A mob of over 250 angry student protesters derailed a lecture on the rise of anti-police attitudes in the United States held at Claremont McKenna College on Thursday.
The speaker, Heather Mac Donald, a Manhattan Institute scholar and author of the 2016 book “The War on Cops,” was met with a sizable resistance before her scheduled lecture at Claremont McKenna College on Thursday evening. Student protesters banged on windows and shouted “F*ck the police” and “Black Lives Matter,” ultimately forcing the lecture to be livestreamed online from a near-empty room on campus.
Just a day before her event at Claremont McKenna, a similar event was derailed by protesters at UCLA.
“The protesters surrounded all the doors to the Atheneum where I was supposed to speak, so none of the students who had signed up to attend my lecture could get in,” Mac Donald said. “I was hustled from my guest suite by several police officers from Claremont PD into the lecture hall. It was decided that I would give the speech for live streaming to a largely empty hall. The organizers moved the podium so that it would not be visible through the windows to the students surrounding the building once night fell. We jumpstarted the timing of my talk as the crowd seemed to be getting more unruly.”
Unfortunately, campus police decided to cut Mac Donald’s lives-stream short. “During my speech, the protesters banged on the glass windows and shouted. It was extremely noisy inside the hall. I took two questions from students who were watching on livestream, but then the cops decided that things were getting too chaotic and I should stop speaking,” Mac Donald said. “An escape plan through the kitchen into an unmarked police van was devised; I was surrounded by about four cops. Protesters were sitting on the stoop outside the door through which I exited, but we had taken them by surprise and we got through them.”
In her short lecture, Mac Donald argued that there is no institution more dedicated to protecting black lives than cops.
“And while the protesters likely didn’t show up to these scenes of carnage, the cops did,” she said, speaking about victims of gang violence. “They are the only government agency that works every day to ensure that black lives matter,” she finished.
Peter Uvin, vice president for academic affairs at Claremont McKenna College condemned the angry mob that derailed Mac Donald’s lecture.
“What we face here is not an attempt to demonstrate, or to ask tough questions of our speaker, all of which are both protected and cherished on this campus, but rather to make it impossible for her to speak, for you to listen, and for all of us to debate. This we could not accept,” Uvin said.
Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com