BERNIE GOLDBERG: I think this is one of those good news, bad news stories, Bill. The good news is that Ben Shapiro -- whose, by the way, only “crime,” and I use that in gigantic quotation marks, is that he had conservative views that leftist didn't want to hear -- the good news is, he got to speak. The bad news, as you just reported, is that it cost $600,000 to make sure he could speak without getting beaten up. The overriding question for me is, how did we get to this point? Things like this don't happen overnight. They evolve over long periods of time. And I think the answer is that university presidents and deans for far too long allowed left-wing students to disrupt and shutdown conservative speakers. Faculty members, professors who were once radical students themselves, never condemned this kind of stuff. In some cases, they encouraged it. If somebody in power, Bill, had expelled students early on in this ridiculous game, had said, "You know what? This is a university, we don't tolerate this,” I don't think we'd be at this point today.
BILL HEMMER (CO-ANCHOR): Wow, that's like catching the back side of the storm, right? The LA Times, here's a paragraph from The LA Times today: “UC Berkeley has told students that counseling is available to those stressed by all the commotion. A large swath of the campus will be closed off, including the plaza where the free speech movement began in the 1960s. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on security, and police now can use pepper spray on protesters after a 20-year-old ban was lifted by the city council this week.” End quote. Smells like freedom, Bernie.
GOLDBERG: This is my favorite part of the story. The first of those items that you, mention that students at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the best public universities, or any university in all of America, will get free mental health therapy if they were troubled or unsettled or bothered by something that Ben Shapiro said. In 1944, 18-year-olds, 19-year-old, 20-year-old men and boys stormed the beaches at Normandy. German machine gunners were firing bullets at them, and they went up the beach to free Europe, and now we have 18, 19, 20-year-old young men and women who need mental health therapy if they heard something they don't like? This is part of how university presidents and administrators help keep these kids as infants. They need to grow up. And you know what, when they leave college and if they pull a stunt like this, I hope their employer throws them the hell out of the office because somebody needs to do that.
