I Helped Get Milo Yiannopoulos Disinvited From UCLA. Here’s Why.

When the Bruin Republicans announced their decision to invite Yiannopoulos, and that his talk would be called “10 Things I Hate About Mexico,” I was distraught. Not because Yiannopoulos would be speaking on campus—it’s a free country and he has the right to say what he wants to, where he wants to, no matter how puerile or malicious he is.

My objection was that I didn’t want my club hosting him.

The question goes to the issue of why the Bruin Republicans exist. Is the club’s mission simply to provoke people? If so, Yiannopoulos would make perfect sense as a speaker. But then, so would Richard Spencer. Or Chris Cantwell. Or Ward Churchill. Provocation has an absolute value sign around it and once you make that your guidestar, there is no logical way to differentiate between provocateurs.

I would argue that while the Bruin Republicans might provoke people with the speakers we host, that’s tangential to our true mission: To promote conservative ideas in the public square.

As you might imagine, that’s not an easy job at UCLA.

Part of that task means countering the liberal dogma that conservatives are racist troglodytes and demonstrating that Republicans aren’t all old, or white, or men—I’m a 21 year old Mexican-American woman—and explaining that at the end of the day, it’s ideas that matter, not identity politics.

Hosting Milo Yiannopoulos would surely have undermined all of that. If we had allowed him to use our platform to “trigger snowflakes” we would have been subverting our own cause, replacing our mission with his. And there would have been no way—none—for the club to have claimed that we didn’t endorse his views: He was going to be speaking at a club fundraiser. That’s as clear an endorsement as a student group can give.

All of which is why I informed the club that if they agreed to continue with the event, I would resign as outreach coordinator.

After the public announcement, tension grew within the club, with the group divided between those who argued that maintaining the club’s invitation to Yiannopoulos was a free speech issue and those who saw it as an issue of strategy and integrity.

The ultimate decision, however, belonged to the club’s executive board. And they understood the issue wasn’t really about Yiannopoulos at all: It was about keeping our club together. Because while it’s theoretically possible that the invitation of one speaker might be worth the fall of the conservative movement at UCLA, Milo Yiannopoulos—a loathsome intellectual bantamweight of no public consequence—wasn’t that speaker. This simply wasn’t the hill for the Bruin Republicans to die on.

All of which is why the board made a unanimous decision to cancel the event. Some members of the club took this as a loss, because disinviting Yiannopoulos was what liberals on campus had wanted. But this view misses the point: Conservative ideas do not exist simply to counter liberal ideas: They rest on bedrocks of human nature and philosophy. We don’t believe in free speech because progressives believe in curtailing speech. We don’t believe in limited government because progressives believe in big government. We believe these things because they are right and can be justified on their own terms. They are first principles. An ideological movement based around nothing but knee-jerk oppositionalism isn’t a movement at all. It’s a pose.

Disinviting Milo Yiannopoulos probably won’t magically win us converts at UCLA. But if our goal is to win converts, then it really was a necessary precondition for getting people to listen to our message. And I’m proud of the Bruin Republicans for doing it.

Mariela Muro is a junior at the University of California, Los Angeles majoring in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations.