Read our editorial on the ruling class response to Charlie Kirk here.
Students at the University of California, Berkeley protested the ultra-reactionary organization Turning Point USA’s “American Comeback Tour” event on November 10. The tour, which has attempted to capitalize off the recent annihilation of TPUSA’s hated ultra-reactionary founder Charlie Kirk, aims to generate legitimacy and mobilize young people behind US imperialism and its fundamentally unpopular policies.
Protesters began to assemble outside of the venue, Zellerbach Hall, hours before the start of the event. Already, the university had closed down nearby buildings and forced classes and other regularly-scheduled uses to be relocated or rescheduled. The police established a perimeter around the building to meet the protest and came with barricades and weapons.
As the protest grew, students chanted slogans of “Fascists out of Berkeley,” “Trump must go now,” and “Fuck Charlie Kirk.” Several times exchanges developed into fights, with police intervening to defend the reactionaries against the students. Monopoly news reported that the attendees were typically older and not students, unlike the protesters. One attendee, a 45-year-old man, was struck in the head with a bottle and required medical attention.
Later in the evening, as the event ended, protesters shamed the exiting attendees as the police facilitated their escape. By the end of the night, four protesters had been arrested. Four people were also arrested the night before the event on felony vandalism charges for allegedly securing a cardboard sign to a campus gate.
One of the speakers of the event, a supposed “comedian” named Rob Schneider, called the protesters “Antifa,” mirroring Trump’s recent executive order that seeks to ramp up repression against anti-imperialist activists. The FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force is investigating the protesters.
Schneider noted that “There is an attack on Western civilization and the United States is the last bastion of hope. As Charlie Kirk said, if you do not assimilate, it is an invasion, and that is what we’re experiencing.” Far from being an innocent exchange of ideas, these reactionary events serve to justify the most brutal treatment of immigrants and workers and unapologetically defend U.S. imperialism, especially in a state like California where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been particularly active and violent against workers.
Photo: Protesters outside the TPUSA event at the University of California, Berkeley. Photo retrieved from X.
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