One self-described Ben Shapiro hater had at least one brief shining moment: he emailed the Young Americans for Freedom chapter at the University of Southern California, where Shapiro is scheduled to speak on October 4, and leaked his leftist friends’ plans to wreck the event.
The student wrote:
As much as I hate Ben Shapiro and what he stands for, and I mean that guy drives me crazy, I am firmly a believer in letting people speak, so I want to let you know that at the Oct 4th event there will be a sizable number of student activists seeking to disrupt the event by coordinating texts, phone calls, and alarms to go off during the event. Activists include members of both USG [USC’s student government] and org leadership who are distributing the signup link along with the code to get a free seat, so the number of disrupters may be fairly large. I believe that if this is allowed to happen it will make everyone at our university look bad, so I advise you to take reasonable steps to prevent an embarrassment.
YAF spokesman Spencer Brown commended the student for standing up for free speech, but added that the student should consider working with others to stop the incipient disruption:
This John Doe is right: It’s incredibly embarrassing when these prestigious institutions are reduced to ideological echo chambers where students run the show and administrators are powerless against the angry horde of intolerant leftist tyrants in training. But rather than placing the onus on the conservative students who are doing the work their own school won’t—bringing a leading conservative and ideological diversity to their campus—why doesn’t this leftist hold his own teammates accountable and prevent an embarrassment of their own.
Brown continued, “If the last school years’ worth of campus lectures and the tired tactics of leftists to silence conservative students is any guide, USC leftists continuing their threats to subject Ben Shapiro and the USC Young Americans for Freedom chapter to a heckler’s veto will only make a mockery of themselves by showing their true, intolerant colors, while giving Ben Shapiro a larger platform and conservative students more power than ever.”
Shapiro’s events have been plagued by protests numerous times, including the near-riot at Cal State Los Angeles in February 2016; the protesters who blocked the stage at the University of Wisconsin in November 2016, finally giving the finger to him as they left, which prompted Shapiro to respond with a double-bird; the infamous University of California, Berkeley event in September 2017, when the university spent $600,000 on police protection, and the protests at the University of Utah the same month.