How one lawmaker is weaponizing social media to eradicate LGBTQ+ curriculum

A limited days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated a video was posted on social media of a Texas State University apprentice mockingly re-enacting the conservative activist s death Rep Brian Harrison saw the video and got to work He pulled up the university s online syllabus catalog and revealed a class called LGBTQ Communication Studies where students were to learn about how communication sustains both discrimination against LGBTQ people and their resistance according to the unit description Within the hour Harrison shared the video of the learner on his X account alongside the image of the offending subject description Despicable the Midlothian Republican wrote in his post to his followers WORSE I just exposed out that Texas State University is literally indoctrinating students RESISTANCE and TRANSGENDER JUSTICE Why are GregAbbott TX s Regents at txst allowing this After sparking the online outrage with his post Harrison appeared on Steve Bannon s show later that day to fan the flames railing against the San Marcos-based university for offering the program Shortly after Texas Scorecard a conservative website followed by a multitude of state legislators wrote about Harrison s efforts naming the professor and further dissecting her syllabus Texas State removed the program from its catalog the day after Harrison s post It s unclear if the unit is permanently removed The university refused to explain its decision and the professor did not respond to requests for comment This chain of events has become a standard playbook for the North Texas lawmaker who is increasingly seeking to make an impact through his prolific social media posts over his work in the Legislature For more than a year Harrison has been on a crusade against Texas universities scouring module catalogs and university websites for examples of gender ideology or LGBTQ curriculum riling up his X followers about the use of taxpayer dollars to fund liberal indoctrination on campus and calling out university leaders and members of his own party for allowing the coursework to stand In the Capitol Harrison is a loner Republican functionaries publicly deride him and his lack of legislative success he passed zero of his own bills this year or they disregard him entirely But last month Harrison notched a major triumph for himself drawing attention to a dispute that led to the ouster of a Texas A M professor teaching about gender identity and later to the resignation of the university president Nobody thought I could do it Harrison revealed in an interview with The Texas Tribune in his Capitol office last month Everybody was mocking me I ve become used to that down here People didn t think I d be able to get the professor fired much less the president of the university one of the biggest universities in America fired And then look at the ripple effects After the Texas A M situation Texas Tech University authorities limited classroom discussions about transgender and nonbinary identities The University of Texas System endorsed it was reviewing all its courses across nine universities that discuss gender identity And the University of North Texas Texas Women s University and the Texas State University System informed syllabus audits Harrison took credit for it all Everything you re seeing at Texas A M Texas Tech Angelo State University that is a conclusion of my actions Harrison reported I m not gonna stop until this is all done His alma mater No university has taken more heat from Harrison than Texas A M his alma mater and the place he credits with giving him his political start I love A M People forget that commented Harrison who transferred to the university in During the summer of he took a constitutional law class where they discussed the new Supreme Court decision to strike down the state s ban on consensual gay sex in Lawrence v Texas Two decades later Harrison was one of the insufficient House Republicans to vote to remove the anti-sodomy language from state code a move he noted he supports because it results in less ruling body The bill passed out of the House this session but died in the Senate Harrison reported that professor whom he described as a liberal who didn t force his personal politics on students wrote him a letter of recommendation for a White House internship That opportunity took him to Washington D C and sparked his career in leadership after he graduated from A M with an economics degree in He worked in the Social Measure Administration Strength and Human Services Agency and as a deputy director in an office of Vice President Dick Cheney during George W Bush s presidency After a stint at the U S Department of Defense he moved back to Texas During that time he worked in multiple citizens relations firms helped his dad with his home building company and briefly he and his wife bred and sold labradoodles Harrison moved back to Washington in to again work for HHS under Trump where he became fitness Secretary Alex Azar s chief of staff in When the COVID- pandemic hit Harrison was involved in overseeing the Trump administration s response including its vaccine rollout At the time Reuters published an article that Trump had appointed a labradoodle breeder to lead a pandemic taskforce presented as evidence that the administration was mismanaging the COVID response It led to additional coverage and a joke at his expense on Stephen Colbert s Late Show and would mark the first time Harrison was widely ridiculed by the media and cast as ineffective Maybe there was a reason I went through what I did before I got here Harrison mentioned of