Some version of that may turn out to be true, but as of right now the original plans for Free Speech Week have fallen apart.

Some critics have suspected Yiannopoulos of never intending to hold the event in the first place, though Mike Cernovich, the right-wing activist and Twitter personality who was scheduled to speak on September 27, said he doesn’t believe this is the case.

“I believe Milo sincerely wanted Free Speech Week to happen because he approached me months ago to be involved,” Cernovich said. “I had a family visit planned, and he expressed some disappointment. This wouldn’t have made sense if he hadn't expected the week to go as planned. Thus I don’t buy into the theory that he never wanted Free Speech Week to happen.”

But Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich, who announced in a blog post earlier this week that he was pulling out of the event due to uncertainty about its future, accused Yiannopoulos on Thursday night of “unethical behavior” in a Periscope video. Wintrich said that Yiannopoulos and his company knew the event wouldn’t go forward as planned.

“Internally they knew it wasn’t happening [as of] Wednesday,” Wintrich said. “I saw no reason to string people along pretending that something was going to happen that wasn’t going to happen.” (“This would be the first I’d heard of it, if true,” Yianopoulos said in a text message. “We have gone through dozens of different iterations of proposals. For getting through the next few weeks. So I don’t know if someone shared a DISCUSSION. But the current plan is not that, and it isn’t true we’re cancelling or knew we’d be cancelling on Weds—I wouldn’t be flying people in today if that were the case.”)

Some of the names on the list had never been confirmed.

Coulter told me on Wednesday that she had not received a contract from her speakers bureau, “I’m sure because of the obstacles Berkeley is throwing out.”

Bannon is also not going. He is attending a conservative forum in St. Louis on Sunday and is going, according to a source familiar with his plans, to Alabama for the Republican Senate primary there. Bannon is backing hard-right conservative judge Roy Moore in this race against Trump-endorsed Senator Luther Strange in the contest to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s old seat.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince, who had also been on a schedule, told me he had never planned to go to Berkeley.

“A typo,” he said in a text message. “I’m in Africa and was never planning to attend.”

One person who had been scheduled to appear who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the speakers had been confused and kept in the dark.

“People didn’t know how to get tickets, their travel wasn’t being booked, they heard Coulter pulled out and Bannon was never confirmed, and they kept getting the run around,” this person said. Vanity Fair reported that Yiannopoulos’s company had told speakers it would only give them 48 hours’ notice of their travel bookings, which the company presented as a way to prevent “sabotage,” but which could also be construed as a way to avoid booking people’s travel for an event that was not likely to happen.