Berkeley's Mayor Jesse Arreguin has just endorsed the rioter's veto. In the wake of his police department standing by and allowing hundreds of masked and armed Antifa demonstrators to breach barricades and attack a handful of peaceful free speech and anti-Marxist demonstrators – to the horror of even the Washington Post – the mayor is sending a message to the world, which over the weekend saw extensive video coverage of thugs beating up heavily outnumbered peaceful protesters, that the city wishes to reward the mob.

Matier and Ross of the S.F. Chronicle report:

In the aftermath of a right-wing rally Sunday that ended with anarchists chasing attendees from a downtown park, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin urged UC Berkeley on Monday to cancel conservatives' plans for a Free Speech Week next month to avoid making the city the center of more violent unrest. ... The mayor wants UC Berkeley to halt plans by a conservative campus group, the Berkeley Patriot, to host right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos during its scheduled Free Speech Week from Sept. 24-27. Berkeley's right-vs.-left cage matches began with an appearance that Yiannopoulos was to have made in February at a campus hall, an event that was aborted when black-clad anarchists like those who broke up Sunday's downtown rally stormed into Sproul Plaza, smashed windows and set bonfires.

U.C. Berkeley's new chancellor, Carol Christ, has admirably risen to the defense of free speech and called this a "year of free speech" for the campus. But Mayor Arreguin thinks he has a better idea: reward Antifa for its violence on campus, where its members did over a hundred thousand dollars of damage stopping Milo's speech, and for their attack on peaceful demonstrators on Sunday.

Mayor Arreguin is pretending that rewarding behavior does not encourage more such behavior. Lab rats in psych departments across the land respond to reward that way, and so will the rats of Antifa. He is telling them they are free to police political speech in Berkeley.

Meanwhile, other leftists are realizing that Antifa is driving voters toward Trump and the GOP. As James Queally, Paige St. John, Benjamin Oreskes, and David Zahniser of the L.A. Times write:

Some in Berkeley worried that Sunday's chaos, captured on video and quickly disseminated through social media, would provide unwanted ammunition to Trump and his supporters. "We can't keep producing this audio-visual propaganda," said Andrew Noruk, a counter-protester who denounced the fights. "It is recruiting for the right." (snip) One counter-protester, in tears, said she worried that Sunday's event would be tied to violence. Another, who helped break up a fight, was upset over the altercations. "We need to get antifa out of here," said Jack Harris, 20, of San Francisco.

The blog Philadeliquency has a pointed and amusing celebration of the gift that Antifa is for conservatives. Long and worth a read. Here is a sample (language warning):

I feel sorry for leftists. I realize many of my readers are leftists. I have to make a distinction here, because "Democrat" and "leftist" are not synonymous terms, as the whole flap over the Rizzo statue makes obvious to people now. There's a lot of them in Philadelphia and they pretty-much signal off each other like cattle moo-ing their way across a pasture. Few of you realize what is coming, but I already see the winds blowing. You will feel that wind turn gale force as the months go by. The people I'm feeling sorry for are you guys, gals – and other – who have been out marching in circles around City Hall hoping Trump would give a [s---] about your Magic Marker signs. Standing next to you in those crowds were miscreant humanities students and flunkies otherwise known as AntiFa and Black Bloc. Unfortunately for you, even though you didn't don AntiFa garb you are going to be lumped in with them; because you've been winking and nodding at them and quietly accepting the normalization of extra-judicial unconstitutional violence as if it were protected speech. That is soon going to come to an end and it's not because of Charlottesville. Sorry, that's how it's going to be spun. Own it. The backspin has already started[.] ... You see, there are quite a number of Democratic senators in Congress who are up for re-election next year. Our very own U.S. senator Bob Casey is considered vulnerable being located in a state that voted for President Trump. One of the most vulnerable Democratic senators in Congress is Missouri senator Claire McCaskill. Her state voted for Donald Trump by 57% to Hillary Clinton's 38%. She has to desperately look as moderate as possible, her Republican attackers will put up ads "Clare's people think every last one of you is a racist Nazi," and pair photos of her in ballrooms with Nancy Pelosi set to dramatic music. See how this works? This obviously has Democratic strategists in a pickle. It's very obvious what next year will be like. The worst footage from protest demonstrations will be put on display in campaign advertising and all the claims that Democratic pundits and authors have made claiming America is festooned with 64 million gas-chamber-murdering Nazis. Everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a Nazi. They're all Nazis. Every [f------] last one of them is a [m-----------] Nazi. There are few Republicans up for re-election in 2018 who are really vulnerable. Those 64 million Trump voters still have access to ballot machines and they can still vote. Calling every Trump voter a Nazi, as so many of you have done, is not going to be forgotten. That projection is going to come back to haunt people. It terrifies people who actually do politics as part of their career; namely pundits, campaign strategists and party officials. The Republican platform is simple. They are going to remind everyone that leftist protestors and pundits alike cast the specter of Nazism to vast oceans of voters and they have the video footage the screenshots and the writings to validate it. They are going to remind their core base and Trump's voter base what the rhetoric was, that leftists living in cities think all of America between the outskirts of Philadelphia to the city limits of San Francisco is a vast ocean of Nazis. But that's OK. Democrats' prospects are not that great next year. November 2018 won't be long away. The second those returns come in you can put the masks back on and go marching again, comrade.

Hat tip: Clarice Feldman, Instapundit