Jan. 16, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:44
3965 "Why I'm Suing UC Berkeley and Antifa..."
A victim of leftist violence and her legal representative join Stefan Molyneux to discuss their extensive lawsuit against UC Berkeley, UCPD, Berkeley PD, and members of BAMN/Antifa related to last years Anti-Milo Yiannopoulos Riot.Previous Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIFYTYNl7ngPress Release: https://freedomxlaw.com/freedom-x-files-lawsuit-targeting-uc-berkeley-city-berkeley-civil-rights-violations-cancelled-milo-yiannopoulos-appearance-last-year/Lawsuit: https://gallery.mailchimp.com/0579eca0bf695b09b40266abc/files/e5f11be7-76e3-4b99-bc2b-223439636793/complaint.pdfKatrina on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/smisanthropeKatrina on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC66AM1MJ4wIG3smb1y07kHgWilliam J. Becker, Jr. is the President, CEO and General Counsel of Freedom X. For more information on Freedom X, please check out: http://www.freedomxlaw.comYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hope you're doing well. So I have, well, we're talking again to Katrina.
We talked to her last year, and now we're talking to her with Representative William J. Becker Jr.
He's the President, CEO, and General Counsel of FreedomX.
The website is freedomxlaw.com.
We're going to put that in the link below.
And you can have a look at Katrina's work at twitter.com forward slash smisanthrope, or you can search for Strategic Misanthropy on YouTube.
Thanks so much for both of you for taking the time today.
Thanks, Stefan. Thanks for having us.
So what brings us together today is a matter of law.
And of course, William, I would like for you and of course for Katrina to talk about what is going on and the causes of action that you have and have submitted against various parties at the event from Milo from last year.
So I wonder if we could talk a little bit about what the legal case is, what the cause is, and what you hope to achieve.
Sure. Call me, Bill.
I'll just mention that I'm one of the attorneys on the case.
I am handling the constitutional claims, and Sean Steele and Alexander Eisner are handling the tort claims.
So the complaint is broken into those two categories.
On the constitutional side, we're alleging 14th Amendment civil rights violations against the city of Berkeley, their police department, the University of California, Berkeley, their police department, The chiefs of these divisions, all the titular heads, because ultimately you have to sue individuals in these kinds of actions.
And on the tort side, and there are some other civil rights claims under state law in California, That deal with violence against people who are perceived or are of a particular political nature.
So under these statutes, we can assert claims against the perpetrators of the battery for violating those statutes, for committing violence solely because they don't like what somebody believes.
On the tort side of it, the claims are Your typical salt and battery claim, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, and premises liability because the university created a dangerous property by failing to enforce their own security policies.
Right. And Katrina, what have you found out since we talked last February?
What have you found out that has been the most shocking or surprising to you since we last shared this information?
There's certainly been a lot.
The last time we talked, I think, was just two or three days after the incident happened.
I still didn't even know at that point what had happened to my husband, the fact that he had been beaten unconscious, the fact that He had been mobbed just a few feet away from me and I didn't even know because I was still blinded by pepper spray and trying to escape myself.
But pretty much every step of the way since then, we've just found out more and more about really the extent to which university resources were used by the individuals who perpetrated this act.
So the protest, which turned into a riot, I would say intentionally, which was intended to be a riot, was organized by student groups.
They receive student funding through the ASU. In other words, they get UC Berkeley money, which means they get taxpayer money.
They use classrooms on campus.
Even some of the organizations that aren't student groups, that are technically off-campus groups, meet on campus.
They met on campus before the event to plan it.
They met on campus after the event.
To decompress and celebrate it.
Articles were published before and after in the student newspaper, which is also funded by the university, encouraging people to attend the riot, encouraging people to riot, and then celebrating the riot afterward, including students admitting to participating, and participating in the property damage and the general mayhem.
And I don't know what...
I mean, I certainly didn't expect UC Berkeley to show up at my door with a formal apology and go to the media and say, you know, mea culpa and all of that.
But I was quite surprised to see zero action taken against any of these groups, zero action taken against these individuals, these students, you know, still publishing articles months and months later, advocating for more riots.
Just nothing.
No problem at all, you know.
Students get expelled, as you've covered before, for jokes that are taken Badly, right?
Or aren't even taken badly, but some administrator hears it and decides to make us think about it, and that is a threat to student safety.
