Fear and Loathing in the Campaign’s Wake

On the day Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States, Jessica Gamble, the head of her university’s chapter of the College Republicans, stood on an auditorium stage and addressed her fellow conservatives.

“The University of Washington is a bastion of academic excellence,” she said. “You got into this school for a reason. When your voice and your ideas are not heard, discourse suffers.”

The day was a victory for Ms. Gamble, too. She had arrived at the Seattle campus four years earlier from a town whose total population would fit in this auditorium. She loved the university but had grown frustrated by a liberal atmosphere that she found stifling.

After Mr. Trump’s election, in November, it had felt openly hostile. Somebody had made a flier calling Ms. Gamble a racist. It listed her cellphone number along with her father’s. But things were changing. Republicans were back on top. The new president had promised to crack down on political correctness on college campuses. Ms. Gamble’s liberal classmates hated the Republicans more than ever, but they had been powerless to stop her from inviting an ally of the new president to speak on campus. And for every creepy message left on her cellphone as a result of the flier, there were dozens of notes from conservatives around the world lauding her for her courage.

“Thank you for those messages,” she said now, standing at the corner of the stage and reading from her notes in a crisp monotone, “because you kept me going.”

She then introduced the Republicans’ guest of honor. A man wearing oversized sunglasses, copious jewelry, and a puffy green shawl strode theatrically across the stage. The crowd cheered.

“Hello, faggots,” said Milo Yiannopoulos.

That was in January. In the weeks since, Mr. Yiannopoulos, an editor at the pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart, has seen his star rise as a free-speech martyr after a violent protest at the University of California at Berkeley — instigated not by students but outside groups, according to officials — prompted the police to cancel his scheduled talk. The protest drew condemnation from many corners, including the West Wing, where President Trump fired off a tweet threatening to withhold Berkeley’s federal funding.

But it was his appearance at the University of Washington, a week and a half earlier, that revealed how the incursion of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s brand of politics can leave a public university smoldering even if no campus property is set to flame. Whether it exposed existing fault lines or created new ones, Mr. Yiannopoulos’s tour forced administrators and students to confront the fact that campus culture is now bitterly contested territory — a space in which free speech and safety can seem like conflicting values.

Mr. Trump’s election has been deeply discomfiting to colleges, not only because of the president but because of the various figures who have risen to power on his coattails. Among them is Mr. Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart editor famous for encouraging online abuse campaigns against people, usually women, whom he has deemed worthy of scorn.

The 33-year-old provocateur began taking his act to college campuses in 2015, hoping to cut into the young, conservative body politic and connect its brain to its spleen. In regularly protested (and occasionally canceled) talks, he denied the existence of campus rape culture and the gender wage gap, mocked feminists and transgender people, highlighted cases in which hate crimes had been exposed as hoaxes, and explained that the biggest threat to black lives in America is other black people.

“I have never been offended,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek. “I don’t know what it means.”

Mr. Yiannopoulos, who is gay, branded his string of campus appearances the “Dangerous Faggot Tour,” and took to calling Mr. Trump “daddy.” Mr. Yiannopoulos speaks in the vexing dialect of online imageboard sites, a patois of pseudo-ironic viciousness and inside jokes that the so-called alt-right has used to wage an asymmetrical war against respectability politics. But he is also capable of sounding erudite, which, combined with a suit and tie and his British accent, can make him appear at home on a university stage.

Yet he is just as likely to arrive wearing a hot-cop outfit, border-patrol gear, or gold chains and black lipstick. At Louisiana State University, he appeared onstage wearing a giant blonde wig, a full-length white dress, and heels and calling himself “Ivana Wall.”

“The only natural response to outrage culture,” he told students at the University of Pittsburgh, “is to be outrageous.”

Among young conservatives it would be hard to find a less-likely ally of Mr. Yiannopoulos than the student who championed his appearance at Washington.

Ms. Gamble, who is 22, grew up in Carbonado, a former coal-mining town near Mt. Rainier with 600 residents and no traffic lights. Her parents were fiscal conservatives who did not have college degrees. Her father built and installed cabinets before the recession forced him to take a job as a purchasing manager for a company that sold machine parts. Her mother kept the books for a local chain of tire retailers. Their daughter cultivated solitary hobbies like hunting and fishing.

At age 10, Ms. Gamble was transfixed by a televised debate in which Dino Rossi, the Republican candidate for governor, parried questions from the moderator and his Democratic opponent with charm and precision. “He didn’t mumble over his words, he didn’t think about it too long,” she remembers, “He just knew the answer.” Mr. Rossi went on to lose his election by 133 votes, the narrowest gubernatorial margin in the history of modern elections.

