Monday, February 05, 2018By Kristina Khan and Shane Burley
On November 22, 2017, Joel
Valdez and Blair Nelson, two members of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and both
students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), joined Gavin
McInnes on his program, "Get Off My Lawn." The young "conservatives"
excitedly promoted their appearance on his show earlier in the week. McInnes,
who is founder of the Proud Boys, has been thoroughly investigated by the Southern Poverty Law Center and describes himself as a
"Western Chauvinist." He has become a leader in the "civic
nationalist" contingent encircling the "alt-right." McInnis
interviewed Valdez and Nelson about their encounter with a fellow student on
campus on November 16, asking Nelson, "Why did you not punch him
in the face?"
TPUSA, famous for its aggressive tactics against leftist
professors across US campuses, was founded in 2012 by a disgruntled Charlie
Kirk, who failed to get into the United States Military Academy at West Point.
Kirk hardly built TPUSA into the organization it is today, however; the nonprofit
is funded largely by Republican mega-donors and is a
source of controversy for allegedly funding student government campaigns on several
campuses.
McInnes asked them about an
alleged "wild attack by an antifa professor" who supposedly
confronted Nelson and Valdez "just for being conservatives." The
instructor they were referring to was Tariq Khan, a US Air Force veteran and
graduate student at the university. Khan challenged this characterization,
saying he confronted the two after they made what he felt was a veiled threat
against his children. Khan, his wife (one of the authors of this piece) and one
of his children had been filmed by right-wing, anti-Muslim student activists in
the same spot on campus two years earlier, and UIUC's chapter of TPUSA had
already attempted to push two campaigns against two different women of color
associated with UIUC this past fall: an undergraduate student and a staff
member. After the confrontation between Valdez and Khan, TPUSA members and
allies created a campaign of threats and intimidation across media platforms.
Targeting Campuses
According to TPUSA's website,
they have chapters at around 350 college campuses and approximately 64 chapters
in high schools around the country. TPUSA is the home of the "Professor
Watchlist," a McCarthy-style blacklist of "biased" professors.
On Comedy Central's show, "The Opposition," Kirk described the
"Professor Watchlist" as "an awareness tool," but if a
professor makes the list, they then "coincidentally" become the
target of malicious campaigns.
Amanda Gailey, an English
professor at the University of Nebraska (UN), is one of now hundreds of
professors across the country who were targeted by the group, receiving threats
in her inbox after they launched a campaign against her and UN graduate student
Courtney Lawton. These campaigns nearly all roll out the same way: TPUSA self
publishes a story on their site, Campus Reform, of alleged "abuse" or
bias from the left; the victim of the story starts getting threats; and
universities find themselves dealing with outside pressure to get rid of the
professor or student in question. Kirk said to CNN in December 2017 about his
"Professor Watchlist,"
We do not call for any of that
sort of harassment. We don't condone it. We don't try to facilitate any sort of
cyber bullying or harassment. And just because you put up the words, or another
article that's been written about a professor in an aggregated format, does not
mean we should be held responsible for what other people do.
But it's not just anonymous
virtual trolls that are intimidating professors. TPUSA's tactics are shady, to
say the least. Across the country, TPUSA members film leftists without their
consent, both on and off campus. They have tried to infiltrate
leftist meetings and spaces. They stalk leftists online, documenting their
lives and doxxing them. Intimidation and infiltration strategies like these
border on being illegal, and TPUSA knows it. Their members walk a carefully
directed line to avoid negative publicity, and should any arise, they do
massive amounts of damage control through their own media outlets.
The New Yorker published its own exposé on TPUSA, citing anti-Blackness and
illegal election funding, which shed a bit more light on the practices of this
nonprofit. But what's yet to be thoroughly investigated but beginning to be
uncovered in central Illinois and Nebraska are TPUSA's connections to
neo-fascist organizations and individuals.
