The former TPUSA chapter president at Texas State University, Stormi Rodriguez, who is now a TPUSA representative, told host Alex Marlow that an “Orwellian-like task force” has been established at the school to monitor the TPUSA group after the student government failed to successfully ban the conservative student group from campus. Rodriguez spoke to Marlow about the situation representing a “wake-up call” for Texans during a Friday interview for the weekly TPUSA campus report segment on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.
“After everyone told the student government, ‘You cannot ban Turning Point USA because it’s illegal and unconstitutional,’ they decided that instead, what they would do is create this task force, this counsel that would be in charge of investigating Turning Point USA,” said Rodriguez on Friday.
The TPUSA representative said that the school’s new “Campus Climate Task Force” will be “monitoring” the TPUSA group to see if the conservative students are “endangering students” with their ideas. Rodriguez added that the task force was established after the student government tried and failed at permanently banning the conservative group from campus last semester.
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Rodriguez said that the school’s student government initially attempted to ban the TPUSA group by claiming that the conservative students “created a hostile environment for students, and [that] students just didn’t feel safe having to see our ideas on campus.”
“They were saying that students needed to be escorted to class because the Turning Point USA posters and messages were just too scary for them,” said Rodriguez.
The TPUSA representative noted that the Campus Climate Task Force is still an ongoing matter, and that the conservative students are still able to continue with the group’s actives on campus in the meantime.
“It’s just now there is definitely this Orwellian-like task force that will be overlooking us,” said Rodriguez, who added that this matter had been “a wake-up call” for many who assumed that Texas would be exempt from the authoritarian left-wing zealots who appear to be dominating so many college campuses in other parts of the country.
“I think a lot of people assume, especially parents in Texas, that when they’re sending their student off to a university, that because it’s Texas, it’s not like other campuses across the country, that it’s not these campuses that you see on TV all the time, but it definitely is happening here in Texas, too,” said Rodriguez.
“Just because it’s Texas doesn’t that our free speech won’t be attacked here,” the TPUSA representative added, “People want to attack free speech [in Texas] because we’re such an example of freedom to the rest of the country.”
Rodriguez said that despite all the push-back, the leftists on campus had actually inadvertently helped TPUSA with recruitment.
“This has definitely helped grow [the TPUSA group],” said Rodriguez, “and that’s something that I told student government at the last student government meeting where they passed the piece to ban us. I told them that from now on, when you see more members at Turning Point USA, when we bring in more speakers, it’s in part because of their attempt to censor us.”
“They helped it grow, and publicized Turning Point USA,” affirmed Rodriguez, “and I hope they remember that this upcoming school year.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler at @alana, and on Instagram.
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