It was proof that every single vote mattered, even in a smudge of a town like Carbonado. Maybe Ms. Gamble could make a difference. She became hooked on politics, confounding her parents by keeping the family television perpetually tuned to C-Span. She resolved to enroll at the University of Washington’s flagship campus, in Seattle, which sat just across Lake Washington from Bellevue, home of the state Republican Party headquarters.

Coming to Seattle gave Ms. Gamble culture shock. She had to get used to falling asleep to the sound of traffic and the glow of streetlights outside her window. And the political environment was just as disorienting.

She began to glimpse the uncharted depths of liberal politics. She had never considered transgender people and the battle for more inclusive personal pronouns. Racial politics were practically brand new to her, and much thornier than they had seemed from afar.

Ms. Gamble now saw textures in the political landscape that didn’t exist in Carbonado. She couldn’t pretend to know the answer to everyone’s problems. So she began to drift on the ideological spectrum — not from right to left, but from authoritarian to libertarian. If you don’t understand someone else’s life, she figured, better just to stay out of it.

Alan-Michael Weatherford also came to the University of Washington from rural America. His hometown was not a town but a “census-designated place” in Virginia with fewer than 200 residents. He grew up on a farm there with his mother and stepfather, who worked at a factory that made furniture. At age 10, after a custody battle, he went to live with his biological father in a suburb of Richmond. Near the end of high school he came out as gay, and was kicked out of the house.

He enrolled at Christopher Newport University, becoming the first in his family to go to college, and eventually went to Washington as a doctoral student. He teaches a class, called “Queerin’ the Americas,” where he uses novels, films, and poetry to “deconstruct people’s commonsensical understandings about minoritized people” — those whose narratives have been turned away by mainstream culture.

Mr. Weatherford has cultivated a keen sensitivity to the social dynamics that make others even more vulnerable than him. Yes, he is gay, but he is also white, cis, and able-bodied. “I have a lot of privilege,” he says.

Mr. Weatherford belongs to a caucus within his academic labor union that focuses on accounting for the specific needs of its most vulnerable members. He volunteers at a local prison, teaching Spanish to inmates. His syllabus includes a trigger warning.

He sees his work, inside the classroom and out, as part of a corrective to the biases against “minoritized” people that persist on campus, despite what Mr. Trump and his conservative allies say about higher education’s liberal hegemony. Mr. Weatherford had watched warily as Mr. Yiannopoulos’s college tour snaked its way around the country.

The doctoral student had a term for Mr. Yiannopoulos’s flamboyant embrace of Mr. Trump’s politics: “White homonationalism.”

The Breitbart editor had a term for Mr. Weatherford’s vigilant embrace of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions: “Horseshit.”

In July, Mr. Trump accepted the Republican nomination. The political battle lines were drawn.

Around the same time, Mr. Weatherford learned that the Republicans at Washington had invited Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak on campus.

He hadn’t been Ms. Gamble’s first choice as a guest speaker. She had supported Rand Paul in the primaries. Very few of the Republican club members were fans of Mr. Trump.

But it was an election year, and most of the club members had watched a favorite candidate endure what they considered to be hyperbolic criticism from the left. They wanted a speaker who would embody a piercing counterpoint.

The university’s student government held its own presidential election in the spring, and Ms. Gamble and her conservative friends were irritated by the candidates’ attempts to “out-progressive one another.”

The university then was considering the creation of a temporary “tent city” on campus where up to 100 homeless people could live and govern themselves. Ms. Gamble and her fellow conservatives thought it was a bad idea, but every student-government candidate supported it.

Ms. Gamble says she rarely faced outward hostility toward her political views in the classroom, but the small moments in which she felt unwelcome or invisible had added up over the years. Speaking up for moderate conservatism felt like whispering in a loud room. The frustration is hard to convey to an outsider, she says, but her fellow Republicans seemed to understand intuitively.

“You’re put into that position where either you’re quiet, or you fight back,” she says. And when you fight back, “It’s a bit more conservative than you intend to, and it’s a bit more rash than you intend to.”

Ann Coulter would have been a bold choice for a speaker, but nobody in the club liked her. There was a lot of support for Ben Shapiro, a young conservative pundit known, in part, for opposing Mr. Trump and telling Mr. Yiannopoulos to “grow up” — moves that had earned him a rolling wave of anti-Semitic messages online. But Mr. Shapiro came with a $10,000 price tag. Mr. Yiannopoulos, whose college tour was being subsidized by Breitbart, did not charge a fee.

