Some Incredibly Inconvenient Data For College Republicans
Right wingers on college campuses don't actually feel persecuted
Their khakis were pleated. I remember that much.
It was a few days after George W. Bush somehow won re-election against John Kerry because John Kerry had read a book and enjoyed windsurfing and college Republicans at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus set up tables outside the grimy old student union, the one they tore down soon after and replaced with a soulless shopping mall food court. They handed out pamphlets and lobbed insults at students giving them the finger on their way to lunch.
These college Republicans – all of them men, almost all of them whiter than me – were peacocking after Bush’s inexplicable 2004 victory, urging campus libs to abandon their politics and join the winning team. Post-9/11 politics had been good to these kids, rooting for the ultra-nationalist team, which kicked the ass of the empire management team in 2002 and 2004.
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I remember their smug smiles and the self satisfaction seeping from their pores. They could not be happier with the misery that surrounded them. They were an island of spiteful joy in an ocean of students wearing all-black to mourn a loss to the idiot boy king, who had been installed by friendly Supreme Court justices four years earlier. I wanted to throw my Taco Bell burrito at them, but I was hungry and had a five-hour block of classes coming up. So I ate the burrito and glared at the Bush freaks, who have – in the intervening years – surely logged on hard enough to learn to hate the former president as a RINO and a traitor to the white race, things of that nature.
One of the pamphlets those college Republicans handed out that day (mostly unsuccessfully) was about their rights being denied on campus. All these years later I can’t remember the exact wording. I do remember this: They wanted more “pro-America” professors at the university to balance the “anti-American” educators indoctrinating us with the truth about American imperialism at the turn of the century.
Denny Carter
Keeping the White House, having a Supreme Court majority, holding congressional majorities, gaining power in the states: It was not enough for these kids. The right wing’s domination of the country’s culture and politics in the years after the 9/11 attacks would not suffice. Through sheer will these young men kept up their grievances and maintained their victimhood in the face of the totalitarian leftist ideology they believed existed on Maryland’s campus.
These boys once heard a professor express skepticism about the all-encompassing Bush administration psy-op that rushed the nation into a catastrophic war and they said look, we are being persecuted for our beliefs. Maybe they heard a sociology professor say being gay was not in fact a personal choice (the zoomers may not remember this discourse) and they said, look, we are being persecuted. Perhaps an economics professor said flatly that progressive taxation was a viable system for maintaining a capitalist society. The persecution has never been so blatant, so severe for these boys, who must remain victims of a merciless left-wing system or their entire politics would fall to pieces. From their dorm bunks at night, these boys cry out for a flat tax.
Remembering those campus Republicans, recalling their Vance levels of smugness and their pleated khakis, I was surprised to see today’s college right wingers say they don’t feel persecuted for their shitty politics. In fact, hardly any college student believes they’re being persecuted, according to a national survey released this month by the Lumina Foundation and Gallup, an organization that recently stopped tracking presidential popularity because they’re afraid of the most unpopular president in history.
Just 3 percent of student respondents – including 2 percent of self-identified Republicans – say they “feel they don’t belong on their campus due to their political beliefs.” It’s the kind of data that makes one think the entirety of the right’s grievance culture is made up. You might call this unreality if you are a faithful Bad Faith Times reader.
Almost three quarters of college Republicans in US say their school does an excellent or good job protecting campus speech. That a lower rate of self-identified campus Democrats say the same never seems to make its way into our media's hysterical coverage of campus political environments. That so many elite universities with more money than god immediately and happily caved to the Trump regime in their 2025 takeover of those schools hasn't changed the tenor of this coverage, focused almost exclusively on the downtrodden right wing students complaining that they can't use slurs on campus without repercussions.
Students who "identify with a political party are just as, if not more, likely than their peers to believe their own views are accepted on campus," according to the Lumina data.
This polling, like every other measurement of American politics, is based on the idea that all politics are the same, that good and bad things are precisely the same thing. The political belief that immigrant families should not be thrown into the back of an unmarked van by masked government agents is the same as the political belief that masked men should, in fact, be able to violate the constitution every hour of every day and throw immigrants into the buzzsaw of a totally lawless deportation machine. These beliefs are treated as equal and opposite.
If conservatives on college campuses do feel persecuted for their beliefs, maybe it's because their beliefs are bad and wrong. Maybe it's because their worldview is not compatible for a working representative democracy. Maybe you should get better politics and stop being such a shit if you don't want to be shouted down by people with good politics. It's one solution we should consider, anyway.
It doesn't make you feel any better, I know, but you now have data to back up your well-founded and totally justified belief that the whole campus-conservatives-as-victims canard was made from whole cloth. Almost no one on America's college campuses feels persecuted for their political beliefs. Campus Republicans are not being herded into camps. They are not being disappeared by shadowy forces. That, sadly, is the fate of left-wing college students.
The Trump regime's use of AI surveillance to persecute of college educators who refuse to tow the fascist line was always a solution in search of a problem. The ruination of lives and careers at the hands of the government and right-wing, billionaire-backed activists who want nothing more than a totalitarian fascist state – under the guise of academic freedom, naturally – was not done in service of political balance on college campuses, whatever the fuck that actually means. It has been done in bad faith to stop young Americans from buying into the foundational principles of the multiracial liberal democracy the right wants to annihilate.
The American right wing's incessant crying about campus censorship was always an admission: They wanted to censor their cultural and political enemies, to place strict limitations on what their opponents could teach to young Americans with impressionable minds. The American right does not crave fairness or an equal playing field; it craves domination, it craves subjugation. Something as flimsy as reality – that 3 percent of college students feel put-upon for their politics – is not going to get in the way of that wretched little project.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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