Since the media is very interested in incidents of political violence, I’m sure this attack caught on video will receive huge national attention. So far there is a brief story about it in the Daily Californian (a student-run paper):

UCPD responded to a report Tuesday afternoon that a male tabling for a conservative organization on Upper Sproul Plaza had allegedly been assaulted, according to a Nixle alert released by UCPD on Wednesday afternoon. The victim alleged that he had been tabling for the conservative group Turning Point USA on Tuesday afternoon about 3:29 p.m. when two males approached the table… One of the two men slapped the phone out of the victim’s hand and proceeded to knock over the table…

And what happened from there can be seen in the video which was posted on Twitter today by TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk:

LEFTIST VIOLENCE ON CAMPUS While recruiting for our @TPUSA group at UC Berkeley a leftist thug comes & assaults our activists punching him in the face & hitting him repeatedly Imagine if the attacker was wearing MAGA hat, would be national news! This is the violent left! RT! pic.twitter.com/7RjbCPUcDf — Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 21, 2019

Police are looking for the man seen throwing a punch in the clip. He had left the scene by the time they arrived.

Kirk has a point. This assault is a lot worse than anything that happened to Jussie Smollett and goes well beyond the attack-smirk of Nick Sandmann. Plus this is happening in the home of the free speech movement. There’s even a connection to the Smollett case which is already a big story. Breitbart News spoke to the student who filmed the attack:

The UC Berkeley student who recorded the video, Alex Szarka, told Breitbart News that he began recording the incident after witnessing the aggressor flip over a TPUSA table. “As we were approaching the main area on campus where student groups have their tables set up, we noticed [the TPUSA student] with a sign that said something like, ‘be aware of false hate crimes,’” said Szarka to Breitbart News… “Unfortunately, I’m not exactly surprised at what transpired,” said Szarka, adding that after the incident, he had heard an individual defending the actions of the aggressor. “I heard a guy say something like, ‘Yeah, violence is not okay, but he was effectively asking for it by being provocative,’” said Szarka, “He was referring to the sign about Smollett.”

So to sum this up: Fake attack gets national attention which begets real attack which gets…? Will the national media work itself into a frenzy over this too or will this be treated as local news? It would be interesting to hear CNN’s Don Lemon trying to find some way to defend this. Will CNN even run the clip? Start holding your breath now!

Update: The College Fix has published some additional video of the incident. The guy in the black t-shirt actually threatens to shoot the guy holding the camera.

Also, Berkeley’s Chancellor Carol Christ has released a statement on the attack which says in part, “we strongly condemn violence and harassment of any sort, for any reason.” The statement also says there’s no evidence this guy is a student, so maybe this is someone walking through the campus. We’ll have to wait and see. But the other guy definitely seems to be triggered by the TPUSA table which had signs referencing fake hate crimes (Smollett).

Here’s a copy of the statement plus a photo of Hayden, the guy seen getting punched in the video: