...UC Berkeley needs “to be bullied into realizing that it is less hassle to just let us have the event than it is to fight us tooth and nail every single time,” Yiannopoulos said.
As the sole sponsor of the event, his company, Milo Inc., is prepared to “spend a lot of money,” he said. Yiannopoulos said he expects the event to cost $250,000, including $100,000 for security. The school spent in the range of $600,000 on the Shapiro event.
Yiannopoulos rejects the notion that the event will be a forum for white supremacists or other extreme voices, calling it a “mainstream, reasonable, respectable, conservative and libertarian festival of free speech featuring a former first adviser to the president of the United States, a 12-time New York Times-bestselling author (Coulter) and a gay, Jewish immigrant with a black husband (himself).”
Yiannopoulos also pushed back at the notion that the whole thing is an attention grab. “I don’t have a response to those people,” he said. “They’re professional leftist activists with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, which is borderline criminalizing conservative points of view.”