Members of the Ryerson community are all too familiar with the weird and wacky security incident reports that have come to fill our school email inboxes. However, an especially odd report raised more eyebrows than usual Thursday.
According to the report, some flyers printed on campus earlier this week included hate-related statements.
The weird part? According to the report, similar flyers have been reported coming out of printers at other Ontario universities as well as universities across the United States this week.
The flyers, which included anti-Semitic, homophobic and racist statements, were found on printers across campus on Monday morning. Ryerson’s Integrated Risk Management (IRM) team, the department responsible for the security incident reports that are emailed regularly, released the report on Thursday evening.
Ryerson’s IRM and the Ryerson Security office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Ryersonian.
Princeton University also reported hate-related flyers being printed on their campus, which included statements like “the struggle for global white supremacy” and images of swastikas. Other universities like the University of California, Berkeley, Brown University and Smith College have reported similar incidents this week.
According to the New York Times, the flyers are the work of infamous hacker Andrew Auernheimer, who goes by the alias “Weev.” The flyers directed readers to a neo-Nazi website, where Auernheimer had posted a rant that explained his motives. The website’s publisher, Andrew Anglin, put up a blog post about the posters, in which he called Auernheimer’s actions “heroic.”
We’ll keep you updated as the story unfolds.
With files from Kelsey Rambaran.
Dylan is a fourth-year journalism student and one of The Ryersonian's news editors.