Glenn Harlan Reynolds

They told me if Donald Trump were elected, voices of dissent would be shut down by fascist mobs. And they were right!

At the University of California, Berkeley campus, for example, gay conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos had to be evacuated, and his speech cancelled, because masked rioters beat people, smashed windows, and started fires. Protesters threw commercial fireworks at police.

According to CNN: “The violent protesters tore down metal barriers, set fires near the campus bookstore and damaged the construction site of a new dorm. One woman wearing a red Trump hat was pepper sprayed in the face while being interviewed by CNN affiliate KGO . . . . As police dispersed the crowd from campus, a remaining group of protesters moved into downtown Berkeley and smashed windows at several local banks. No arrests were made throughout the night.”

According to CNN, the protests caused over $100,000 in damage.

Yiannopoulous wasn’t the only victim of silencing efforts. At Marquette University, conservative speaker Ben Shapiro faced efforts by Marquette university employees to silence him.

The Young Americas Foundation obtained Facebook comments by Chrissy Nelson, a program assistant for Marquette’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies, encouraging people — at the behest of “one of the directors of diversity” — to reserve all the seats for the hall and then not show up. The purpose of this was “to take a seat away from someone who actually would go.”

Trump is playing with the press: Glenn Reynolds

Trump loves making enemies and that's a problem: Column

So students who wanted to hear a speaker with alternative views would find themselves unable to get a seat, because a university employee had made fake reservations. All, apparently, in the name of “diversity.”

Likewise, when conservative Gavin MacInnes (a founder of Vice.com) appeared to speak at New York University, he was met by an angry mob that forced him to cut his talk short, while a woman who identified herself as an NYU professor urged police, whom she said were “protecting the Nazis” by keeping the crowd away from MacInnes and his entourage, to "kick their ass” instead of protecting them.

This stuff all looks terrible — so bad that Democrat operative Robert Reich was reduced to blaming “outside agitators” for the violence, a trope that, as law professor Ann Althouse noted, has unfortunate resonance with the Jim Crow era. And President Trump even tweeted that Berkeley should lose federal funding for its inability to ensure free speech rights for everyone on its campus.

Well, the rioters may or may not have been Berkeley students — as Althouse notes, since they were wearing masks, there’s really no way Reich could tell — but I think it’s safe to say that the rioting happened because they thought they could get away with it. (And with no arrests, I guess they did.) Likewise, I think that the staffers at Marquette didn’t entertain any thought that what they were doing might get them punished. (Nor, as far as I can tell, have they been).

That’s because there has evolved on our campuses a culture of impunity: Misbehavior on the part of lefty activists will get winked at, even as other groups (sports teams with sexist appearance rankings, say) get raked over the coals for minor misbehavior. This double standard is of a piece with many campuses openly taking sides over the election, treating Trump’s win like a terrorist attack, while investigating Trump supporters for racist allegations only to find no evidence that they had done anything except say “Make America Great Again,” as Babson College, a small school in Massachusetts, did.And as CNN's Marc Lamont Hill acknowledged, right-wing rioters are absent on college campuses.

Sen. Barrasso: EPA needs Scott Pruitt

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Whether or not Berkeley loses its federal funding over the Milo riots (and it won’t), I think it’s time for action to address this double standard. First, state and local law enforcement agencies need to target violent rioters who seek to silence speakers. It is a felony under federal civil rights law to conspire to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights, among which is free speech. In addition, many states have laws (generally called Klan laws) that punish people who engage in mob violence or intimidation while masked. These should be applied as well.

Second, perhaps it’s time to have a Title IX-style law banning discrimination according to political viewpoints on campus. Many states (including California) already have laws banning discrimination in hiring and firing based on political viewpoints. Perhaps we need a federal civil rights law providing that colleges that receive federal funds (which is pretty much all of them) can lose those funds if they discriminate against students because of their political views.

Some colleges may complain that this is federal interference in their internal affairs, but given the limited resistance they’ve mounted to intrusive Title IX regulations, it will be hard to take such complaints seriously. America’s colleges and universities have a free speech problem. It’s appropriate for the federal government to take action to protect the civil rights of those affected.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.