It was over before it began and were it not for the provocation and violence from those that tried to put the event on, it would have proceeded. Honestly, they shut themselves down!

EDITORS’ NOTE: We have updated this story to include information about the Bull Moose Party and two of its former members current activities operating a White Nationalist publishing company in Pennsylvania.

STATE COLLEGE, PA – A planned event on Monday that was to feature the founder of the neo-fascist Proud Boys was shut down just minutes before it was supposed to start in the wake of escalating tension from protests outside the hall that might have been escalated by the organizers and event attendees and supporters themselves, including the host of the event.

The event was titled “Stand Back and Stand By” which is a callback to what then-President Donald Trump said to the Proud Boys from the stage during a 2020 presidential debate and was to feature Gavin McInnes, who founded the group in 2016.  There were calls to cancel the event out of concern for safety as well as anger that the event was being paid for with tuition dollars. University officials chose to allow the event to continue citing free speech.

Police guarded the Joab L. Thomas building as hundreds of counter-demonstrators, the majority of them Penn State students, amassed outside two hours before the event was supposed to begin. There were chants and speeches given by students for at least an hour, and the gathering remained peaceful until event host Alex Stein, who promotes himself as a professional troll, was allowed to step outside the building and provoke the crowd. The counter-demonstration then became a shouting match between Stein and protesters but with the exception of someone spitting on him, there was no escalation, which Stein himself said “frustrated” him. Stein was accompanied by members of Uncensored America, the organization that hosted McInnes, and several supporters including Christian Watson who is trying to make a name for himself as a conservative commentator. After fifteen minutes, Luca Miraldi, the Penn State student who secured the funds from the University for Uncensored America to host the event, beckoned Stein to come back inside the building.

According to the blog Extremely Bad, Uncensored America was founded by Sean Semanko, who graduated in 2020 but is still involved politically on campus. He had served as secretary for a self-styled alt-right group calling itself Bull Moose Party that saw a split regarding support for Trump that year because some members felt he didn’t fulfill campaign promises he made. The Southern Poverty Law Center noted in an article that two members of the Bull Moose Party, Vincent Cucchiara and Dmitri Loutsik, are currently operating a White Nationalist publishing company called Antelope Hill Publishing out of Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania.

The following year Semanko served as President for the Penn State chapter of Turning Point USA and hosted British misogynist Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. To date Uncensored America has only hosted neo-fascist speakers such as one time Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who resigned from that position after comments surfaced of him seemingly condoning pedophilia,  and Elijah Schaffer who was recently fired from Glen Beck’s media outlet The Blaze in light of sexual assault allegations.

After Stein went back into the building, the protest was left more passionate and fired up and it began moving back and forth between two entrances to the building. Eventually Proud Boys showed up and some fighting ensued with someone who was standing with the Proud Boys pepper spraying a number of people. There were some arrests, but the time of this posting police had not made clear who was arrested.

Just over a half-hour before the event was to start, campus officials announced that they were canceling the event prompting cheers among the protesters. “Due to the threat of escalating violence associated with tonight’s event, Penn State University Police determined that it was necessary to cancel the speaking event in the interest of campus safety,” campus officials said in a statement. Police also came out to announce the cancellation to the crowd, and Stein, McInnes and Miraldi ran to a car and fled the campus.

Before the event and particularly during the protests many wondered why the event was even sanctioned by Penn State to begin with, citing how official barred Richard Spencer to speak there as part of a college speaking tour he embarked on. This came not long after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 where counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed when rally attendee James Alex Fields plowed his car into a group of people, Spencer, an organizer of the Unite the Right rally requested to speak on campus that fall but then-University President Eric J. Barron said in a statement, ”(T)he First Amendment does not require our University to risk imminent violence,” and that “There is no place for hatred, bigotry or racism in our society and on our campuses.” A subsequent lawsuit was dismissed a few months later after the organizer did not respond to a request by the judge to explain why the lawsuit should continue.

Similar calls to prevent McInnes from speaking on campus were heard over the past few weeks, with those opposed citing the Proud Boys’ role in instigating “critical breaches” of the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack last year, which has led to several criminal investigations and convictions for the group and its members with seditious conspiracy among the charges. The Proud Boys are seen as a terrorist group in New Zealand and a “terrorist entity” in Canada. McInnes, who is from Canada, has regardless been allowed to remain in the United States, his supporters saying that he has obtained U.S. citizenship.