But students on campus who are admitted rioters and advocates of violence and practitioners of violence, somehow that's not a violation of the code of conduct for students.
That's not a threat to student safety.
They're fine. Right.
Now, let me put this question out to you both, because for a lot of people who don't know the history, and we'll put a link to the cause of action that you filed, because people should really read through it.
I mean, it's fascinating stuff.
It is, as we talked about before the show, it's philosophy with footnotes, and we're making very cogent arguments.
So the counter argument that I think would pop up into a lot of people's head is to say, well, this kind of came out of nowhere.
Who could have anticipated what happened?
And you, I think, address that very well in the suit.
And I wonder if you could help people understand how much preparation and how much how many best practices could have been enacted by the administration and by the police for that matter as well.
Yeah.
Well, let me share with you an article that Heather McDonald, who is the author of The War on Cops, wrote a year ago, which she sent to me today and is very informative today.
You can find a link to it on my website, or you can go to the City Journal and search for it.
It's dated February 23, 2017.
And let me just read you briefly what she said about it.
She said, City police had used tear gas on the first night of violence to stop rioters from throwing bricks, rocks, metal pipes, glass bottles, and other dangerous objects at them.
Nearly a dozen officers were injured.
One officer, hit with a bag of gravel, sustained a dislocated shoulder.
The next day, local leaders sharply criticized the police for what activists termed a police riot.
So on the second night of anarchy, The department refrained from any crowd control tactics, such as skirmish lines, that allegedly rile up protesters.
The violence against civilians worsened, including multiple assaults, a robbery at gunpoint in the name of no justice, no peace, and shots fired at a homeowner trying to prevent damage to his backyard.
Nevertheless, the second night of riots was deemed a relative success from the police perspective because officers had not had to use force to protect themselves.
The official takeaway from the four-day breakdown of law and order was that it is better to allow widespread property damage than to use preventative tactics that risk confrontations with rioters and that might require officers to forcefully and un-tele-genetically defend themselves.
The department would only intervene in group lawlessness to protect life.
And they settle on the property damage as the cost of not interfering.
Well, so in our complaint, we didn't refer to that particular argument, but we did refer to the fact that they were aware of past riots, and that included the more recent San Jose riots.
Where pro-Trump people were trying to attend a rally and the City of San Jose Police Department directed them, actively directed them straight into the crowds of angry anarchists.
That's something that was clearly known to UC Berkeley and City of Berkeley Police during the planning stages for this event.
This event, by the way, was being sponsored by the UC Berkeley College Republicans.
And as alleged in the complaint, the college Republicans met with city police and UCB police officials.
And they admitted they were aware of that.
They were aware of the attacks on Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Davis just weeks before.
They were aware of the University of Washington shooting.
I don't know if there was a murder committed, I can't remember, but there was a shooting that occurred around a Milo event.
All of these factors, if you are a law enforcement agency, are going to be very important in determining the scope of planning that's going to be necessary to deter demonstrations.
At UC Berkeley, you ought to be at least familiar with civil unrest dating back to the 60s.
It's not a new phenomenon.
And during this course throughout the years, both the city and the university have developed fairly conscientious coordinated plans to try to address Large demonstrations.
So you have to ask yourself, with all this experience, all this intelligence and background, why did they drop the ball on February 1 and permit so many people to be assaulted and permit the property damage and permit the building to be put on fire,
etc., etc.? By the way, I want to just add, this all happened in front of Martin Luther King Student Center, named after the person we're celebrating today, Martin Luther King Jr., Who was a proponent of non-violent demonstrations.
Isn't that ironic that the left, including Black Lives Matter, would demonstrate violently in front of that center?
They're such hypocrites. They don't believe in peace.
Well, and of course, the suspicion I think that a lot of people have is that if they allow a right-wing meeting to descend into chaos, then it deters people from trying to have those meetings, that there is a kind of soft censorship involved.
And who wants to go back when this kind of crap storm has happened?
So get your comments on a couple of the key points, at least from my perspective, in the complaint.
So here's one that I hope puts some sort of framing for people to understand.
Government actors are responsible for creating and exposing the plaintiffs to the unlawful actions of an angry mob of violent anarchists by directing law enforcement officers to vacate locations in and around Sproul Plaza and the MLK Center at UC Berkeley, agitating the mob by issuing feckless dispersal orders and empty threats of arrest from a vantage point where they could ensure their own safety while leaving plaintiffs exposed to violent assaults.