Mr. Yiannopoulos, says Ms. Gamble, was the fiscally conservative choice. Dino Rossi would be proud.

Not long after Mr. Yiannopoulos accepted Ms. Gamble’s invitation, a petition circulated online asking Ana Mari Cauce, the president, to “stand up for student safety and tolerance” and ban him from campus.

Ms. Cauce was sympathetic. The president was a former professor of psychology and American ethnic studies who had dedicated her own research to illuminating the unique risks facing women, gays, immigrants, and people of color.

She was an immigrant herself, having fled Cuba with her family when she was 3 years old. Her brother, Cesar, a North Carolina union organizer, was shot and killed while protesting a rally of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party in what came to be known as the “Greensboro Massacre.” Later, when Ms. Cauce came out as gay, her mother told her, “Now both my children are dead.” (She eventually came to accept her daughter’s sexual orientation.)

Political tensions on campus reached a new pitch after Mr. Trump’s election. In mid-November students from LGBT and women-of-color advocacy groups led a walkout to protest Mr. Trump’s policy proposals. People waved signs that denounced the president-elect in blunt, vulgar terms. The next day, somebody hit a Muslim student in the face with a bottle, giving her a concussion.

Ms. Cauce reassured undocumented students that university police officers would not ask about their immigration status.

But she could not reassure them about Mr. Yiannopoulos.

In December the president released a statement expressing disgust for Mr. Yiannopoulos’s tactics. Without naming him, she addressed the Breitbart editor directly.

“If all you can do is attack and tear down those you disagree with, then I encourage you to level your attacks at me,” she wrote. “While some of the points you claim to be trying to make are worthy of discussion, I am proud to stand in opposition to those who are not only willing, but actively looking to stir up hate and fear, especially when it is targeted at those who are already the most vulnerable.”

By then, Ms. Cauce had consulted with the Washington attorney general’s office, which advises the university on legal matters, and decided not to intervene. She instead encouraged students to steer clear of the event and deny Mr. Yiannopoulos the attention he sought.

If the president had tried to block Mr. Yiannopoulos’s talk, the university would have faced a lawsuit that it would have lost, according to Ronald K.L. Collins, a professor at the law school who specializes in the First Amendment. Norman Arkans, a university spokesman, said the Ms. Cauce’s decision was based not just on the legal ramifications but also on the principle of free speech.

The power to revoke Mr. Yiannopoulos’s invitation rested in the hands of the students who had extended it — in particular, a stiff-lipped libertarian from Carbonado who was eager to make her voice count.

The flier arrived in Ms. Gamble’s inbox from an anonymous email address just after New Year’s. “The Racist in Your Class,” read the header.

Below: two pictures of her from her Facebook profile, followed by a note about the scheduled talk by Mr. Yiannopoulos.

“Let Jessie know what you think about her close friendships with Neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” it suggested. “Why don’t you tell her father too while you’re at it.”

The flier directed readers to Ms. Gamble’s email address and social-media accounts, and listed both her phone number and her father’s.

It took a friend only a few hours of sleuthing to trace the flier to the person Ms. Gamble believes to be its author, a graduate student at the university whom she says she has never met. The flier soon disappeared from where it had been posted online, but its claims about the Republican club’s president were echoed on anarchist websites.

Maj. Steve Rittereiser, spokesman for the university police, said the flier did not constitute harassment because it was not a threat. “To some degree,” he told the student newspaper, “there’s a free-speech piece to this thing.”

Changing her cellphone number turned out to be relatively easy, and Ms. Gamble kept a cool demeanor about the flier, but it frightened her. It also deepened her resolve.

“To be honest,” she says, “we were more committed to Milo as more and more obstacles were thrown our way.”

The university did not try to persuade the Republican club to disinvite Mr. Yiannopoulos, but it did make the club pay for extra security during his visit. After all, the Breitbart editor would not be the only outsider able to claim free-speech rights on the Washington campus. Protesters would be allowed to assemble outside. And Mr. Yiannopoulos’s college tour was designed to attract attention well beyond the borders of campus.

The Republicans set up a page on the fund-raising website GoFundMe. Their campaign brought in more than $12,000, enough to pay all the costs of the event, which sold out.

In the weeks leading up to Inauguration Day the students began to thrill to the notion of defying the campus forces that were so determined to stymie their speaker and brand them as bigots by association. “Even people that were more moderate got sick of being treated that way,” says Ms. Gamble, “and they wanted to come out and hear someone stick it to that kind of culture on campus.”

