What UC Berkeley and Republican Leadership Share in Common

UC Berkeley and Republican leadership both attempted to silence the voice of individuals by pretending to give them what they wanted without giving them voice to what they wanted. Ann Coulter called their bluff; acceded to their demands she speak in the afternoon during class sessions, only to students, and only if the time and place were announced minutes before her speaking event. She agreed to their ruse and then asked the school not request the police to stand down in the event of rioting and also expressed her expectation any rioting students would be expelled. Caught in their own trap, UC Berkeley dis-invited Ann Coulter. She said she would show up anyway. Then on Thursday UC Berkeley reversed itself and re-invited Ann Coulter to speak, quietly changing the date of her presentation to a non-school day. Ann respectfully deferred, said she will show up on the original date anyway.

Republican leadership also pretended to give voting individuals their voice when they brought forward Ryancare a few weeks ago, touting it as a repeal and replace Obamacare bill. The Freedom Caucus was not fooled, pointed out it's impossible to replace what has not been repealed, as irrational as expecting Americans to allow, "Taxation without Representation." As Professor Langdon put it in ​The Da Vinci Code, "Surely such a travesty has never occurred." It's as outrageous as it is illogical to presume replace can occur without first a repeal of what is to be replaced. The undesirable alternative is a revision, a virulent mutation of an already cannibalistic lifeform, certainly not in keeping with what voters pressed levers to produce in Trump's first term as President of the United States.

The tension at issue whether it be repealing and replacing Obamacare or Ann Coulter exercising her free speech rights at UC Berkeley is concentrations of power overwhelming the freewill of individuals. Governments of different forms throughout history had been created, generally to favor concentrations of power until the founding of the United States of America. Building upon the declarations of principles contained within the Declaration of Independence of 1776, individuals with unalienable rights through the exercise of their own freewill created the US Constitution with its system of divided government to limit concentrations of powers inside and outside of government, inside and outside of our national boundaries.

Two concentrations of power were of most concern to the framers, Britain and mobs. To repel the Redcoats the Continental Army and Navy were called up and made ready. To guard against such mobs as had been observed in France and elsewhere The People chose our form of government to be a Republic instead of a Democracy, trusting representatives voted for by the people in their own districts would secure and defend the disparate wants and needs of individuals in all of the thirteen states. All went well in this grand country of ours until the representatives voted for by the people themselves became concentrations of power, at war with the individuals who brought them to power in the first place.

Which is why when President Trump's voters were shown what their individual representatives had wrought in the form of Ryancare, they knew they had been betrayed. They knew their individual representatives were acting as a unit on behalf of some one or another concentration of power and not on behalf of the voters that elected them. Such also was the betrayal of Ann Coulter, her supporters, and her willing open-minded listeners by the self-proclaimed Birthplace of the Free Speech Movement: UC Berkeley. The university in its role as a defender of free speech, like the representatives selected by Trump's voters, had succumbed to the frantic concentration of power vested in what we will call for the moment The ​Global Citizens' Initiative.

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