Right Here, Right Now by Stanford Politics

JUNE 2018 | ISSUE 05 | STANFORDPOLITICS.ORG

Right Here, Right Now

His mother was in Obama’s cabinet, but he’s on a mission to redefine campus conservatism.

+STANFORD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL UNDERGRADS +THE FOUNTAIN HOPPER’S BIG MOMENT +INSIDE THE POLITICS OF THE FOOTBALL TEAM A

Your weekly rundown of Stanford news and commentary on campus, local, US, and world politics.

STANFORDPOLITICS.ORG/MONDAYMEMO

CONTENTS

THE FOUNTAIN HOPPER’S INFLECTION POINT

Is the Campus Newsletter’s Tabloid-Inspired, Agenda Driven History What Makes It Special or What Holds It Back? LUCAS RODRIGUEZ

2017-2018 POLITICOS

The Most Influential Undergraduates at Stanford SP STAFF

JOHN RICE-CAMERON WANTS TO MAKE STANFORD GREAT AGAIN

ROXY BONAFONT & JACK HERRERA

LOCKER ROOM TALK?

Inside the Politics of Stanford Football in the Age of Trump THOMAS PFEIFFER

MASTHEAD EDITOR IN CHIEF RUAIRI ARRIETA-KENNA

MAGAZINE DIRECTOR NATHALIE KIERSZNOWSKI MANAGING EDITOR JAKE DOW

CHIEF OF STAFF MADDIE MCCONKEY

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER LANDON ELLINGSON SENIOR EDITORS ALLIE DOW ELLIOT KAUFMAN

ASSOCIATE EDITORS RALEIGH BROWNE SIERRA MACIOROWSKI REBECCA SMALBACH JULIAN WATROUS AMBER YANG

Special thanks to Tom Pfeiffer for copy editing assistance.

PHOTO EDITOR AMELIA LELAND PHOTOGRAPHERS SHIRLEY CAI HANAN YAJOOR

EDITOR’S NOTE

Four years ago, when I first set foot on this sunny, spacious campus, I had no idea what I wanted to study, let alone pursue as a career. Little did I think that one day I wouldn’t be able to see myself doing anything but political journalism. Like most freshman, I was undeclared and hadn’t ruled out any field. At first, I sought to explore Stanford’s renowned science and engineering departments. But as I looked around, I mostly saw older students who were passionate about — and had seemingly found success in — everything from taking part in Silicon Valley’s startup culture to conducting groundbreaking research to vying for admission to law or medical school. Even as I realized that I much preferred the social sciences and humanities to STEM fields, there wasn’t any club that really stuck out to me. I strove to find a way to satiate my desire to engage in our political system without actually being a politician, to serve the public meaningfully and, if possible, to do so through writing. I may not have known it at the time, but it seems that all along I had always wanted to be a journalist. My high school didn’t have a newspaper, and Stanford doesn’t have a journalism major for freshmen to explore. So it wasn’t until I became a sophomore, began to study political science, and started writing for the Stanford Daily and Stanford Politics (then called Stanford Political Journal) that I found something that invigorated me the way other activities stirred my peers. Stanford Politics was founded the previous year — a year marked by, arguably, the most heightened level of political activism and engagement on campus in recent memory — so when I joined the new publication, it felt something akin to what I assume it’s like to be a part of a startup. Our co-founder, Jason Willick, had just graduated and begun a career in professional opinion journalism, and our next editor in chief, Truman Chen, was intent on making Stanford Politics a home on campus for thoughtful commentary about serious issues. I appreciated them and the mission, but I also wanted Stanford Politics to do more. By creating and co-hosting the Stanford Politics Podcast my sophomore year, I hoped to provide an outlet for students like myself to be able to have conversations about contemporary issues with peers, professors, and even public figures like Cory Booker and Barney Frank (two of my first interviews as a student journalist). Then during my junior year, I was fortunate to be an intern at POLITICO Magazine, a publication I had been an avid reader of and admired. Through that amazing opportunity, in addition to everything else it offered me, I got to see how a professional newsmagazine is actually made. Returning to Stanford last year, I set about working to bring some of what I saw in D.C. to Stanford, particularly by launching Stanford Politics Magazine and The Monday Memo email newsletter. This issue of Stanford Politics Magazine is, thus, a big one for me. Not only is it the final issue of this academic year, but it is also my last contribution to a student journalism scene at Stanford that has given me some of the most fulfilling experiences of my last four years. Being editor in chief of Stanford Politics has been one of the most endlessly exhausting though eminently rewarding roles I’ve had. When I took over last spring, I sought to remake our identity and image on campus from a niche publication of bipartisan think pieces to a mainstay of student journalism. While I can’t say that it’s been easy and that we haven’t got room to grow, I can say that I’m extremely proud of what we’ve done. Stanford Politics Podcast is still running, and the new hosts and producers who have taken over since my initial involvement two years ago have had on a number of amazing guests this year, including Congressman Adam Schiff, former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, and former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle. Our November cover story — an exposé of Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review network he’s maintained — was deemed “the most read and shared politics article from across the web” the day it was published and was later recognized as one of the best pieces of local reporting of 2017, an honor few student publications can lay claim to.

