UC Berkeley student radicals clash with police, attack conservatives outside TPUSA event honoring Charlie Kirk

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said the Berkeley Police Department arrested two people for fighting.

By Jessica Schwalb, The Washington Free Beacon

University of California, Berkeley student radicals clashed with police and Turning Point USA supporters Monday night, leaving one conservative bloodied and resulting in multiple arrests.

Registered student groups, including the UC Berkeley chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Young Democratic Socialists of America, as well as Students Organizing For Liberation (SOL), an unofficial student group, organized the protest outside an auditorium where TPUSA was ending its nationwide college tour.

The TPUSA event honored founder Charlie Kirk, who was killed by a politically motivated assassin two months prior.

According to Fox News, SOL posted a flyer to its Instagram story set to “Bella Ciao,” a song favored by resistance movements and revolutionary anti-capitalist partisans.

Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, etched the song title onto one of the bullets found in the suspected murder weapon.

The protesters, many clad in keffiyehs, medical masks, and other face coverings, launched fireworks, smoke bombs, and flares.

They waved Palestinian flags and carried a banner that included red upside-down triangles, a symbol Hamas uses to mark its targets.

At least one fight broke out between an agitator and a TPUSA supporter. The altercation left a man wearing Kirk’s signature red “Freedom” t-shirt with a face gushing blood.

As the brawlers were being arrested, a left-wing agitator taunted him yelling, “Hey, white boy! You’re bleeding, white boy!”

Other masked protesters stalked police, encouraging them to kill themselves, video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows. “Pigs, pigs help yourself, it’s not too late to kill yourself,” one chanted.

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said the Berkeley Police Department arrested two people for fighting.

Another two were arrested by campus police—Christopher Joseph Benton, a 48-year-old unaffiliated with the university, and Jay Eduardo Maytorena, 22, who is either a current or former student. Benton and Maytorena were arrested on charges related to trespassing and resisting arrest.

“Otherwise, more than 900 people attended the TPUSA event, which proceeded without disruption,” Mogulof said.

TPUSA officials attributed the unrest to “Antifa thugs.” The student groups put out a statement Tuesday afternoon denying their affiliation with Antifa and boasted that they delayed the TPUSA event by an hour and a half.

“During the action yesterday, community members were brutalized by the police while being smeared by the right wing media as ‘Antifa,'” the statement posted to Instagram read.

The incident put UC Berkeley on the Trump administration’s radar, with assistant attorney general for civil rights Harmeet Dhillon saying her office would investigate.

“I see several issues of serious concern regarding campus and local security and Antifa’s ability to operate with impunity in CA,” she posted to X.

Berkeley College Republicans president Martin Bertao, a junior, said the agitators were trying to silence conservatives.

“It was a violent group of people who were not there to just merely exercise their First Amendment rights,” he said.

“They were there to try to silence our rights to have political speech and to try to scare us into not coming back. That was their goal.”

Four additional UC Berkeley students were also arrested on suspicion of felony vandalism shortly after midnight on Monday, hours before the unrest began.

The group glued roughly 30 flyers promoting the protest to Sather Gate, a historic structure leading to the center of the college, and tried hanging a five-foot-tall cardboard bug from it, the Daily Californian reported.