White supremacists, led by Matthew Heimbach (right) vandalize the Towson University campus
Nicole Colson provides the
facts you need to know about some of the conservative, "alt-right"
and downright fascist groups that might be coming to a university near you.
September 19, 2017
September 19, 2017
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THIS FALL, it isn't just
students who are returning to college campuses. Right-wingers of all stripes--including
neo-Nazis, in several cases--are showing up as well, aiming to win students to
their noxious worldviews.
These reactionaries understand
something the left does, too: that universities are ideological battlegrounds,
where young people can become radicalized. So the right is heading into the
fall with the aim of dominating on campuses and recruiting students to their
own brand of activism.
And their cover story is to
play the innocent victim--of supposedly liberal administrations and cruel
left-wing professors and students who take away their cherished right to
"free speech." Meanwhile, they mercilessly scapegoat and victimize
people of color, undocumented immigrants, women, LGBTQ people and other
oppressed minorities.
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ONCE AGAIN, the University of
California (UC) at Berkeley is ground zero for the alt-reich.
Last week, the College
Republicans and Young America's Foundation--which is tied to the billionaire
Koch Brothers--brought conservative commenter Ben Shapiro to speak on campus.
A former editor of the
Breitbart "news" website, Shapiro claims in
his book Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth that
U.S. colleges and universities "promote atheism, sexual perversion
(including pedophilia and statutory rape), and rampant environmentalism."
That's an odd claim,
considering the lengths to which the Berkeley administration went in order to
make sure Shapiro had the opportunity to promote his bigoted views. The UC
administration found a venue for him--along with many hundreds of thousands of
dollars to make sure the event went off without a hitch.
UC Berkeley agreed
to pay for the rental of Zellerbach Hall and staffing of the event, not to
mention additional security fees and other costs. "In all," Newsweek
reported, "the public university was estimated to have spent $600,000
on security for the talk by the controversial commentator."
Additionally, reported
the Los Angeles Times, the campus underwent "unprecedented"
actions to curtail left-wing counterprotests, including bringing out
"[p]olice officers and physical barriers...in a roughly half-mile-long
perimeter around six campus buildings Thursday afternoon, cutting off access to
Sproul Plaza, the site of Mario Savio's famous 1964 address during the free
speech movement and a common meeting ground for activists of all stripes."
And coming up next week: A
collection of right-wing groups at Berkeley, including the College Republicans
and Berkeley Patriot, is planning four days of hate--dubbed
"Free Speech Week"--beginning September 24. The reactionary
speakers have even been arranged thematically, with professional Islamophobe
Pamela Geller coming for so-called "Islamic Peace and Tolerance Day"
and Ann Coulter headlining "Mario Savio Is Dead" Day.
It was unclear,
as this article was being written, whether the events would take place,
since right-wing student groups at Berkeley responsible for the meetings had
reportedly missed multiple deadlines for submitting contracts with venues and
speakers, security plans and more. Some of the supposedly "confirmed"
speakers--like peddler of racist pseudoscience Charles Murray--declared that
they had never even agreed to speak.
But that didn't stop UC
Berkeley officials from
bending over backward to disregard their own regulations for right-wing
student groups. As of late Tuesday night, Free Speech Week will go on, even
though only two speakers (Milo Yiannopoulos and Islamophobe David Horowitz)
have even confirmed with the campus they were attending--another requirement.
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THIS FALL, Berkeley won't
stand alone either. At Columbia University in New York City, the
College Republicans are bringing Mike Cernovich, a self-professed
"American nationalist" and alt-right conspiracy theorist, to campus.
Cernovich surged to prominence
in the alt-reich scene (though he rejects that label) due to his social media
interaction with Donald Trump during last year's election--and White House
officials since then. Last year, he was a main force behind bizarre claims that
Hillary Clinton was connected to a pedophile ring in a pizza shop (referred to
as "#PizzaGate").
According
to the New York Times, Cernovich got his start as "a men's self-help
writer whose work disdained feminism and promoted a message of men's
empowerment that often dwelled on the question of how to meet women"--and
claimed that date rape is a made-up concept.
Given that the Columbia
administration recently settled
a lawsuit filed by the male student accused of rape by Emma Sulkowicz--whose
"carry the weight" protest against sexual assault drew widespread
support and attention--bringing someone like Cernovich to campus represents a
horrifying ideological assault on women's rights and rape survivors in
particular. That he will receive a fat honorarium to peddle his lies adds
insult to injury.
