CHICAGO – University of Chicago student Jake Bittle doesn’t care for President-elect Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer.
Bittle took to Facebook last week to announce his plans to “start projectile vomiting five minutes into the discussion” Spicer is slated to hold with students at David Axelrod’s Institute of Politics on Wednesday, the Chicago Tribune reports.
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Bittle and another student were hauled into the dean of students’ office after Bittle posted the threat, and asked his fellow students “who’s with me?” The other student made an inside joke about beating up an intern at the IOP in protest.
Bittle had a friendly chat with dean of students Michelle Rasmussen on Wednesday, and said Rasmussen assured him his plan to vomit at the event “would be protected speech, as long as I do not actually vomit on Sean Spicer,” the Tribune reports.
Bittle said he promised Rasmussen he “won’t vomit on him on purpose.”
In other Facebook posts, Bittle said he planned to accidentally barf of the press secretary.
“There is no protest,” he wrote, according to The Chicago Maroon. “I’m just going to projectile vomit on Sean Spicer … by accident.”
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The senior, who edits the South Side Weekly magazine, told The Maroon university officials should just mind their own business.
“Taking an outsider’s perspective, I guess I can see why they’d want to inspect what might look like a threat, but knowing the situation and the context, their involvement feels like a bit of an overreach,” he said. “Whether a university administration should be responsible for or involved in monitoring student social media pages at all is a separate question, about which my opinion is probably clear.”
Bittle’s beef with Spicer seems to stem from the press secretary’s comments that the Trump administration plans to review how the White House grants access to the press, including the traditional daily press briefings. Those comments followed Trump’s decision during the campaign to black list some media outlets from his events.
“I don’t think that we need to treat this person like a normal press secretary coming in to talk about life on the job, and I think it is insidious that Axelrod called him a friend and is tacitly normalizing the administration by having him in for a discussion,” he told the Maroon. “It turns out that the IOP intends to treat this administration like a normal one and I don’t think students should treat this as business as usual.”
Bittle’s tough talk also earned him an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, where Carlson mocked the student about his plan to disrupt Spicer’s visit.
“One of your explanations was, well, he represents a press operation that is hostile to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, therefore he should not be allowed to talk,” Carlson said. “There seems an irony in that. He’s against freedom of speech, so you don’t allow him to talk? How does that work?”
Bittle claimed he doesn’t aim to prevent Spicer from speaking, but “I as a student, and my peers, should be allowed to his presence on my campus in ways that aren’t just civil or decorous and don’t involve just standing up and asking him a question …”
The Tribune attempted to contact Axelrod and Rasmussen regarding Bittle’s antics and Wednesday’s event, but was forwarded instead to university spokeswoman Marielle Sainvilus.
“The University of Chicago supports protest activity as long as it does not prevent the speaker and the audience from participating in the event,” she said.
IOP executive director Steve Edwards, meanwhile, is defending the decision to host Spicer.
“With the pending inauguration of President-elect Trump, it’s vitally important to understand how his administration will approach the presidency and the key issues affecting our nation during the next four years,” he told The College Fix. “Our event with Sean Spicer is the first in a series of in-depth conversations we’ll be hosting during winter quarter that seek to examine the impact of a Trump presidency from a variety of issues and perspectives.”


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