that time period I want to make a difference They have to castigate they have to impugn my motives Because if I m right what does that say about them In Harrison ran for the open congressional seat in his district and ultimately lost to then-state Rep Jake Ellzey He then ran in the special electoral process to replace Ellzey in the state House and won Harrison s first legislative session was in around the same time that conservative higher training activists were starting to rally around ending diversity equity and inclusion programs When Texas lawmakers prohibited DEI offices staff and services at inhabitants Texas lawmakers prohibited DEI offices staff and activities at general universities but carved out exceptions to still allow teaching and research about topics of race and gender Harrison voted for the ordinance But promptly after the law was implemented he turned his attention to the classroom An early success Harrison got an early taste of an internet-driven triumph when Texas A M eliminated an LGBTQ studies minor months after he started posting about it Texas A M is offering a MINOR in this What The Hell he wrote in January on his X account declaring he would find out if the state was using taxpayer dollars on these programs In this instance Harrison went to the school directly He revealed he met with A M Provost Alan Sams in January last year and urged the university to end the scheme or otherwise explain its justification for keeping it The university refused to get rid of the minor at the time stating that any elimination needed to go through a formal process So he took his occurrence to X UPDATE After discussions with TAMU leadership they just established that Texas A M is spending state materials to assert that gender and sexuality are socially constructed he posted promising legislative action But before the next legislative session arrived A M took action In September Harrison announce the minor was going away when he explained on X that Texas A M University System Chancellor John Sharp advised him the university was eliminating the operation Proud to have helped deliver this triumph for Texas taxpayers who should never be forced to fund Harrison wrote At a faculty meeting a insufficient weeks later university leaders denied political pressure played a role and repeatedly stated the minor would be cut because of low enrollment Yet faculty questioned why the university wasn t taking a stronger stance to correct Harrison s narrative Rep Brian Harrison is publicly taking credit for shutting down the minor professor Sarah Beck announced at the meeting There has been no announcement from the provost office rebutting Harrison s rhetoric Despite the optics university representatives are loath to credit Harrison s actions alone for their moves And Harrison isn t the only one putting pressure on schools to take stronger action Gov Greg Abbott called for Texas A M to fire the professor who taught about gender identity and Lt Gov Dan Patrick called Welsh s handling of the situation unacceptable Everyone has a motive for a lot of things they do I will maybe never understand his motives Robert Albritton chair of the Texas A M board of Regents explained the Tribune But A M is much bigger than one individual And we will continue to be bigger than one individual and so we will take all criticism we ll evaluate it and we ll move forward Texas Tech University System Board Chair Cody Campbell also denied their up-to-date decision to prohibit conversations about transgender identity had anything to do with Harrison The things he announced didn t have any impact on anything we did Campbell informed The Tribune Meanwhile chosen faculty who have closely watched Harrison say that he s just one sportsman in a broader movement of conservatives using their online platforms to push America s college campuses to reimagine themselves in their image He got something to kind of stick with what happened to A M and so in that way he s maybe stood out above the crowd a little bit declared Karma Chavez department chair in the Mexican American and Latina o Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin But I really do just see him as a symptom of a broader trend in political beliefs right now in Texas and around the country It s only a matter of time Jessica Pliley often wonders if she could be next The Texas State University history professor whose scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality has watched her colleagues on campus and around the state become social media targets as their inhabitants comments or classes have been misconstrued or taken out of context for political gain The development is a way of life of fear and silence instead of open discussion and debate she says I have been having a lot of conversations with my partner about what will happen when somebody like Brian Harrison targets me she explained Part of me is thinking it s only a matter of time Just now she s taken actions to protect herself from feasible online harassment And she canceled an annual lecture she gives on campus around Halloween about the European and North American witch trials She worried the themes discussed patriarchy capitalism and poverty could be taken out of context and used against her She thinks Harrison is using his online platform to target any idea he disagrees with which she called anti-democratic and a violation of trainee s ability to choose what they want to learn It s extraordinary she commented He required to get rid of all these courses in the Legislature and because of the political process he was not able to do that So he is moving to a different process of leading a witch hunt through