We were also the first media outlet to report on #MeToo allegations against former Stanford professor Franco Moretti last November, and our continued coverage of the issue — from our January cover story on Stanford’s complicated history with sexual violence to an original and exclusive op-ed by former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson about how women can fight back — has been impactful. An open letter that 40 representatives of student government, community centers, and more, published in Stanford Politics to demand that the University administration use a different campus climate survey was even cited by a provost in a February announcement of new plans to focus on the very course of reform asked for by those advocates. Not to mention, we’ve kept up, and arguably even grown, our reputation as a thought-provoking source of Stanford commentary — from publicly criticizing the University’s approach to discourse to inspiring “op-ed wars” about the state of student media. During my four years at Stanford, I’ve been proud to see what Stanford Politics has become as a publication, especially during my tenure as editor in chief. But Stanford Politics is not a one-man-show. As early as this fall, when staff writer Roxy Bonafont stayed up all night to report fully, factually, and fairly on Robert Spencer’s controversial speaking event on campus, to just recently, when our new magazine director Nathalie Kiersznowski spent countless hours laying out and designing this latest print issue, I’ve witnessed firsthand how much work each and every member of the Stanford Politics team has done — and continues to do — to make us what we are. This issue alone is the result of so many individuals’ efforts. Roxy and Jack Herrera worked tirelessly — after hours of interviewing his friends, his family, and John Rice-Cameron himself — to profile the man who’s become the face of the Right on campus (and who also just so happens to be Susan Rice’s son). But with a subject who other publications have treated as simply a talking-pointgenerator, Roxy and Jack have painted a committed ideologue who has stepped out of the shadow of his celebrity parentage to make make a name for himself as Stanford’s top politico. Similarly, senior staff writer — and something of a media reporter of late — Lucas Rodriguez did a deep dive on the mysterious campus muckraker known as the FoHo, while freshman staff writer Thomas Pfeiffer looked into a subset of the Stanford population that many might overlook when it comes to politics: student athletes. Lastly, our annual “Politicos” feature is the kind of piece that shows that there are people all around us who, whether or not you agree with their intentions, are working to make an impact both on campus and around the world. A few years ago, when I was looking for my own way to make an impact, I found a home in Stanford Politics and in journalism more broadly. The years since have been a wild ride, especially with the election of a president who denigrates the field, but I’m nonetheless certain that this is what I’m meant to do. And I hope younger generations of Stanford students also find that calling, because real journalism — doing the work of both investigating and informing — is more necessary than ever. I’m excited to see where Stanford Politics goes forward from here, and I’m more than confident in my successor, Daniela Gonzalez, and managing editor Jake Dow, both of whom are extraordinarily competent at what they do and have been central parts of Stanford Politics the last couple years, to take this publication to even greater heights.

While I can’t say that it’s been easy and that we haven’t got room to grow, I can say that I’m extremely proud of what we’ve done.

Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna Editor-in-Chief

THE FOUNTAIN HOPPER’S INFLECTION POINT june 04, 2018 written by: lucas rodriguez | photos by: shirley cai | read time: 20 min

IS THE CAMPUS NEWSLETTER’S TABLOID-INSPIRED, AGENDA-DRIVEN HISTORY WHAT MAKES IT SPECIAL OR WHAT’S BEEN HOLDING IT BACK?

Almost every two weeks, though not on a regular schedule, the vast majority of Stanford students, professors, and administrators open their email inboxes to find a familiar sight — a new edition of the Fountain Hopper, or, as it is nicknamed, The FoHo. Immediately, they may be drawn to the all-capitalized subject line describing the Fountain Hopper’s latest scoop. Upon opening the email, readers’ eyes will be met with a plethora of colorful, bolded, highlighted, and underlined text, once again designed to draw their attention to certain facts, headlines, or the like. As one begins to read, they usually encounter a humorous, conversational, somewhat snarky voice delivering them “news [they] can use.” The publication’s anonymity only adds to its allure. When reading the Fountain Hopper, one may not really feel like they’re reading anything at all; rather, it can feel like you have someone, almost like a friend really, orally recounting what they think you need to know about Stanford. As subscribers read more editions, they becoming better acquainted with this mysterious voice, though the person behind the curtain changes every year. However, no one really reads the Fountain Hopper solely because it’s a mysterious, entertaining storyteller.

FOUNTAIN HOPPER THE FACT OF THE MATTER IS, the Fountain Hopper has become a ubiquitous name on campus due to its penchant for breaking many of the most noteworthy Stanfordrelated news stories in the last four years. As much as other campus publications don’t like to admit it, the Fountain Hopper’s track record of bombshell reporting is unparalleled. In its first few years of existence, the Fountain Hopper broke the Caroline Hoxby - Kappa Sigma story (in which a Stanford professor entered a fraternity’s backyard and tried using garden shears to cut through wires connected to the fraternity’s speaker); it reported on a legal loophole that allowed Stanford students to access their admissions files; and, most famously, it was the first publication to unearth the now-famous Brock Turner rape story. Just this year, the Fountain Hopper broke a story on the suspected of drugging students at a Sigma Chi fraternity party as well as the fact that Stanford University suggested using the words, “I’m okay, everything’s okay,” on the plaque at the site of the Brock Turner assault over the phrases desired by the victim. The Fountain Hopper, which according to a recent Stanford Politics article “regularly critiques the University administration and challenges the status quo of student journalism,” is truly Stanford’s top muckraker. But despite its tendency to inform the Stanford community on some of its more unsavory goings-on, many retain conflicting opinions of the Fountain Hopper, and generally rightfully so. Some dislike the way it has mixed its editorial voice with its reporting. Others believe the omnipresent focus on anonymity, both for its lead writer/editor and its reporters as well as for almost all of its sources, runs the Fountain Hopper into journalistic and ethical problems. One critic, who was the subject of a recent Fountain Hopper story, has gone so far as to label the publication a “tabloid-rag” that sensationalizes the news. In fact, the Fountain Hopper was partially inspired by tabloid journalism, but its most recent and outgoing editor has sought (and still hopes) to see it take a new direction. Thanks to interviews with her and with founding editor Ilya Mouzykantskii ’16,

Stanford Politics can reveal the scattered — and until now, mostly unknown — history that has shaped the Fountain Hopper into what it is today. Perhaps above all else, however, the publication’s backstory reveals how the Fountain Hopper’s eagerness to embrace a muckraking, tabloid-esque identity may be the very thing that restrains its potential to be what it wants to be tomorrow.

