Keep Austin Criminal
A rant by Saoirse Ní Mhaille
UT Austin hates me and doesn’t want me to breathe in that good stormy air. $25 to open a window. Yes, I could just run outside, but what if I want to enjoy the storm from the safety of my room? What if I’m doing homework and can’t get my laptop wet? What if I want to go to sleep to the sound of the rain? What if I just farted and it really stinks? Hmmm??? What then???
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
[CW: Racism, anti-semitism, Nazi imagery, homophobia]
Our organization recently received a tip about a facebook group called UT Austin Hot Takes, which had recently been taken over by admins posting and enabling white supremacist content. As we investigated the group and its members, we stumbled onto information that overlapped with an ongoing investigation we had been conducting into some fascists & reactionaries who had showed up in May to disrupt RSF’s People’s Trial of the rapist professor Robert Reese. Below we’ve compiled the information we have gathered. We uncovered a larger network of connections that included outright Neo-Nazis, neo-confederates, and the racists of the Young Conservatives of Texas.
By La’Kayla Celeste. Republished with permission of the author.
I don’t make a habit of reading The Daily Texan, one of the nation’s largest college newspapers and source of great pride at the University of Texas at Austin. I don’t pick up the paper because of the residual bad taste in my mouth from several casually racist encounters I’ve had with the Texan over the 4 years of my undergraduate education. Now, as a second-year graduate student at the University completing a Masters Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies, my main concern is meeting my deadlines. This was the business I was minding when I happened across Volume 118, Issue 131 of the publication while on campus one morning a few weeks ago. It was the image that struck me: a close-up of Daniel Nkoola, Black creative and undergraduate student in Radio-Television-Film, the major I earned one of my bachelor’s degrees in. I picked up the paper, excited to read when something else in the top, right hand corner caught my eye. A graphic proclaimed that this story was the 6th installment in ‘The 5% Project,” a collaboration between The Daily Texan and UT’s chapter of the National Association of Black Journalist. I stared at the notation for a few minutes before snapping a picture on my phone, leaving the paper where I found it.
Continue reading “The 5% Project (It Really Be Ya Own People!)”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
Update 10/25/19: As of Fall 2019, Lillian Bonin has acted as Chairman for the Young Conservatives of Texas. In the year since this article was published, we further uncovered her ties to white nationalists and participation in rape-apologia in pro-Kavanaugh demonstrations.
[CW: transphobia, anti-semitism, racism]
Over the past few days, we have been investigating the political activities and leanings of Lillian Bonin, a UT Liberal Arts Representative. On Friday, we acquired a screenshot of a comment made by Bonin on an AJ+ video. In this comment, Bonin refers to a white man attempting to unlearn his racism by saying “when the left literally won’t accept you until you fully cuckify yourself.”
Continue reading “Scratch a Liberal Arts Rep, a Fascist Bleeds”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
CW: sexual assault, harassment, homophobia, racism
We’ve just made it through another series of hellish weeks, with SXSW and Roundup hitting us back to back. As we come out on the other side of Roundup, we wanted to highlight some of the moments from this weekend that made even clearer why Greek Life is, at its core, a racist, cisheteropatriarchal institution. We’ve captured some of the student discussions and other events of this weekend, including catcalls, insider secrets, and assaults. Remember that this is only a small sampling of the events and experiences of this weekend, and there are likely many more stories that remain untold due to fear, shame, stigma, or the normalization of the horrors of Roundup & Greek Life.
Continue reading “Crash The Party: Shitty Moments from Roundup”
Autonomous Student Media: Gestures Towards the Ungovernable
Ask a room full of organizers about the things that inspired and radicalized them, and you’ll probably end up with a good number of people. A few may specifically mention slam poetry & spoken word, a form of expression that often attracts radical and revolutionary thinkers because of its ability to give voice to experiences and ideas that are typically silenced. At UT, you may find some of these creative radicals in a local group called Spitshine Poetry. Founded in 2012, Spitshine hosts weekly writing workshops and regular open mic nights, where students may collaborate on and present their work.
