It's OK to Incite
On November 28th, the University of Connecticut hosted a talk featuring guest speaker Lucian Wintrich. What was supposed to be a speech turned out to be a chaos due to the audience’s response to the controversial topic. A fight broke out and the night ended with Lucian Wintrich being arrested and charged with Second Degree Breach of Peace. While some students may say that this was not a surprise at all, it was still a very unexpected bump in the road, and left the majority of the people in shock.
Lucian Wintrich is a conservative White House correspondent for the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit. He was invited onto campus by the UConn College Republicans to deliver a speech titled “It’s OK to be White” to talk about what he refers to as “identity politics” in modern cultural and political landscape. In the week prior to his arrival, posters that advertised his presence at the campus were torn down, and it was speculated that protesters would be attending the guest talk. Due to the controversy of this speech’s topic and the negative response from students, representatives of the University of Connecticut had stationed police officers to supervise the event. Over 300 student arrived at Schenker Hall that evening to attend the event and unfortunately, the majority was not there to support him.
During his speech, Wintrich presented a slideshow that consisted mostly of posters and memes that make light of the situation. He also appeared to be giggling and insincere, and the overall atmosphere appeared to be unprofessional - though it could have been due to the discord in audience and provocative interruptions such as “Go home Nazi”. Overall, the guest talk did not seem well-received by the UConn Community.
Wintrich’s speech was then disrupted when a woman approached the podium, grabbed his papers, and proceeded to walk away. This is when Wintrich ran after the woman and put her in a choke hold to aggressively retrieve the papers. When this happened, UConn police immediately broke them apart and removed Wintrich from the campus. Wintrich was arrested later that night. The words of this incident got out very fast as there were Facebook posts about this event in the UConn Buy or Sell page. Students all over UConn commented their thoughts and opinion about what has happened. Though some blamed the woman for being rude and stealing his paper, many others responded that Wintrich was at fault for handling the situation with aggression and violence. A lot of students also believed that his sole purpose was to infuriate the people to make a point by doing and saying offensive things. A lot of people were also outraged as to why he was even encouraged to speak at Uconn. As a result, UConn released a statement that they do not bar the speakers based on the content because freedom of speech is one of the university's principles. As long as it follows the campus guidelines, anyone is allowed to give guest lectures. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that UConn’s supports of the content or the message.
After the fight broke out, different news channel were very quick to report the incident. Lucian Wintrich continued his freedom of speech on Twitter stating his afterthoughts of the night. He continues to back himself up with satirical remarks, and states that he is disappointed that UConn failed to secure his freedom of speech and safety. It is understandable that this speech might have been very controversial, but UConn has always supported freedom of speech regardless of the content. It was his action that can not be condoned since it quickly escalated into something violent. Regardless of the woman’s wrongful choice for taking his speech papers, it can be agreed that there could’ve been better ways to handle the situation.
Lucian Wintrich’s appearance at UConn gained national attention and sparked the debate on freedom of speech and what exactly it is and when it is allowed. The UConn Humanities House will be doing a broadcast on this topic relating to this incident in the upcoming week. Stay tuned on our website!