FOUNTAIN HOPPER DOT COM When Ilya Mouzykantskii arrived on campus in September of 2012, he had already established himself as a student journalist of sorts, or at least a publisher intent on serving the community’s interest. In the months leading up to the class of 2016’s New Student Orientation, Mouzykantskii and another member of the class of 2016, Amelia Brooks, noticed that many of their classmates had taken it upon themselves to post some of their admissions essays on the class Facebook page. Seeking to collect these submissions and formalize them into something that could provide useful insights to both the Stanford community and high schoolers interested in applying to Stanford, Mouzykantskii and Brooks created a blog titled “Confessions from Stanford” with the aim of, in the blog’s words, providing “a collection of insights and experiences from members of the Stanford Class of 2016 recounting our transition into freshman year.” They posted the blog’s details on the class Facebook page and quickly began receiving submissions. Blog posts ranged from admissions essays, to biographical snippets, to reflections on the admissions process and tips on how to get into Stanford. The blog blew up. According to Confessions from Stanford’s statistics page, it has received over 40,000 hits from 103 different countries. Mouzykantskii, who now works in the cryptocurrency industry, tells Stanford Politics, “This was sort of my first foray into student journalism.” In Confessions he seemed to have found a way to give people access to the sort of information they wanted to know. Building off his work on Confessions, once Mouzykantskii actually arrived to campus, he decided he would try to start another similar lifestyle publication somewhat akin to outlets like Buzzfeed, which were growing in popularity at the same time. Mouzykantskii and a group of his friends gathered in Old Union to brainstorm how this publication could work. They decided, Mouzykantskii retells, that they would run pieces like “Five people you might meet at late night” and that they would name their new blog, “the Fountain Hopper.” In a stunt to gain attention and readers, Mouzykantskii says they even went so far as to buy 1,000 rubber ducks with the words “fountainhopper.com” written on them which they dispersed in fountains around campus. Despite these efforts, the original Fountain Hopper never took off — Mouzykantskii and his friends abandoned their project after failing to garner more than 30 hits a day. After these two brief but notable dips into campus media entrepreneurship, Mouzykantskii would go on to focus his extracurricular efforts elsewhere. In spring quarter of his freshman year, he

Ilya Mouzykantskii was an ASSU senator during his sophomore year, but he concluded that “student government is not the vector for change.” He went on to launch the Fountain Hopper newsletter the next fall. (KRISTEN STIPANOV / STANFORD DAILY)

mounted a campaign and was elected to the Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) Senate, Stanford’s student government. “The thought in doing that,” Mouzykantskii recalls, “was sort of like ‘yo, there’s a bunch of shit that’s fucked up here. How can we go about changing it?’ And not even changing it,” he adds. “Before that, just letting people know about it, because people are sort of blissfully oblivious, and that’s fine, but also it’s not really fine ’cause ignorance sucks.” Through Senate, Mouzykantskii says he saw an opportunity to change things on campus for the better. Confessions from Stanford and the original Fountain Hopper represented ways in which Mouzykantskii had attempted to help Stanford students get to know their community better. But, his time on student government was ideally meant to go beyond that goal, he says. He wanted to help students understand how they could improve their community. He had already become personally frustrated with the Stanford student experience early on, noting one specific experience in particular: “The thing that bugged me the earliest and the longest was Stanford’s international student health insurance policy.” As a Russian native, Mouzykantskii was automatically enrolled in a $5,000 per year Cardinal Care insurance plan, which, in his opinion was “wholly inappropriate for healthy 19-year-olds; it’s far too expensive.” Understanding that he could waive the health insurance with proof that he was enrolled in another plan, Mouzykantskii sought assistance from the University in finding alternative, cheaper plans but received, unsurprisingly, no such help. “I wrote some [Stanford] Daily op-eds about it. I sent an email out to all the international students via an email list. I was mad,” Mouzykantskii recounts. After spending almost all of his sophomore year serving on the student council, Mouzykantskii says he concluded in spring of 2014 that “student government is not the vector for change.” To him, the ASSU came to represent “this special thing that is created by administrators to interface with students in a way that they can

control.” He was particularly bothered by the fact that Nanci Howe, the director of Students Activities and Leadership, would, according to him, sit in on Senate meetings and unduly influence the agenda. The ASSU was specifically created, according to its constitution, in part to “encourage responsible citizenship and the exercise of individual and corporate responsibility on the part of students in the government of student affairs and activities,” and to do so in a manner “free from control or suspension by Stanford University.” And for the most part, it is independent, yet Mouzykantskii still believed it did not provide him ample opportunity to enact the change on campus he sought.

FOHO, REINCARNATED The summer of 2014 quickly flew by, and as Mouzykantskii prepared to return to Stanford for his junior year, he says he stumbled upon a TechCrunch article titled, “Why Everyone Is Obsessed With E-Mail Newsletters Right Now.” The article essentially argues that, in August of 2014, email newsletters from all sorts of traditionally web-based publications were experiencing a rise in popularity, and it outlines reasons why it believes publishers and readers alike are drawn to this method of information delivery. “I read this and I’m like, ‘Huh, very interesting.’ And so I begin thinking about what this could look like in the course of a publication,” Mouzykantskii recalls. So, once again, he convened a group of his friends — this time to bring the Fountain Hopper back as an email newsletter. Not only did Mouzykantskii already have some experience in student journalism from Confessions and the original Fountain Hopper, but he also had professional journalism experience — during high school he twice interned with the New York Times in their Moscow bureau. In fact, it was these two internships that got Mouzykantskii into Stanford (which he claims he knows as a fact because he was able to look at his admissions file via a legal loophole he discovered and would report

on in his new, very own email newsletter). However, although the publication would eventually become a quasi-news outlet reporting stories such as the aforementioned one, Mouzykantskii says he was actually not thinking of it in that way at the time of its conception. “The focus here was not news,” Mouzykantskii declares. “The focus here was utility.” “You want to create a publication, a product, that has a couple mantras. The first one is you got to respect eyeballs. You got to respect your readers. You can’t just throw trash at them. You have to understand that a Stanford student’s time is valuable. You’ve got to give them reasons to click on it, and they can’t be clickbait reasons; they have to be high-value reasons. My way into this was writing about things at Stanford you didn’t know that could essentially save you money. It was a consumer-focused publication.” Indeed, if you look back at FoHo #1, you’ll see headlines like “Cheap Car Rental At Stanford From 15$/Day” and “Super Shuttle Discount Code,” detailing ways in which Stanford students can be frugal just like Mouzykantskii was when he switched his health insurance plan. In addition to these socalled “Stanford Hacks,” FoHo #1 also originally included a news digest of all Stanford-related stories. “The way it worked,” Mouzykantskii explains, was, “I would read all the news with the word Stanford in it (I had a Google News alert set up), digest it, and spit it out in as concentrated a form as possible.” The intention was, he says, “By reading Fountain Hopper, you don’t have to read anything else.” FoHo #1, to Mouzykantskii’s and his friends’ surprise, was very successful, he says. Mouzykantskii claims that 90 percent of people who received the first email (which he once claimed was upward of 10,000 Stanford affiliates) opened it and presumably read it. That same TechCrunch article may help to explain why the medium of delivery was so important. One of the reasons it argues that email newsletters are so popular is that “readers pay more attention to email.” As the author of the article notes, “While it might be harder to get people to fork over their email addresses than it is to get them to like or follow something, once you do, they’re much more likely to actually pay attention, and you can reach more people in the long run.” But Mouzykantskii and his friends even cleared that obstacle of getting people to “fork over” email addresses by instead just obtaining Stanford emails and autosubscribing them to their mailing list. Though Mouzykantskii would not comment on the specifics of how they logistically went about doing this, he remains adamant that Stanford’s community use policy was not broken in the process as the emails are individually publicly available on the web. (University spokespeople have repeatedly criticized the Fountain Hopper’s distribution practice, though it is common for other student organizations to also send emails to recipients within the campus community who haven’t opted in previously.) The subsequent few editions of the new Fountain Hopper email newsletter largely mirrored the format of the first. That is until FoHo #9 — “EXCLUSIVE: PROF ASSAULTS STUDENT AT FRAT PARTY, COURSERANK CLOSES, AND MORE STANFORD NEWS YOU CAN USE.” In FoHo #9, Mouzykantskii and his collaborators were the first to report on the now-well-known-on-campus Caroline Hoxby/ Kappa Sigma story, detailing how the professor allegedly entered the fraternity at night, attempted to turn off its music by cutting a speaker’s wires with garden shears, and assaulted a member of the fraternity.

