How Texas Colleges Have Responded to the Hate Groups Behind All Those Racist Flyers
The first flyers appeared on November 9, 2016, plastered on lampposts and in bathroom stalls across Texas State University. “Now that our man TRUMP is elected and republicans own both the senate and the house — time to organize tar & feather VIGILANTE SQUADS and go arrest & torture those deviant university leaders spouting off all this Diversity Garbage,” read one. It happened again and again, not just at Texas State, but also at the University of North Texas, Rice University, the University of Texas at Dallas and others: “Look around, white man. Is this the country your ancestors died for?” “Imagine a Muslim-free America.” “A Notice To All White Americans: It Is Your Civic Duty To Report Any and All Illegal Aliens.”
Many of the flyers bore the logo and website of American Vanguard — a group whose manifesto begins, “White America is under attack” — or, later, those of a splinter group called Patriot Front. More than a year after the 2016 election, hateful messages paired with fascist and Nazi symbols continue popping up on college campuses across Texas, and administrators are still struggling with how to respond.
Records obtained by the Observer show how colleges attempt to balance campus safety, police resources and free-speech protections as they react to guerilla propaganda campaigns. Taken together, the hodgepodge of responses illustrate the outsized disturbance that a group of a few dozen angry young white men — led by a 19-year-old from the Dallas suburbs — have caused for Texas colleges.
Patriot Front, a neo-Nazi group led by Coppell native Thomas Rousseau, came out of a splintering of white supremacist and alt-right groups in the aftermath of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Rousseau, a then-lieutenant of American Vanguard, wore the hate group’s uniform at the rally as he stood alongside James Fields, the murder suspect who allegedly rammed a vehicle into a crowd there, killing one and injuring 19.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/nazis-go-school-texas-colleges-responded-hate-groups-behind-racist-flyers/