Erecting barricades in such a manner as to enable angry malefactors to surround plaintiffs and assault them, and to deprive plaintiffs of an exit route failing to enforce the law and by other affirmative actions.
And there's a huge amount compressed into all of that, but I wonder if you could break it down a little bit so that people can understand how it seems that there was...
You know, the invitation to the event based upon here are best practices, we're going to have 100 cops or so, and then this sort of fencing in, this provocation of the attack crowd, the barring off the exit route and basically creating a pressure cooker of almost certain violence.
Yeah, well, the university's crowd management policy specifically states that it's the obligation of the law enforcement officials to assist people trying to remove themselves from a danger.
And that's specifically something they didn't do, and based on what Heather McDonald's article tells us, that was a conscious decision not to do that.
In the earlier part of the evening, there was a police presence in Sproul Plaza.
That police presence was not a very tight skirmish line, and had there been interagency cooperation with the City of Berkeley, And with outside police agencies, when I consulted with the college Republicans at Cal State Fullerton, they brought in outside agencies, the sheriff's department and other people, because they understood the risk.
Berkeley should have understood the risk too.
So what they did was, and this is what we learned from the judge's decision in the summary judgment order in the Hernandez versus San Jose case, which Harmeet Dillon is Litigating with her law firm.
And in that summary judgment order, the judge said it's not enough to just stand down.
That's not going to create malfeasance.
You've got to show that there is affirmative conduct that the police are engaged in.
They're actually doing something to make matters worse, to put the plaintiffs in a position worse than the one they found them in.
And if they show deliberate indifference to a known or obvious danger, well, you knew there was going to be a known or obvious danger because social media was lit up.
You knew that they were organizing.
It was, like Kat says in the Daily Californian, they were encouraging people to come and demonstrate.
And you knew from the Black Lives Matter incident in 2014 that when demonstrators come to that campus or anywhere in Berkeley, that they're likely to be violent.
You knew from the ascendancy of these anarchist groups, like By All Means Necessary and Berkeley Antifa and the rest of them.
The police knew about that, and we have evidence of that, that they knew about these groups and that they were planning for them.
But what ended up happening is they acquiesced.
So what did they do that was affirmative, though?
To begin with, they affirmatively walked into MLK Center.
I'm not even going to say that's a stand-down order.
They deliberately walked into MLK Center exposing the public to a known and obvious danger.
So that fits one of the prongs of the San Jose judge's order.
And they affirmatively set up barricades in such a configuration.
These were double metal barricades in such a configuration so that once you've entered Scroll Plaza, there's no exit.
There's no way to go back.
And so in the videos you see of our client John Jennings and Katrina and Trevor Hatch, The three of them are just being pummeled against those barricades.
They have no place to go.
They're being pepper sprayed, they're being battered, and they can't find an exit route.
So, the police chose to do that.
Now, why would you choose to cage people into a zone like that?
For what purpose?
It was almost as if this was planned by the Three Stooges, and not by a police force that's supposed to conduct itself For the purpose of fulfilling its sworn duty to serve and protect the public.
Now, help me understand this issue of agitating the mob by issuing feckless dispersal orders and empty threats of arrest.
I didn't quite follow the reasoning behind that, and of course I wasn't, as Katrina was, on the ground there.
How does that play into the complaint?
So here's what the UC Berkeley police did.
Once they left their wide skirmish line to walk into MLK Center, they went up to levels and with bullhorns, issued dispersal orders and threats of arrest.
If you don't disperse, we're going to arrest you.
These people were already agitated.
How much more agitated do you think they would be, or emboldened would they be, If they're being told they're going to be under arrest, but by what?
By police sitting in the security of MLK Center, where they're ensuring their own safety, but not ensuring the public safety.
That was an empty threat of arrest.
So that just encouraged more agitation among people who were already I'm going to wear this tomorrow at our press conference.
You only achieve peace through strength.
I think there was a president who said that and was very successful at it.
You don't achieve peace through weakness.
And what the police force here did was they surrendered to the mob.
They surrendered to the heckler's veto.
They said, we'd rather ensure our own safety than perform our duties.
So the feckless orders were a result of what they had learned from 2014.
