The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) said that student organizers and staff agreed to call off a planned event on Tuesday evening at which Stephen Davis, a Proud Boy member known as “MAGA Hulk,” was set to speak, because of “grave danger should the event continue.”
“It is unfortunate that the event could not proceed as planned,” the university said. “As a public institution, UC Davis values and supports freedom of expression as rights guaranteed to every citizen,” adding that “calls for harm to others or acts of violence are not protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.”
According to local news reports, during the clashes between the groups, pepper spray was deployed and barricades were knocked down, although reports did not say which group did what. On social media, supporters of both groups blamed the other side for the violence, including spraying pepper spray.
UC Davis noted that campus police were on-site protecting the building, but did not intervene in the clashes because “the situation de-escalated on its own, eliminating the need for the police to engage.”
After the deadly violence by fascist and other white nationalist groups at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when a car ramming attack by an attendee killed a left-wing counter-demonstrator, left-wing activists have increasingly adopted a tactic called “deplatforming,” or seeking to shut down their events or otherwise disrupt them. These have ranged from a small number of demonstrators to crowds of thousands rallying outside of events, seeking to block access to them or to make noise drowning them out.
Opponents of the tactic argue that right-wing speech is just as protected by the First Amendment as left-wing speech, and accuse the protesters of trying to deny them those rights.
The Proud Boys are a far-right gang that describes itself as “Western chauvinist” and glorifies violence and masculinity. According to the Southern Poverty Law Conference (SPLC), “The Proud Boys’ actions belie their disavowals of bigotry: Rank-and-file Proud Boys and leaders regularly spout white nationalist memes and maintain affiliations with known extremists.”
In addition to the Charlottesville event in 2017, the group has appeared at several other violent incidents, including a brawl in New York in 2018, the terrorizing of Black churches in Washington, DC, in late 2020, and the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.