On Thursday last week, campus leadership dismissed UC Berkeley lecturer Peyrin Kao — the latest casualty in the administration’s war on Berkeley’s free speech foundations. Kao’s censuring proves yet again that free speech at UC Berkeley is no more than administrative marketing. It’s a principle invoked when convenient and easily discarded when costly. This semester, […]
Tag: protest
Bob Dylan’s Model Political Art
“I have never written a political song. Songs can’t save the world.” – Bob Dylan In 1961, Bob Dylan arrived in New York City to meet his idol. Woody Guthrie, by then dying of Huntington’s, had been the prototypical hero of early 20th-century folk music, authoring celebrated pro-labor and anti-fascist classics. Dylan settled in New […]
No Kings Day Demonstrates that the Modern Era of Protest Culture Needs to be Revamped
On October 18, 2025, cheers and shouts echoed across the United States as a collective movement ensued among Americans nationwide. The news of more than 2,700 planned protests made headlines, all brandishing the same unifying slogan: “No Kings.” To criticize the Trump Administration for its already controversial policies in just less than a quarter of […]
Turning Point USA, November 10th, 2025
On Monday November 10, Turning Point USA had its final stop of a 2025 tour on campus at UC Berkeley. Whilst attendees sat inside Zellerbach Hall, furious students, staff, and community members protested outside, declaring that conservative and instigative media were not welcome on campus. Outraged that the progressive campus would host TPUSA’s “American Comeback […]
Caught in the Crossfire: UC Berkeley and the Federal War on Higher Education
At the crossroads of politics and pedagogy, the Department of Education has become a focal point of national controversy under the Trump Administration. Since 1867, the Department of Education has widely administered and funded state-run education in the United States. Along with this function, it also operates investigations on the grounds of racial preferences, and […]
On Happyend, Duty, and Justice
Neo Sora’s 2024 film, Happyend, brings to life a verisimilar portrayal of a country in decline: a right-wing, authoritarian, surveillance state slowly in construction. In a process replicated throughout the world, basic rights — to privacy, to refuge, to anonymity — are stripped away, ostensibly in the name of group-safety. High school students in Sora’s […]
The Lockean protests of D.C. juries
Despite what national authorities may tell you, Washington, D.C. is not a dangerous city. On August 22nd, this fact was apparently not of great concern to the nation’s commander-in-chief, who federalized the D.C. National Guard and sent 2,200 National Guard members to the city. This was carried out on erroneous grounds that the nation’s capital […]
Indonesia and the Chronically Online Political Voice of Gen Z
Searching Indonesia on TikTok once yielded viral videos of an 11-year-old kid racing boats and “aura-farming”. Now, the same search is instead met with clips of burning buildings, demands to the government, and the “Jolly Roger” flag from the 1997 Japanese manga and anime One Piece. These two jarringly different snapshots have one thing in […]
Uncivil Unrest from Nepal to the United States
With their Parliament building still warm from the blaze of the day before, tens of thousands of Nepalis gathered for an impromptu election. The burning of Parliament was only one part of a fiery two-day protest in Nepal’s capital, which toppled the former system, setting up an interim government in less than a week. In […]
Medals and Meddling: Unraveling the Olympic Paradox
This year’s Olympic games were one for the books. The world watched, enamored, as Simone Biles won gold after gold, as Turkish Yusuf Dikec nonchalantly walked to the stand and fired bullseye after bullseye, as Australian Rachael Gunn did her best interpretation of a kangaroo interpreting the movement of a dying fish. For a few […]
The Fault of the Frequent Protest
It’s been over half a century since the Free Speech Movement gripped UC Berkeley, yet the institution still maintains its reputation for frequent protests and progressive ideology. UC Berkeley has found its name in national headlines throughout the years for mass protests like Occupy Cal and various anti-war movements. The issue is that protests, designed […]
Humor in the Woke World: Harmful or Hilarious?