And what they essentially had learned there was, we're not going to do our job.
We're just not going to because the casualties and the property damage are likely to be less if we don't intervene.
Now, that's kind of unfair to the victims of assault and battery.
Well, of course, you could say that ahead of time.
And then people could make their decisions accordingly.
But enacting it against what seems to be best practices, to me at least, is really setting kind of a trap.
And I think so now I understand this later part where you say, by abandoning their tactical positions and issuing multiple dispersal orders backed by empty threats of arrest...
Defendants UCPD and UCPD DOES did not merely withhold protective services.
They left plaintiffs and other innocent victims in a worse position than had the defendants not acted at all.
So I think that's where you're saying the next domino comes down, whereas it wasn't just that they stood around and did nothing.
It was that because they provoked and then withheld.
They didn't just withhold. They actually go like a red flag in front of a bull.
Setting up the cage.
Right. The lion's den, setting up the cage, the barricades that prevented an escape, and emboldening them with their hollow, vacuous threats of arrest.
That's enough to establish affirmative conduct.
Right. And I can say from being the person sort of there on the ground, it was a huge contributing factor for us because We saw, when we initially got there, we saw not a lot but some police presence outside of MLK. And we, I may have mentioned it last time, we even actually chanted Blue Lives Matter at them.
And one of the officers who was standing outside waved at us.
And we had no idea that they had retreated inside the building.
We kind of had other stuff distracting us, things going on.
And kind of next thing we knew, The Black Block march had started, we looked behind us and the cops who a second ago were waving at us and, you know, appearing to at least kind of be holding a skirmish line, as Bill mentioned, were just gone.
All inside the building.
And not just inside the building, but also inside the building and locking the doors.
So the picture that's shown in the complaint of me being treated for pepper spray, that was after I attempted to get inside the building The police refused to let us in and we had no choice but for me to kind of collapse against the window with, you know,
I wish there was a bigger backed up picture because undoubtedly there were officers right behind the glass with me there being treated by, you know, some good Samaritan, some random civilian who actually they were probably there to help Antifa against police, but they tend to be nonpartisan so they helped me in that instance.
Same deal on the other side.
They wouldn't let the other guys in either, initially.
So there was literally no escape.
So this brings me to this question.
I sort of feel like we need this satanic football play-by-play going on to figure out where everyone's moving.
But as far as I understand it, you guys, Katrina and others, were trapped in the bottom of a U. And the bottom of the U was this barricade that was erected.
And on paragraph 77 of the complaint, you say, had defendants not erected the police barricade so as to completely block all egress all the way out from Spruill Plaza in a southern direction, The plaintiffs would not have been pinned down and could have escaped to the south and avoided the damages and losses.
So they let people in, they withdrew to the MLK building, and then you were stuck in the bottom of the U facing this feral mob when the police had withdrawn.
So the police barricade plus the invitation, so to speak, to the mob to come in was what created the powder keg at the bottom of this U-shaped.
Is that a fair way to put it?
I would add the affirmative conduct they engaged in in the planning stages where they understood That there was ample reason to believe that there would be substantial violent demonstrations and they were completely unprepared.
There was no interagency cooperation.
And so that's an affirmative stage of events and decision making that violated their own policies.
I liken this to a fire where the firemen are standing On the street with their hoses looking at the fire and saying, I don't want to go in there.
It's hot there. I might get hurt.
You know, that's exactly what happened here.
And by setting up the barricades, it's like the firemen saying, let's see, let's stage this so that the people can't get out instead of making it possible for them to get out.
I mean, this is unconscionable.
What the police departments did here, all in the name of political expediency, because they cannot, in good conscience for them, they cannot violate their duty to the left-wing establishment of that community.
We're going to see more and more of this unless we demilitarize these ridiculous Millennial organizations that are made up of anti-white, they say white supremacy, but they're really, they're just anti-mainstream, anti-American, anti-tradition, anti-whatever this country was founded on.
And they're going to try to take it over through a revolution like the Jacobins that they are.
And that's exactly what they're doing.
And ultimately, just like the Jacobins in their reign of terror, they're going to be they're they're not going to win.
So this is the frustrating thing for me when it comes to prevention.
So as you point out, this is from paragraph 79.
