Alt-right provocateur touts Cal event
‘Free Speech Week’ will bring Steve Bannon and Ann Coulter to campus
As he gears up to host “Free Speech Week” at UC Berkeley, conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos said Thursday that he hopes the school will reconsider its decision to deny his group the use of Zellerbach Hall and other indoor venues during the high-profile event that will bring former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter to the famously left-leaning campus.
“I don’t believe that UC Berkeley really wants to have people like that speaking in the open air with the shooting risk that represents,” he said.
“There’s a huge threat to their personal safety. I do not believe UC Berkeley wants to be the college campus on which Ann Coulter gets shot dead or Steve Bannon gets shot at.”
During a wide-ranging 30-minute interview with the Bay Area News Group, Yiannopoulos said he was confident school officials would reverse their decision because “they will see sense.”
But the university quickly rejected the request.
“We’re going to continue to do what’s necessary to provide security for these events,” said campus spokesman Dan Mogulof, adding that the school may ultimately spend in excess of a million dollars on that effort. But, he said, the school is not prepared to allow the use of inside venues when the event’s organizers had months to submit the required paperwork to secure them.
“It’s time for people to take responsibility for their actions and for their deci- sions,” Mogulof said, noting that the group can always postpone the event and use indoor venues at a later date.
Widely regarded as the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, the campus has become a flash point in recent months. After a planned speech by Yiannopoulos in February was canceled over security concerns and violent demonstrations, some conservatives accused the school of limiting their ability to express themselves.
The school has said it is committed to upholding free speech, but some student groups and faculty have argued that Free SpeechWeek— which kicks off Sunday — is all about hatred and bigotry and should not be permitted to take place.
Complicating the situation is the fact that the student group hosting the event, Berkeley Patriot, and the school have been engaged in a back- andforth debate over venues, with school officials saying the group has lost access to large indoor venues because of a series of missed deadlines.
Berkeley has pointed to a successful talk earlier this month by conservative writer Ben Shapiro as evidence of its commitment to free speech, but Yiannopoulos called that event a “smokescreen” featuring an “establishment-friendly, diminutive Jewish neocon” who “nobody cares about.”
Yiannopoulos’ “ultimate goal,” he said, “is to bully and humiliate the UC Berkeley administration into meeting their First Amendment commitments and to meeting their obligations of the law to treat conservatives as they treat liberals — which they don’t.”
In the run- up to the event, there has also been confusion about who exactly is confirmed to speak, with the school and Yiannopoulos posting differing accounts.
On Thursday, Yiannopoulos insisted that Bannon and Coulter are confirmed speakers.
UC Berkeley needs “to be bullied into realizing that it is less hassle to just let us have the event than it is to fight us tooth and nail every single time,” Yiannopoulos said.
As the sole sponsor of the event, his company, Milo Inc., is prepared to “spend a lot ofmoney,” he said. Yiannopoulos said he expects the event to cost $250,000, including $100,000 for security. The school spent in the range of $600,000 on the Shapiro event.
Yiannopoulos rejects the notion that the event will be a forum for white supremacists or other extreme voices, calling it a “mainstream, reasonable, respectable, conservative and libertarian festival of free speech featuring a former first adviser to the president of the United States, a 12-time New York Times- bestselling author (Coulter) and a gay, Jewish immigrant with a black husband ( himself).”
Yiannopoulos a lso pushed back at the notion that the whole thing is an attention grab. “I don’t have a response to those people,” he said. “They’re professional leftist activists with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, which is borderline criminalizing conservative points of view.”
He said there should be no room for violence at the event. “I will tell my audience to be peaceful,” he said.
If violence breaks out, the left is “100 percent responsible,” he added. “I make no apologies for the actions of others. I’m responsible for what I do.”
Yiannopoulos said he would welcome students with different viewpoints to the event and bashed a group of UC Berkeley faculty and others who have called for a boycott of campus during the four- day program.
“If we’re so clownish,” he said, “they should be able to beat us in an open debate.”
On Wednesday, the final day of the event, Yiannopoulos plans to give a “Mario Savio Award for Free Speech.” Savio’s family has pushed back at the use of the Free Speech Movement founder’s name, but Yiannopoulos isn’t budging.
“It gives me enormous pleasure to see his family upset about this because they are now on the wrong side of history,” he said. “These are no longer free speech warriors.”
Yiannopoulos called himself the “founding member and life president of the Steve Bannon fan club” and cited Madonna, Skeletor and Darth Vader as professional inspirations. He said he likes “anybody who upsets all the right people.”
The event — the kickoff of what Yiannopoulos says will be a seven-month, 60date worldwide tour — is also set to feature Islam critic Pamela Geller and conservative writer David Horowitz.
“Who knows what’s going to happen? It’s a very contentious and very unpredictable issue,” he said of the upcoming tour. “This is something that impacts every student everywhere no matter what college campus they’re on in America.
“There is a massive multi-pronged assault on the conservative point of view that make it professionally incautious and in some cases socially disastrous to express conservative points of view in public,” he said. “That is what Free Speech Week is attempting to blow up.”