UConn Brouhaha Lands Gateway Pundit Troll Lucian Wintrich in Handcuffs

Color photo of Lucian Wintrich in jacket and tie in a library, holding a martini
Lucian Wintrich, #Twinks4Trump creator and alleged UConn peace breacher (W Leland via Wikimedia Commons)
Campus police arrested pro-Trump White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich after a fracas interrupted his speech at the University of Connecticut.

He came, he triggered, he tussled. So went Lucian Wintrich’s evening at the University of Connecticut on Tuesday, where campus cops handcuffed and arrested him after a melee broke out during a speech he was attempting to deliver.

The UConn College Republicans had invited Wintrich, the White House-credentialed correspondent for the right-wing website Gateway Pundit, to speak at the school.

Wintrich, 29, was delivering an impassioned defense of the 4chan meme, “It’s OK to be White,” to a mostly hostile audience of about 300 in a lecture hall on the university’s main campus in Storrs.

Video of the event posted to the College Republicans’ Facebook page shows Wintrich trading barbs with the crowd and straining to speak over chants of “Go home, Nazi,” “Black lives matter,” and “Fuck you.”

Before he could finish his address, much of the audience rose to leave in protest.

Color mugshot of Lucian Wintrich sporting a bow tie and round, horn-rimmed glasses
Wintrich’s booking photo (University of Connecticut Police Department)

At that point, as various videos posted to social media show, an unnamed woman removed a sheaf of papers from the lectern — presumably Wintrich’s notes for his speech — and walked away with it.

A ruckus ensued, ending with campus police removing Wintrich from the room and detaining the tuxedo-clad iconoclast on one charge of breaching the peace, a second-degree misdemeanor.

Front Page Confidential obtained the incident report, which states that Wintrich “followed the female and grabbed her, pulling her backwards in a violent manner” and further alleges that “Wintrich’s tumultuous behavior caused significant disruption to the event.”

Police later freed Wintrich on $1,000 bail.

You’d think that would be enough for one night, but Lillian Whittaker, a reporter for the Daily Campus, UConn’s student newspaper, described a moblike atmosphere at the lecture hall.

Writes Whittaker:

Following Wintrich’s arrest, police herded the crowds out of the building, saying that the event was over.

Outside, protesters mobbed at the rear of Schenker Hall, chanting. Police again herded the crowd back when escorting out the man in the “Make America Great Again” outfit and several other UConn College Republicans members from the building at approximately 9:05 p.m.

Later on, a smoke bomb was set off, causing the fire alarms to go off in the hall. The UConn Fire Marshal was brought to the scene.[…]

Wintrich was escorted out of the west entrance of the building at about 9:57 p.m., where he was swarmed by students and escorted into an unmarked car by the police. Police blocked off students attempting to bombard the car.

Crowds grew at the front of the building and proceeded to chant at the police inside the building long after Wintrich left.

Wintrich later Tweeted out his mugshot to followers and declared victory, claiming the event helped prove that “the leftist media is turning Americans against each other.”

He also published his unabridged speech on the Gateway Pundit site, complete with PowerPoint slides.

Wintrich’s address opens with an anecdote about a “fat girl” confronting him over his politics at a “hipster bar” in  Pittsburgh. He then commences to lament the state of the nation, as he sees it.

“There are currently two Americas, one full of cherry trees, apple-pie capitalism, and pragmatism, and another, bizarro America run by illegal immigrant tranny communists,” he writes.

“The left,” he contends, “is attempting to create an environment where white people who don’t claim that they’re transgender, or something, are ranked as minorities; placed at the very bottom of their totem pole of intersectional Olympics.”

It’s a sentiment that comes straight out of the alt-right handbook, as one heckler pointed out during Wintrich’s aborted address, calling out,  “You’re like a third-rate Milo!”

The reference is to Wintrich’s onetime collaborator Milo Yiannopoulos, whose “Dangerous Faggot Tour” precipitated a left-wing uprising on the UC Berkeley campus in February. (Like Yiannopoulos, Wintrich is openly gay.)

Much of Wintrich’s shtick seems derivative of Yiannopoulos, right down to trading insults with the audience and jibes aimed at Muslims and fat people.

Similarly, Wintrich seeks to claim the mantle of the oppressed alt-righter shouted down by campus lefties — a mantle UConn protesters seemed prepared to bestow upon him this week.

Albeit with a little help* from Wintrich himself.

(*Allegedly.)

Though some right-wing commentators — we’re looking at you Ann Coulter and Gateway Pundit editor Jim Hoft — ran with the notion that Wintrich was a victim of liberal wackos, not everyone on the right is convinced.

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro seemed to cut the proverbial baby down the middle, stating that while it was “dumb and bad” steal someone’s notes, Wintrich’s reaction was “NUTS.”

Then again, for Wintrich, whose résumé includes includes a photo series of scantily clad hunks wearing MAGA hats (#Twinks4Trump) and a defense of Gateway Pundit after the site fake-newsily fingered an innocent man in the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas, the UConn fracas is pretty much standard fare.

Click the link below to read the for the Daily Campus story in its entirety:

“White House Correspondent Arrested During Speech at ‘It’s OK to be White’ Event”

For the Hartford Courant‘s article, click here:

“Arrest of Lucian Wintrich, Chaos at UConn Draw National Attention”

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About Stephen Lemons

Stephen Lemons is an award-winning investigative journalist with more than 20 years of experience covering everything from government corruption to white-supremacist gangs. In addition to Front Page Confidential, his work has appeared in Phoenix New Times, the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report magazine.

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