If you needed any proof of how out of whack the radical left's moral compass is, you need only look at a recent event at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The Battle for Berkeley: Why it’s Right, and Righteous, to Drive Fascists Off Campus, Out Of Berkeley… And Out Of Power!”—held May 4 at the infamously left-wing campus of UC-Berkeley—was a “talk and a challenge to debate” by Sunsara Taylor, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, who has also been involved in various left-wing movements over the last few years, including Refuse Fascism and The World Can’t Wait.

“You’re blaming him for Jeff Sessions?”

Campus Correspondent Troy Worden, who also serves as the president of the Berkeley College Republicans, asked Taylor point blank during the event whether or not she would “condemn, unequivocally, the violence that has been perpetrated against my organization for the past six months?

“Will you stand up for our right to free speech? Will you join us to ensure that everyone here can feel safe and can express their opinion without having to fear violence perpetrated against them?” he pressed her, “or will you continue to accept the criminal activity your Soros-funded organization continues to push, inadvertently?”

A simple question, and one that deserves a simple answer. “Yes” or “no” would have sufficed.

Alas, Taylor equivocates.

“I wanna ask you: are you going to condemn the 59 Tomahawk missiles on Syria, the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan, [and] the nuclear chicken with North Korea and the world? Because I’m sorry, you want to talk about violence? I don’t want to [unintelligible]—” Taylor got out before someone demanded she answer the question.

“No, I am answering!” she continued “Jeff Sessions—Jeff Sessions—”

“You’re blaming him for Jeff Sessions?” an audience member asked incredulously.

After a short disruption, Taylor tells Warden that she will not “give [him] the satisfaction of what [he’s] asking for” because she finds it absurd.

“Unless you’re going to come out and denounce actual violence carried out by the state— I feel no responsibility to denounce something that’s not being done by a state against an oppressed people in the name of terrorizing humanity.”

It’s clear from her scrambling and whataboutisms on US military strikes that Worden has outmaneuvered her by asking an easy question. It’s actually concerning that she’s unable or unwilling to give a straight answer.

Condemning violence against one’s political opponents shouldn’t be hard in the United States. In fact, it ought to be easy; we don’t live in the antebellum period, and the country would be horrified if a sitting member of Congress was beaten within an inch of his life on the floor of the Senate, an incident used in American history textbooks to show how high tensions were before the Civil War.

Yet, she can’t do it.

It’s not because she doesn’t understand the question, of course; it’s because she approves of violence against those with whom she dislikes: fascists, i.e., your average, mild-mannered College Republican who had the temerity to invite the flamingly gay Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus.

She can conceive of a situation in which people who hold opposing views are victims, of course; she’s not dumb. On some level, she even recognizes that her opponents can constitute an “oppressed people” (such as, say, when a political minority is forced to pay $6,000 for the protection of over 100 police officers to ensure their own free speech—and the cops then fold like a cheap suit at the first sign of trouble), but she can’t admit it. That would require a restructuring of her worldview.

And the left getting rambunctious and rough? Well, they’re fighting against that fascism, so anything goes. As David Burge put it on Twitter, the petty totalitarians on campus see “your words are the same as violence, our violence is the same as words.”

So, when Worden challenges her again, she shifts gears and claims to be unaware of the violence perpetrated against the Berkeley College Republicans. Either she’s been living under a rock, or she’s duplicitous.

Unfortunately, it’s not the former.

Until the more sane elements of the left are willing to condemn this sort of thinking and argue against it, leftists on campus will continue to get violent.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @SterlingCBeard