As Mouzykantskii recalls, “Someone wrote us a tip; we biked over there; someone had a video. We saw the video and were like, ‘Whoa, that’s not meant to happen.’ And we wrote about [it] a couple of hours later.” “It was not exactly highbrow news, but it’s what people want to read,” he states, repeating again, “It’s what people want to read.” In Mouzykantskii’s opinion, “This is sort of when we graduated into being a news publication… We took our reporting much more seriously.” Following FoHo #9, he says the Fountain Hopper began expanding its team, bringing in more reporters to help investigate the increasing amount of tips they would receive.

SEEDS OF A FUTURE FOHO One of those students that eventually made their way onto the Fountain Hopper’s team was Emma Johanningsmeier ’18. A Nebraska native, Johanningsmeier was actively involved in her high school student newspaper, rising to be its editor in chief before her graduation. It just so happened that Johanningsmeier’s arrival at Stanford in September of 2014 coincided with the Fountain Hopper’s, and discovering the newsletter in her inbox piqued her interest. “It was just something so different,” she tells Stanford Politics. “It was cool, and it was really mysterious. You would get these emails and they had yellow highlighting and things in red and silver, and none of the people in my dorm knew where it was coming from.” Johanningsmeier says she was so intrigued by this new publication that she actually sent an email to the Fountain Hopper asking if she could get involved. But she never received a response, so, instead, she joined the Stanford Daily her sophomore year with the hopes of revitalizing her student journalism career. After spending the year writing some news and occasional features, Johanningsmeier, who has since written during internships for the Omaha World-Herald and the Wall Street Journal, says she decided The Daily wasn’t the best fit for her and sought to join the Fountain Hopper yet again. Junior year, she began getting more involved with the Fountain Hopper, serving in her view essentially as a copy editor and helping out with reporting on the side. Much like when Mouzykantskii biked over to Kappa Sigma chasing his Hoxby tip, there is one particular moment Johanningsmeier recalls that she began to really appreciate the Fountain Hopper’s reporting reach on campus. “I remember I got a call one morning my junior year that was like, ‘Hey, the corrupt ex-president of Peru spotted hanging out in CoHo [a campus coffee shop]. Can you go look for him?’ So I kind of dropped everything and spent a whole day looking for this guy, trying to figure out where his office was, which is ridiculous and funny but also kind of cool that there is a publication at Stanford that does this kind of stuff,” she recounts. The Fountain Hopper newsletter remained written, albeit anonymously, by Mouzykantskii for its first two years, after which the founder handed the reigns over and graduated from the University. At the beginning of this year, Johanningsmeier took over as the anonymous editor and author of the Fountain Hopper, taking over from another individual who asked not to be named in this piece and who had run it for a year with far less fanfare than during Mouzykantskii’s or Johanningsmeier’s tenures.

“The focus here was not news. The focus was utility.”

FOUNTAIN HOPPER

THE FOHO’S HIGHS AND LOWS

BIGGEST SCOOPS BROCK TURNER & EMILY DOE In Jan. 2015, thanks to some investigative work, the FoHo was the first publication to reveal that a star Stanford swimmer was accused of rape on campus. The story became an international headline, with many professional outlets citing the FoHo’s initial report. The FoHo continued to cover developments in the case and three years later also broke the story that Stanford University didn’t want to use the words that were suggested by Turner’s victim for the new plaque at the site of the incident. The latter reporting ultimately led to public pressure for Provost Drell to reveal what quotations were rejected — in favor of the University’s desired “I’m okay, everything’s okay” — and why.

FERPA ADMISSIONS FILES

DISABILITY LAWSUIT

In Jan. and Feb. of 2015, the FoHo published a series of newsletters detailing a legal loophole in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which enables students to request and access any and all files the University has on them, including, most notably, their previously-private admissions files. The story garnered much national attention, including in the New York Times, Fox News, and Buzzfeed News, and it led students at other schools, including Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, to exploit the same loophole with their admissions offices. Ultimately, it led Stanford and many other universities to change their practices and begin to destroy past admissions records so students would no longer be able to access them as the FoHo showed they could.

Just a few weeks ago, the FoHo broke yet another story that could very well end up having massive consequences for the University and for students. In FoHo #63, published on May 17, 2018, the FoHo described a federal class-action lawsuit, filed by three Stanford students and a student-run mental health coalition, accusing the University of “systemically mistreating students suffering from severe mental health issues,” in alleged violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Aside from a note at the beginning that “this is a truly nasty story” and a short, demarcated paragraph at the end offering the FoHo’s “take,” the story avoided editorializing its news content the way it has typically done in the past, a testament to the story’s importance, gravity, and sensitivity.

