The Conservative Long Game in Higher Ed, Part 4: Weaponized Humor – Spoof Clubs, Publications, & Theater

In Resistance from the Right, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd shows us how conservative campus activists understood and marshaled the power of emotion. They realized that both humor and victimhood could be weaponized—used to manipulate the campus mood and perceptions of their commitments. Humor and victimhood afforded them the opportunity to gain listeners. Both involved theater and an audience. Shepherd dedicates a four-page section in chapter three to the topic of “Conservative Humor” (pp. 68-71), and that is the focus of today’s reflection.

Members of YAF mimicked, borrowed, and stole the ideas and “strategies of their adversaries”—of campus leftists and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) members (p. 68). Campus right-wingers also engaged in class straw-man tactics to obtain negative attention for the groups and ideas they opposed. As Shepherd relays, “conservatives presented a carnival mirror interpretation of progressive politics to ridicule” instead of engaging the reality of progressive ideals and politics (p. 68). Obtaining laughs often involves telling a few lies, minor or major depending on your ethics and the stakes.

Campus right-wingers and YAF members had favorite, or preferred, tactics that involved satire, mockery, and weaponized humor. These included “creating fictitious New Left groups, penning satirical New Left publications, and staging theatrical counterdemonstrations in mockery of peace or civil rights causes” (p. 68).  Campus conservatives appropriated “the Left’s language, slogans, and group names,” transforming them for YAF’s and campus conservative’s purposes (p. 68).

While this kind of mockery seems like nothing new, Shepherd asserts that the campus right went further—engaging in “ableism, homophobia, and white supremacy.” Their larger goal was straightforward: embarrass and humiliate the campus left (p. 68). The fact that they willingly and intentionally crossed lines of civility and dignity becomes clear later during Shepherd’s interviews with former members. In their reflections, given many years and decades later, they tried to explain away, downplay, and defend their actions as merely “sophomoric” (p. 68).

The creation of fictious “spoof clubs” arose as a popular campus right tactic. Shepherd relays that, at Wichita State University in Kansas, right-wing students formed “SPASM”—the Society for the Prevention of Asinine Student Movements (p. 68). At the University of Southern California, a group whose initialism formed an anti-Italian slur was created: World Association of Paisan Students. They “demanded an Italian Studies program to celebrate Al Capone, the cultural sensitive cafeteria option of pizza, and a massive canal project to offer transportation via gondola staffed with mandolin players.” This group desired that their demands be fulfilled by April 22 in coordination with the birthday of Benito Mussolini (p. 68).

In Madison at the University of Wisconsin, the “Homophiles of Madison” mocked LGBTQIA students by demanding “a gay studies program and university-sponsored gay social events” (p. 69). Students at the University of North Carolina created a group that made mock demands for “the visually impaired, including hiring blind professors, assigning Braille textbooks, and blinding students [then currently] without visual limitations so that they would be unable to discriminate by race” (p. 69).

While we historians are trained to try and avoid presentist moral norming, it is not hard for today’s readers to feel that Shepherd’s examples get more intense or worse (if ethno-national shaming was not bad enough). To present-day eyes, some of examples are simply shameful dehumanizations of ‘the other’.

Apart from spoof clubs, YAF members also utilized parody publications. The main target was SDS’s New Left Notes. The YAF’s version, New Left News—tailored by each campus chapter—published articles by “Mark Crudd” and other pseudonymous authors. It also made heavy use of “sexual innuendos, drug references, and anti-Asian racism” (p. 69). One YAF NLN version contained an “Atrocity Photo of the Month’ section in which readers could submit bloody images of brutalized Vietcong” (p. 69).  Present-day readers will get strong, reverse Charlie Hebdo vibes here.

Theatrical counter-demonstrations existed in the YAF repertoire. Shepherd relays that Jane Fonda was a frequent target of their ire, in light of her prominence and anti-war stance. Fonda was burned in effigy with a North Vietnamese flag at a University of Southern California event (p. 69). Demonstrators on behalf of YAF “shouted slogans such as, ‘Jane’s a Pain!’, ‘Traitor!’, and ‘Shoot Fonda, Not Film!’” at various Fonda events. They also harassed her bodyguards (p. 69).

By politically weaponizing humor (if we can still call it that), YAF protestors and conservative campus demonstrators could, as Shepherd notes, claim “plausible deniability” in terms of any actions that might occur. They were just joking, right? They did not mean, they would later claim, for their humorous calls for “executions, symbolic hangings, and burning of effigies” to translate into real crimes (p. 70). They hid behind humor, using it as a smokescreen for “devalue[ing] and delegitimize[ing] progressive calls for equality and justice” (p. 70).

Shepherd buttresses this section by including a reflection on recent literature about racist humor and the work of comedy. She utilizes Raúl Pérez’s Souls of White Jokes (2022) and Matt Sienkiewicz’s and Nick Marx’s That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them (also from 2022). Pérez allows Shepherd to rebut the plausible deniability strategy, asserting that racist humor is neither harmless nor marginal—reinforcing boundaries of exclusion, acting to dehumanize objects, and fostering in-group solidarity (p. 70). Sienkiewicz and Marx speak to comedy’s ability to serve as a lubricant in efforts to bring together conservative factions. Humor covers the ugly endpoints of extreme ideological logic, resolving its various tensions and inconsistencies (p. 70).

The section of Resistance from the Right ends by making the point that YAF funders and conservative elders were complicit. Deep donor pockets behind YAF and campus conservatives sanctioned all of these activities. If they did not do so explicitly, they did so in their silence (p. 71). The monied class was not unhappy to see leftists—as well those they defended or shared solidarity—mocked, shamed, and harassed. Conservative elders believed in the anti-communist cause and were pleased to see the Vietnam War defended. Their weaponized humor, and the activities of younger campus conservatives and YAF members, was just patriotism to them.

The series continues next week with more reflections on emotional manipulation. – TL