An internal email released by Berkeley to its faculty asked for help in support of Berkeley’s undocumented student community in the face of “a tense campus climate” and “a dramatic rise in students needing emergency counselling” as a result of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
The email, sent in October by the Undocumented Students Task Force, falsely accused the Berkeley College Republicans of executing a Project Veritas stunt on campus, and calls the conservative group “mean-spirited”, asserting that they had clearly intended to “psychologically harm and frighten undocumented members of our campus community” by chanting “Build a wall!”
The College Republicans corrected the record quickly following the stunt, releasing a statement reading, “The Berkeley College Republicans had no involvement whatsoever in this demonstration and yet are suffering undue blame… [the press] has given our club members an unjustified characterization.”
Project Veritas has engaged in activism over the past few months designed to draw attention to the coddled state of American higher education. They recently introduced “Emotional First Aid Kits” on campuses, successfully tricking a number of social justice warriors into endorsing the packs, which include “genderless comfort blankets” and earplugs to avoid politically incorrect speech.
However, despite the public knowledge that the incident was not associated with the College Republicans, the email uses falsely alleged College Republican involvement as the premise to establish a need for Berkeley staff and administrators to understand the “many structural obstacles our undocumented students have had to overcome” and to combat anti-undocumented immigrant rhetoric by giving undocumented students additional support and attention.
“It is already hard enough for [undocumented students] to figure out how to pay for their tuition without any significant access to financial aid,” the email reads, but as Troy Worden of the Berkeley College Republicans points out, “the professors of the University of California do not understand the struggles middle-class Americans such as myself have in securing financial aid; they only want to see us as hateful anti-immigrant agitators.”
The email urges faculty members to follow outlined strategies for communicating with undocumented students that include but are not limited to posting a message of support for undocumented students on social media, affirming an undocumented student’s sense of frustration, and to smile at undocumented students because “a smile goes a long way.”
The email was only secured by Berkeley College Republicans in November, as it was distributed by the Berkeley administration to its faculty privately in an effort, the College Republicans say, to create a more negative atmosphere for conservatives on campus behind closed doors.
“Over the course of this election year the Berkeley College Republicans have received neither sympathy nor protection from the administration and faculty of our university. Our members have been physically assaulted and our private property has been destroyed, but Berkeley has never once issued a statement calling for the toleration of our political views,” says Worden, in reference to an incident in September in which angry protesters ripped up a Trump cut out and assaulted a College Republican while recruiting members on campus.
The letter, provided to Breitbart Tech, can be read in full below:
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