Protests Planned for Milo Event at DePaul University

Protests have been planned for Milo Yiannopoulos’ event at DePaul University tonight, with a parallel event entitled “Confronting the Right: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why?” set to be hosted by the DePaul Socialist Society.

“What is behind the right’s appeals to ‘free speech’, what do socialists say about the right to free speech, and how do we best confront the Right wing, today?” reads a flyer which has been posted around DePaul campus along with a picture of Yiannopoulos and 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump at the top. “Join the DePaul Socialists for a discussion following a presentation by longtime revolutionary socialist Joel Geier. A founding member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 and a lifelong revolutionary, Joel is currently an editor of the International Socialist Review.”

A protest rally has also been scheduled to take place just before the event on DePaul’s Quad, with 80 protesters currently RSVPing to the Facebook event.

We concerned DePaul students will fight against hate speech on our campus because we have conciously recognized the following:

-Slurs and hate speech have been used by students about marginalized communities on our DePaul social media pages,
-Statements were written in chalk by a political student organization which made some students on our campus feel threatened or excluded,
-A slur was used jokingly to promote Milo’s tour, eventually taken out of the description but not Milo’s tour name,
-These actions were taken without consideration to the effects of that speech on many students attending DePaul.

We are going to picket outside of the DePaul LPC Student Center to address the above issues through discussion, to draw attention away from Milo Yiannopolous’ event, and to show our love of and solidarity with students on our campus who are affected by his lampooning of hate speech as a joke.

Student leaders will be speaking about the above topics at this rally, but feel free to also bring signs or posters.

DePaul students will not feed the troll by attempting to silence him, but will instead show solidarity with those he marginalizes at the DePaul Quad statue at 5:00pm on May 24th.

Tensions surrounding Yiannopoulos’ visit at DePaul have risen even higher after the words “Trump 16. Fuck Mexico” were discovered written on the campus quad floor.

Ahead of the event this evening, organiser Brendan Newell wrote a story for Breitbart that claims DePaul University attempted to sabotage the event by attempting to raise the minimum security costs, halve the venue capacity, cut down the allocated talk time from 60-90 minutes to 15-20 minutes, and limit the amount of time that Yiannopoulos is allowed to actually be on campus.

Despite this, the event is still set to go on as planned with over 600 people RSVP’d to the event on Facebook.