On Friday, students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln branch of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a conservative student organization, set up a booth on campus to recruit and promote. Several individuals, including a PhD student and an English professor, were there to protest, and in one case, harass.
According to its official website, Turning Point’s mission “is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government,” and it boasts approximately 350 branches in high schools and universities across the United States.
According to Turning Point sources on the ground, Professor Amanda Gailey was one of the leaders of the admittedly small protest, holding a sign that read: “Turning Point: Please put me on your watch list. Prof. Amanda Gailey.”
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However, it was PhD student and graduate teaching assistant, Courtney Lawton, who was the real antagonist at this protest. In the video, Lawton can be seen holding a sign that reads: “Just say NO! to neo-fascism,” as well as harassing the booth’s organizer:
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Neo-fascist Becky right here. Becky the neo-fascist right here … She wants to destroy public schools, public universities, hates DACA kids. No KKK, no neo-fascist USA … Fight white nationalism.
Another unidentified woman also held a sign, reading: “Charlie Kirk, founder of TPUSA will put your favorite professors on a watch list. That puts them in danger.”
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Here’s the footage:
The Daily Wire reached out to Gailey, who, aside from saying she wasn’t in the video, directed further questions to the University of Nebraska’s Communications Office. We also reached out to Lawton, but as of publication, she hasn’t responded.
For background, Amanda Gailey is allegedly the same professor who, in December 2015, posted the following to Facebook:
F**k the society that has allowed itself to become so saturated in guns that it’s plausible a child might have one at a park.
F**k the laws that allow toy makers to make toys that look like real guns and that allow gun makers to make guns that look like toys.
F**k racists who think black children look like adults.
F**k a legal and police system that allows grown white men to pose with sniper rifles on a university campus or in a grocery store and allows insurrectionists to train guns on government agents with no consequences but sounds the alarms when a black child is carrying a toy gun.
F**k police officers who undertook a job that carries inherent risk but think any perceived threat to them whatsoever justifies instantaneous lethal force.
F**k police officers who pull up as close as possible to an alleged threat so that they can execute the person as quickly as possible without assessing the situation first.
F**k prosecutors who can indict a ham sandwich but can’t indict a cop who executed a child.
And f**k the NRA for greasing this machine every fucking day with the blood of American children.
Weeks later, Gailey tried to clarify, claiming that her statement was only related to “bad apple” cops:
I did write a Facebook post that expressed my outrage at the police shooting of a 12-year-old child and the failure to indict the bad-apple police officers involved. My criticism of the police was limited to those officers who engage in that kind of policing, which I believe is clear in my post. I did not malign the police in general, nor did I want to, because I respect the many good officers who serve our communities and have even helped me in the past. I know that most police officers are doing hard work in hard conditions, and they are in the front lines of a society saturated in guns, facing threats that police in our peer nations do not. They are key players in our struggle for safe and fair communities.
When BizPacReview’s Carmine Sabia asked Nebraskans Against Gun Violence, of which Gailey is a member, if the professor had posted the rant, they replied: “No.” However, when Sabia uploaded the screenshot as proof, “the page administrator deleted all of our correspondence, including the picture, and blocked [him] from the page.”