Robert Reich has doubled down on his suggestion that Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart News had conducted a false flag operation to shut down a speaking event at a California university in order to portray the left as criminally violent.
On Wednesday evening, left-wing rioters shut down a Yiannopoulos-hosted event with threats, criminal violence and vandalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
On Thursday evening, Reich claimed with certainty that the left-wing rioters (many of whom were masked) were not UC Berkeley students. As a professor at the university, he insinuated personal familiarity with the majority of the school’s nearly forty thousand students.
In an article published in Newsweek – a left-wing and Democrat-aligned news and opinion outlet that presents itself as objective and nonpartisan – on Saturday, Reich restated his suspicions while claiming not to “want to add to the conspiratorial musings of so many about this very conspiratorial administration:”
Hmmm. Connect these dots:
(1) Yiannopoulos writes for Breitbart News, which Steve Bannon – Trump’s strategy director – ran before joining Trump.
(2) Before Yiannopoulos speaks at Berkeley, Breitbart publishes an article saying that Yiannopoulos will call for the withdrawal of federal grants and the prosecution of university officials who endanger their students with their policies.
(3) Berkeley opens its doors to Yiannopoulos, but campus police have to cancel the event because of masked agitators.
(4) Hours later, Trump issues a misleading tweet, accusing the university of not allowing free speech and promoting violence against innocent people with different views and threatening to withhold federal funds.
(5) The next night, Yiannopoulos on Fox News says the incident proves that universities like Berkeley don’t deserve federal grants by cracking down on free speech.
(6) That same night, on CNN, I raise the possibility that Yiannopoulos and Breitbart could have been collaborating with the agitators – saying “I wouldn’t bet against it.” This generates a belligerent column in Breitbart with a misleading headline calling me a liar for claiming that Breitbart News organized the riots.
Reich formerly served as secretary of labor during the Clinton administration.
Newsweek published an op-ed on Saturday, in which Kurt Eichenwald – who claimed to have proof of President Donald Trump having been “institutionalized in a mental hospital in 1990 – argues that the president may be incapable of “[discerning] between reality and what he wishes was true.”
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