University of Iowa students received a mass email Monday morning asking them, “Are you sexist?” The first sentence of the email reads: “Whether you hate women or love women, we have a speaker and a donation drive you won’t want to miss!”
The UI Young Americans for Freedom chapter, or YAF, sent the email promoting a guest speaker Elisha Krauss, who will speak in the Iowa Memorial Union Blackbox Theater on April 7. YAF is a network of college students promoting conservative ideologies.
Krauss is a conservative commentator and former producer of the Sean Hannity radio show on ABC. According to the email, her main talking points will involve criticism of “leftist feminism.”
“The Left claims conservatives don’t respect women, yet they push for men in women’s sports, abortion on demand, and hostility toward women who reject their standards,” the email stated. “This so-called feminism doesn’t empower women — it works against them.”
Regarding why YAF brought Krauss on board, YAF Secretary Daelynn Wygle wrote in an email to The Daily Iowan individuals with leftist values are anti-woman, and Krauss’s talking points reflect conservatives’ views on what the fight for women’s rights looks like.
“By being Pro-Life, we are defending women from the moment of conception,” Wygle wrote. “We want to protect women from being injured by men competing in women’s sports. We also fight to maintain women’s locker rooms and bathrooms as places free from men. All of these positions are clearly pro-woman, yet leftist feminists insanely claim that men can become women.”
Ava Neppl, a fourth-year health promotion major at the UI, said she felt the email was misogynistic and hateful.
“The first sentence being ‘whether you hate women or love women’ knocked me off my feet,” Neppl said. “I think that it’s absurd to push the narrative that it’s okay to be sexist or hate women, which is really the way it comes off. And I am not surprised that the Young Americans for Freedom are pushing this narrative.”
Neppl also expressed her frustration with the UI’s current positioning toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. She said she thinks the email promoted transphobic language and sending it out on Trans Day of Visibility was in poor taste.
“I think it was meant to be harmful and offensive and to get people riled up,” Nappl said.
Similarly, third-year UI student Devin Buttz said she believes the message was intentionally transphobic.
“I’m really shocked,” she said. “It wasn’t just the email itself. It was the day it was sent. It was Trans Visibility Day, and I think it’s insane that that’s sent to everyone on campus.”
Despite the email’s controversial content, Tricia Brown, senior director in the UI Office of Strategic Communication wrote in an email statement to the DI that the university approved the email following the Division of Student Life’s mass email guidelines for student organizations. The DI was referred to the UI’s free speech website.
“The First Amendment protects speech that may be hateful, offensive, or inconsistent with the university’s values,” the UI’s free speech website reads. “The best response to speech the listener finds offensive is counter-speech.”
Brett Johnson, a UI associate professor and licensed attorney, affirmed there is no precise legal definition of hate speech, so what YAF released is protected by the First Amendment.
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Johnson, who graduated from the UI in the 2000s, said conservative student groups sending controversial mass emails is nothing new. He cited an example from when he was in college when a conservative student group sent out an email asking privately conservative students to “come out of the closet” — mocking gay students, saying the most recent YAF email is simply following a tradition of riling folks up.
“It was baiting people because it proves their point. It martyrs them in that kind of a way,” Johnson said. “It’s part of the playbook. This isn’t organic happening just here at grassroots level. This is YAF central saying, ‘Here’s the strategy we want you to follow.’”
Wygle’s statement affirmed the fact that many students had negative reactions to the email, but said their concerns are based on ignorance.
“Other students have expressed anger, annoyance, and shock that we would dare to have mainstream beliefs,” she wrote. “The campus Left’s refusal to acknowledge a viewpoint that isn’t their own and trying to deprive us of our First Amendment rights is the same attitude prevalent in authoritarian, communist, and fascist regimes both past and present.”
Despite the UI’s obligation to uphold free speech, Nappl said the stamp of approval at the bottom of the email that reads, “Distribution of this message was approved by the Office of Strategic Communication in collaboration with the Office of the Provost, the vice president for Student Life, and the chief human resources officer,” is a bad look for the university.
“I think that is embarrassing from [YAF], but also the University of Iowa,” she said. “I would be embarrassed if that was something that came from my organization.”