California Penal Code 185 makes it unlawful for any person to wear any mask or personal disguise, whether complete or partial, for the purpose of evading or escaping discovery, recognition or identification in the commission of a public offense.
So, if people are wandering into, quote, protest, a particular political event, and they're masked or they're covered up or in some way their features or bodies are obscured, isn't that just a, that's when you just start arresting people and the whole thing could have been prevented if that particular statute had been enforced?
Exactly. You see this mob, you have some idea what the size of the mob is as it's approaching down Bancroft Way.
You're expecting it, so you're prepared with a lineup.
And you know what, this isn't news to the city of Berkeley or to the university.
These things are done, they're going to be put together at the Davo Convention when President Trump goes there Sometime soon.
It's done whenever a public leader attends some sort of global conference and demonstrators come out.
So they understand what crowd control requires, and they also understand who the crowd will be made up of.
They simply decided here, and like I say, the best explanation for it is that They wanted to follow the lesson of the 2014 Black Lives Matter incident and minimize the damage to the property for the safety and security of the public of innocent bystanders attending this.
Now, why would they do that? Because the innocent bystanders, and this isn't really a legal argument, but the innocent bystanders wearing their MAGA hats and Coming to see Milo Yiannopoulos are not innocent to them.
In the left's distorted, contorted vision, they are the enemy.
They're the aggressor.
Wearing that hat is an aggression.
Saying make America great is an aggression.
The lessons learned from 2014, the Black Lives Matter assaults, Were something that they must have consciously took into account when planning for the eventualities of the Milo event.
If it were just that, if they were just relying on the experience and the lessons learned from that moment of anarchy, it might be excusable for them to have Made the conscious decision to not intervene and to not protect the public.
But as we know, it was more than that.
Because we know just how vicious the anti-Trump mobsters have been over the course of the past two years.
And just how much violence is perpetrated and how large the crowd sizes are.
We know that. They know that.
So my thought is that they had to have some exterior rationale for the policy decisions that they made, which, as I said, even contradict their own policies,
their written policies. And the only answer I can come up with is that they believe that Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial public figure with a blunt way of speaking, And the pro-Trump people there to assert,
maybe through what they perceive to be schadenfreude, the success of the presidential election, to them, they're letting it all out.
But to the police, they're going to let them vent.
We're going to give them their opportunity to let off some steam, and we're going to To approach this as though we're on the side of free speech.
Oh my gosh, every time I see this argument, and you see it in all their written material, is that they want to promote free speech.
Well, the heckler's veto is not constitutional free speech.
The heckler's veto is where somebody tries to stop somebody who has a legitimate right to speak by shouting them down or by attacking them violently.
The Ninth Circuit, unfortunately, well, the Ninth Circuit actually has some very strong legal authority, some case authority supporting the rights of those who are victimized by Hitler's veto.
They also have some very bad case authority, two of my cases, where the courts have gone the other direction to protect the politically correct ideological So, for instance, in Morgan Hill,
California, a few years ago, when some of my clients wore their American flag patriotic clothing on Cinco de Mayo, wore that to school, and the principal told them to go home or to invert their shirts so that they wouldn't offend the Latinos celebrating Cinco de Mayo.
It was the angry, violent Latinos, or Mexicans they called themselves, even though they're American, It was the angry, violent Mexicans threatening violence that shut down the right of patriots to express their patriotism.
And the Ninth Circuit went against us on that.
So, you know, we're living in an upside-down planet right now.
Everything I read today in the news suggests that the left doesn't get it.
Somebody on Martin Luther King Jr.
Day today, actually some professor somewhere, a professor in gender identity or Whatever this new concept is, said that it's racist not to allow people to come into this country from countries where they're different races.
That's racist because of the white majority and white supremacy in this country.
Well, that's exactly called racism, to accuse a race of being racist because of their race.
Martin Luther King said that he cared about the content of one's character, not the color of their skin.
That's been inverted with Black Lives Matter.
And in addition to that with Black Lives Matter, the hostility toward law enforcement has encouraged law enforcement agencies to back off of their traditional policies of enforcement.
Well, I think we all in our gut – this is not an argument, but I'll just sort of put it out there.
I think we all in our gut know how things would have gone differently if this had been a group of black students or Jewish students gathering together.
And if some KKK members or some neo-Nazi group had set upon them, we all know exactly how this would have gone down.
