Appearing as a guest on Thursday's CNN Tonight, UC Berkeley professor and former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich actually promoted a conspiracy theory that it was in reality a group of right-wingers -- perhaps linked to Breitbart News -- who were responsible for violent riots at UC Berkeley in reaction to Breitbart senior editor Milo Yiannopoulos planning to speak there. Rather than laughing off such a preposterous suggestion, host Don Lemon seemed to treat the "rumor" as plausible and asked conservative CNN political commentator Alice Stewart -- who was up against two liberal guests -- for her reaction.



At 11:17 p.m. ET, Lemon tagged Yiannopoulos as a "white supremacist" as he turned to Reich and posed: "This violence we saw at Berkeley -- we had it live here on CNN last night -- it ultimately -- does it -- it plays right into the hands of the right-wing white supremacists -- someone like Milo Yiannopoulos?"

It absolutely does, Don, and I want to be very, very clear. I was there for part of last night, and I know what I saw. And those people were not Berkeley students. Those were outsiders, agitators. I've never seen them before. There's rumors that they actually were right-wingers, they were part of a kind of a group that were organized and were ready to create the kind of tumult and danger you saw that forced the police to cancel the event.

Reich suggested that conservatives were to blame for the violence as he began:

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Moments later, Lemon followed up: "You think this was a strategy by Yiannopoulos or right-wingers to -- they put this on so they could -- in an effort to show that, you know, there's no free speech on a college campus like UC Berkeley?"



Reich repeated the tin foil hat theory:

I wouldn't bet against it, Don. You know, again, I saw these people. They were very -- they all looked almost paramilitary. They were not from the campus, and I've heard, you know, again, I don't want to say factually, but I heard that there was some relationship there between these people and the right-wing, and the right-wing movement that is affiliated with Breitbart News.

The CNN host responded: "It is interesting because there have been protests, but nothing this violent. We haven't seen anything to this level."



He soon turned to Stewart and posed: "Alice, what do you think of what Robert said? Do you think these could have been paid actors?"