After threatening an elaborate plan to infiltrate and protest The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh at Texas A&M University on Wednesday, LGBT activists were largely a no-show.
Only one individual purportedly from the original group that planned to protest Walsh’s speech made an appearance, and he simply asked a question and shared that he actually agreed with much of what Walsh said.
Originally, a large walkout was planned for Walsh’s remarks and Q&A with students at the university in College Station, Texas. Walsh was invited by Texas A&M’s Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter.
Days before the event, however, a detailed written plan by LGBT activists to disrupt the event leaked. The plan involved activists wearing “business-casual” and “cisgender and heterosexual-passing” to blend in with Walsh’s supporters and smuggling in flags as well as speakers to amplify chanting. Also included were detailed instructions on where to sit and when to start chanting and walking out, raising one fist in the air.
“When [trans, gay, queer] people are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” activists planned to chant, according to the plan.
“An extra special thanks to the leftist infiltrators in the crowd,” Walsh quipped as he began his remarks at the packed and heavily secured event. “I look forward to your hijinks. The cops and security especially, look forward to it.”
Walsh’s remarks centered around his argument that modern gender theory is fatally flawed and that men and women are distinct biologically.
“Gender ideology is the most severe and extreme attack on truth in our lifetimes and possibly in the history of mankind,” Walsh told the audience.
During the Q&A portion of the event, a purported member of the LGBT activist group, who said he identifies as a woman, told Walsh he didn’t feel attacked by Walsh’s speech.
“I’m actually a part of that organization that was going to come and try and derail you tonight,” the individual said. “I didn’t hear a single thing though that constituted an attack on queer or trans lives or an attack on me personally, so I don’t know what they were on about there.”
The individual went on to say that while he agrees with Walsh that “it is an absolute travesty that the trans community bases everything on such vacuous concepts,” he still does not agree with Walsh’s conclusion that the only two genders are men and women.
“I appreciate your attitude. I very rarely encounter your attitude from that side,” Walsh responded.
“I was excited and ready. I thought it was kind of game on,” Walsh commented after the event. “We might have scared them away ahead of time by taunting them. … Especially with this subject they know that their point of view is so vacuous that they don’t want to be challenged and that’s why they kind of run away.”
The conservative podcast host added that college campuses, even more conservative campuses, are where gender ideology is spread the most, so students need to hear the “basic common sense” point of view that he is expressing.
Caleb Haisler, the president of Texas A&M’s YAF chapter, told The Daily Wire that he doubted the activists would be able to find enough protesters to disrupt the event. Haisler added that hosting Walsh was important to the conservative university club because they want to help keep the campus “conservative-minded.”
“Texas A&M is largely seen as a conservative campus, and in many ways it is, but in many ways it’s kind of not. It’s sort of an apathetic campus,” Haisler said. “It’s been leaning more and more left.”
“So I think what we hope to do is just sort of keep Texas A&M a conservative minded campus so that when donors think of Texas A&M, they think of Matt Walsh coming, they think of Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Michael Knowles coming to our campus,” he said. “And when high schoolers go on YouTube and they look at these videos, they notice that it’s Texas A&M, they want to go to a school like that. And so it in the end, what that leads to is more conservative students coming to A&M, keeping it conservative, more conservative donors appreciating the school and then holding the board of regents accountable for doing dumb things.”