Although conservative students at the University of California, Berkeley announced their decision to cancel Free Speech Week Saturday, event co-organizer and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos insists his plans to come to campus haven’t changed.

The four-day Free Speech Week event, which initially was supposed to commence Sunday, found itself to be the target of liberal ire and threats of protest for weeks. UC Berkeley, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, has seen far-left violence and chaos derail four conservative events since February. And when agitators threatened to swarm the campus, deter attendees, and stamp out free speech once again, the Berkeley Patriot student organization decided to cancel its event for everyone’s safety.

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“We have not been able to secure an alternative venue large enough to accommodate the press on short notice, likely due to the Bay Area’s commitment to free speech for everyone except Milo,” the Berkeley Patriot organization said in an email, according to NBC Bay Area.

UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof took issue with the Berkeley Patriot’s criticism, saying, “Claims that this is somehow the outcome desired by the campus are without basis in fact,” ABC News reported.

“The university was prepared to do whatever was necessary to support the First Amendment rights of the student organization,” Mogulof added. “It is extremely unfortunate that this announcement was made at the last minute, even as the university was in the process of spending significant sums of money and preparing for substantial disruption of campus life in order to provide the needed security for these events.”

“The university was prepared to do whatever was necessary to support the First Amendment rights of the student organization,” Mogulof said, claiming that UC Berkeley had been fully prepared to spend “in excess of $1 million in order to make these events safe” for everyone involved.

UC Berkeley said that it had spent roughly $600,000 to prepare for the protests promised in response to conservative columnist Ben Shapiro’s campus appearance last week. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter canceled a planned speaking engagement on campus back in April that still cost UC Berkeley $600,000. And Yiannopoulos’ planned UC Berkeley event back in February resulted in extensive property damage when far-left agitators carried out their violent protests.

Berkeley Patriot’s attorney, Marguerite Melo of the Melo and Sarsfield firm, maintained in a statement Saturday “the university has made it impossible to hold the event,” the local Berkeleyside publication reported. “A lot of these speakers have withdrawn. To have an empty gesture of ‘Free Speech Week,’ when there are no speakers is impossible. And the university couldn’t guarantee our speakers would be safe.”

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“We are very disappointed,” Melo added. “We are going to cancel. We have made a determination, or our clients have, that it is just not safe. If we had Zellerbach Hall, that would be a different story. But my clients didn’t want to be responsible, even morally, if something happened.”

Although the Berkeley Patriot organization distanced itself from its own event, Yiannopoulos took to Facebook to proclaim that he, Pamela Geller, Mike Cernovich and others would still appear at Sproul Plaza on Sunday for the “unofficial university event,” now taking shape as a rally.

“My security team confirmed to me this morning that the police department will be out in force on Sproul Plaza tomorrow at noon. We will not be deterred,” Yiannopoulos said Saturday. “We will proceed no matter what, in whatever format we can, to realize the promise of Free Speech Week and send a message that conservatives will not be bowed by pressure from academics, the media or anyone else.”

Saying that the speakers had been “let down by the student organizers” who withdrew the group’s sponsorship from the event “under pressure from the administration,” Yiannopoulos added that “we shall defend free speech, whatever the cost may be.”

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Kmeron/Wikimedia Commons)