On the day Mr. Yiannopoulos arrived, Mr. Weatherford helped coordinate a peaceful takeover of the library adjacent to the building where the Breitbart editor was scheduled to speak. Uniting under the name “UW Resist,” the leaders of several student-advocacy groups held a teach-in, leading sessions on how to effectively organize and take political action.

Some people roamed around the library with phones. Mr. Weatherford knew some of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s admirers were fond of “doxxing” — posting personal information about their opponents online and encouraging the internet trolls to swarm. It was hard to know the intentions of the camera-wielding strangers, but he suspected they might be trying to out undocumented students.

He and the other student advocates had come prepared. “We had a whole safety team dedicated to making sure they were OK,” he says. “We escorted them in and out of the building, making sure they were covered up.”

Mr. Weatherford wanted to get off campus before Mr. Yiannopoulos arrived. After the teach-in, he walked with a group to join a protest in a different part of the city.

They carried anti-Trump signs. A few of them chanted, “No justice, no peace!” When a man walking in the other direction stopped and started filming them, they used the signs to cover their faces.

The man with the camera walked alongside the group. He continued to film. “You’re invading my safe space,” he deadpanned when someone held a sign up to his lens.

Mr. Weatherford, dressed in black and carrying a bullhorn, walked over to the man. “Just cut it out,” said the doctoral student. “You’re trying to doxx people.”

The man argued that recording people in public was not the same as “doxxing” them. “You guys have doxxed the organizer of this event already,” he said, referring to Ms. Gamble.

He kept trying to follow the protesters, and Mr. Weatherford kept getting in his way. “You wanna get away from me dude?” the man said, raising his voice.

Mr. Weatherford’s reply was matter-of-fact: “I don’t have to.”

As Mr. Yiannopoulos and protesters from around Seattle converged on campus, the peaceful protests of the afternoon gave way to a rowdy scene.

A human wall jammed in front of the building where Mr. Yiannopoulos’s talk was going to be held. Protesters tried to block ticket holders from entering the venue, while police officers tried to keep protesters from rushing the entrance. Bricks and other foreign objects flew through the air. “Who’s the real fascists?” someone yelled.

Inside the auditorium, Ms. Gamble stood onstage and thanked her parents, who were in the audience. “I promise all the stress and worrying I put you through will one day be worth it.”

When Mr. Yiannopoulos appeared, just after 8 p.m., the sparse crowd rose to its feet and cheered. “The monsters, the unpleasant monsters of the progressive left, I’m sorry to tell you, have left us half-full this evening,” he said.

“There are apparently, I’m told, 1,500 more people with weapons on their way over here,” he said. “God, it’s so, so sexually exciting!”

The first half-hour of the talk played like a stand-up routine, as the Breitbart editor tested his audience’s appetite for jokes about how women and gender-studies students are ugly, how protesters are unemployed losers, and how those upset by Mr. Trump’s election should simply kill themselves.

Ms. Gamble sat in the front row. She would never say some of the things Mr. Yiannopoulos was saying, even if she supported his right to say them. He seemed more angry at campus political correctness than she was. At heart she was a wonk, not a culture warrior. “It was very hit-and-miss with me,” she says. But the Breitbart editor was nothing if not entertaining.

Mr. Yiannopoulos had just delivered a punchline about “Latinx,” the gender-neutral pronoun for people of Latin-American descent, when somebody in the audience stood up and told him that somebody outside the venue had been shot.

It took a few moments for Mr. Yiannopoulos to realize he was not being heckled. The playfulness drained from his voice.

“Is that real?” he said.

The 34-year-old victim was not a student. According to news reports, he is a computer-security engineer and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a socialist labor group, who was there to protest Mr. Yiannopoulos’s talk.

Around 8:30 p.m., the man lay bleeding in the middle of the public square, shot in the abdomen.

Days after the incident, The Seattle Times reported that the shooter was a former student at the university who had expressed support on Facebook for Mr. Yiannopoulos and the National Rifle Association, and had sent the Breitbart editor a message earlier in the evening seeking an autograph. (The campus police said this has not been confirmed, and the investigation remains open.)

The victim remains in the hospital. Sarah Lippek, his lawyer, asked that The Chronicle not print her client’s name because his family is worried about harassment.

She added that her client does not want the person who shot him to go to prison. He instead wants to sit down with the shooter and seek justice through dialogue.