Despite Valdez' claims on
"Get Off My Lawn" of being present for the anti-Trump rally because
of an "interest in civil discourse," TPUSA members harassed and
filmed many of that day's attendees and speakers, including Khan. One member,
Andrew Minik, then posted the video they took on the Campus Reform site, along
with the erroneous story about Khan. Andrew Minik is one of many TPUSA
members paid to write for Campus Reform, which is a joint
project of the National Leadership Institute. The Institute provides an online
forum for students to "report liberal abuse" and to even "get
paid to hold their school accountable."
Joel Valdez, Blair Nelson and
Andrew Minik aren't doing anything other TPUSA members haven't done. Lying
about their interactions with their fellow students and their professors on
campus is how TPUSA operates as an organization. Administrators at UIUC
"knew it would be trouble," when they became aware that there would
be a TPUSA chapter on campus. But what makes the UIUC chapter seem unique is
their happy interaction with the notorious McInnes.
From Trolling to Threats
The culture of "exposure"
that TPUSA intends to bring to college campuses is patterned after identifying
specific people, often students or adjunct faculty, and then spurring them on
with erroneous claims that leave them personally and professionally vulnerable.
After Minik published his
erroneous article about Khan on Campus Reform, the death threats started
pouring in. Threats from Neo-Nazis, white nationalists and Islamophobes came
from all over the country to Khan's inbox. Khan, who is partially of Pakistani
descent, appeared to be singled out in part because of his ethnicity, leaning
to their heavy focus on Muslim immigration. His academic department and the
Graduate Employees Union office received threats and phone calls demanding Khan
be expelled. As the story exploded, it was picked up by sites like InfoWars and
shared by Ben Shapiro, Lou Dobbs, Charlie Kirk and former White House
Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci.
While Khan's department
refused to cave to the threats, university administrators in the Office of
Conflict Resolution are punishing Khan for pushing back against Valdez's
threat. Khan was called in and an administrator assigned to the complaint filed
by Valdez asked why Khan "didn't just walk away."
"We've been reporting the
actions of these white supremacists to the administration for the last three
years and they have done absolutely nothing to protect students, staff and
faculty of color from white-supremacist threats," said Khan. "So when
a fascist made a veiled threat against my children, I had no choice but to
confront them myself, because the administration won't confront them."
Khan was not allowed to read
his entire defense statement in a meeting with administration and was told that
if he appealed the university's decision, he would have to pay more money for
the punishment process -- a threat of sorts to a graduate student father of
three making poverty wages.
Campus Wars
Unfortunately, Khan's
situation of not finding support from his university is becoming terrifyingly
common. On December 28, George Ciccariello-Maher announced his resignation from
his tenured position at Drexel University. "After nearly a year of
harassment by right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and internet mobs,
after death threats and threats of violence directed against me and my family,
my situation has become unsustainable," said Ciccariello-Maher in a public
statement. Academics like Mark Bray, Mike Isaacson and others have become
targets of an increasingly hostile set of far-right student and media organizations,
targeting them for casual statements or left-wing views in their private lives.
While conservative organizations have always made an effort to confront what
they see as left-wing bias on college campuses, the tenor of that activism has
changed since Donald Trump and the trolls of the "alt-right" came on
the scene, creating a cloud of potential violence and serious career
implications.
Sitting under Minik's Campus
Reform article about Khan, comments such as "Chuck Neely's" were
reported by Khan's department to police. "Expelled? No. We need to deal
with this as white men in a white nation," wrote "Neely."
"This garbage dares to
assault us? We physically remove him from this plane of existence. He has zero
right to exist in our nation, he is made to leave one way or another."
Other TPUSA members joined in the threats, promising to pay the legal fees for
any attacker.
Like his fellow TPUSA members,
Valdez claims to simply be a "conservative" who believes in
capitalism and the free market, yet he proudly shares on social media accounts
the now infamous "alt-right" symbol Pepe the Frog, work by
rape-apologist Mike Cernovich, and graciously thanks extremist
"Infowars" conspiracy peddler Alex Jones for any retweets. Nelson has
argued genocide is merely a leftist construct, an opinion that he disagrees
with.
These patterns of racism make
their way to the top of Turning Point's leadership. As The New Yorker reported,
Crystal Clayton, one of TPUSA's most prominent members for five years, said,
"I hate Black people. Like fuck them all.... I hate Blacks. End of
story." TPUSA also posted and then hastily removed a blatantly
anti-Semitic tweet last November.
