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‘A Horrible Thing’: Conservative Student Group’s Abortion Memorial Vandalized, Leader Threatened

   DailyWire.com
YCT vandal
Photo courtesy of Young Conservatives of Texas

Students vandalized a display intended to memorialize aborted babies on the campus of the University of North Texas (UNT) on Wednesday and also sent threatening texts to the leader of the conservative student group that put it up.

Members of the UNT chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), a group that has existed in some form since 1980, received permission to place 1,000 small pink flags around the Denton, Texas, campus to commemorate unborn lives lost since Roe v. Wade, according to The Spectator USA. Each flag represented approximately 60,000 babies.

The chapter’s president, Kelly Neidert, told The Spectator that the flags were accompanied with various signs that said “abortion is murder,” “unborn lives matter,” and “overturn Roe v. Wade,” in part a reference to the looming battle to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

According to social media posts obtained by The Spectator, liberal students took aim at the memorial before it was even in place, mocking it and making a “capture the flag” game out of ripping down the exhibit erected by those whom they deemed “sexist, transphobic, all around horrid.” According to video captured by YCT, several students plucked the signs and removed the flags, including one girl carrying a soda.

Ultimately “more than 350 flags were stolen and multiple signs were taken from the display,” according to a press release from YCT.

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Other screenshots obtained by The Spectator showed that Twitter users sent abusive and threatening messages to YCT and even Neidert herself, including one that told her to kill herself and another that said in part, “Personally, my code of conduct dictates that hexes should be cast unless the most heinous crimes are committed (rape, murder, etc). But who I am to tell other witches how to practice their craft?”

Neidert told The Spectator, “I was shocked to see my peers so openly desecrating our abortion memorial. The memorial was intended to give a visual representation of lives lost from abortion in a meaningful way. The students had planned this beforehand and had ‘capture the flag’ teams ready to take the flags down. We called campus police but by the time they showed up, everything had been taken or damaged. Overall it was a horrible thing to see.”

Neidert and the UNT chapter of YCT have been the subject of online harassment and threatened hexes before. As The Daily Wire reported in July:

Practitioners of witchcraft have joined the cause of liberal student groups at the University of North Texas (UNT) in an attempt to remove a conservative student organization from the school’s campus.

As first reported by Texas Scorecard, UNT College Democrats joined LGBT campus group UNT GLAD and “Chicanx/Latinx” student group MUEVE to write a Change.org petition demanding the removal of the UNT chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT).

The petition, addressed to University President Neal Smatresk and signed by more than 2,500 people as of Monday afternoon, alleges that YCT “has shown a pattern of racism, transphobia, and homophobia throughout the 2019 through 2020 school year.” It goes on to cite examples of what they deem objectionable behavior, such as when YCT tweeted that “pronouns in your [T]witter bio isn’t a personality trait.”

Also listed is the time YCT encouraged students to celebrate National Coming Out Day by “coming out” as conservatives, as well as when they made a point about affirmative action by holding a bake sale that charged different prices based on the customer’s ethnicity. Claiming “these actions have hurt numerous organizations, minority groups, and the well being of harassed students,” the petition maintains that “YCT needs to be held accountable for said transgressions.”

Related: ‘Pure Evil’: Conservative Student Organization In Texas Under Attack From Witches And Liberal Student Groups

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