Colorado State University (CSU) student and Turning Point USA (TPUSA) chapter president Gabby Brown told Breitbart News that leftists had tried to get her group’s event featuring TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle banned for “creating unsafe spaces” on campus. Brown spoke to SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow in a Wednesday interview for the show’s weekly TPUSA campus report.
“There has been a lot of what [the school] deems bias-related incidents on our campus recently,” said Brown, who mentioned that some students — who had no affiliation with TPUSA — had posted photos in “blackface” makeup, and that in a separate incident, an anonymous vandal had drawn a swastika on a building.
“And somehow,” continued Brown, “Turning Point USA has been conflated with those things, which is completely untrue and unfounded. None of our students were involved in any of those things.”
One reason for the wrongful conflation was likely due to the university’s president, Joyce McConnell, who bizarrely sent an email to the entire CSU student body in which she compared Kirk and his organization to “blackface” and a swastika.
Subsequently, students had become outraged Brown’s event featuring Kirk, Trump Jr., and Guilfoyle as speakers on Tuesday.
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“We came out and said that those things were horrible, and we have nothing to do with that,” said Brown, “but because we’re a conservative organization on campus, a lot of people are just willing to loop us in with any of the horrible things that happen on campus, because they want to silence us.”
“When Charlie Kirk got on stage last night, he made it clear that Turning Point USA is not involved in those things, and we do not stand for racism,” continued Brown, adding that students had nonetheless arrived before the event to protest.
“There were petitions signed by students, trying to get us kicked off campus for creating ‘unsafe spaces,'” said Brown, “and there were many groups who began to really target us for exercising our right of free speech and bringing speakers, who, otherwise students would never hear their viewpoints on this campus.”
Brown added that while some of the protests were silent, others were not, as individuals clad in all black began chanting “hey hey, ho ho, Turning Point has got to go.”
“There was some communication sent out by the university, which directly conflated us with those bias-related incidents,” added Brown, in reference to the email sent by the university president last month.
“It absolutely is exhausting to deal with the lunacy of the tactics that are used on campus,” said Brown, “but without a group like Turning Point USA on campus, it wouldn’t really be as possible as it is today, so we’re grateful to have Turning Point on our campus.”
According to a Turning Point USA spokesperson, the university’s president has since apologized privately to Brown for potentially putting innocent students in harm’s way.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.
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