A student protester at Portland State University tried to derail an event featuring ex-Google employee James Damore by attacking the venue’s sound system.
A protester, Heather Clark, momentarily disrupted an event featuring ex-Google employee James Damore when she smashed the venue’s sound system. Although the system was physically damaged, the venue’s technology team was able to get it up and running within ten minutes. Clark was ultimately escorted out of the building and slapped with a misdemeanor citation.
During the event’s discussion, several student protesters stormed out of the venue. The event also featured former Evergreen State College professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. One student told a panelist to “shut up” before walking out.
“When I enrolled at PSU, in one of America’s most secular cities, I thought I was entering a world of open-minded and thoughtful young adults,” event organizer Andy Ngo wrote in a column for the Wall Street Journal on the event. “Instead I encountered a new kind of fundamentalism, many of whose adherents claim to disavow religion.”
Ngo, a graduate student at Portland State, was previously fired from his campus job at the student newspaper after one of his tweets appeared in a Breitbart News report. The video, which went viral on social media last May, showed a Muslim student stating that non-believers, or apostates, would either be banished or killed in countries run under Islamic law.