Ticketholders to a Milo Yiannopoulos speech at the University of Colorado-Boulder received an anonymous message Wednesday afternoon, just hours before the event.
“We know who you are, tonight we will know your faces,” the email threatened those who planned to hear the controversial alt-right provocateur. “The identities of attendees will be released to the public on a list of known Neo-Nazi sympathizers. We do not tolerate fascists.”
On Thursday, University police said they did not believe the ticket holders’ names and email addresses had been obtained by a hack; College Republicans had messaged ticket holders about the event, and their emails may have been culled from that correspondence, they said.
CU-Boulder’s Turning Point USA chapter president, Nick Reinhart, told Heat Street that the student organization had faced criticism for weeks “from anti-free speech groups” over the Yiannopoulos speech, so he wasn’t surprised by the email.
“I believe the senders of this email used empty threats to try to intimidate and frighten members of CU’s conservative community,” Reinhart said. “This was also a sad and immature attempt to silence the free exchange of speech simply because they disagreed with the speaker’s message.”
On Wednesday night, protestors congregated outside of the sold-out event, and Fox 31 Denver reported pushing and shoving. Police arrested one person for failure to comply with an officer’s orders and two for misdemeanor assault, the news channel said.
Before Wednesday, a petition calling for CU-Boulder administrators to cancel Yiannopoulos’s speech gained more than 1,800 signatures.
Chancellor Phillip DiStefano said in a news release that while the university does not endorse the viewpoints of all public speakers on campus, “we must support the free exchange of ideas.”
The event drew more than 420 students and filling the room to capacity, Reinhart said.
Turning Point USA had extended an invitation to Yiannopoulos before Reinhart assumed his leadership role. But he supported the decision both because of Yiannopoulos’s takedowns of “victimhood culture” and because he believes in free speech— and “not because our organization agrees with everything [Milo] has to say,” Reinhart said.