And I think that's the fundamental – I think aspect behind this third claim where you talk about plaintiffs incorporate by reference the allegations in the preceding paragraphs.
All persons within the jurisdiction of this state have the right to be free from any violence or intimidation by threat of violence committed against their persons or property because of Political affiliation.
And I think that rests on this idea, if we reverse the groups, I think we all know how it would have gone down, which I think is the basis behind saying some of this inattention, some of these positive actions that you argue resulted in threats to life and property occurred because of the political nature of the event.
So what's new? The left owns academia.
The left owns Silicon Valley.
The left owns...
Most of the deep state in the government and, you know, so what happens is that you're never going to be able to prove your theory because you're never going to find somebody go to say Hillsdale College and try to put on, try to present, name some lefty crazy, Salsur, you know, Linda Salsur.
You're never going to find Hillsdale College have her speak there, and so you're never going to find angry right-wing protesters try to stop it.
But if you were to test the theory, you would very likely find, and there's a study that shows this, that Republicans and conservatives don't believe in suppressing the right of others to express their unpopular viewpoints.
Ergo, the First Amendment is very popular with conservatives.
The First Amendment is not popular at all Now, if they really understood the meaning of the First Amendment and what it took for this country to establish it as a principle and as law, maybe they'd think differently.
Because maybe if they sat back there as the people who were struggling against the British Empire and being overtaxed and having their rights I've taken away from them and their Fourth Amendment search and seizure rights and all that.
Maybe had they lived back then, they'd stand for those principles, but they don't.
They're so secure now in their political correct world.
They're so confident in the entertainment industry and all those other places, I said, that they say the most outrageous things.
What this country really needs is a big shakeup, and that, you know, in the past that's always been something like a world war.
9-11 didn't do it, so I'm not sure what it's going to take for people to start to understand the basics of civilization again.
When you didn't mention another really big piece at play here, which is the media, and you kind of mentioned it peripherally, but directly it makes a huge difference in terms of what the police and the university do because they have this They don't have to coordinate or anything like that.
They just have this automatic complicity with the media, right?
There were major news outlets on the scene, but if you looked at any of the reporting, especially on national legacy media platforms, you wouldn't know that individuals had been attacked and hurt.
Even though the videos were up on YouTube and easily searchable and findable, even though one of those attacks happened in front of an ABC7 News camera, When Chiara Robles was pepper sprayed, no.
They don't cover that, right?
Alternative media, all over it.
Stefan and others, all over it.
And thank goodness for that, because otherwise there would be zero possibility of getting this information out there.
I wouldn't even know what had happened to my husband if it weren't for some on-the-ground, non-legacy media journalist just doing his thing and putting out The information that he thinks is important to get out to people and getting out on platforms like YouTube and Twitter and other things like that.
The idea of increasing left-wing control over those platforms is therefore very, very concerning to me and a huge threat because right now that's kind of all we have, right?
Everything else gets crafted by By this mainstream narrative that gets to kind of pick and choose.
You know, here we'll find, we'll play over and over and over again, the clip of one guy getting punched at a Trump rally, but we'll never play the video of my husband being beaten unconscious or of our fellow plaintiff face down in the street with multiple skull fractures.
Right. Now, as far as identifying some of the perpetrators, I mean, not everybody was perfectly, they didn't have that Boba Fett mask on, right?
Not everybody was perfectly masked.
You have, you know, I don't know, dozens of cameras around, you have witnesses, you have helicopters with cameras, bank surveillance cameras and so on.
What has happened to the efforts to identify and deal with some of these perpetrators?
That's a really good question.
Well, let me answer first, Scott.
I sent out public records requests about a year ago, less than a year ago, obviously, but a long time ago, that never got any responses to.
So, one of the reasons why we delayed in filing the lawsuit was because I was hopeful that we were going to get some cooperation.
We never did. It's curious, isn't it, that there was only one arrest during this.
It's curious that you see these faces bluntly attacking Jennings, Kat's husband, and hammering her and Trevor Hatch with bats and sticks and flagparks.
And we see their faces, and there is surely a way for the police to put out an APB To say, anybody who knows this person, please contact us.
Have they done that? We're going to ask them in deposition whether they did that, and why not?
Don't they have any interest in stopping this?
