Right-wing firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos vowed Saturday to hold a rally at the University of California, Berkeley after a student group that planned a week of events with him called it off.
His announcement added to a confusing turn of events surrounding "Free Speech Week," a four-day campus event slated to begin Sunday featuring right-wing speakers.
The conservative student group Berkeley Patriot, which had been organizing the event, told university administrators Saturday that they would cancel it, the university said. The group's representatives told the San Francisco Chronicle they feared for their safety.
"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," UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said in a statement.
Yiannopoulos said he was blindsided and "personally irritated" by the news, but insisted on holding a rally with fellow right-wing commentators Sunday on Sproul Plaza, the center of activity on campus during the 1960s Free Speech Movement.
"We are going to be hosting an event come hell or high water tomorrow," Yiannopoulos said in a live video on Facebook. He made his comments from a hotel room after cancelling a news conference on San Francisco's Treasure Island.
"We will be expressing our constitutional rights to free speech, free expression, on Sproul Plaza, the home of the Free Speech Movement, tomorrow as planned, with or without student help, with or without the cooperation of UC Berkeley itself."