Nick Ribaudo, a student at Penn State, was attending a protest at his university earlier this week when he heard sudden screams. He and about 300 other students were protesting against their college hosting Gavin McInnes, founder of the violent Proud Boys group, and Alex Stein, another far-right figure, on campus that evening.
Ribaudo was standing on a pillar, trying to get a vantage point of the action, when a group surged towards him, shrieking. One of their friends, a student at the university, had just been pepper-sprayed.
“They said one of the Proud Boys did it,” Ribaudo said, “and I’ve seen the footage to back that up.”
Terrified and with legs shaking, Ribaudo handed the group his water bottle. They flushed out their friends’ stinging, red eyes right in front of the building where they would have class the next day.
“It’s a miracle more people were not injured,” Ribaudo recalled.
Students at Penn State have been dealing with the aftermath of violence and chaos around the planned speeches, and criticism is continuing to grow over the university’s role in allowing the event to be arranged in the first place.
The far-right Proud Boys have been labeled a terrorist organization by New Zealand and Canada and some of its members were charged for their actions during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
McInnes and Stein were both known as provocateurs who espouse hateful rhetoric, and eventually the university called off the event. But not before chaos had descended, and the speakers were inside the lecture hall, ready to go.
The university’s president, Neeli Bendapudi, said in a statement: “It is unclear which individuals onsite then resorted to physical confrontation and to using pepper spray against others in the crowd … Stein and McInnes will celebrate a victory for being canceled, when in actuality, they contributed to the very violence that compromised their ability to speak.”
For many student protesters, that narrative plays down the role of the university in allowing the event in the first place and that angers them. Ribaudo is among them.
“I’d like to continue to talk about this,” Ribaudo said. “It’s dizzying, baffling, and clear the university did a really bad job.”
The scenes of violence were dramatic. Campus police and Pennsylvania troopers scoured the perimeter, ready for when things inevitably escalated. And Proud Boys could also apparently be seen lingering outside the venue, dressed in their black and yellow garb.
Ribaudo recalled that Stein came out of the building before the talk was scheduled to begin and grabbed a protester’s sign. He then called students “snowflakes” and filmed them for his social media. One of the captions of his videos on Twitter read “Mentally Insane College Students in America!”
“Stein was deliberately egging people on so he could posit himself as a martyr,” Ribaudo said. “He riled up the crowd, and I guess this worked.”
As the protest crowd swelled, there was an announcement that Penn had canceled the event. This was after the pepper spray and after McInnes and Stein had been escorted off the premises.
Students continued to march down Pollock Road, shouting “Whose campus? Our campus!” and “We are not afraid of Proud Boys.”
