Vandalism at University of Virginia Ahead of Kellyanne Conway Talk Fits Pattern of Earlier Harassment, Organizer Says

Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway speaks during the "Getting America's Children Safely Back to School" event at the white House in Washington, on Aug. 12, 2020. Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

Organizers of a scheduled talk at the University of Virginia (UVA) by Kellyanne Conway, former campaign manager and special counselor to former President Donald Trump, have met with repeated harassment and vandalism in recent days from unknown persons who do not want the event to proceed as scheduled or to draw significant attendance, the student group told The Epoch Times.

The talk, scheduled to begin at 7:00 p.m. on Sept. 29, is hosted by Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), who have put up posters around the UVA campus only to see them defaced, torn down, and covered with anonymous signs alluding to the events of Jan. 6.

The tactics put to use here are the latest instance of a widespread effort to thwart conservative speakers at schools across the country, and are of a piece with earlier strategies used to try to disrupt and “de-platform” past speakers who have come to UVA to share their views with the student and alumni communities.

Nickolaus Cabrera, director of the UVA chapter of YAF, who organized and hosted a well-attended talk by former Vice President Mike Pence in April that some activists unsuccessfully tried to cancel, described how he and fellow members put up posters around campus in accordance with university regulations, only to find them removed and defaced.

Anonymous vandals placed signs such as this one over announcements of Kellyanne Conway's Sept. 29 talk at the University of Virginia. Courtesy of Nickolaus Cabrera

“One day, all of our posters were taken down. We walked through campus and they were all replaced with pieces of paper with the text ‘Jan 6, 2021,’” Cabrera told The Epoch Times.

Nonetheless, Cabrera said he hopes that those who dislike Conway and her beliefs will try to engage civilly with their ideological opponent rather than resort to such tactics.

“We would obviously encourage those individuals who put those pieces of paper in front of our posters to attend the event and ask questions,” he said.

Despite the underhandedness of such tactics, Cabrera said he has not gone to the administration to ask for an investigation and potential disciplinary actions against those responsible, because such harassment is chronic and he knows well from experience that university officials are unlikely to do much.

“We haven’t tried to pursue an investigation into this. These things are common, they happen all the time, and whenever we try to pursue them, we don’t get anywhere,” he said.

In the face of anticipated dangers from student activists, the Conway talk has required extensive coordination with university police.

“The university police department has been working with us very cautiously to make sure this event goes as planned, and to put metal detectors in place as you walk into the building and secure the perimeter,” Cabrera said.

A Familiar Pattern

Cabrera said this is far from the first time that activists opposed to speakers he has brought to campus have resorted to coercion or disruption to achieve their goal of “de-platforming” individuals with whom they disagree.

On March 17, a few weeks before the Pence talk, UVA’s student newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, ran a staff editorial entitled “Dangerous rhetoric is not entitled to a platform,” which argued that Pence’s connections to Trump and his stances on such issues as same-sex marriage and Black Lives Matter constitute a form of violence against marginalized groups in the country, and that Pence, therefore, should not have the right to express his views at the university.

In the end, Pence’s talk went ahead as scheduled, but not without a sustained campaign of anonymous harassment, intimidation, and sabotage against the event and its organizers. As in the case of Kellyanne Conway’s talk, unknown persons vandalized posters put up around campus to promote the event, drawing devil’s horns over Pence’s image.

In October 2021, Cabrera and fellow members of YAF organized an event entitled “In Defense of Mr. Jefferson,” in which two UVA alumni, Rich Lowry and Rep. Chip Roy, would visit the campus to discuss the continuing importance of Thomas Jefferson—who founded the university in 1819—in the face of efforts to discredit the third U.S. president as a racist slave owner. Lowry is an author and the editor of the opinion magazine National Review, and Roy is a Republican Congressman representing Texas’s 21^st district.

In the days leading up to that event, vandals conducted a campaign of harassment and intimidation, tearing down some of the posters and scrawling anonymous messages on others, in one instance crossing out the event’s title and writing “Racists Defending Rapists” directly below it. Activists also organized a letter-writing campaign intended to bombard the UVA administration with letters demanding the cancellation of the event.

The activists put up posters of their own with a QR code which, when scanned, generated a template of a letter addressed to the university’s dean of students, reading, in part, “I am writing to you as a student concerned about the upcoming event hosted by the Young Americans for Freedom student organization. . . . Congressman Chip Roy, one of the speakers at the event, has a history of making racist remarks publicly. He has also worked to introduce legislation preventing American schools from teaching about the history of racism on which our country was built.”

The letter goes on to call for the event’s cancellation, stating, “The ‘In Defense of Mr. Jefferson’ Event has already received significant backlash on social media from angered students. We believe that the event indirectly defends values of racism and slavery, offending many UVA students. I ask that you act in our best interest as a student body in efforts to protect our community at large.”

In this instance, the efforts of the vandals and harassers failed, Cabrera noted.

“The event itself went great, we had a packed house, every seat was taken and some people had to stand along the walls. [Lowry and Roy] spoke in defense of Jefferson, why we defend Jefferson and why we should honor his legacy,” Cabrera said.

A Double Standard?

Cabrera and fellow members of YAF have had to approach off-campus donor networks to obtain funding for the events they have sought to host. At the same time, the university has not hesitated to spend lavishly to lure speakers with left-wing viewpoints, he said.

On April 21, 2021, under the auspices of its “Racial Equity Speaker Series,” the university hosted, via Zoom, a virtual talk by Ibram X. Kendi, an author and agitator who has promoted a view of the United States as fundamentally racist and oppressive and has advocated, in books such as “How to be an Antiracist,” strategies that Kendi believes white people should use to overcome deeply ingrained habits of thought. Kendi has also advanced the theory that policies that fail to challenge racism and inequality directly and consciously contribute to those social problems.

UVA paid Kendi $32,500 for a one-hour talk that did not even require his presence on campus, Cabrera said.

“The university will pay $32,500 to host a critical race theorist, but when it comes to hosting a speaker we solicited donors to pay for, people are calling for cancellation of the event,” he continued.

“I’m all for diverse perspectives, the university should host whomever they want, but to speak on a Zoom call to students, it’s quite appalling to me that this happened. The university would never pay this amount of money to a conservative, they would never pay Ben Shapiro $32,500 to come and speak,” Cabrera added.

The Epoch Times has reached out to UVA for comment.