-Angela Valenzuela
by Eric Kelderman, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 6, 2021 Sitting in front of a roaring fire, Kimo Gandall looks and sounds like a politician from a bygone era. Wearing a three-piece suit and holding a tumbler of Elijah Craig bourbon as a soft jazz intro fades, he begins one of his “fireside chat” videos on Facebook or YouTube, taped at his parents’ home in Huntington Beach, Calif.
“I’m going to talk about the issues, how we’re going to implement them and how we’re going to change them,” says Gandall, 23, a former president of the College Republicans at the University of California at Irvine, before he delves into a detailed report on the financial situation of the College Republican National Committee.
The genteel setting sometimes includes a TV tray holding the Bible, Robert’s Rules of Order, and books such as Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which theorizes about the likelihood of future wars between the Christian West and the Muslim East.
But Gandall’s buttoned-down persona is at odds with his darker views. He believes, for instance, that the United States is headed toward a race war fueled by progressive politics and the Black Lives Matter movement. “The leftist narrative now wants you to actually kill each other because you’re of a different race,” he said during a July 2020 podcast. “A lot of the leftist, BLM rhetoric — Black Lives Matter — founded itself on wanting racial division, right, when you have whites bow down to Blacks.”
Gandall, who graduated in June with a degree in political science, is not an outlier. Instead, he has become a key figure in California campus politics, and one of many young conservatives across the nation who are leading campus Republican groups further right, ideologically.
The shift has led to a schism among campus Republicans that mirrors the divide in the national party: In a dozen states, including California, campus conservatives are splintering, in part, over whether to support the former president, Donald J. Trump, and his populist message.
But the division also results from allegations that some campus groups are allying themselves with the far right: Individuals and organizations that are, to varying degrees, “antidemocratic, antiegalitarian and white supremacist,” Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of research at the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab, at American University, writes in her book Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2020). While such groups are not monolithic, Miller-Idriss explains, a common belief is that dominant groups — white people, men, Christians, Americans — face an existential threat from an increasingly diverse society. Within that framing, higher ed’s efforts to increase racial diversity and inclusion are seen as a liberal plot to erase white and Christian traditions and culture.
As some campus Republicans move toward the far right, what was previously an assault on higher education from groups based largely outside academe has become an inside job; not a mob of tattooed white supremacists marching across campus in paramilitary costumes, but clean-cut undergraduates who are savvy on social media and cloak their extremism in irony and edgy internet memes.
The shift has been felt by some faculty, who fear that any minor misstep with a conservative student could lead to hate mail, a barrage of social-media backlash, and vilification by conservative lawmakers. Students and faculty of color, and those who are Jewish or undocumented fear that the rhetoric of these groups could spark actual violence. Even moderately conservative students find themselves without a place to share their political activism on campus.
Colleges are left in a quandary: How to deal with students who are hostile to core principles of higher education while also fulfilling their duty to uphold the First Amendment.
andall and other young conservatives are disillusioned with mainstream Republicans, who they see as too willing to abandon political and religious traditions to accommodate social and demographic changes.
He calls himself a “paleoconservative,” a term coined in the 1980s by traditionalists who supported strict limits on immigration, an isolationist foreign policy, and trade protectionism. The movement has also been linked to white nationalism, according to the nonprofit Political Research Associates, a social-justice think tank.
Gandall embraces the ideal of a “naturally ordered society,” meaning, for example, that traditional gender roles and heterosexual relationships are required for the good of society. He is against same-sex marriage and has said that “transgenderism is a mental illness.”
He opposes violence and says he could not possibly support white nationalism because he identifies as “half-Hawaiian.” While the College Republicans at UC-Irvine are mostly male and Christian, Gandall said about half its members are from Hispanic or Asian backgrounds.
At the same time, Gandall imagines a violent clash as “the logical conclusion of what the left is doing in their systematic oppression of whites, nationally and in California.”
