An employee at the University of California Los Angeles was filmed ripping down posters — put up to advertise Ben Shapiro’s speech on Monday — just hours before the Daily Wire editor emeritus was scheduled to take the stage at his alma mater.
Young America’s Foundation, which is hosting Shapiro for an event on Monday at 6:30 p.m. PT, posted a video on X showing a university employee tearing down the Shapiro speech posters, saying that his boss told him “to take flyers down.” The man refused to give the name of his supervisor, saying, “I’m doing my job, what they told me to do, so you have a good day.”
WATCH:
Why don’t UCLA administrators want students to know YAF is bringing @benshapiro to campus tonight? pic.twitter.com/XXbEuPM5zw
— YAF (@yaf) October 21, 2024
It’s not the first time UCLA’s administration has attempted to get in the way of Shapiro’s YAF event. Last week, university bureaucrats forced YAF to shut down its Eventbrite page, where people could acquire tickets for Shapiro’s speech, and forced YAF to redirect attendees to UCLA’s main ticketing office, RedState reported.
According to RedState, UCLA taking over the ticketing means YAF cannot know in advance “if people who are known agitators or security threats are registering, or what efforts are being made to ensure that a bunch of lefties don’t gobble up the 1,200 available tickets then no-show the free event.”
UCLA has also rejected YAF’s request for a standby line, which would help the group ensure that those who want to attend the event can get in while preventing leftist students from filling the event space and then staging a massive walkout.
YAF’s lawyers wrote a letter to UCLA, stating, “When pressed, UCLA has not stated any reason whatsoever for this unreasonable stance, other than to cite to its own policy number 862, which simply states that for ‘major events,’ (i.e., events presenting disfavored points of view that may result in counter-protests), ‘[n]o standby line will be allowed unless advance approval [is] provided by UCLA Fire Department and with limited standby Tickets offered,’ without providing any justification for this limitation or explanation as to why approval has not been given in this particular case.”
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“Given UCLA’s past conduct discriminating against the expression of conservative and pro-Israel points of view … it is clear that the refusal to approve the use of the standby line procedure exacerbates the unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination that UCLA engages in,” the letter continues. “Moreover, UCLA owes a constitutional duty to impose only reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech. There is nothing reasonable about UCLA’s refusal to approve a procedure that has been used by all of its peers in the university community to great effect, and without any appreciable harm to any university’s interests.”
Shapiro blasted UCLA in a thread posted to X on Monday, writing that it “has forgotten what it’s supposed to be” and is plagued by “scandals of plagiarism, DEI, riots, furries, BDSM, womxn, and ‘monsterf***ers.”
Tonight, I’ll take the stage at UCLA. Before I do, let’s review how my once-elite undergraduate alma mater became a woke trash heap drowning in scandals of plagiarism, DEI, riots, furries, BDSM, womxn, and “monsterf*ckers.” 🧵
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) October 21, 2024
