Speak up without fear, young conservatives.

That’s the hard-earned lesson from Richelle Wagner, a conservative student at Johnson County Community College in the Kansas City area, who says she was told to censor herself in order to be on the student newspaper – and whose right-of-center social media posts someone at the school apparently found disqualifying.

In the end someone trolled her online, as she received repeated hate and derision for merely speaking her mind.

It all started when Wagner, a 39-year-old mother of two reviving her college career “on a lark” this past semester, had sent a rebuttal to a liberal op-ed she’d read in The Messenger student newspaper last February.

It took some six weeks for her article to appear, she says – noting that the author of the very article she was rebutting “was supposed to be editing it and he didn’t.”

Why not?

“Because he didn’t like my conservative views,” the Ron Paul-inspired libertarian tells The Heartlander.

Worse yet, when she was surprisingly offered a position on the paper as an opinion writer, someone decided to cull Wagner’s social media posts and sent a dossier of allegedly “offensive” ones to the Student Media Advisor.

She surmises it was an attempt to prevent her from getting the position.

Singled out for scrutiny?

Wagner said she’s not aware of anyone else on the newspaper staff having that done to them – and that the faculty advisor checked other departments and found no such policy elsewhere.

“I don’t think anybody has had this sort of treatment at all. I think I’m the first conservative to come through.  

“The faculty advisor didn’t really know how to handle it. He was asking different departments, like, ‘Do you guys have a social media policy [for] their school podcasts and stuff?’ They’re like, no, nobody else has any policy like this. They don’t go through your social media history.”

The faculty advisor, she says, had “never had anything like this happen. He didn’t know how to handle it. This is just like, I’m stress-testing the system as the sole conservative coming through. …

“Our conversation was friendly, but ultimately he was telling me to censor myself and to be careful and to bow down to the cancel culture and the woke mob, even though he thought it was ridiculous. 

“He thought that what I [posted] was not anything to get upset about. He thought the whole thing was ridiculous, but he was also scared. He was scared of the woke mob, even though it seemed to be one person. 

“He was acting like it was legitimate when he had no real reason to.”

She says the advisor – though urging her to clean up her past posts for the sake of her future career – encouraged her to write an article about her experience and its implications for freedom of speech, and that she could consider her conversation with him to be “on the record,” meaning she could refer to it in her piece.

To the newspaper staff’s credit, they not only ran her article (“My Experience With Campus Cancel Culture In Student Media,” May 7), but included a cartoon Wagner created with AI lampooning cancel culture.

The Messenger/AI-generated

But Wagner says the next time she saw the advisor he was furious.

“He was just so irrationally angry … because I think he was scared of how he came off.

“He says, yes, there should be conservative voices on the newspaper, I don’t like it that it’s so slanted only to the left. But then he’s also saying that anybody who says anything that’s offensive to the left shouldn’t be allowed.”

Having been yelled at furiously, Wagner reported to her next class in tears and in a fog of distraction.

“It was embarrassing,” she says.

Could derail an academic career

The advisor apologized the next day, and she offered to edit her May 7 article to soften her portrayal of him. But she got to wondering: What if she was an 18-year-old with conservative views, rather than a more-resilient, more-seasoned 39-year-old? How much more withering would the inquisition into her views – and the yelling – be for someone so young?

“I told him in our conversation the next day, if I had been an 18-year-old, this would have probably derailed my entire academic career,” Wagner says.

Sadly, the episode may have helped derail it anyway: She says she likely won’t be continuing on with her formal education – in part because she found her instructors so uninspiring, and in part because the apparent attempt to cancel or censor her soured her on it.

“I only had two professors that were actually good. I signed up for six classes. So that’s four bad professors. … I don’t think they were even reading my assignments. … And then my experience [with] the student newspaper – and I ultimately decided there’s no point in even doing this. …

“I think college is not worth the time and money. I think that I’d be better off just teaching myself, with free or cheap materials; and I can buy the textbooks on Amazon. 

“Most of the professors didn’t really add anything.”

Message to young conservatives

What would she tell those wide-eyed 18-year-old conservatives whom she dreads will endure what she has?

“Speak up, because cancel culture is over. It’s dead. And we need to exercise our rights to make sure it stays dead. They can’t really do anything to you. 

“Ultimately what people are really scared of is the Antifa mob coming and, like, burning stuff down. I once had a program director at KCUR [Kansas City public radio station] tell me that he could not put me on the air. He said that I should have a podcast, but he said he can’t put me on the air because the Antifa would burn his building down.

“And that’s ultimately the enforcement arm of the left, what people are scared of. It’s not really mean comments online; it’s the violence. 

“But now that Trump is in charge, those people are actually being prosecuted. And so they can’t really get away with that stuff anymore – like the guy who was burning Teslas. These people are gonna get prosecuted, and so their power is gone now. 

“And so, we have to actually push back and move the Overton Window to the right and speak up and let people know that we actually exist and they don’t have any power anymore – to ignore them.”

Didn’t have to be this way

What she fears for young conservatives at JCCC who are interested in journalism is that “they’re probably just going to keep their head down and keep quiet because they don’t want to get the heat like I did. …

“The left will get as sensitive as they need to be in order to get offended.”

The Heartlander reached out to JCCC spokespeople to ask if they could shed any light on these allegations, whether conservatives are being cancelled at JCCC’s student newspaper, and what the school would tell Wagner in the aftermath.

“Student involvement with The Messenger is a voluntary activity at Johnson County Community College, overseen by a faculty advisor and Advisory Board of local journalists, but run by the student editors,” the college’s statement reads.

“The Messenger staff members and editors are full-time, paid student employees. Student employees must adhere to The Messenger policy manual created by the students, which includes their social media policy. The social media policy was added by students in 2021. All student employees of The Messenger are required to adhere to this policy.

“Ms. Wagner was invited to be on The Messenger staff, but declined, as she did not agree to adhere to The Messenger’s social media policy. The faculty advisor informed her that she was still welcome to be a guest columnist on future stories, and she has had multiple pieces published by The Messenger this past semester. There were no conversations or actions on behalf of the College that were politically motivated.”

It didn’t have to be this way, Wagner writes in her May 7 article:

“A college, and by extension its student media, should reflect a marketplace of ideas, not a monoculture. A publication that claims to represent students must include ideological diversity, or it’s just propaganda. The moment a paper starts purging dissenters, it ceases to be a journalistic institution and becomes a mouthpiece for left-wingers. When young journalists are taught that dissent is dangerous and conformity is safe, the future of the free press is at risk. …

“Instead of being concerned about having me, a person who says ‘offensive’ things, associated with The Messenger, I wish the faculty advisor had taken a step back and realized that this standard is ridiculous, and that the person complaining was the problem, not me.

“He should never have advised me to censor myself. I shouldn’t have had to make this choice.”