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[Very Surprised Voice] Those White-Student-Union Facebook Pages Are Probably Fake

Over the weekend, a number of Facebook pages for so-called white student unions began cropping up, with more than 20 universities tied to supposed student groups claiming to celebrate white culture.

As was pointed out by Bears for Equality, however, the groups are likely an astroturfing campaign carried out by white supremacists. Last Wednesday, a page for a white student union at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was shut down, drawing the attention of Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi who blogs for the Daily Stormer, a notorious and virulently racist and anti-Semitic publication. In a post about the controversy, Anglin directed readers to set up more Facebook pages.

So, guys. Here’s the plan:

Make more of these White Student Union pages on Facebook for various universities. You don’t have to go there. Make one for Dartmouth, Princeton, etc.

Go, do it now. If they won’t let it on Facebook, put it on tumblr or wordpress or whatever. Get it up, then forward links to the local media.

Just fill it up with pro-White memes and “we’ve had enough of these people” rhetoric.

Extra points if you actually go to the school.

And that’s how you end up with 25 or so pages for white student unions at universities like Rutgers and NYU. In an interview, the admin for the NYU page, a proud and outspoken advocate for white people, declined to identify themselves.

The now-defunct page for Penn State’s white student union posted a status at one point proclaiming that the group was united with other WSU’s under the NAESA. It’s unclear what NAESA actually stands for, though it’s probably not the National Association of Elevator Safety Authorities. Still, the posting indicates that whoever was establishing these pages was either coordinating with others or setting up every account on their own.

Many of them even share the same filler text about European ancestry, proclaiming, in part, “We unapologetically provide a safe space for white students to air their true feelings about the future of our nation, discuss and reflect on the lessons laid down for us by our great European writers, philosophers, and artists, and develop a positive program to restore the pioneering will and greatness of our unique and virtuous people.”

The moral of the story: College students are not-quite-adults who often make careless decisions. Creating a nationwide network of white student unions probably isn’t one of them.

Still, as Bear for Equality writes, the best recourse is to report white-student-union pages to university administrations who might act to protect their trademark. The other point is to not engage with trolls; these aren’t people looking for spirited, rational debate.

Those White-Student-Union Pages Are Likely Fake