Other reported guests invited
by Columbia's College Republicans are former English Defense League head, open
racist and anti-Muslim bigot Tommy Robinson, who has a
history of violent altercations--and Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund manager
and pharmaceutical company executive convicted of securities fraud in August.
In Shkreli's case, there's no
word on whether his upcoming prison sentence will impede his planned talk at
Columbia.
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CAMPUS SPEAKING tours by the
right aren't new. And the
claims that such groups are being marginalized by campus administrations
are not only easily disproven, but usually laughable. (Try comparing the
funding of the College Republican group at your school and the campus
socialists.)
But beyond speaking events, a
crop of "alt-right"-style groups is being emboldened on
campus--taking a more confrontational and harassing approach to left-wing
students and student groups.
This includes groups the
"Red Elephants"--a conservative group known for
its YouTube videos--and for its
claims to stand for "liberties, freedoms and constitutional rights of
the American people. Our goal is to spread truth to the citizens of this great
nation by reporting news and promoting free thinking."
Apparently, however,
"free thinking" means the "freedom to think" only like them.
Those who disagree with the group's right-wing
worldview or its promotion of white supremacists like Kyle
"Based Stickman" Chapman--known for beating an anti-racist
protester over the head with a stick--are subjected to ridicule and harassment,
both online and in real life.
At UC Berkeley, for example,
members of the Red Elephants, joined by student members of the libertarian
group Liberty Hangout, have disrupted or attempted to disrupt multiple meetings
of progressive organizations, including a
recent meeting of a campus club affiliated with the International Socialist
Organization, the publisher of this newspaper.
As
the OC Weekly reported, the Red Elephants' "main claim to fame is
livestreams of events that are transformed into glitch-heavy videos that depict
the left as the sole aggressors in political clashes, which, for Red Elephants,
justifies the violent reactions of the alt-right."
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OTHER GROUPS that aren't
necessarily new to campus disruption have escalated their activism in the wake
of Trump's election a year ago.
Turning Point USA, founded in
2012, claims to have a "presence" at more than 1,000 college campuses
and high schools and aims to "identify, educate, train and organize
students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets and limited
government" in order to "push back against intolerance and bias
against conservatives in higher education."
How does it do that? By
promoting intolerance and bias in the form of the "Professor
Watchlist" website--a not-so-veiled blacklist that the group says is to
"expose and document college professors who discriminate against
conservative students and advance leftist propaganda."
In reality, of course, liberal
and left-wing professors and academics have
overwhelmingly borne the brunt of attacks on their jobs by conservatives
and campus administrations--with little defense of their "free-speech
rights" that the reactionaries have suddenly developed such a fondness
for.
As Princeton professor and
author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor noted in a New York Times op-ed article,
"When it comes to protecting the speech of people who are most vulnerable
to being intimidated into silence--like people of color and gay
people--conservatives either are suspiciously quiet or drive further
intimidation with wildly negative news coverage."
For professors and vulnerable
students--undocumented immigrants and LGBTQ people, for example--such
harassment can have lasting real-world consequences.
Turning Point claims to be
opposing leftist attempts to take over campuses, but it was exposed earlier
this year for secretly funding at least two candidates in a campaign for
Undergraduate Student Government at Ohio State University (OSU). According to
leaked text messages, the group set aside at least $6,000 for the candidates,
as part of "a nationwide effort to put conservative students into student
governments at colleges across the U.S."
"Liberals consistently
dominate campus student government and our goal is to secretly take them out
without them knowing what's coming," a message
from Turning Point USA Leadership Director Kennedy Copeland reportedly said.
Can anyone imagine the outcry
if a national progressive organization was caught funding attempts to
"secretly take out" conservatives from student governments?
Turning Point isn't the only
group looking to exploit the current campus climate to push free-market
ideology.
Spiked Online and Reason.com
recently announced that they are teaming up to sponsor campus speaking events
this fall dubbed
the "Unsafe Space" tour.
Spiked is a libertarian
publication that once claimed a variant of Marxism from its founder Frank Furedi,
but now mainly attacks the left. Reason--whose tag line is "free minds and
free markets"--has long been a bastion for libertarian thinkers like
Milton Friedman.
Calling the tour "Unsafe
Spaces" is a deliberate provocation--an attempt to needle left-wing
activists over the perception that political correctness has run amok and
campuses have devolved into places where liberals and progressives are so
fragile that they can't handle the free exchange of ideas.
