Skidmore College student says 'cancel culture campaign' blocked her from creating a campus chapter of conservative activist group Young Americans for Liberty
A Skidmore College student has accused classmates of launching a 'cancel culture campaign' to stop her from forming a campus chapter of the conservative activist group Young Americans for Liberty.
Hannah Davis railed against liberal students at the private university in Saratoga Springs, New York, in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday.
Davis said she got pushback 'almost immediately' after she proposed opening a YAL chapter at the school.
Critics went so far as to set up a petition to stop Davis' effort, which claimed that YAL groups are 'springboards for hate speech and bigotry disguised as political discourse'.
Last week the Skidmore Student Government Association told Davis that she could not establish the chapter, citing 'concerns of hate speech and making students on campus feel unsafe'.
Skidmore College student Hannah Davis accused classmates of launching a 'cancel culture campaign' to stop her from forming a campus chapter of the conservative activist group Young Americans for Liberty
Davis railed against liberal students at the private university in Saratoga Springs, New York, (pictured) in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday
In her Fox News interview Davis asserted that the critics didn't understand what YAL represents.
'I actually chose Young Americans for Liberty because I thought that students would be receptive to it, because it wasn't a partisan group,' she said. 'I was clearly wrong about that.'
'They were calling Young Americans for Liberty an alt-right organization, a white nationalist organization, which is just misinformation and has no truth behind it.'
YAL, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, bills itself as 'the most active and effective pro-liberty youth organization advancing liberty on campus and in American electoral politics'.
The organization was formed in 2008 at the end of staunch libertarian Ron Paul's presidential campaign, which had motivated hundreds of students to rally together on campuses nationwide.
YAL bills itself as 'the most active and effective pro-liberty youth organization advancing liberty on campus and in American electoral politics'. Members of a chapter at UCLA are pictured above
The Change.org petition against the Skidmore YAL chapter racked up more than 1,700 signatures by Wednesday. That's more than half of Skidmore's undergraduate population of about 2,600.
The petition took issue with several events that have been sponsored by YAL chapters in recent years:
- 'In 2018 the American University YAL hosted an event originally titled "No, Don't Believe All Women", with the editor for the Daily Caller, a site that the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed on their hate-watch project for their "white nationalist problem".
- 'In 2018 the University of Oregon's YAL chapter hosted Milo Yiannopoulos for an event during which he stated "I don't want Muslims in the country. You have two kinds of Muslims in the country. One, you have the nice middle-class who are never going to blow themselves up in an airplane or in a public space, and the other kind of people you have in this country are terrorists, people who are here to commit terrible crimes."'
- 'In 2016 at UCLA a trio of students attended an event organized by the college's YAL chapter titled "An Encroachment on Liberty: How the Left Exploits Transgender Laws" carrying signs among which read "transgenderism is a mental disorder!"'
- 'In 2016 at a University of California Santa Barbara event organized by YAL in which members carried Yiannopoulos in on a throne. Yiannopoulos called the UCSB gender studies professors along with all gender studies professors carpet munchers and d*kes. He repeatedly returned to the right-wing mainstays that all feminists are fat and ugly. He referred to the anger of black female protestors at DePaul, saying "maybe it's cause I f**ked all their brothers."'
The petition concluded: 'YAL's pattern of racism, homophobia, and transphobia cannot be disputed. Skidmore must make no space for this kind of open bigotry on campus.'
Skidmore's Student Government Association voted against creating a campus chapter on March 5.
The university's president, Mark Connor, told the Times Union that the decision was left completely up to the association.
'The student leaders whom our students have elected as their representatives have the right to vote to decide the outcome of this process I encourage all members of our community to exercise their freedom of speech and freedom of association and to engage with each other with patience, courtesy and respect for one another,' Connor said.
But Davis argued that blocking the formation of groups like YAL blocks the freedoms Connor mentioned.
'It's not going to be easy, going forward, if the students control whether we exist on campus or not,' she said.
No comments: