More To My Letter About The Berkeley Puncher Incident


Hayden Williams (right) with President Trump at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference on March 2nd.

The Berkeley Puncher is a ’cause cele­bre’ in the con­ser­v­a­tive press and social media. Keith Burris, edi­to­r­i­al direc­tor of Block Newspapers (own­er of the Toledo Blade) wrote an op-ed about the ‘war on tol­er­ance’ and used the vio­lent inci­dent in Berkeley as an illus­tra­tion of ‘both sides’ doing it and it should stop. I wrote a letter-to-the-editor in response.

Hayden Williams, a so-called con­ser­v­a­tive activist was punched in the face while tabling at the University of California-Berkeley on Feb. 19 for the group Turning Point USA. The punch­er was arrest­ed and the legal process needs to go for­ward.

I wrote a letter-to-the-editor and an edit­ed ver­sion was pub­lished on March 8, 2019 on page A6 of the Toledo Blade. Due to the edit­ing a cou­ple impor­tant points were left out.

Here is the full text of the let­ter I sub­mit­ted: (words edit­ed out of the print­ed ver­sion are in BOLD)


Keith Burris wrote in his essay “The war on tol­er­ance” (pub­lished March 3rd) that tol­er­ance was “accept­ing, cham­pi­oning, the same right to speak, assem­ble, and think for your neigh­bor as you would assert for your­self,” but he was­n’t exact­ly cor­rect.

Tolerance real­ly means that you may not agree or accept some­one’s views but you won’t try to sup­press them or force them to change their views. There is no require­ment for accept­ing a view dif­fer­ent than your own to be tol­er­ant.

Tolerance also does­n’t mean you can say any­thing you want any­where you want and avoid neg­a­tive feed­back. People might throw fruit, call you names, send you death threats, counter protest, force you to buy your own plat­form to speak, or they may try to assault you like what hap­pened to the stu­dent and the BBC reporter described in Burris’ essay. Violence over speech is wrong and in most cas­es ille­gal, but don’t assume the group the stu­dent belonged to was just a ran­dom con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dent group mind­ing it’s own busi­ness.

Turning Point USA isn’t tol­er­ant of those who hold views dif­fer­ing from it. TPUSA has been accused, accord­ing to a New Yorker arti­cle, of vio­lat­ing spend­ing cap and trans­paren­cy rules at dif­fer­ent col­lege cam­pus­es by fun­nel­ing “dark mon­ey” into stu­dent gov­ern­ment elec­tions and may have bro­ken cam­paign finance laws to help the Republicans in 2016. TPUSA also has a “Professor Watchlist,” a McCarthy-ist web­site fea­tur­ing pro­fes­sors at uni­ver­si­ties across the coun­try who TPUSA says “dis­crim­i­nate against con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dents and advance left­ist pro­pa­gan­da in the class­room.“

The sign at the school booth said “Hate crime hoax­es hurt real vic­tims” and like a sim­i­lar sign, “All Lives Matter”, it is what is implied that caused the stu­dent to be chal­lenged. It was a com­men­tary on the Jesse Smollett hate crime inci­dent. It’s not a coin­ci­dence that many con­ser­v­a­tives, like mem­bers of TPUSA, believe that all hate crimes are hoax­es. Had the sign been at the booth of the col­lege LGBTQ group, the intent would have been per­ceived quite dif­fer­ent­ly and much less neg­a­tive­ly.

The stu­dent was look­ing for new mem­bers for his group AND he was look­ing for a con­fronta­tion at one of the most lib­er­al col­leges in the coun­try. He was­n’t look­ing to be hit in the face to be sure, but he isn’t as inno­cent as the con­ser­v­a­tive press and Keith Burris implied.

One can’t draw con­clu­sions just from one side of the sto­ry.


The edit­ed ver­sion might sound like I was blam­ing the vic­tim. He should­n’t have been punched in the face but it seems to me it was like a guy pour­ing gaso­line on the ground while smok­ing who then claims to be a vic­tim when the gas catch­es fire and burns him.

Tolerance can’t exist when peo­ple try to pro­voke a response from the oth­er side(s) by using provoca­tive or inflam­ma­to­ry lan­guage. Williams did that with the “Hate crime hoax­es hurt real vic­tims” sign.

Obviously Burris and the rest of the con­ser­v­a­tive press have no idea what tol­er­ance real­ly means.