Austen Fletcher of “Fleccas Talks” went to Stanford University last Thursday to check out the big left-wing protest of Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, who was speaking on campus that evening as part of the Young America’s Foundation’s Fred Allen Lecture Series.
Though Shapiro would ultimately spend a majority of his speech denouncing the “dangerous game” being played by the Alt-Right, left-wing protesters were out en masse ahead of the speech to denounce Shapiro’s supposedly “hateful” rhetoric. But, as Fletcher’s footage of his interactions with protesters shows (below), when asked to give some specifics about things Shapiro has said that are worthy of such an emphatic response, many of the protesters struggled to come up with anything at all.
One of the people who joined the protest admits to Fletcher that he has no idea who Shapiro is. Another protester says vaguely that Shapiro says “some f***ed up sh**” and made “statements that I don’t really agree with.”
“Nothing he has to say is true,” says a more committed protester, who agrees with the notion that the mainstream conservative author and commentator is an “extremist.”
Asked specifically what Shapiro has said that he disagrees with, another protester only manages to answer, “Well, uh, there’s a whole slew of things. I think just generally what he stands for.”
“Because I identify as LatinX,” says another in response to the question. “And there are a bunch of marginalized people that Ben Shapiro is against,” he adds, offering no evidence for the broad accusation. “Before the talk, I didn’t know much about him,” the student admits. “…I knew that he was labeled as like this really bad person with the people I get along with, which are other people who identify as LatinX or African American.”
Asked why he’s protesting Shapiro, another participant of the rally struggles to answer, at which point one of the apparent organizers of the event, who is wearing giant hoop earrings, intervenes, telling the other protester that he doesn’t have to talk to Fletcher. “He’s an adult,” says Fletcher, who has experienced this same policing of speech by protest organizers in the past, as The Daily Wire has reported.
When Fletcher gets a chance to ask the “adult” protester what specifically Shapiro has said that “can be viewed as hate speech,” the guy says, “Nothing specifically, I just think he says a lot of stuff that obviously hurts communities. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t be out here.”
Given the chance to give a message directly to Shapiro, one protester who doesn’t want to show his face to the camera says only, “F*** Trump!” Shapiro, as anyone familiar with his work knows, has gotten flak from the Right for at times being critical of Trump.
The hoop earring-wearing protester who intervened eventually helps lead a chant that is presumably supposed to “resist” Shapiro: “The People United Will Never Be Divided!” Another chant that got going at the event: “No Cops! No KKK! Ben Shapiro, Go Away!”
Fletcher informed The Daily Wire that he was “borderline harassed” at many points in the evening by the very protesters who were claiming that they felt “attacked” by the rhetoric of Shapiro and the presence of his conservative supporters.
Fletcher’s video below:
As The Daily Wire reported ahead of the event, the organizers behind what was billed as a “Silent Rally” in protest of Shapiro accused him of espousing “dehumanizing ideas,” yet those same organizers created a flyer promoting their rally that featured an insect spray bottle with Shapiro’s face between images of insects, suggesting that he is a bug in need of extermination.
The majority of Shapiro’s speech was dedicated to dismantling the racist and anti-conservative arguments of the Alt-Right. Despite Shapiro spending most of the night “bashing the living sh** out of Nazis,” however, left-wing protesters attempted to disrupt the event anyhow, at one point chanting “Hey Hey! Ho Ho! Ben Shapiro Has Got To Go!”
Related: WATCH: Protesters Disrupt Shapiro Speech; He Points Out Their Terrible Timing