A DIFFERENCE ON OPINION In FoHo #9, Mouzykantskii didn’t just write about the Hoxby incident, he infused his own criticisms of the University into it. The report explicitly and implicitly argues that Stanford should have temporarily suspended the professor from teaching until the corresponding investigations had concluded. It declares: “If Caroline Hoxby was a Stanford student (and not a professor), the University would come down on her like a ton of bricks. FoHo does not think professors injuring students is OK. FoHo also thinks you have the right to know and Stanford has the obligation to tell.” Such jabs at the University aren’t unique to FoHo #9 — in fact, they’re integral to the identity of the newsletter. Though he originally conceived the Fountain Hopper as a consumer-focused publication, Mouzykantskii still believed, as he described earlier in our interview when discussing his motivation to join student government, that “there’s a bunch of shit that’s fucked up [at Stanford].” As the Fountain Hopper took on its newfound reporting role, it also took on more and more of an anti-establishment stance. Mouzykantskii, speaking on behalf of the publication he founded

but is no longer in charge of, declares, “We see our goal as educating Stanford students that all is not well in this green paradise and that the reasons that things are not well, generally speaking, have names; they are administrators that have names.” Mouzykantskii himself was skeptical of the Stanford administration dating back to his issue with the health-insurance. That experience opened his eyes, he says, to the fact that, in his opinion, “Stanford Inc. does not work in the interests of the people paying in.” “Any place where there’s a lot of money, you’re going to have unsavory things happen, and no one at Stanford,” until the arrival of the Fountain Hopper, Mouzykantskii states, “was trying to figure out what those unsavory things were.” The Fountain Hopper’s most defining feature, the very characteristic that allows it to criticize the Stanford administration in its news coverage, is what Mouzykantskii calls “the special blend” — the way it employs a sarcastic, casual tone to mix reporting and editorializing. The reason the Fountain Hopper’s tone may seem so conversational, he explains, is because, originally at least, it really was based off conversation. “The way that I initially wrote news for FoHo was I would sit down and tell the story to a friend across a table with a timer. I would want to illustrate as colorfully and succinctly as possible what the issue is and

BIGGEST BLOOPS MED SCHOOL LAB POISONING

CLASS PRESIDENT COVER UP

ATTACK ON THE STANFORD DAILY

In Mar. 2015, the FoHo collaborated with Vice News to break a story involving a student at Stanford’s School of Medicine who was found poisoning her labmates’ with paraformaldehyde. The story represented yet another massive FoHo scoop; however, unlike Vice’s version, the FoHo published the name of the alleged perpetrator and the names of the victims in its newsletter. Vice explained at the bottom of their story that they chose to omit names “out of respect for the privacy of all involved,” a common journalistic practice for stories of this nature. “The victims of this case,” Vice specifically noted, “requested that their names not be released, citing concerns for their families and their careers.” The FoHo unsympathetically did not follow suit.

This past Nov., the FoHo alleged that University officials “covered up” and did not adequately punish the class of 2018’s student presidents for purportedly engaging in an “illegal initiation” after they were elected the previous academic year that involved getting their selected cabinet drunk, putting those people in the back of a U-Haul truck, and then accidentally crashing the U-Haul truck, injuring several. The FoHo’s report generated a list of significant contestations from those involved, all detailed in a Stanford Daily piece published only a couple days after the FoHo’s original report. Above all, The Daily story makes clear that the class presidents were put under social probation by the University and required to undergo risk-management training, contradicting a central claim of the FoHo’s scoop.

In Feb. 2017, the FoHo attacked the Stanford Daily’s recent coverage of a University controversy, alleging that campus newspaper was “KOWTOWING TO STANFORD’S ADMIN[ISTRATION]” because it takes money from the University in a way that compromises its independence. The attacks generated a response from The Daily’s editorial board that, in part, involved them explaining the details of their financial arrangements and how such do not, in their opinion, compromise their independence. The FoHo could have easily obtained that information prior to publishing, either by reaching out to Daily staff or by simply researching The Daily’s publiclyavailable non-profit data, but if they had, the story might have read very differently and would have likely lost its angle altogether.

why you should care about it… Then I would take that recording and transcribe it, and that would form the basis of the text that would later be edited.” For Mouzykantskii, this method was another way he could ensure he was capturing people’s eyeballs and not wasting their time. Writing the Fountain Hopper in such “colorful” language certainly makes it more entertaining to read than a typical Stanford Daily story is. Even Johanningsmeier, whose vision for the Fountain Hopper is often at odds with Mouzykantskii’s, justifies her continuation of his rhetorical style: “My goal with the publication is to provide news to our subscribers. That’s always been the primary purpose of the publication, but in order to get our subscribers to care about the news and in order to keep them reading our publication, we have to maintain this tone.” From the onset of the publication, Mouzykantskii says he knew that “this was always going to be the way that Fountain Hopper delivered information.” He says he had seen the style used successfully in another context. The Tab, a British tabloid-style publication by and for university students, Mouzykantskii says, was the one publication that most served as a basis for the Fountain Hopper. Though Mouzykantskii came to Stanford from Russia, he previously lived in Cambridge, England, where he had the opportunity to become familiar with these sorts of publications.

“It’s in your face, it’s aggressive, it’s attention seeking,” Mouzykantskii describes The Tab and other similar British publications, “and it works really really well in terms of doing the job it’s meant to do, which is checks and balances.” As the editor of the Fountain Hopper this year, however, Johanningsmeier has tried to focus more on original reporting than commentary. “I’m not categorically condemning opinion-writing in the FoHo,” she says. “I think that there is a place for it; I think it can be useful even if it’s just a line at the end of a story saying, ‘FoHo thinks this is--,’ but I’ve really tried to focus on the reporting.” Mouzykantskii, on the other hand, says he is aware of criticisms surrounding the tabloid-style of journalism — when mixing fact and opinion, it may be easy for readers to confuse the two and form skewed perceptions — but he says is not as worried about this happening. “I respect Stanford students,” he says. “I respect their intelligence. I think that, by and large, they’re pretty bright, and I believe that they are able to extract what they need to extract from the Fountain Hopper, be that facts or opinion.” “Yes, we have opinions,” he emphasizes, “but I trust you to be able to tell what a fact is and what an opinion is.” Perhaps Mouzykantskii is right — maybe the Fountain Hopper’s readers can indeed tell the difference. Once more, there’s nothing inherently wrong with mixing opinion and reporting; most