"Universities in the
nation that gave us the First Amendment and the Sixties student Free Speech
Movement have been besieged by an unholy alliance between a self-raised army of
student offence-takers and busybody bureaucrats, willing to ban a speaker or
snuff out inconvenient thought as soon as someone cries 'bigot,'" claims
the tour website.
In other words, the tour is an
attempt to promote the same kind of ideological assault on liberal and left
ideas that was popular with the right during the 1990s--when conservative
figures used the ideological offensive in the service of rolling back gains
made on campuses during the 1960s and restructuring universities and campuses
along neoliberal lines.
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AND THEN there are the
outright Nazis and fascists.
A
report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in February documented
increased white nationalist, Ku Klux Klan and anti-Semitic organizing on
campuses. "Emboldened by a presidential candidate who embraced their ideas
with a nudge and a wink, and electrified by his victory, white nationalists in
2016 fanned out and spread their message of fear and loathing among the
nation's young people," the SPLC wrote.
In the weeks since
Charlottesville and the murder of anti-racist protester Heather Heyer, several
far-right neo-Nazi groups and activists have made it clear that they see
college campuses as key to recruiting to their noxious cause--and that they
haven't been put on the defensive by the outrage that erupted after their
deadly violence.
Richard Spencer, one of main
forces behind the gathering of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in
Charlottesville, has plans to speak at the University of Florida in October--and
is suing multiple schools that have canceled his speaking engagements or denied
his requests to speak on safety grounds after the violence he helped promote in
Charlottesville.
Or there's Identity
Evropa--the group known for chanting "You will not replace us" in
Charlottesville. Under the auspices of founder Jason Damigo, the group bills
itself as "a generation of awakened Europeans who have discovered that we
are part of the great peoples, history, and civilization" and advocates
for a "90 percent white America."
The SPLC says that Damigo has previously
targeted professors who taught courses on the concept of white privilege
and has promoted "white student unions" on campuses. As
The Root noted:
According to the
Anti-Defamation League, Identity Evropa distributed flyers and literature on 65
campuses in 2016, and its posters and flyers have already been spotted at more
than a dozen colleges in the first few weeks of the 2017-2018 school year.
Using catchphrases like "Our generation, our future, our last chance"
and "Action. Leadership. Identity," the group has streamlined a
process called "#ProjectSiege" that is geared toward indoctrinating
young people.
Identity Evropa calls
#ProjectSiege "the beginning of a long-term cultural war of
attrition" and outlines how its brainwashing process works. It begins with
innocuous conversations and gauging to see if the young person is left- or
right-leaning.
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THE TRADITIONALIST Worker
Party (TWP)--whose members also gathered in Charlottesville and reportedly were
some of the most violent--not only has an orientation to campuses and college
students, but it attempts to appeal to students who feel as though they are
being left behind by capitalism.
As opposed to some of the
libertarian and pro-free market forces organizing on campuses, the TWP claims
it was created "by and for working families" and is opposed to
capitalism, using tag lines like "Class cooperation against capitalism and
communism" and "Local solutions to the globalist problem." Of
course, in their estimation, the "globalist problem" is Jews,
non-Christians and LGBTQ people, among others.
The TWP also makes overtures
to those concerned about the destruction of the environment, decrying
"increasing levels of pollution, economic exploitation and political
cronyism" destroying the way of life for "millions of White
Appalachians."
According
to the SPLC, TWP leader Matthew Heimbach got his start as a baby racist by
attempting to form a "white student union" in high school, and later
college. Seeing students as key to recruiting to its racist hate, the group
posts flyers, holds protests and tables on campuses--particularly in
Appalachia.
The
TWP actually formed out of the Traditionalist Youth Network--a youth group
that claims its mission was "to provide resources and support to
independent groups of high school and college students throughout North
America"--and not the other way around.
While the crusaders of hate in
groups like the TWP might represent the most toxic and violent racism, they are
part of a continuum of the right wing that aims to reverse any and all
progressive gains on campuses, recruit foot soldiers to their right-wing ranks
and remake campuses to promote a more overt right-wing ideology.
We know what will be lost if
they succeed: the rights of oppressed and marginalized students to organize and
gain access to resources in education; the ability of professors, campus
activists and workers to speak out; and the safety of larger communities faced
with a growing and emboldened far-right threat.
Stopping future
Charlottesvilles requires standing up to the alt-reich on our campuses today.
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