Lucian Wintrich, the White House correspondent for the far right, White House-credentialed website Gateway Pundit, was arrested Tuesday night after grabbing a woman at a talk he was giving. The altercation happened at the University of Connecticut during a talk Wintrich was giving a talk called “It Is OK To Be White” after a woman appeared to grab papers off the podium.
The woman involved in the incident told local media Wintrich tried to attack her face.
BREAKING: @lucianwintrich appears to attack a @UCONN student during speech after she took something off podium. pic.twitter.com/WAcNYAak7c
— Kevin Galliford (@KallMeKG) November 29, 2017
“I can confirm that the speaker has been arrested and he is in police custody,” UConn spokesperson Stephanie Reitz told The Hartford Courant. “There are no other arrests and no injuries.’’
The spokesperson also said that Wintrich would be charged Tuesday night and that campus police were also investigating a smoke bomb that went off outside the room where Wintrich was speaking.
The speech was sponsored by UConn’s College Republicans, who said on their Facebook page that Wintrich’s speech was an “opportunity to meet someone on the front lines of the media versus Trump battle,” and that he would “discuss identity politics, liberal victimhood, anti-conservative bias and other hot-button issues.”
#UCONN crowd chants "Go home Nazi!" to @lucianwintrich, interrupting his speech. @WTNH #CTnews pic.twitter.com/mw4vAmZnbk
— Mario Boone (@MarioBooneTV) November 29, 2017
Earlier this month, Wintrich cancelled an “It Is OK To Be White” appearance at University of Massachusetts Boston after the school asked Wintrich to change the name.
“It’s humorous but highly frustrating that UMass Boston just PROVED the meme I was using for this speech,” Wintrich told his own outlet, Gateway Pundit, at the time. “To think that they would take issue with a title as laughably mundane as ‘It Is OK to Be White’ is indicative, I think, of a larger problem within America, it’s the ‘systematic oppression’ of anything that does not negatively reference and bash white people on university campuses. Ironically, the speech I’ve been working on deals in part with university and media censorship of concepts and ideas.”
#BREAKING @UConn cops just arrested @lucianwintrich for assaulting a student during his "It's ok to be White" speech. Cops have cleared the lecture hall. @WTNH #CTnews pic.twitter.com/ZRmNT0SOo4
— Mario Boone (@MarioBooneTV) November 29, 2017
Gateway Pundit, the outlet for which Wintrich writes, is a pro-Trump blog credentialed by the White House with a history of pushing conspiracy theories. Wintrich is the outlet’s White House correspondent.
His chaotic appearance Tuesday night is the latest in a recent series of campus controversies surrounding white nationalist and far right speakers. Earlier this year, protests and fires broke out at New York University when “ProudBoy” Gavin McInnes spoke, and violence has broken out around the country surrounding former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ campus appearances.