FOUNTAIN HOPPPER professional magazine features do just that. The larger issue with this style of journalism is that, if not held to a thorough and high standard, it can sometimes sideskirt facts and critical nuance in favor of making a point. This may only be magnified in the context of the Fountain Hopper, which not only strives to deliver agenda-driven news in an entertaining fashion, but to also do so quickly. It’s not hard to imagine how the urge to deliver news “as colorfully and succinctly as possible” could lead to difficult decisions over which facts and perspectives to include and which to not. Often, the Fountain Hopper’s desire to express its anti-establishment stance — whether that be aimed at the Stanford Daily, student government, or its most frequent target, the University administration — has seemed to lead to journalistic shortcomings in its reporting. Multiple Fountain Hopper pieces in the past four years have been either contested by the subjects of the stories or called out for skimming over key details. By taking shortcuts — sometimes failing to confirm purported facts — the Fountain Hopper is able to break more stories, though sometimes at the sacrifice of their readers’ true informedness. The campus news cycle has essentially reached a sort of equilibrium whereby the Fountain Hopper breaks a story (and often provides its opinion, based only on the facts it chooses to report), and then

writers from the Stanford Daily later provide a slower, often more comprehensive, look on the story sans editorializing. The problem with this sequence of events is that the Fountain Hopper, by regularly being the first publication to tell a story, can have an undue, slanted influence on people’s perception of certain events. Not as many people are as likely to read whatever follow-up is published by The Daily, and though the Fountain Hopper has printed some corrections in the past they only seem to come, if at all, a good amount of time after the initial story has been published, rendering their ability to inform less effective. This is not to say that the Fountain Hopper does not meaningfully inform the campus. It has certainly brought to light some of the biggest, most important stories of the last few years, and its investigative work has been lauded, including in a previous Stanford Politics piece, as superior to that of The Daily. Most recently, the Fountain Hopper broke news of a lawsuit brought against Stanford for alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Perhaps due to the seriousness of the story in question, or maybe speaking to the goals of the Fountain Hopper’s current editor, the report avoided editorializing almost entirely and just let the story speak for itself. Johanningsmeier, who Stanford Politics has deemed one of this year’s most influential undergraduates, says, “I think that I’ve done less editorializing than [previous editors of the Fountain Hopper] did in the past, and I’ve really tried to focus on the reporting side.” She says that, in her view, “if we have to resort to opinion writing in FoHo, then there isn’t enough content; the content should speak for itself.” Nevertheless, even as Johanningsmeier has tried to make the Fountain Hopper a more legitimate journalistic outfit, the publication remains, above all, committed to accountability journalism — that is, reporting aimed at holding those in power accountable. It comes as no surprise then that the University is not a fan.

UNACCOUNTABLE ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

Emma Johanningsmeier, this year’s editor of the Fountain Hopper, has worked to take the publication in a more journalistic direction.

The University’s largest qualm with the Fountain Hopper, in the words of outgoing Vice President of University Communications Lisa Lapin, is its anonymity. Lapin told Stanford Politics that the University has a strict policy of not responding to “individuals, blogs or news organizations that do not identify themselves, operate anonymously, that do not identify their writers or editors, do not attribute sources of the information they publish, and that have no accountability to their audiences for the accuracy of the content they publish.” Some of these concerns have also been shared by the Stanford Daily’s editorial board.On its selective and unattributed sourcing, they wrote, “This means, at any given time, The FoHo is only

privy to one perspective (its side, or the side of its sources). You may agree with this perspective, but you should nonetheless be concerned. This means that if you take everything written in The FoHo at face value, your understanding will only ever be half-complete.” To be fair to the Fountain Hopper, a significant number of their tips do come, they say (and it can often be inferred), from lower-level University administrators (many of whom are also included on the Fountain Hopper’s mailing list). Nevertheless, Fountain Hopper readers never receive the University’s official comments or statement regarding any of their stories until The Daily usually publishes a follow-up piece, letting attacks on the University (which are frequent in the Fountain Hopper) go unaddressed when shaping first impressions about a story. The University’s policy does have ramifications, but the rationale for that policy may actually be grounded in widely-accepted journalistic standards. It’s useful to look to the Society of Professional Journalists’ (SPJ) Code of Ethics. SPJ is, in its own words, “the nation’s most broadbased journalism organization, dedicated to encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior.” Indeed, its Code of Ethics is widely accepted across the journalism world as the definitive guidebook for how to ensure one’s work remains accurate, fair, thorough, and, ultimately, ethical. A number of the Fountain Hopper’s practices do come at odds with some of the principles outlined in the Code of Ethics. The Code of Ethics, which Lapin herself cites, states that journalists should “seek the truth and report it” in part by “remember[ing] that neither speed nor format excuse inaccuracy.” Though this specific point is not referenced in the University’s policy towards the Fountain Hopper, it nevertheless still applies to the publication. The Fountain Hopper’s desire to deliver the news as “colorfully and succinctly as possible” could potentially lead to, and arguably has in the past, the publication of information that is not necessarily inaccurate, but surely at least incomplete. The past of the Code that Lapin does reference is its encouragement of journalists to “identify sources clearly” and “be accountable and transparent” by, in part, “abid[ing] by the same high standards they expect of others.” On both these fronts, the Fountain Hopper clearly struggles. The Fountain Hopper almost always attributes many of its scoops to unnamed “tipsters.” To be clear, it’s unreasonable for the University, or for us, to expect the Fountain Hopper (or any publication for that matter) to name all of its sources. As the Code of Ethics makes clear in one of its position papers, anonymous sources have a long and important history in journalism for they are “sometimes the only key to unlocking that big story, throwing back the curtain on corruption, fulfilling the journalistic missions of watchdog on the government and informant to the citizens.” Even so, it also makes clear that journalists should only grant anonymity in a unique set of circumstances, such as if the magnitude of the story necessitates it or if the source may genuinely face tangible repercussions because of the fact that they shared crucial information with a reporter. And, even when a source is granted anonymity, the

