On Oct. 14, Politico published an article revealing the Telegram messages of several administrators, members and other high ranking officials within the organization Young Republicans. These messages glorified rape, stated “I Love Hitler” and spouted a number of slurs against queer people and people of color.
While Young Republicans made a short statement condemning the chats, high-ranking Republicans, including Vice President JD Vance, defended the chats as just another incident of kids being stupid on the internet.
After reading about this incident, I was inspired to sit in on and observe what similar organizations on UA’s campus were saying. On Oct. 14, I sat in on a YAF event advertised on the group’s Instagram story as a meeting to discuss “leftist monoculture at UA” and heard more of the same being spewed by an organization on our campus.
The meeting opened with a short discussion among student members, which consisted of mocking left-leaning protests on campus and the beginnings of a hate campaign against faculty member Wendy Rawlings, a professor within the English department, who YAF claimed “believes her students to be terrorists.”
The organization then brought in former UA English professor Patrick Hermann, who used his lecture to spread hateful conspiracy theories, mock and disparage current administrators and faculty members and claimed that UA is “designated by Trump as the public university who is going to screw the elite colleges which have been carrying this banner,” referring to diversity initiatives.
During his speech, Hermann argued that UA faculty are being forced to submit to DEI policies, and called ideas like gender identity and transgenderism “social contagions.” Hermann then went on to make claims stating that everyone in a bureaucracy is at the highest level of their incompetence — directly mentioning UA faculty members James Dalton, Tiffany Sippial, and David Deutsch as examples.
Despite YAF and Hermann’s stance that it’s important for colleges to be a space for respectful discussion of a wide variety of political and economic theories, the speech used around leftist and queer faculty at the University mark a clear lack of respect. The idea that promoting faculty working on queer art or cataloging history around communist political figures can only be the result of a “psychotic break” also furthers conspiratorial ideas that queerness and left-wing ideology are only the result of severe mental health problems.
Hermann then proceeded to make statements that the University is complicit in indoctrination, and celebrated the removal of Iota Iota Iota, a indoctrination.”
One of Hermann’s most heinous statements was that statistics around queer and trans suicide rates were “completely bogus” — a complete detachment of any responsibility, and a showing that YAF is not concerned about the negative mental health effects of the anti-LGBTQ+ messaging being pushed by the organization or its speakers.
After the event, when I engaged with both Hermann and student members of YAF, they continued to spread “groomer” conspiracy theories surrounding LGBTQ+ individuals, including librarians, teachers and UA faculty, to the point of Hermann directly stating, “They are really active on this, the grooming in the school libraries and then the transgender thing from the school counselors. You probably know a little bit about what can happen to your kids.”
After questioning the dangerous consequences of demonizing queer people, and removing their protections, YAF president Trenton Buffenbarger had a simple statement of accountability: “Hate speech isn’t real.”
Events like these make it perfectly clear that UA’s YAF chapter is not a place to merely discuss conservative ideas; it is an organization designed to spread conspiracies, hate and right-wing propaganda on our campus. Worst of all, its efforts are only pushing students who are sincerely engaging with conservative ideas further right and further down the Christian nationalist pipeline.
If its effort this spring to remove references to gender identity, sexuality and gender expression from the required UA non-discrimination clause for student organizations wasn’t enough to convince students that this is an organization peddling hate, then I ask anyone who loves a queer person in their life to attend their meetings and see what YAF is saying.
Amid rising violence against queer people in the South, I also encourage students to prioritize joining in protest alongside the Alabama QSA, UA College Democrats and the UA Leftist Collective. This event made it clear that YAF sees its opposition as a joke, and was a reminder that the importance and power of queer people is needed.
Jacob Bennett is a junior studying computer science.
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