The UC Davis College Republicans reportedly canceled an event featuring two of the nation’s slimiest internet trolls—Milo Yiannopoulos and Martin Shkreli—in response to student protests on Friday.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, university police put up barricades to control a crowd of protesters shouting “shut it down” in the hours leading up the the event at UC Davis. The call to nix the event altogether came just thirty minutes before the men were scheduled to speak.
Yiannopoulos, who enjoys speaking hatefully as much as possible and just got paid big bucks to do so in a book, was predictably upset. On Saturday, the Breitbart News writer, who spearheaded an online harassment campaign against actress Leslie Jones, took to Facebook to voice his displeasure.
Yiannopoulos’ Facebook post includes allegations, not previously reported or since verified (in fact, university police have flat-out denied his claims), that protesters threw the aforementioned barricades at police, and attacked people attending the event with “bags of feces” and sprays of urine. Yiannopoulos also referred to the student protesters as “Left-wing thugs” and menacingly declared that, “we will be pursuing this matter further.”
Amidst growing concern about the event, UC Davis Interim Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter said in a statement on Wednesday that he did not support canceling the event because doing so would, “benefit [Yiannopoulos’] ultimate goal of gaining media attention,” and such a cancellation, “would be reported in news outlets throughout the country.”
This is the sort of thing to definitely consider before inviting a lying, manipulative bigot to your campus.
UPDATE, 1/15/17, 1:30 PM: Apparently Yiannopoulos was right about the feces, because Martin Schkreli definitely got dog poop flung at his face at UC Davis on Friday night. I feel relief.