“Nothing To See Here”

This is the story of a time I got  a Nazi fired.

One of my least enjoyable times as an employee of William Jewell College was in the first couple of years of working there when a guy with a big Confederate flag in the back of his truck would drive around the middle of campus and scream intimidating things at Black students. 

You could hear the big loud redneck exhaust climbing the hill and assaulting campus. One time, I heard he finally did something that got the campus to act and secure a protective order to keep him away. I never looked it up or asked to see if there was any truth to that. I would always see the guy driving around the streets of Liberty — first a Confederate flag, then a Trump flag — but I personally never saw him on campus. 

The reason why that guy is relevant is that the flyer partially reproduced here, in addition to four other pieces of white nationalist propaganda, was posted in White Science Center on or about November 13, 2016. When that happened, a potential culprit of "off-campus guy" was floated by the campus administration as a possible offender. "Our buildings are secure, but we are a semi-open campus. We all have to be safe," they'd suggest ready to leave it at the vague suggestion of a stranger. 

A suspect was never officially identified, but a person employed by a third-party security company as a Jewell Campus Safety Officer was quietly let go and disappeared from the campus intranet overnight after quickly being identified as sharing similar resources with other students privately.

The man was identified after I showed the flyers in my class, after being explicitly told by administration not to. After class, a student came up to me and said, “you don’t think this has anything to do with the Campus Safety guy that some people are having a problem with, do you?” After collecting a few student stories, one thing led to another quickly one afternoon and the circumstances that led to this individual being identified transpired. 

I was told he was known to Student Life staff to have openly expressed pro-fascist, white supremacist views on campus, told people that complainants in Title IX cases were lying, and even taught one student to become a Holocaust denier. 

I saw the paper written for a CTI 100 class myself. 

I documented all of this in dozens of emails.

One student testified in a written statement to Student Life that the safety officer said he liked Jewell and previously told students he felt comfortable there "because there weren't many Blacks."

"We can't fire him. Another company has to do it," the head of Student Life bumbled. 

"What if they just transfer him to some other campus?" I said.

"That's not how it works. We don't get to decide that, but we can decide we don't want him here anymore."

Then I was told by a former cabinet-level employee to "shut the fuck up about this and never talk about it again,” which I never have and never will.