UC Berkeley cancels Milo Yiannopoulos event amid violent protest, by Michael Bodley.

A protest at UC Berkeley turned fiery and violent Wednesday night, shutting down a scheduled speech by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

The Breitbart News editor was set to deliver a speech inside a UC Berkeley campus building but hundreds of protesters began throwing fireworks and pulling down the metal barricades police set up to keep people from rushing into the building. Windows were smashed and fires were set outside the building as masked protesters stormed it.

The Berkeley Police Department said people threw bricks, smoking objects, and fireworks at police officers. University police locked down all buildings and ordered a shelter in place, and later fired rubber pellets into the crowd of protesters who defied orders to leave the area.

“This is what tolerance looks like at UC Berkeley,” said Mike Wright, a Berkeley College Republican member said as smoke bombs went off around him.

The left says that their love trumps hate, that they are into free speech, and that their opponents are thugs. Sure.

Protesters argued that hate speech isn’t free speech, countering the university’s explanation — free speech — on why it had allowed the event to proceed even as students demanded that the university cancel it.

And who defines “hate speech”? Why the left — hate speech is speech they disagree with. Again, so childish you are left wondering whether they are being stupid or evil.

The protest turned violent just after 6 p.m. when dozens of masked anarchists, dressed in black and wearing backpacks, emerged from the otherwise peaceful crowd.

As “Milo had got to go” chants broke out, they struck: in small groups, at first — knocking down the fences, cutting through to zip ties. Then, they came in droves, as the dozens of university police officers quickly retreated to an inner ring of fencing.

That, too, was breached, as protesters ran toward the student center, where Yiannopoulos was, waiting for the event to begin. Police, donning riot gear, headed all the way inside.

The new left (as distinct from the old left, who championed the working class) is behaving like their intellectual forebears, the Nazis — who surely took identity politics to its logical extreme. The Nazis were power-hungry ex-communist lefties, godless and green.

At around 6:30 p.m., Yiannopoulos posted a message on Facebook … One thing we do know for sure: the Left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down.”