social media to achieve the same goals She says people who face the barrage of calls emails and social media messages when they are in the online crosshairs suffer personal consequences to their mental soundness Pliley declared she reached out to the Texas State professor who taught the LGBTQ communications class Harrison posted about and described her to be in deep deep distress Capitol Cockroach In the wake of the president of Texas A M s ouster hard-right national figures celebrated Harrison s efforts We got a scalp a big one Steve Bannon communicated Harrison on his podcast Thank you brother Great work Brian Harrison might be the the bulk impactful state legislator in America former U S Rep Matt Gaetz of Florida posted on X Meanwhile majority of of Harrison s Republican colleagues in Texas went on ignoring his social media feed just as they largely ignored him during the legislative session That s because in Austin Harrison is viewed as a gadfly with minimal legislative victories or allies He s introduced numerous bills to prohibit citizens universities from offering courses about LGBTQ topics But none of his bills advanced in a Legislature that still generally requires its members to go through the process of doing the work to win favor from peers There have been times when people are extremely sympathetic with his stances but he s so combative that they don t want to ally with him Rep Carl Tepper R-Lubbock announced in an interview And it s indeed counterproductive to what he s trying to achieve Harrison passed zero of his own bills this past session but posted hundreds of times on social media claiming that Texans were being betrayed by their Republican leaders and that his fellow lawmakers were not working hard enough for their constituents In an article declaring Harrison the session s cockroach a framed printout of which he has proudly displayed in his Capitol office Texas Monthly calculated that he posted on X more than times over the lesson of the -day session Harrison rejected the idea of passing decree as a metric of effectiveness arguing instead that a lawmaker s ability to do so was exclusively a reflection of kowtowing to the uniparty leadership Anyone can pass a bill It takes no skill he announced Harrison has frequently tried to rile up his social media army against members of his own party railing against Abbott and House leaders over property taxes DEI in higher instruction and the so-called empowerment of Democrats in the Legislature A stark reminder that show horses show And work horses work Rep Jeff Leach R-Allen posted on social media bout the state s ban on COVID- vaccine mandates an outcome Harrison takes credit for Selected of Harrison s allies meanwhile say he s effectively squeezing lawmakers to align with the conservative base Brian s role is honestly to put pressure on other members through his voice on social media Rep Steve Toth R-Conroe disclosed It s how we all play together Freshly emboldened After Welsh broadcasted his resignation from Texas A M amid the disagreement over a professor teaching about gender identity Harrison took a preeminence lap on social media WE DID IT TEXAS A M PRESIDENT IS OUT Another MASSIVE achievement for the LIBERTY BOTS against the Austin Swamp Rats he posted Liberty Bots are what he calls his conservative online followers He right away turned his attention to campaigning against Christian Hardigree the newly-hired president of Texas A M University-Victoria Harrison reported Hardigree advocated for DEI in her resume because she announced she hired a range of faculty from diverse backgrounds in a previous job Are GregAbbott TX s Regents at tamusystem about to hire another DEI advocate as President of A M Victoria he wrote But this time A M leadership pushed back Chancellor Glenn Hegar publicly defended Hardigree s conservative bonafides fundraising prowess and leadership achievements taking a swing at those who criticized her Critics who scour her CV for politically charged buzzwords miss the bigger picture Her life and career have been defined by amenity accountability and results Hegar announced That s the kind of leadership Texas A M-Victoria requirements Harrison took another jab at the University of Texas at Austin resurrecting posts from earlier this year when he staged an undercover inquiry at an event organized by the Women s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department that discussed obstructions to healthcare that transgender people face and mentioned gender affirming care UT-Austin did not respond or make any changes when Harrison first homed in on the event in March posting images of booklets and materials he saw on campus that mentioned transgender people But Harrison is freshly emboldened and unapologetic about the effects of his posts My job is to be a voice for people and to maximize their freedom and their liberty he explained I lose no sleep about it Like I did the right thing I know it And the response has been overwhelming Disclosure Texas A M University Texas A M University System Texas A M University System Texas Monthly Texas State University System Texas Tech University University of North Texas University of Texas System and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune a nonprofit nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members foundations and corporate sponsors Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune s journalism Find a complete list of them here This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune PARSELY autotrack false onload function PARSELY beacon trackPageView url https www texastribune 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