Within the first ten minutes of Dave Chapelle’s “The Closer,” he critiques Black people for “beating up his beloved Asian people,” laughs about black police brutality, and describes a plot to a movie he devised in which aliens who were banished from earth come back to reclaim it as their own and titles it “Space […]
Resistance Beyond Borders: HK19 Meets Myanmar’s Anti-Coup Movement
The recent Myanmar Coup is hardly unprecedented. Myanmar was governed by a military dictatorship from 1962 to 2011, leaving the country under the iron fist of the Tatmadaw, the Burmese Military. The strength of the Tatmadaw was enshrined by the 2008 Constitution, which guarantees one third of parliamentary seats to the military, reserves leadership of […]
BLM Protests Challenge France’s Colorblindness
Justice Pour Adama As Assa Traoré, a French anti-racism activist of Malian descent, followed the murder of George Floyd in late May 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the United States, she saw in it the opportunity to seek justice for her brother and awaken a colorblind France to the […]
“Snowflake” and the Decline in Civil Discourse
“Snowflake.” A precursory Google search brings about an array of sources. YouTube recommends a video entitled, “SNOWFLAKE GETS OWNED BY MILITARY VET!” Breitbart offers an article entitled, “Triggered: Journalist Snowflakes Scared Trump Supporters Are ‘Turning on the Media.’” Most definitions for “snowflakes” revolve around the same general concept: a derogatory slang term that describes a […]
Basra in Flames, with No Water to Put out the Fire
Basra is a city located in the southeast of Iraq, bordering the countries of Kuwait and Iran. Basra is known as the oil capital of Iraq, yet despite the abundance of wealth, the whole country, and especially Basra, has been suffering from a stagnant economy. Government corruption, financial mishandling, and high unemployment took the Basrawis […]
“Pics or it Didn’t Happen”: California’s Millennials’ Resistance to Voting
How much would you pay for an avocado? Millennials, even if they refuse to admit it now, will fork up a relatively large amount, such as $12 for avocado toast or $5 for a side of guacamole. Driven largely by millennials, the current 18- to 35-year-olds, avocado consumption has skyrocketed from one pound per person in […]
The Political Is Not Personal: Neoliberalism and Today’s March Culture
“The personal is political”. With its roots in 70s second-wave and intersectional feminism, this phrase is found everywhere in our current political discourse. In any march or protest you go to, it’s likely that you’ll see it some sign or banner. Its ubiquity can be attributed to its effectiveness: few other phrases capture so well […]
The War on Terror’s New Domestic Front
The Government Wages War on Racial Justice, Environmental, and Anti-Fascist Activists “I think especially in light of the advent of Antifa, if you look at what’s going on there, you know, you have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also”. In other words, Anti-Fascist protesters are “some pretty bad dudes” while amongst neo-Nazis […]
Zucchini-gate or Bust: Berkeley’s Battle for Affordable Housing
Standing at the podium in front of the mayor and eight City Councilmembers, cameras zooming in, lights blurring, voices fading to a dull murmur in the background, one citizen was brave enough to brandish an anti-housing weapon no one had ever thought to wield: a zucchini. At the Berkeley City Council meeting on the night […]
Trump on Immigration – A Preview of the New Administration
Keeping with his campaign promise to restrict immigration from the Arab world, President Trump on January 27th began his program of “extreme vetting” with an executive order barring the acceptance of new refugees and restricting all travel to the United States by citizens of several Middle Eastern countries. The order quickly drew widespread criticism, with […]
The Indian Farce of Free Speech: JNU Students Arrested Over Alleged Anti-India Comments
At UC Berkeley, if you plan to take Political Science 1, also known as Intro to American Politics, at any point, then you will likely hear Professor Citrin rant at least once about the increasing erosion of free speech at Berkeley. He will bemoan the tarring of our legacy as the location of the Free […]
#VaiaDilma: President Rousseff’s Trust Deficit
Less than five months after voting President Dilma Rousseff into office last October, the Brazilian people have demanded her impeachment. On March 15th, 2015, approximately one million Brazilians, wearing the national colors of green and yellow, took to the streets in a series of nationwide demonstrations and chanted “Out Dilma.” Sao Paulo witnessed the largest […]
Liberty and Protest
There is a consistent tension between the “sovereign’s” First Amendment Rights to free speech and assembly and the state’s chronic apprehensiveness about the creation of a dynamic and potentially unstable security situation. In the aftermath of the Berkeley Black Live Matter Protests, I personally was drawn to the interesting phenomenon of violent crowd dispersal and […]
A Freshman’s Perspective on the Recent Police Brutality Protest
I grew up in Redmond, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. “Home” to me meant verdant parks. Quiet streets. Quieter nights. The calm darkness of those nights was unbroken except for the occasional passing taillight of our city cops’ fancy Dodge Chargers. When I was three or four, my parents told me what to do in […]