And maybe they have. Maybe we don't know, but we haven't heard of any arrests.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, Bill, but that would also bypass the issue of optics, because you could just go and question that person, or if you have cause enough, you could arrest them, and there wouldn't be six million cameras around.
So if their concern is, well, it looks bad, I don't see how that concern would be violated by finding somebody and questioning them after the fact.
Yeah, I'm not sure I understand you, but they should be questioned, and if there's been no effort to identify the These malefactors, these wrongdoers, these lawless animals, then I would wonder, really, why don't we disband the police force?
But we hope to find out, in the discovery phase of this case, who the identities of a lot of those individuals are.
And we're hoping that the police will have done their investigations to uncover that information.
I'm sure they know through social media.
I'm sure they've gone through the usual investigative protocols necessary to identify violent criminals.
And if they haven't, then they're going to be exposed for not having to.
So, you know, it's not easy to win these lawsuits.
Can I be frank?
I saw a statistic that only about 3% of federal civil rights cases prevail, or 4%, something like 96% go down in flames.
Part of our objective is to be the voice of truth that gets the word out to people.
Even in conservative communities, they're unaware of what's really going on out there.
I know too many people who don't even own cable, so they don't listen to Fox News.
They're certainly not listening to talk radio.
You know, they're going about their daily lives and trying to avoid having to confront these problems.
So one of our objectives is always to show that there are victims of a cultural attack on conservative values.
This is one example.
And if we can just bring some light to it, somehow, some way, Within that community, perhaps we'll be able to change policy there.
Well, of course, the challenge, as I think people know, is that I think it's been repeatedly upheld that the police actually have no obligation to protect.
They have no obligation to enforce the law and public universities get these special dispensations from normal liability issues.
Yeah, that's an impediment that's hard to, or an obstacle that's hard to get over.
The fact that they don't owe a duty to protect is really at odds with their sworn duty to protect.
It doesn't make sense.
But the courts are the same courts that are, these activist courts come up with these legal notions and they don't get overturned.
So we have to work with that.
So what would be the best way that people who are listening to this or who are watching this, guys, what would be the best way for them to help spread the word, to help out with what is going on?
Because it does seem to me to be a very important case.
Well, as far as FreedomX is concerned, by the way, I started FreedomX as a non-profit, 501c3, after 30 years of practice.
Because of the cases I was getting involved in, because I kept seeing conservatives and conservative symbols and traditions and beliefs being attacked, and it bothered me.
So I started FreedomX, and the name FreedomX was intended to specifically not be like some of these other organizations that are all named American Freedom This and American Freedom That.
FreedomX is shorthand for freedom of expression.
And the X also, I believe, serves as that unknown integer in an algorithm that you're trying to solve.
You're trying to solve for X. What is our freedom worth is the question.
Freedom X. Solve the puzzle.
So, people can go to the website and donate at the website because it's tax-deductible.
When they donate, we can fight this thing with greater strength because, I'll tell you, starting a non-profit is not easy.
It's like running any business.
It requires funding.
And I don't like to beg for it.
I'm in the business to vindicate the rights of conservatives and people of religious faith.
But it does take money to run a business.
So they can donate to this, help us grow, help us hire more attorneys, help us.
I've got cases around the country that I want to fight, and I can't do it because I don't have that kind of support right now.
So that's what they can do, at least from our perspective.
Right. Sorry to interrupt.
That's freedomxlaw.com.
And I'm sorry, Katrina, you wanted to add.
I was just going to second that.
Bill's representing us pro bono, which he doesn't make a lot of stink about, but it's a huge deal for us.
And as he mentioned, he does have a focus on protecting conservatives and folks of religious background.
He didn't ask us a single question about our religious background.
Some of the plaintiffs are Some are homosexual.
Some of us are atheists.
So once again, we have a case of awful, awful Christians being super intolerant and not helping people who don't necessarily align with them on every point.
So I really think he deserves everyone's support.
And beyond that, sharing the story.
I'm a huge believer in alt media as the way of the future.
So sharing this interview, post it on Facebook, you know, tell your friends about it.
We're kind of at the point where, you know, you kind of got to do some of what the left does, make people uncomfortable at Thanksgiving or Easter or whatever it is, you know?
