Against Political Violence, for Free Speech

Against Political Violence, for Free Speech

When political violence came for campus conservatives, one nonpartisan student club refused to let its peers go quiet in fear

On the afternoon of September 10, Colorado State University went quiet. Students walked between classes with their heads down, glued to their phones, each of them piecing together what had just happened a state away. Charlie Kirk, set to speak at CSU next, his stop after Utah Valley, had been assassinated.

Things had already been tense before that. A planned counter-response involving Dean Withers and the Young Democrats had quietly fallen apart before he ever arrived. But now the tension turned into something heavier: a worry that conservative students would go silent too, that the space they’d spent years building for themselves was under attack.

Political Review sat at the center of CSU’s political life. Not a governing body, more like the kids’ table of campus politics, the place where people from both sides actually talked to each other. So when everything went quiet, folks looked there first.

What followed was eight long days.

In that stretch, Zee Cohen-Sanchez, founder of the political action committee National Ground Game and its touring Unfuck America debate series, came to co-presidents Patrick McCabe and Victoria Doscotch about bringing the tour to CSU rather than letting the moment pass in silence. Political Review had one condition: NGG couldn’t make a dime off it. No fundraising, no cashing in on grief. The university required NGG to cover the room and security on its own. McCabe and Doscotch agreed to host anyway, not as a counter to Kirk anymore, but as a way to honor him, each of them putting their own convictions on the line to show up for something bigger than either of their politics. Doscotch’s boldness and McCabe’s steadier, more careful instincts turned out to be the right pairing, and a big part of why a public university was willing to host something that size at all, and pull it together by the morning of the 18th.

McCabe’s job in those eight days was reaching Turning Point USA directly so the venues could line up. The university had no way in on its own. What it needed wasn’t press and wasn’t competition, it was a person. A conservative working inside a bipartisan group who could lead with shared values and a relationship instead of institutional weight. That’s what opened the doors.

Throughout the day, Destiny (Steven Bonnell II) held an open debate on the plaza, where students could walk right up and push back on him. Just before he arrived, he’d made the controversial claim that conservatives “need to be afraid of getting killed when they go to events so that they look to their leadership to turn down the temperature.” That was a hard thing to sit with. But the club’s position held: the conversation needed to happen anyway. The answer to a claim like that is engagement, not silence.

Political Review took its share of criticism and held its ground. It worked closely with campus law enforcement on serious security: SWAT teams, bomb-sniffing dogs, helicopters overhead, snipers on the rooftops, and coordinated the day’s logistics with TPUSA’s CSU chapter, running the debates alongside a vigil that drew thousands to campus.

There’s an irony in how it all came together. That same September, the broader student political community was in its own fight with the university over free speech, one that started over chalking, put CSU’s speech policies beneath real scrutiny, and ended with a rewrite weeks later. Political Review’s event never fell under that fight; the policy simply didn’t apply. What secured the debate and the vigil wasn’t a policy win. It was a direct relationship with a single administrator, and the chance to share values with peers who’d endured a hard moment together. Where the wider campus found conflict, they found people, among them a quiet institutionalist willing to move things from the inside, and aching hearts willing to be bold for their movement.

The hope is that the rest of the country follows suit: campuses that keep debating, keep showing up, and keep exercising the right to free speech, refusing to let a few violent acts drive people out of politics and away from their neighbors.

Stay involved with CSU Political Review: csupoliticalreview.org · @csupoliticalreview

Go Rams.

Disclosure: Patrick McCabe is not affiliated with, and does not endorse or share the values of, National Ground Game PAC or its Unfuck America Tour. He received no compensation, monetary or in-kind, direct or indirect, from NGG, the Unfuck America Tour, or Colorado State University in connection with the events described above. This account reflects his personal recollection and is provided for informational purposes only.

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