speaker dropped out or revealed that they had never even intended to come. The students also said they feared for their safety and had received messages threatening to attack them if the event went on.

Yiannopoulos said he was coming anyway.

The former news editor from the opinion site Breitbart News was a far-right rock star on Feb. 1, when he showed up at UC Berkeley to deliver an anti-immigration speech. Student Republican clubs across the country had invited him to their campuses for a post-Trump-victory speaking tour. Yiannopoulos framed the appearances as a backlash against what he called coddled, politically correct leftists who dominated American universities. On campuses, he insulted women and black people, and targeted one transgender student by name in Milwaukee.

But soon after rioters prevented Yiannopoulos from speaking at UC Berkeley in February, the right wing also kicked him out of their realm when video clips surfaced in which he appeared to defend pedophilia. Yiannopoulos lost a book deal, his job at Breitbart, and an invitation to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Now, Meyer said, “He’s not selling anything but himself.”

If Yiannopoulos is intent on resurrecting his image and leading a new social movement — the rise of the political right on college campuses — what happened Sunday suggests “the support for his cause is just not there,” said Michael Heaney, a University of Michigan professor who studies the sociology of protest movements.

“Most of what you see in social movements is people trying to get attention and failing,” Heaney said. “What makes people like Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King so extraordinary is that they were able to mobilize people.

“Most people try and fail,” he said. “Milo Yiannopoulos is par for the course. He’s an activist who has failed to galvanize people for his cause and that makes him typical.”

He said Yiannopoulos has more in common with Abbie Hoffman, founder of the short-lived, 1960s-era street-theater group called the Yippies, than with King, Chavez, Parks — or Mario Savio, whose name today is a symbol of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.

The Sproul Hall steps where Yiannopoulos stood Sunday are named for Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s who spoke eloquently from those steps against a ban on students’ political activities imposed by the UC regents.

On Sunday, Yiannopoulos lamented, “I didn’t get to say much.”

Protesters clashed on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza ahead of Milo Yiannopoulos’s appearance Sunday, Sep. 24, 2017. Yiannopoulos left after about 15 minutes on campus.

Media: Guy Wathen, Chris Preovolos, Kimberly Veklerov

During his brief appearance, about 150 people surrounded him in Sproul Plaza, and hundreds more never made it through the single metal detector set up at Shattuck and Telegraph avenues. For about 30 minutes, a Chronicle reporter watched police halt the line leading to a holding area where people were screened before walking through the metal detector. Only after Yiannopoulos concluded his 15-minute visit did police briefly allow the line to move again.

UC Berkeley Police Chief Margo Bennett said police never halted the line but only slowed it down.

Among those unable to get into the plaza were members of the Berkeley Patriot, the conservative students who invited Yiannopoulos in the first place.

Their withdrawn invitation cost Yiannopoulos the student sponsorship needed for him to be allowed to use sound amplification for his speech. He blamed the university for the loss of the sound system, and for the security that kept so many people out of Sproul.

“It was chaos, because that’s how it was designed to be by UC Berkeley and the police,” Yiannopoulos told The Chronicle. “I was denied any kind of amplified sound, so no one could hear anything I was saying.

“There were protesters screaming into my face,” he said. “It was absolutely impossible to proceed, and the entire audience was being held outside. Then I was told antifa was showing up and I was being evacuated. It was impossible to deliver the speeches we had planned.”

And yet, “UC Berkeley did permit him to speak,” Heaney said. “The fact that he did basically force Berkeley to allow him to speak, that is a positive development I would say.”

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Six injured in east London ‘acid attack’

Six people have been injured in Stratford, east London, in a reported acid attack.

Police were called to Stratford Centre, opposite Westfield, just before 20:00 BST, following an “altercation” between two groups of males where a noxious substance was thrown.

Ambulance crews treated six males at the scene for their injuries, and three of them were taken to hospital.

A 15-year-old boy has been arrested on suspicion of grievous bodily harm.

Those reported injured were believed to be in a number of different locations, sparking initial fears that people had been sprayed at random.

However the Met Police said those injured were connected to the initial attack.

Ch Supt Ade Adelekan said: “I would like to be very clear concerning this incident.

“What initially may have been perceived as a number of random attacks has, on closer inspection, been found to be one incident involving two groups of males.”

No-one suffered life-threatening or life-changing injuries.

Witnesses at the scene said an argument had broken out among a group of people.

A man who gave his name as Hossen, an assistant manager at Burger King, said a victim had run into the fast food chain to “wash acid off his face”.

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The 28-year-old added: “There were cuts around his eyes and he was trying to chuck water into them.”

Tahseen Taj lives in one of the buildings just opposite the shopping centre and was disturbed by the noise.

“I could hear a lot of ambulances and police from around 20:45, but also there’s a West Ham match today; I thought it must be a football brawl,” she said.

“But after some time it just increased and increased, and there were a lot of fire brigades and ambulances and police, and it was quite chaotic to be honest.

“I was quite worried.”

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