Inside the auditorium, nobody knew anything. Mr. Yiannopoulos excused himself from the stage. The audience members murmured and took out their phones, trying to glean information from the initial news reports.

After a minute, Mr. Yiannopoulos returned and suggested that the show go on.

“If you think that is insensitive or inappropriate I completely understand, and please make yourself heard now,” he said in a sober tone. “But my view is that if we don’t continue, they have won.”

The crowd stood and applauded, then chanted his name.

When he resumed, Mr. Yiannopoulos started into the core theme of his talk: “Cyberbullying isn’t real.”

He explained that the goal of campus liberals was to blur the distinction between words and actions, so that they would be justified in retaliating against offensive humor and microaggressions with actual violence. He encouraged the audience to picture hordes of armed “social-justice warriors” enraged by mere words, exacting vigilante justice.

“Now, we’ve just heard of something awful happen outside, and it strikes me that this is the perfect illustration of what I’m talking about,” said Mr. Yiannopoulos.

A stranger saying vicious things on the internet, he said, is different than a stranger attacking you on the street. Only the latter does real harm.

“If you don’t like words, you don’t reach for a pistol,” he said. “You reach for an off switch.”

At 4 in the morning, Mr. Weatherford’s phone started to buzz.

Strangers were sending him messages on Twitter.

“We fouuuund youuuu.”

“Bend over they are coming.”

“You are done.”

A person whose Twitter avatar featured an illustration of Pepe the Frog — a popular “alt-right” mascot — dressed as Mr. Trump sent the graduate student a still image of himself from a video shot the previous afternoon.

“Btw, this is a doxxing,” the person wrote.

The man Mr. Weatherford had confronted on the sidewalk films protests as a hobby. He had posted the video of their argument on YouTube.

One commenter had identified Mr. Weatherford as a university employee, Another pointed users to his RateMyProfessors.com page. New reviews soon appeared, claiming that Mr. Weatherford traded good grades for sexual favors and had once beaten a student with a baseball bat while screaming, “I hate white people!” (He reported the postings to the site, which has since removed them.)

On 4chan, the online imageboard site, anonymous commenters mused about getting him fired and splitting his head open. One user mentioned seeing him around campus and name-checked his Spanish class number and section.

“im gonna beat yout faggot ass bitch,” said an email sent to his university address. “youre done for.”

Frightened, Mr. Weatherford wrote to Ms. Cauce. He knew the president sometimes responded directly to students who came to her with problems.

“I recognize that I carry a lot of privilege, but provided that this extent of harassment is happening to me, I can’t even fathom what others that are more vulnerable are experiencing,” he told her. “We are not all equal; some of us need to be protected in an environment that actively seeks to destroy us. You can help to prevent that.”

“Doxxing” threats were new territory for Ms. Cauce. She forwarded his note to the campus police and the student-life office.

Mr. Weatherford felt that she had brushed him off. He later filed a report with the university police. A detective is investigating one particular threat against him. An officer now escorts him to class.

Through his union he has filed a grievance with the university, arguing that by allowing Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak on campus it had created a hostile work environment.

Free speech sounds simple in theory, says Mr. Weatherford. Legally speaking, it is an equalizer: everybody has the right. In practice, though, the benefits of free speech tend to accrue to the powerful, he says. And in this case, the university should have used its own power to stand up for its most vulnerable constituents, even if it meant risking a lawsuit.

“This is what happens to minoritized people,” he says. “We don’t get listened to.”

Ms. Gamble says she has no regrets. She feels bad that someone was shot, but she blames outside agitators and ineffective crowd control, not Mr. Yiannopoulos.

She liked what the Breitbart editor said about cyberbullying not being real. After the hell she caught for inviting him to campus, Ms. Gamble found it comforting to think that she didn’t have to let other people’s angry words change how she felt about herself.

“If you don’t dwell on it,” she says, “and you know who you are and where you stand in life and you know what your end goal is, it’s not something that’s meant to hurt you.”

Ms. Gamble, who expects to land a job with the King County Republican Party, knows what her end goal is.

It is the same goal she had in mind when she invited Mr. Yiannopoulos to embolden the conservatives on her liberal campus to speak their minds. It is the same goal she has had ever since Mr. Rossi’s articulate case for conservatism inspired her to go into politics.

She wants to amplify red voices in a blue state.

What will those voices be saying? That, she doesn’t know.

“‘Conservative’ is definitely a term that’s changing post-Trump,” she says.

“It’s kind of like, ‘Conserving what?’”

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.