UCLA: Student Protest Against Anti-Woman Event by Campus Republicans

June 6, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

From members of the Revolution Club at UCLA:

A group of people started a Facebook page planning to protest an event called “Feminism is Cancer” hosted by the Bruin Republicans. The main speaker was Milo Yiannopoulos, an active promoter of the hatred of women, who claims that rape culture is a myth, that women are inherently less intelligent than men, and so many other fucked up ideas that contribute to the atmosphere within which women are regard as mere breeders, sex objects, and the property of men. People were stirred up by the outrageousness of this event and the ideas it promoted, but also because of a recent incident where Bruin Republicans took a photograph of themselves smiling smugly and holding signs which said “Get your gender out of my restroom,” “There are only two genders” and “Transgenderism is a mental disorder.”

We arrived at the scene after two crowds had already gathered. One crowd included about 80 students blocking the main entrance to the event at the top of some stairs, linking arms and chanting “Bruins against hate!” and hundreds of students and others there to watch the event. Then there was a large number of people wearing Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hat, along with various American flag garb. The protest was defiant, unwilling to leave despite being repeatedly asked to by the pigs. The little agitation that was being done came up short in channeling the defiance of the crowd with real substance against the slew of hateful and harmful ideas represented by the event and some of the people in the crowd.

We initially joined in some of the chanting and allowed people to speak on the bullhorn before we did agitation of our own. We contributed a few chants such as “Women’s lives/trans lives, they matter here!”; “Rise up for the women of the world!” and “Racist, sexist, antigay, American fascists, go away!” We read the quote from Bob Avakian: “Unbelievable as it may seem, in the 21st century there are still people—including people in positions of power and authority—who are determined to force women to bear children, regardless of the situation, the feelings, and the better judgment of those women themselves. That is a way of enslaving women to the dictates of an oppressive male supremacist, patriarchal system; and that is what the cruel fanatics who are determined to deny women the right to abortion are really all about.” We riffed off of that to talk about the war on women and the righteousness of our standing up against it.

In response to the chants and agitation, the fascists at the bottom of the stairs started chanting “USA!” and “Build a wall!” In turn, we read the short revcom.us piece “Food for Thought: Trump and an Illegitimate system” to expose what the people at the bottom of the stairs, this country and this system are really all about. We riffed off of the piece to indict the system and direct people to the real solution—revolution and communism—and to communicate how they can act now—by joining the revolution club and fighting the power.

We passed out the recently released Message from the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and had a few great conversations with people, one of which began with someone asking us a question about how to make revolution in an advanced capitalist country, since that hasn’t been done before. We were there with someone who just decided to run with the Rev Club and who said that this protest was “a great initiation into the club and political life.”

The protesters successfully blocked the main entrance and forced the attendees to go enter through the back of the building. We stayed at the top of the stairs until pretty late after the event began; we continued to chant and agitate some against the fascists who couldn’t get inside. It is not often that the fascists come out of the woodwork at UCLA—a lot of people commented about how they projected blatant disregard for oppression and backed that up with a lot of entitlement and ignorance. It is even more rare, though, to see this kind of defiant opposition to these harmful ideas among students, so it was important for us to be there to project the possibility of a totally different world and to channel people’s defiance into what it’s really going to take to get free.

 

 

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.