Code states that “the reporter owes it to the readers to identify the source as clearly as possible without pointing a figure at the person who has been granted anonymity.” In the Fountain Hopper’s case, this would likely involve saying something like “a University administrator within the Office of Community Standards told the Fountain Hopper that--” or “a member of the aforementioned fraternity stated that--.” The Fountain Hopper very rarely does this sort of labeling and thus leaves its readers to speculate about whatever motives the source may have had in speaking to the Fountain Hopper or whether the source is even credible to begin with. Both Mouzykantskii and Johanningsmeier told Stanford Politics that they spend many hours thinking hard about sources’ motivations when pursuing a story, but that fact is still not at all communicated to the readers. The almost guaranteed anonymity tipsters receive from the Fountain Hopper is likely one of the things that encourages people to go to them with information, but the Fountain Hopper’s relentless pursuit of information in maintaining this practice undeniably contends with widely-held journalistic norms aimed to best inform readers. Moreover, on top of rarely identifying sources to the fullest extent possible, the Fountain Hopper also remains an anonymous publication, making them mostly unaccountable to their readers. (It should be noted that Lapin does know that Johanningsmeier is the editor but takes issue with the fact that her authorship of the newsletter is not made public.) Journalists aim, in large part, to encourage public scrutiny of different persons and organizations; however, to ensure consistent accuracy from those in the profession, they too must be held under the same public scrutiny. It’s difficult for Fountain Hopper readers to do this because the vast majority of them don’t know who’s delivering them the news. When asked why the Fountain Hopper remains an anonymous publication, Mouzykantskii states, “because it’s much easier to have an affinity relationship with a brand than with a person.” He believed that in order for the Fountain Hopper to successfully continue after his graduation from Stanford, he had to build the publication’s brand around “mantras and beliefs,” not around a person. Johanningsmeier similarly offers that “the primary purpose of the anonymity is not to protect myself.” The anonymity, she says, “really has much more to do with the mystique. Honestly, no one is interested in reading Emma Johanningsmeier’s newsletter, right?” “There is a mystique about FoHo,” continues Johanningsmeier, who earlier cited the mystique as part of what attracted her to the publication in the first place, “and part of that comes from the anonymity. I think that putting a name on it would diminish the mystique quite a bit.” Is the University right to insist on full transparency for all of the Fountain Hopper’s sources? No. It’s not difficult to imagine the Fountain Hopper granting anonymity to a University employee who fears employmentrelated consequences for leaking information about the administration. However, it is perfectly reasonable to ask for more transparency, specifically by way of identifying sources to the largest extent possible,

It’s not hard to imagine how the urge to deliver news “as colorfully and succinctly as possible” could lead to difficult decisions over which facts and perspectives to include and which to not.

FOUNTAIN HOPPPER and even by revealing the Fountain Hopper’s editor and team of reporters. The Fountain Hopper’s current practices may get more people interested in and reading the newsletter but that comes at the cost of their reliability as a news source.

***

When elaborating on the new directions she’s hoped to take the Fountain Hopper, in addition to emphasizing the reporting side, Johanningsmeier states, “Something that I’ve tried to do is establish The FoHo as a publication people can trust. I don’t think people have always seen The FoHo as a publication they could trust, or at least not everyone has. And I’m sure part of that comes from the image of this sort of tabloid-esque newsletter and the fact that most of our sources remain anonymous.” Yet, many individuals on campus, whether they be students, teachers, or administrators, do trust the Fountain Hopper enough to continue going to them with tips — it’s what enables the Fountain Hopper to break the stories it does. Simultaneously, however, there are those on campus, Lisa Lapin included, who don’t trust the Fountain Hopper for the exact reasons Johanningsmeier outlines. The Fountain Hopper thus currently finds itself at a critical juncture in its history as a news source. There is undoubtedly a higher level of accountability at Stanford because of the muckraking work of Ilya Mouzykantskii and Emma Johanningsmeier. But just because the Fountain Hopper has been widely successful beyond Mouzykantskii’s original dreams doesn’t mean it can’t still be better. In the same way the Fountain Hopper has taught us to think critically about and question the Stanford administration’s actions, we must also think critically about this publication that has risen to such prominence on our campus. A number of the Fountain Hopper’s tendencies, such as it’s anonymity and its unconventional tone, were specifically designed to keep people engaged with the publication (and quite successfully did so). But those same factors may now collide with its growing desire to successfully and ethically serve as the main watchdog of the Stanford administration. Is the Fountain Hopper better as an advocate or as an investigator and informer? Does it have to choose one or can it perform both? Does employing a tabloid-style tone and too easily granting anonymity to sources compromise its journalism? Would people still want to read the Fountain Hopper and provide it with tips if it loses the very qualities that set it apart? The Fountain Hopper has a number of directions it can go from here — it can revert to its tabloid-style, advocacy-oriented origins, or it can make efforts to do more legitimate journalism. Ultimately, its future staff (as well as current and future readers) must decide what they want the Fountain Hopper to be. Lucas Rodriguez, a junior studying economics and political Lucas Rodriguez, a junior studying economics and political science, is a senior staff writer for Stanford Politics.

science, is a senior staff writer for Stanford Politics.

POLITICOS the most influential undergraduates at Stanford

POLITICOS

2017-2018 POLITICOS At the end of every year, Stanford Politics highlights a number of undergraduates of impact, the “Politicos.” In the past, these Politicos have hailed from campus media organizations, activist groups, student government, and more. This year, we received more nominations of people to consider than we have ever before. After interviewing a shortlist of over 30 nominees, our editorial board has decided to recognize the following list of ten individuals and groups — profiled below by members of the staff of Stanford Politics — as this year’s most influential undergraduates at Stanford. As a non-partisan publication, Stanford Politics does not endorse any particular agenda held by any of the Politicos.

John David Rice-Cameron Sophomore, History and Economics

John David Rice-Cameron, or “JRC,” is one of the most talked-about students at Stanford. A number of rumors surround his persona as a rightwing ideologue, many of which are untrue. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Rice-Cameron, who Stanford Politics has profiled more extensively, is indeed a figurehead for and leader of a movement to redefine campus conservatism. He has helped to organize the hosting of controversial speakers at Stanford — from the alleged Islamophobe Robert Spencer this past fall to Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk just last week. Additionally, in January, Rice-Cameron co-wrote a widely-criticized article in the Stanford Review, in which he accused a Stanford professor of being a “ring-leader” of a “violent domestic terrorist movement” and called for the professor’s resignation. (The professor responded by labeling Rice-Cameron’s work as “right-wing propaganda” and “yellow journalism.”) Rice-Cameron’s conservative politics are all the more intriguing when one considers that his mother is former Obama administration National Security Advisor and US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice ’86. However, as many children of well-known figures spend much of their lives trying to do, RiceCameron has succeeded already in his short time at Stanford to establish an identity based on his own efforts and achievements and not his parentage. And as the recently-appointed president of Stanford College Republicans, Rice-Cameron has even more potential to continue his mission to Make Stanford Great Again.

