Multiple students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) attempted to steal Turning Point USA (TPUSA) signage and posters last week. Multiple instances — one of which involved a student hightailing it across campus with a stolen pro-First Amendment sign — were caught on video.
It appears that students at UMBC have decided to take it upon themselves to enforce the “free speech zone” policies on UMBC’s campus, according to multiple videos that have surfaced showcasing yet more examples of ways in which some students react to conservatives at universities today.
The term “free speech zone” refers to when university administrators designate a specific area on a college campus for one to exercise their First Amendment rights, which in turn, seems to have given students the false narrative that the United States of America in itself is not a “free speech zone.”
While recruiting students on UMBC’s campus, TPUSA northeast regional manager Taylor Cisinski had several of his promotional materials stolen, to which Cisinski reacted by following after the students in an attempt to retrieve his signs and posters, while filming the occurrences.
In one video, a male student can be seen running across campus with a stolen TPUSA sign that read, “Free Speech Has No Zone in America.”
Watch below:
“Can I have my sign back?” Cisinski can be heard saying to the student in the video, after catching up to him. “If it was a socialist table, I wouldn’t take their stuff.”
In a second video, another male student appears to assault the TPUSA activist while he is filming inside a student center in pursuit of a third student who had stolen a stack of posters.
Watch below:
“Do not touch me,” the TPUSA activist can be heard saying in the beginning of the video while a male student is seen extending one arm toward the camera, causing the camera to lose focus. Cisinski then follows after another student who is seen walking away with several posters.
“Can I have my posters back?” said Cisinski to the student after catching up with her. “That’s pretty fascist, taking people’s stuff, shutting down their free speech.”
“Oh shit, oh my God, I’ve always wanted to be in one of these,” said the student upon realizing that she was being filmed, likely in reference to the plethora of videos that have surfaced on the Internet, which showcase leftists harassing conservatives on college campuses.
“Why do you think it’s okay to take people’s stuff?” continued Cisinski in the video. “Can I have those back? If it was a socialist table that I disagreed with, I wouldn’t go and be rude and take their stuff.”
“Do you have a right to be here?”
“Yeah, we do,” responded the TPUSA activist. “We paid for that table. We went up to the office. Now can I please have my stuff back?”
“Do you have a permit [to be on public property]?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, somebody told me you didn’t have a permit,” reacted the student, before finally handing Cisinski back his posters.
Last week’s incident involving multiple students stealing TPUSA materials was preceded by an incident one week earlier, in which UMBC administrators told TPUSA activists that they needed permission from the school in order to exercise their First Amendment rights on public property.
“We were told that a group of students put a bounty out on our materials that we were not giving away,” explained Cisinski to Breitbart News. “Throughout the day, we had multiple students coming up and stealing our stuff.”
Cisinski added that before the students began stealing the TPUSA materials, they first attempted to rid the conservative activists from campus by calling security on them. But when calling security was to no avail, the students took matters into their own hands.
“Oftentimes, these leftist students will call us fascist on campus, but then they’ll display those exact tendencies by trying to shut down our political speech and disrupt our events,” said Cisinski. “It was also very ironic that this one student decided to steal our sign supporting freedom of speech.”
“College campuses have created a culture where it’s okay to shut down conservative viewpoints by any means necessary,” he added. “When you constantly label the other side as racist, fascist, and evil, then it becomes okay to act erratic in an effort to silence conservatives.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.
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