Remember this story, next time someone tries to minimize the violence that the left is doing, I'm trying to put everything I can about it out there just for that purpose, because we're a small minority, we're a small fraction of the people who've suffered this kind of violence in the last couple of years,
and we've been lucky enough to get some of it out there and to get this legal support and to hopefully have a chance Yeah, and I'd like to say,
too, that the way people can stay informed about the case is to sign up on Our website for the newsletter so that we have your email address and you'll get updates and not just on this case but our other activities.
And Katrina, let's close with You and your husband and those you know.
Because, of course, the last time we talked was right after the event.
We'll put a link to that interview below.
But reading some of the physical fallout, the emotional distress, what's it been like for you over the last year to be dealing with this, not just physically, emotionally, but also to see the lack of justice that's coming forward from the existing police force and administration?
Right. Yeah. It's been a roller coaster, to say the least.
Immediately after the incident, we were pushing as hard as we could to do as much of the investigation ourselves.
And, you know, going and doing interviews with you.
Chiara was doing a bunch of interviews.
Just kind of just in case.
You know, we knew that police investigations could be slow.
We were worried about the trail growing cold, that kind of stuff.
So there were basically a bunch of people with head injuries trying to investigate all this stuff and pull it together.
I was completely overwhelmed with the number of people that I didn't even know, some of them not even in the country, who jumped in and helped because so much of this stuff is online.
The only reason I know what happened to my husband is because of stuff that was posted online.
We probably never would have found out otherwise.
And getting all that together, getting it to the police, things like that.
And then to have, as far as I can tell so far, nothing done with that information was...
I don't know. It was painful, for sure.
I mean, the experience itself was kind of painful because, you know, I've listened to you for a long time.
I'm not unaware of the fact that police can and do stand down.
But I guess it's different to experience it yourself, you know, so that in some ways, after the fact, I was feeling really stupid.
I was feeling really stupid for believing that I was safe because there were police standing there.
And then, you know, another part of me that was more forgiving I was like, well, but that's what they're for, right?
I mean, they're supposed to be there doing that.
And then, you know, it just takes time with a lot of this stuff.
I mean, I did have PTSD, which is a weird thing to be on here talking about because I remember a roommate of one of my siblings accusing me of giving her PTSD because I called her a mean word on the internet once.
And so Now that I've actually gone through it, and it's less to do with what happened to me and more to do with just the memory of the helplessness.
Because I knew something was happening to my husband, and I knew it was really bad, and I knew I couldn't do anything about it in the moment.
And seeing the video of it is astonishing.
And how is his recovery going?
He has some permanent physical effects that will never go away.
Luckily, they're not.
Interfering too much with his life.
Can I interject something here, Kat?
I mean, her husband and Don Fletcher, one of our other defendants, he was the one who was beaten unconscious on the street of Berkeley there on Abernathy Way.
They really had to overcome a lot of trepidation in becoming plaintiffs in this case because they fear Antifa type of I don't want to call them people, animals, coming after them.
And, you know, what they're really doing here is what every great person who stood up to wrongfulness has done.
The martyrs throughout history are the people who have fearlessly stood before their attackers.
and said I got to do the right thing and so you know we don't want to expose them if we don't have to any more than we're doing it through the public attention this case gets but the public ought to know and understand that it isn't easy for these four individuals to come forward like this and there are more people like them out there who aren't doing that you know there are probably dozens out there Who are fearful,
who are fearful not just for themselves, but for their families, for their children.
And so it's very bold of them to do it and courageous, and I congratulate them for doing it.
I wanted to mention one thing, though, another affirmative step that I did not allege in the complaint, but I did allege the fact of it, not the opinion of it.
And the fact is that the UC Police Department told the public through the press Through the Mercury News, how many officers they were going to have out there, which is like Barack Obama telling the Taliban when we're going to withdraw, and how many troops we're going to pull out or send in.
Don't these boneheads ever learn that you don't give the enemy that kind of intelligence?
Well, unless they don't consider them the enemy.
That's the fundamental question.
Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time today.
Just wanted to remind people, of course, freedomxlaw.com is the place to go.
And you can follow Katrina's excellent Twitter feed at twitter.com forward slash smisanthrope and strategic misanthropy is the search term on YouTube.
Keep us posted, guys.
I'm very curious to see how this plays out.
And, you know, we cross our fingers.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard the phrase with the Ninth Circuit, Unfortunately, that does seem to happen quite a bit, but we'll keep our fingers crossed that justice will prevail and best of luck in the fight.
