The University of California at Berkeley’s College Republicans have received several death threats in recent weeks, with unidentified vandals posting stickers across campus calling for members of the group to be beheaded or lynched.
But the most recent round of sticker threats comes less than two months after students, protesting the College Republican’s speaking event for Milo Yiannopoulos, caused $100,000 in damage on campus.
A spokesman for the group told the student newspaper that the College Republicans have long received threats, dating back even before the November election.
A College Republicans spokeswoman also said that members had been “pepper sprayed, sucker-punched and verbally and physically assaulted for voicing their opinions and beliefs” on campus. And in March, members caught another student destroying one of the College Republicans’ signs, posting video of the vandalism to their Facebook page.
By deadline, neither UC Berkeley nor the university’s police department responded to Heat Street’s queries about how many individual reports they had received about threats or vandalism targeting the College Republicans.
This semester, the Berkeley College Republicans have hosted speeches for other controversial speakers, including Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald. On April 27, the group will host Ann Coulter.
The student newspaper slammed the College Republicans’ choice of Coulter in a staff editorial published Friday.
“Bringing a controversial troll onto campus hoping to ‘bridge the divide’ among political ideologies seems like a familiar attempt to ‘create a dialogue’ — the same misguided rhetoric used by Berkeley College Republicans when they invited Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus in February. We all know how that ended,” the editorial board wrote, linking to an article about the violent protests.
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Steamboat Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum.