'Free Speech Week' Likely Cancelled, Milo To Give Theatrical Press Conference Blaming Berkeley / by Jay Barmann

by Jay Barmann
Originally published on SFist

As we've pretty much assumed all along, the grand gesture that has been Milo Yiannopoulos's Free Speech Week appears to be little more than a gesture intended to incite a media frenzy — and if it ever was intended to be a real event, it appears to have fallen apart. One scheduled speaker Lucian Wintrich, the D.C. correspondent for far-right website Gateway Pundit, posted a live video on Twitter Thursday night (see below) in which he said that Milo and members of his staff were being "weird" and "shifty" about the entire event, and were saying as early as last week that the event would likely not happen. Wintrich publicly withdrew from the event Thursday, and as Mediaite reports, according to a source with knowledge of Milo's plans, Milo plans to hold "a theatrical press conference on Saturday in which he intends to call it off — and blame UC-Berkeley for its ‘forced cancellation.’" Sounds about right.

KQED confirms with a rep for Milo, Zachary Locompte-Gobel, that there will indeed be a press conference tomorrow. UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof tells the Chronicle that he's aware of these media reports, however the university has not heard directly from Milo or the student organization ostensibly hosting the event, the Berkeley Patriot, that Free Speech Week has been canceled.

Wintrich says he and friends were "praying" that the event was real and that it would take place, and he was looking forward to joining Ann Coulter, Steve Bannon, and InfoWars crank Mike Cernovich on the stage at Free Speech Week. But he says it became clear to him that Milo, Inc. wasn't being totally forthcoming, and he says "it was made clear to me this week that this event definitely wasn’t happening, and I had to drop out — I saw no reason to lie to the public and mislead people into thinking it was happening."

As we saw this week, the big names on Yiannopoulos's alleged schedule for the four-day event, Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon, both dropped off the schedule, and then we learned that ex-Googler James Damore had never even been asked to speak, and he publicly announced he'd be sitting this out too. The Washington Post reported that commentator Heather MacDonald also hadn't been asked, though she was put on the schedule, and the same goes for conservative political scientist Charles Murray, who told the Chronicle of Higher Educationthat Milo is "a despicable asshole" and he wanted no part of this event.

Add to that the various reports about disorganization on the part of the Berkeley Patriot — an organization that essentially formed over the summer, has about 10 members according to university administrators, and some have suggested could have been created by Milo himself as means to get entry to a campus event. (The Daily Cal pointed out that, as a publication, the Berkeley Patriot has only published a handful of stories on their nascent website, and I've already wondered aloud why the Berkeley College Republicans didn't want to be a party to this, after they were the group to originally invite Milo to campus back in February.) And now Vanity Fair is calling this a "Fyre Festival for the Right" — and they report, tellingly, that "Milo Inc. would not even tell the speakers what flights it had booked, or what hotels they would be staying at, until 48 hours before the day they were scheduled to speak," claiming they wanted to avoid "sabotage" by the university.

Yiannopoulos knows well how to play the media game, and as many have thought all along, his greatest triumph here would be promoting the narrative that's already in place: The birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley, has been so corrupted by liberal thought and "social justice warriors" that they no longer support free speech, and, in fact, do everything they can to thwart it.

The real narrative is likely that Yiannopoulos has far fewer convictions than he lets on, and he's being paid — most likely by activist billionaire family the Mercers, as the Daily Cal discussedthis week and as BuzzFeed reported over the summer — to stir the pot and influence a new generation of conservatives by making these provocative gestures. Left-wing activists in Berkeley played right into his hand in February, creating a scene of chaos and destruction that led to his speaking engagement there being cancelled, and he's been thirsting for more ever since — images of antifa doing battle with flag-waving "patriots," or just vandalizing private property, being the bread and butter of the alt-right.

Let's just hope that if this thing is getting canceled, 24 hours before it was set to start, UC Berkeley sends Milo the bill for whatever preparations they've already paid for — just like SF Mayor Ed Lee recently did to the group Patriot Prayer, who single-handedly sowed chaos in San Francisco several weeks ago and made their own last-minute cancellation of a right-wing rally.

Previously: UC Kicking Down $300K For Free Speech Week, And The Schedule Chaos Continues