The Daily Cal has been fucking killin’ it on the “Free Speech Week” fiasco: 

When UC Berkeley asked Young America’s Foundation, or YAF, and the Berkeley College Republicans to pay nearly $16,000 in security fees for Ben Shapiro’s speech, YAF lashed out immediately, stating that campus administration was taxing conservative free speech.

But public financial returns obtained by The Daily Californian show that every year, YAF spends millions of dollars funding campus events such as Shapiro’s, propped up by tens of millions in annual donations from many wealthy, powerful foundations linked to prominent conservatives such as Donald Rumsfeld, the DeVos family and Charles and David Koch.

This organization is the driving force behind many tumultuous, conservative events scheduled on campus. It was one of the many voices that pushed hardest to make Ann Coulter’s controversial appearance at UC Berkeley happen — before pulling its support two days before the event.

Way to go, student journos who are asking real questions while America’s august editorial boards are wanking to that ever-popular tune, The Highest Form of Free Speech is Bowing Down to the Loudest Butthole in the Room. Because there are these abstractions, and don’t get me wrong I will engage you in a debate about theoretical shit all day long, but at the end of the day somebody’s getting paid, and I’d rather talk about that with the limited time we have left on a habitable planet.

Assholes like YAF (a bunch of hoary Nixon bagmen dressing up their regressive segregationism as Hip New Rebellion) WANT America’s elite opinion columnists leading thoughts at their thought leader conferences about the merits of letting someone threaten and scream at you. Their whole schtick is “if you don’t let me call you names and threaten to deport you, you’re a pussy who doesn’t deserve freedom.” Their type has been railing against campus activists since the dawn of campus activism (which came shortly after the dawn of campuses) precisely because they know it plays into the inherent biases of the people they provoke.

That’s their entire game, it always has been, and for the life of me I will never understand the genre of journalism that is basically, “Here is a scam, let me describe how I fall for it.” Glowing profiles of shitkickers like Ann, asking what the sexy new Nazis want out of life, empathizing with very fine people who just want to yell about welfare, that’s been a whole beat for decades now, and its writers want credit for documenting the apocalypse?

Good for the kids at the Cal, for standing up and pointing out what the real problem is here. It ain’t free speech. It’s the very expensive kind.

A.