UIUC released a statement in the fall restating their
commitment to "defending free speech" on campus. Despite
extremely racist chalking, white supremacist "It's-okay-to-be-white"
fliers, ongoing stalking incidents, harassment and filming of students of color
by "conservative" students, and even physically violent incidents
against people of color, it would seem that for now, the University of Illinois
is choosing to uphold white supremacist values on campus. As the Traditionalist
Worker Party and Vanguard America prepare to launch propaganda campaigns aimed at Midwestern universities
this spring, some student activists of color at UIUC aren't hopeful their
campus will protect them.
More Than Conservative
While much of Turning Point's
public media argues that its members have no association with the white
nationalists of the "alt-right" or the street violence of the Proud
Boys, their short track-record has proven that rhetoric to be a mirage. Kirk's
relationship to the University of Illinois might help provide insight on how
TPUSA doesn't just condone this behavior, but was in fact founded on it.
In 2015, UIUC made national
headlines over a newly established "white student union" on campus.
White supremacists created it on Facebook directly after Black student
activists held a rally on campus the same day. The page, reported by many
people to police, asked for identification of Black activists who, the page's
owners claimed, were "terrorizing" the campus. The page also posted
videos by Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist American Renaissance, and told people to "check
out" Richard Spencer's own National Policy Institute. With a
lack of active support by the university to its students of color, students and
community members met with campus police to try to educate them about these
groups, yet the administration and the police failed to follow up on those
concerns.
Other white student union pages
started popping up around the country in response to the national attention,
and it was rumored that most weren't run by actual students. UIUC's Illinois
"White Student Union" page, however, was run by a group of UIUC
students. In anonymously submitted screenshots of text messages, former
Traditionalist Worker Party member Michelle Kapelski told Debbie Bernal, the
current president of UIUC's Turning Point chapter, that she helped start the
page "as a joke."
One of the first people who
interacted with the page positively (liking and sharing its posts) was a
student by the name of Artur Sak. Sak, a young man whose parents emigrated from
Poland, has since graduated, but served on the first-ever national student board
of TPUSA while at UIUC. When the story about the white student union blew up in
the national news, Sak stopped interacting with the page entirely. As of last
fall, both Sak and the page are gone from UIUC's campus, yet Turning Point
remains. In Sak's bio for TPUSA he says he was with the
organization from the beginning, an association that seems to echo TPUSA's
current membership.
While the extent to which
TPUSA works with self-identified white nationalists and neo-fascists is not
wholly clear, it is obvious that their conservative branding centered on
"free-speech and free-markets" is misleading. Their roots are planted
in racist ideologies and handed to enthusiastic young people unrestrained by a
fear of consequences. At UIUC's campus, for example, rather than seeing TPUSA
members holding "civil discussions" on fiscal conservatism, one is
more likely to see TPUSA members on the quad trying to convince passersby to sign
a petition calling on the administration to reinstate "Chief
Illiniwek," a racist sports mascot that the National Collegiate Athletic
Association forced UIUC to retire years ago.
Kaitlyn Mullen, a TPUSA campus
coordinator at the University of Nebraska, was only one of three dissenting
voices against a resolution by the City of Lincoln committing to
standing up against hate speech in the wake of Charlottesville's nightmare. The
other two dissenting voices came from members of Patriot Front -- otherwise
known as "Blood and Soil" -- one of whom had himself marched in
Charlottesville the day Heather Heyer was murdered. All three voiced feeling
victimized along with having a love of free markets. The city's resolution
against hate speech passed 5-0.
The "alt-right"
targets universities because most are unable or unwilling to prohibit white
nationalist and white supremacist ideas without serious legal battles.
"Free speech" becomes the sound bite of university administrations
and fascists alike in defending the presence of Turning Point USA, Richard
Spencer and others like them. It has become so common for racist and fascist
groups to plot on campuses that the Southern Poverty Law Center released
a student resource guide for dealing with the
"alt-right." But as Khan's case shows, these debates are hardly
debates and they are hardly contained on university grounds.
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