Dustin Ray Hamby is an employee of UT. He’s a vocal white supremacist who participated in the Neo-Nazi “White Lives Matter” rally back in November of 2016. After more local fascists were exposed, Dustin upped his security and removed more of his information–deleting/hiding social media accounts and address. The address listed below is his last known address as of 2016, and may be inaccurate. However, he still works at UT–and was recently promoted to cook!
By Kazi Nazrul, a member of ASN
On August 2nd, the University administration released new aspects of its plans to modernize the University for “security” purposes. These plans include restricted hours for building access and new surveillance systems with proximity card readers and video cameras. To raise awareness, the administration has adopted the cutesy slogan “Your ID is Your Key,” to encourage students to have their UT IDs on them at all times, in order to have access to buildings during restricted hours.
In April 2017, a wave of vandalism struck frats across West Campus over the course of three nights. Frats were tagged with “racist” and “rapist,” among other slogans. Fiji, which was targeted the first two nights, held a racist “border patrol” party in 2015. A study published in March of 2017 found that 15% of undergraduate women on UT campus reported being raped. Actual statistics are believed to be much higher.
The anonymous statement republished here was originally sent to It’s Going Down, which made the acts even more notorious across the country. The graffiti came near the end of a year marked by student struggles against fascist activity on campus, the University’s failure to address racism, and other issues. The University, ironically, tried to make use of its (at the time) new hate & bias incident policy to investigate the vandalism. Shortly afterwards, the piece was again thrust into the spotlight as fraternities and the alt-right tried to connect the May 1st, 2017 stabbings at UT with the vandalisms (and by association all “antifa” and leftists).
Three years later, almost to the day, the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority was tagged with “Eat the Rich.” We host this article to keep alive the memory and intergenerational spirit of insurgency against Greek Life. You can find online readable and printable zine versions of this statement HERE.
Continue reading “Barbarians at the Gates: A Statement From the Vandals (2017)”
Originally published on Facebook by ATXResists
On Monday, February 13th, 2017, students and workers at the University of Texas at Austin awoke to find fascist propaganda and graffiti across West Campus and Campus. Flyers calling for the destruction of Muslims, the outing of undocumented immigrants, and the reclamation of “white pride,” associated with the group American Vanguard—a white nationalist organization—were plastered on poles, newspaper boxes, and statues across campus. Graffiti of the N-word, celtic crosses, and swastikas were spotted in West Campus. Students from the night prior reported seeing a small group of people putting up the flyers. This was not the first time such flyers had gone up; neo-Nazi Identity Evropa stickers had been spotted on a few occasions in the fall semester and were destroyed by anti-fascists. This was, however, the most visible round of fascist flyering on campus.
And this time, due to the mass outrage among the student body, the University was forced to respond. In the response the University made clear that it cares more about catering to the interests that fund and support it (including white supremacists and Trump supporters) than it does about protecting students. In its statement, the University stated that it had removed the posters simply because they violated rules regarding the posting of flyers. The University’s insistence that it “vigorously supports free speech” sent a chilling message: had this been a registered student organization putting up flyers in more “legitimate” places, the University would defend the platform for these fascists to spread their messages against students. The statement from J.B. Bird, Director of Media Relations for the University, furthermore fails to name the fascistic nature of these flyers, only labelling them as “political messages aimed at immigrants, minorities and Muslims,” normalizing the genocidal politics of fascism as a valid political position. Fenves’ letter called for “robust discussions and debate,” as though students of color, Muslims, and immigrants should be forced to debate for their own humanity against those who wish to destroy them. The University has made clear that it believes genocide could or should be simply another option on a ballot to have “enlightened debate” over.
Continue reading “Stand up, fight back! ATXResists statement on fascism at UT”