Community Victory Against Right-Wing Agitator Milo Yiannopoulos

Communities Against Racism and Fascism (CARF) announced that the kick-off event for the far right’s “Free Speech Week” at UC Berkeley fizzled as white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos and his supporters were outnumbered by anti-fascist protesters on September 24. CARF, along with many other groups and individuals, came out to take a stand against the misogyny, transphobia, Islamophobia, and racism of the former Breitbart editor and his followers.

At the last minute on September 23, Berkeley Patriots, the student group behind "Free Speech Week", announced that all events had been cancelled. However, when Yiannopoulos said he would make an appearance to speak about “Feminism Awareness,” saying that “feminism is cancer,” CARF and others came out to show direct opposition to his bigotry. When the provocateur showed up and tried to speak to a few dozen of his supporters, Yiannopoulos couldn’t be heard over the shouts of anti-fascist protesters. He was at UC Berkeley only 20 minutes before quickly exiting the campus flagged by supporters turned bodyguards.

Police used used a security checkpoint to delay entrance of hundreds more counter-demonstrators into the campus’s Sproul Plaza.

Before Free Speech Week was cancelled by alt-right organizers, former Google employee James Damore was on a list of speakers included in the event line-up. The software engineer was fired from his post at Google after writing a memo claiming men are biologically better-suited to coding than women. When a protest on his behalf was planned at the Google Mountain View Campus on August 19, feminists joined with people reacting to the violence at Charlottesville and demonstrated against misogyny in tech in downtown Mountain View. That time, the alt-right Google campus protest was also cancelled at the last minute.