Santa Monica Students Say Pepper Spraying a PR Victory

My article from the April 5 Front Page Magazine:

Santa Monica Students Say Pepper Spraying a PR Victory

By Matthew Vadum

Santa Monica College students angry about tuition increases may have successfully tricked campus police into advancing their cause on Tuesday.

Apparently unaware of California’s continuing descent into the fiscal abyss, students showed up in force at a college trustees’ meeting to protest a planned 300 percent increase in tuition for core courses. The college says the dramatic price hikes are necessary because state funding for higher education is drying up as California’s spendthrift public officials continue to lavish taxpayer-funded benefits on their allies in the labor movement.

Up to 30 demonstrators, possibly left-wingers, were doused with pepper spray after a student mob was forcibly ejected from the trustees’ meeting. In America such chemical drubbings are almost always provoked by leftist protesters for public relations purposes. They know they can count on journalists to sympathetically portray them as victims of police brutality punished by the powers that be for speaking truth to power.

Members of the crowd were reportedly angry because only a few students were admitted to the meeting. 

They began to force their way into the event after officials refused to relocate the proceedings to a room that would accommodate more people.

Students began chanting “Let us in, let us in,” and “No cuts, no fees, education should be free.” Two police officers who found themselves virtually surrounded by unhinged mantra-repeating Santa Monicans used pepper spray to prevent students from further disrupting the meeting.

Santa Monica College spokesman Bruce Smith said the use of pepper spray was necessary to maintain public order. “It was the judgment of police that the crowd was getting out of hand and it was a safety issue,” he said.

Left-wing organizers are well aware of the symbolic value of confrontations with the authorities. One male student can be heard saying in the video from the Santa Monica campus, “We won! We won! They pepper sprayed us!”

The pepper spraying of Santa Monica students came months after police sprayed the same crowd control chemical on Occupy Wall Street demonstrators at the University of California at Davis in November. The Occupy movement promptly began using images from the confrontation as propaganda, ignoring protesters’ provocative behavior and falsely claiming police brutality.

In reality it is the demonstrators who tend to use brutal tactics.

Occupy Wall Street, and the satellite protests it has spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world have been spectacularly violent. Radical activists are responsible for hundreds of crimes, including assault, gang rape, arson, rioting, robbery, and a host of others.

The anti-American activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement announced earlier this year that they plan to violently disrupt the G8/NATO summit in Chicago on May 19.

Adbusters, the radical magazine that spearheaded the Occupy movement, claims its supporters will conduct a massive occupation of Chicago “in the tradition of the Chicago 8.”

When the nations of the G8 and NATO begin meeting May 19, the movement plans to press its demands. Occupiers want an economy-killing “Robin Hood Tax” to be imposed on financial transactions, an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, and “a nuclear-free Middle East” (translation: the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Israel), according to Adbusters.