Irvine Valley College students Lloyd Vincent Labriaga and Kyro Beshay told Breitbart News that they recently started a brand new Turning Point USA group on their campus, and have already been subjected to harassment by people on campus — one of whom is believed to be a professor — just a few weeks into the fall 2019 semester. Labriaga and Beshay spoke to host Alex Marlow in a Thursday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily for the show’s weekly TPUSA campus report segment.
“We weren’t sure initially when that man approached us, [if he] was actually a professor, but we know for a fact that we were actually being recorded by [a professor],” said Beshay, who is the vice president of the new TPUSA group on campus.
According to both Labriaga and Beshay, a man believed to be a professor approached the conservative students — while they were recruiting members for their TPUSA group — and told the students that they would never “get laid.” Meanwhile, a professor recorded the incident.
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“We assumed this person was a professor based on an anonymous source that works at IVC,” added Labriaga, who is the TPUSA chapter president. “They basically gave us a list of professors to be mindful of — because of their very radical beliefs, and that they might actually penalize us academically.”
Labriaga and Beshay said they initially reacted to the incident by attempting to engage the man in a discussion, but that he was not interested. The students later reported the harassment to the school’s dean, in hopes that his behavior “will be corrected.”
“The reason why we had approached the dean,” said Beshay, “is because that sort of behavior is really unacceptable, but it’s something we saw a lot of at that [recruiting] session — we’ve had a lot of people come up to us with conflicting opinions — voicing them in a way that you would not [use] in an actual debate.”
The students added that the individual in question — along with two other professors — maintain a blog, which they use to lambaste conservatives and Christians.
“We’re a really, really new chapter, we haven’t even gotten the opportunity to present a lot of activities to our club members [yet] — so, nothing we’ve done really [warrants] that sort of behavior,” said Beshay, who added that just their presence on campus — promoting conservative ideas — has been enough to elicit these types of responses from people.
“I feel like most conservative students who want to voice their opinion are afraid to do because they’re afraid that they will get penalized from the professor or ridiculed by them,” added Labriaga.
Labriaga also shared why he decided to get involved with conservative activism.
Given that I’ve lived in Orange County for most of my life, I know that there’s a lot of silent conservatives, especially in high school, because we’ve been [subjected] to this liberal education system, where even myself — during my health class — one time in high school, we were taught by one of the people that worked at Planned Parenthood, and — everyone in that class — we didn’t really believe her — I just had this feeling that we’re against what she believes, and this pro-Planned Parenthood agenda. And that’s why I feel like most young people nowadays are very silent about their beliefs, but I know they’re pretty much leaning to the right.
“The reason I joined TPUSA,” said Beshay, “is that we weren’t able to have that civil debate — I was being told so often and so much that there wasn’t any debate because we couldn’t have that conflict with one side — I wouldn’t be able to mention my point of views to anyone at school who had a conflicting point because I’m not sure of how they would react.”
“And so,” added Beshay, “by joining TPUSA, I hoped to help facilitate that sort of civil debate in an environment where we’re not going to be worried about being attacked.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.
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