Radical Inclusion. Ori Brafman
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coming from San Jose, Cupertino, and Mountain View, all home to the massive tech companies. Likewise, in Menlo Park and Palo Alto venture capital funds deploy billions of dollars. But Berkeley is the epicenter of social imagination—the place where the conscience of Silicon Valley originates.
It was on the Sproul Hall steps that Mario Savio stood to lead the free speech movement, and he walked through the administration building’s doors for the very first sit-ins just forty years ago. This is where protest movements from civil right to animal rights were launched.
Berkeley is no stranger to diversity of speech, and the campus is no stranger to controversial voices. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic, for instance, Professor Peter Duesberg gave a talk claiming that HIV wasn’t caused by a virus but was instead the product of drugs and a party lifestyle. Protesters objected to the presentation, predicting that it would impact HIV policy— and indeed, South Africa went on to base its policies on Dues-berg’s theories.
For decades the campus has prided itself on being accepting of an eclectic cast of characters, from religious protesters to antinuclear activists to proud nudists. So tolerant are the campus and community of a variety of speech that local businesses sometimes sponsor protesters, paying them to display ads on the backs of their picket signs. When outspoken conservative activist Milo Yiannopoulos announced that Berkeley would be his final stop on the year-long tour he had dubbed an “all-out war on social justice,” while you couldn’t have expected the student body to be thrilled, you wouldn’t have expected an actual war.
At one university on the tour, his appearance led to the resignation of the chancellor; at another appearance the protests grew so tense that a bystander was shot in the abdomen. Fearing similar outcomes, other universities preemptively canceled Yiannopoulos’s appearances.
On the day of his appearance at Berkeley, tensions were running high. Student anxiety over Yiannopoulos’s speech wasn’t necessarily about the views he might express. Various campus groups worried that he might do something like call out undocumented students, as rumors to that effect had been swirling on social media—and were validated by an open letter sent to Berkeley students on February 1 by the university’s Office of Student Affairs.
University officials feared violent clashes among protesters. The University of California Police Department stepped in, requiring the Berkeley College Republicans to raise $10,000 to cover the costs of security—which initially seemed to pay off, as the evening started with a peaceful protest and dance party against the rainbow-illuminated backdrop of the administration building.
Here’s where things took a turn.
According to one version of events, reported by national media and believed by those in our nation’s capital inclined to think the worst of Berkeley, at 5:39 p.m. student protesters began moving to block the venue entrance, and twenty-one minutes later Milo was evacuated. At 6:03 p.m. students shot fireworks at the building, and over the next ten minutes the protesters broke fences and windows. In response, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd. Things only escalated from there, as protesters broke the windows of the student building and threw Molotov cocktails erupting in flames that lit up Sproul Plaza.
The next day the White House escalated the situation further with a thinly veiled threat: if Berkeley couldn’t keep student violence from erupting over speech, perhaps the university wasn’t deserving of federal funds.
Politics aside, you can see the origin of the concern: how could a campus that prides itself on tolerance condone vandalism and violent behavior by its students? Indeed, playing Monday-morning quarterback, you might think that the university should have exerted more control, hiring more police officers and vetting student groups to prevent the chaos that ensued.
But something didn’t add up. When we dug a little deeper, we found that the administration, the media, and virtually everyone else following the story had gotten it completely wrong.
The problem with the students-are-to-blame version of events is that the student organizers of the protest were residents of a co-op that abided by nonviolent ideologies.
Think about that for a moment. These are students with majors like development studies and environmental science who toss around phrases like “community spirit” and “global consciousness.” Sure, they might be guilty of smoking pot, but they aren’t the Molotov-cocktail-throwing type.
In fact, knowing that the protests might create tensions, the organizers actually went to great effort to underscore their nonviolent intentions. “We are not here to engage in physical confrontation,” they wrote on the flyer they distributed to draw a crowd. “We will protect each other,” they continued, “to ensure our democratic right to protest and our safety.”
The event invitation even included safety tips for attendees, a number to dial in case of medical emergency, and instructions on how to spot the trained legal observers who would be present to document potential provocateurs and any incidents that might occur.
The student body was organized and ready to carry out its peaceful protest, as had so many others outside Sproul Hall over the decades.
But somehow everything went wrong. The violence intensified so rapidly that no one saw it coming. And no one knew exactly who or what was behind it. Even Sergeant Reich couldn’t explain it.
People who have been to battle know that the most dangerous attacks don’t announce their arrival. The most lethal attack is the one that catches us by surprise.
The military describes such blindness to impending attack as the “fog of war”: the myriad things you may not know about your adversary—their location, numbers, capabilities, and goals.
But think about this: what if the fog not only denied you access to the facts but actually convinced you of the validity of erroneous data? From a business perspective, imagine not merely being unsure about the number of your customers but being certain of an incorrect number. It’s under this condition— of believing wrong information—that the most difficult issues emerge and take us by surprise.
There is always some fog present, and organizations try to diffuse it as best they can.
The military uses on-the-ground scouts, communications intercepts, high-resolution satellites, and night-vision technology to track and assess the enemy. Businesses analyze market trends to identify and outmaneuver the competition. But what if the information you see deceives rather than informs you? The real danger in battle and in business “wars” is that you may be convinced you have a clear picture when you don’t actually understand what you’re seeing.
That’s exactly what happened in Berkeley. Without anyone realizing it, the fog of war enveloped the campus. The attack wasn’t at all what it appeared to be. This brings us back to our conversation with Sergeant Reich.
She, along with the rest of her police force, is dedicated to protecting the campus and the community. But in order to protect against an attack, you need to know who’s waging it.
This fundamental question—who incited the Berkeley violence—has ramifications far beyond the Berkeley police or even the city itself. As Reich and her colleagues tried to make sense of what was happening during the protests, operatives from both political parties on the national level were composing their own narratives about what was going on.
When violence breaks out at a protest, fingers naturally point at the organizers themselves. But as we have noted, these particular organizers were of the nonviolent type. Gandhi could’ve learned a thing or two from them about organizing peacefully. Even if we’re to believe that the culprits were the student organizers, who regardless of their co-op lives did turn violent, why would they target, of all the buildings on campus, the student building, the one that houses all the student clubs (which—wait for it—skew heavily progressive)?
It would be out of character for them to do so, they had no motive for targeting that part of campus, and they had no history of such behavior. Either something completely unexpected happened that morphed these peace-loving liberals into hyper-aggressive militants or there’s