The assault against free speech, rights of women, Jews on college campuses
The Joseph Biden administration has, in recent days, announced rule changes to its federal Title IX education regulations which it has advised its Department of Education to enact by August 1.
They attack foundational democratic rights, like free speech and the right to due process. They also attack social gains, in this case the right of women to have their own sports divisions, which was the original victory of Title IX in 1972. The rule changes are part of the Democratic Party’s broader campaign to erode the Bill of Rights in order to suppress political opposition, encapsulated in but by no means exhausted by the endless, boring, and dangerous prosecutions against former President, Donald J. Trump.
Biden’s rule changes would also undercut the right of individuals to cross-examine those accusing them of sexual assault, lessen the burden of proof sufficient to convict the accused of assault, and therefore expel them; they would mandate educational institutions receiving federal funds to address people by their incorrect pronouns, as well as allow men to play in women’s sports.
On its own, these rule changes would constitute a grave and alarming assault on democratic rights within public schools. Taken together with the overall context of college campuses at the current moment, however, and Biden’s rule changes lend a hand, aid if you will, to the incipient fascist movements infecting college campuses. A significant part of the anti-Jewish protests on campus, especially since Oct. 7, have consisted of the kinds of political forces who would weaponize snitch lines against political opponents to frame them up. Those organizing the anti-Jewish protests themselves have resorted to falsely accusing their opposition of violence, when it’s Jewish students and their allies who take the brunt. However, when Jewish students report these acts, urgency for them doesn’t come.
Attacks against free speech on college campuses have been brewing for a while. Going back to the 2010s, mere “cancel culture” began rearing its head, starting with complaints about right-wing big mouths one day, to complaining about Jewish —I mean “Zionist”— students the next. Looking back at the last 25 years of life on college campuses, “cancel culture” and “political correctness” were pathetic euphemisms all along for what was staring us right in the face: Jew hatred. Even going as far back as the Sept. 11 bombings, Bin Laden and his insane minions declared American support for Israel as their justification for turning the Manhattan skyline into a holocaust and turning the Twin Towers into mass biological weapons that infected countless hundreds of thousands with cancerous debris, making it the worst atrocity against a civilian population in history, surpassing Hiroshima and Dresden in point of wickedness. To say nothing of suicide bombings in Israel before 9/11. It wasn’t President Bush who ignored the warnings; it was everyone.
Many on the radical Left, which I was a part of for more than ten years until recently, wondered for a while why Islamists started teaming up with the hijackers of the gay and lesbian movement, today’s “LGBTQ+ Movement.” We all know why now, as we see these spoiled middle-class punks get duped by cynical Muslim fascists into thinking Islam is some kind of liberation movement, and that it represents the legitimate cause of the Palestinian people, which it doesn’t.
While media attention focuses on ‘Ivy League’ campuses where the fascist-Stalinist alliance has made things physically dangerous for Jewish students, the ramifications of Hamas’ attack on Israel reverberated across campuses around the planet. For those of us living in the Rio Grande Valley region, we’ve witnessed a microcosm of what’s happening in places like the University of Columbia. Since the October 7 pogrom, the local contingent of Hitler-Stalin-pact forces have held their share of anti-Jewish events, which I’ve covered, going back to October 10.
Read more on my archive.
Their last major action took place at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Edinburg campus in December, where many non-students descended on campus to hold a hate rally outside of the library. I counter-demonstrated and several students joined me, as they made their way to class. One student who stopped and shook my hand was on his way to Jewish Studies class. A brave and courageous student senator, Alexis Uscanga, whose name will always be honored and go down in university history, condemned the march on his campus, pointing to the antisemitic chants and their thuggish attitude seen in shouting vulgarities at campus police who were no doubt there to prevent violence from their side.
Like other student leaders who have similarly responded to their conscience and stood up for what was right, the honorable Senator Uscanga, was unsuccessfully targeted for impeachment in February. The entire trial was shrouded in secrecy. Student executives and university admin made nothing about the trial public, at least voluntarily.
But thanks to public information disclosures, which were resorted to for this lack of transparency, we now know that the article of impeachment against Uscanga was filed at 8 a.m., December 7 — exactly two months after the pogrom and less than two full days after the antisemitic protest on campus.
In more recent disclosures, we’ve learned about the ways in which the Dean of Students bureaucracy guided the unjust and likely unconstitutional impeachment of this student senator.
We’ve also seen this before. At Oberlin College in 2019 and 2020, the Ohio institution was sued by the Gibson family who run a bakery in town because they were defamed by the college after their business was the victim of shoplifting. The college insinuated that racism was behind the business’ decision to call police. It turns out that there, too, the slander campaign was orchestrated by the dean of Students, Meredith Raimondo.
In similar fashion, Kourtnie Hernandez, an “advisor” for the student government association (SGA) at UT-RGV who reports directly to the Dean of Students, guided the impeachment proceedings against Uscanga, as I exposed last week. She was notified of the article of impeachment immediately and — from the sound of the email that the SGA supreme court justice who forwarded the article of impeachment to her — already knew it was coming. She prepared a “training” for the committee that ended up forwarding Uscanga’s impeachment article to the senate for trial and helped expedite the process by providing his phone number to the “internal affairs” chairperson who officially notified him of the proceedings.
After Uscanga’s impeachment failed and it came time to tell him who accused him of wrongdoing, Hernandez “advised” the SGA supreme court justice, Rotce Magdaleno, to implicitly threaten him with expulsion if he told the truth and revealed the identity of the coward who dared to impeach him for an Instagram story post. UT-RGV Dean of Students, Rebecca Gadson, was the originator of the tactic of scaring Uscanga into silence, which was revealed as part of the public information disclosures I received from the university. It was conjured after Gadson and others were notified of a complaint filed against him that did not accuse him of any wrongdoing but, amazingly, accused him of future wrongdoing. (Read above.)
The report penned by the anonymous impeachment author wrote, under the section where the reporting party is asked to “detail” exactly what the alleged offender did, that they were filing a report “just in case anything happens”, upon discovering that their identity would be revealed. The author of the impeachment, who we know is male from pronouns used to describe him (unless of course they’re “trans”), filed the report against Uscanga through a university snitch line just one day after the impeachment trial failed.
Anything to punish Uscanga.
The impeachment article author, who doesn’t want credit for his work (I don’t blame him), speculated that because Uscanga is “very vocal” that he would likely tell everyone who the author was, which he actually hasn’t. Out of fear, he will not tell me. But I don’t want him to. It shouldn’t be left to him. The university should have released this information and not threatened him into silence. Uscanga was not notified of this report against him, either, finding out only through my reporting, as he said to me after I published my findings.
Like other snitch lines UT-RGV has set up in order to help poison relations between men and women on campus as well as to overall undercut civil liberties of all students with frame-ups and setups, the “Vaqueros Report It” is highly promoted across campus and student social media. This falls in line with the broader Title IX bureaucracy nationwide which seeks to curb civil liberties.
The fight for free speech, defending women’s rights, and the right to due process on campus will not be won by the actions of administrators, or the publishing of faculty senate white papers. Students, faculty and staff will have to organize independently from administrators, who cannot and must not be trusted, and use protests, fighting student-staff-faculty senate resolutions, as well as bold, courageous social media campaigns to fight for these things. There’s no other way. It’ll be a long, arduous but worthwhile, decisive battle.
jonathansalinas@substack.com