Nani Friedman Sophomore, Urban Studies

John Yiyang Zhao Senior, Environmental Systems Engineering

Courtney Pal

Senior, Earth Systems and Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity

Nani Friedman, Courtney Pal, and John Zhao are not the official leaders of the advocacy group Stanford Coalition for Planning an Equitable 2035, more commonly referred to as SCoPE 2035 or just SCOPE. SCOPE doesn’t actually have official leaders, or even position titles. Nevertheless, Nani, Courtney, and John were nominated by several of their peers to be considered as some of the most influential undergraduates this year for the work they’ve done as committed and effective mobilizers within the organization. Before SCOPE, which was born out of a Housing Justice Research Lab class project in the fall of 2016, most students hadn’t heard of Stanford’s General Use Permit (GUP) application for expanded campus development. SCOPE sought to change that. Through education and advocacy efforts, the student group (in partnership with the campus chapter of the Service Employees International Union) aimed to highlight, and ultimately mitigate, what they believe would be unjust environmental, transportation, labor, and housing impacts of the University’s expansion plans on Stanford’s workers and other marginalized members of the local community. Their work — from hosting town halls, teach-ins, and visible demonstrations to compiling research, attending public

meetings, and formally submitting feedback to Santa Clara County — has made SCOPE one of the best organized grassroots groups in this field. SCOPE recently released their official policy platform, a lengthy document of wonky ideas on how Stanford’s development can be more equitable. The platform reads less like a piece of campus activism and more like a thinktank report. SCOPE proved to be one of the rare groups that can effectively bridge both on-campus and off-campus activism, blending esoteric policy with political action. Not to mention, SCOPE is not the only avenue for these three student’s activism. Among other things, John is a former co-president of the environmental group Students for a Sustainable Stanford (SSS), and Courtney has been an associate of the Outdoor Education Program for two years. John and Courtney also served as undergraduate representatives in the ‘Beyond Stanford’ steering group for the University’s Long-Range Planning process, and John was a member of the University Committee on Land and Building Development.

POLITICOS

03 Zina Jawadi & Bryce Tuttle Senior, Biology

In recent years, thanks to the work of many advocates, but particularly that of Zina Jawadi and Bryce Tuttle, the disability community has become a more visible and politically effective force on campus. Zina and Bryce founded the Stanford Disability Initiative this year, building on their extensive histories of disabilityrelated work on campus. Both have previously served as presidents of Power2ACT, Stanford’s disability advocacy group; both have served as Disability Lead for the student government (ASSU) executive cabinet; and both now serve as chairs on the Disability Initiative’s board. Zina, who became Disability Lead in 2016, worked with administrators to establish a permanent physical space for the disability community on campus — a venture that Bryce finalized with her once he joined her as a Disability Co-Lead last spring. Their work paid off this past November with the launch of the Abilities Hub (A-Hub), Stanford’s first disability community center. In an interview with Stanford Politics, Zina explained that the center acts as a safe space for people with visible and invisible disabilities alike, as well as allies. Through it, she says, the disability community can finally “raise a voice” on campus. In their work with the Stanford Disability Initiative, Zina and Bryce have amplified that “voice” even further. This year, in collaboration with other Disability Initiative

Sophomore, Political Science

board members, the two authored five Long-Range Planning (LRP) proposals on topics from the value of the Office of Accessible Education (OAE), to long-term plans for A-Hub, to campus social life accessibility and course accessibility. Their goal, Zina describes, is to push Stanford to be more proactive than reactive about issues of disability. As chair of the Academic Scholarship Committee for the Disability Initiative, Bryce says he’s proudest of his successful campaign to get renewed funding for a new disability studies course on campus, “Introduction to Disability Studies and Disability Rights.” Together, Zina and Bryce have changed the campus climate surrounding disability. Two years ago, Bryce tells Stanford Politics, no one was thinking about disability as an issue on campus. But now, he says, “people are paying attention” — a change to which this year’s A-Hub launch, Zina’s and Bryce’s outreach efforts with ASSU senators and University administrators, the founding of the Diversity Initiative, and the first iteration of a disabilities studies course have all surely contributed.

Hamzeh Daoud Sophomore, International Relations

Hamzeh Daoud has been an active leader in both the ASSU Senate and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), championing a number of high-profile movements on behalf of the international student and Muslim student communities. Notably, in the Senate, Hamzeh, who grew up in Jordan, advocated for a widely popular need-blind admissions and aid policy for international applicants. To support this, he co-authored and circulated a petition that garnered more than 1,000 signatures from across the community, and he gathered more than 100 personal narratives from international students to further substantiate it. While he initially viewed the demand as a long-shot, he met with both President Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Drell in an effort to include it in their long-term planning process, an effort that was ultimately successful. Hamzeh told Stanford Politics that Tessier-Lavigne

was “very responsive and personally vouches that a need-blind admission policy is among the top three priorities he will advocate for in the long-range planning process,” something TessierLavigne reiterated publicly just a few days after our interview with Hamzeh. While “it cannot happen overnight,” TessierLavigne said about the initiative during a presentation on their vision for Stanford’s future, “it’s something we want to do, and it’s something that we need to do.” As one of two Muslim senators, Hamzeh also led the senate in drafting and passing a resolution condemning Robert Spencer, a self-described “Islamophobe” who spoke at Stanford in November. Hamzeh was personally denounced by Spencer on his blog Jihad Watch. Nevertheless, Hamzeh made clear to both the public and to Stanford Politics

that he was not originally opposed to Spencer’s right to visit campus, affirming his commitment to freedom of expression. He says he only became opposed after the contract between the speaker and the school was purportedly broken. Hamzeh also gave a spoken-word performance at the well-attended campus counter-rally to Spencer’s visit. Hamzeh, who has been described to Stanford Politics as a role model by multiple members of the Muslim student community, has also worked with SJP to promote Palestinian narratives, and he participated in a widely-seen, on-campus protest following Trump’s designation of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Hamzeh, who hopes to become a human rights lawyer, is currently studying at the Stanford in New York program this spring while he simultaneously works an internship with the New York City Commision on Human Rights; he will work this summer as a Stanford in Government fellow with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.

POLITICOS

Hattie Gawande Senior, Economics

Shivani Pampati Senior, Public Policy

Kinsey Morrison

Senior, International Relations

At Stanford’s activities fair every year, one might notice the many political organizations and the handful of various “Stanford Women in…” clubs (Stanford Women in Business, Stanford Women in Computer Science, etc.). But until a few years ago, there was not a single organization that explicitly catered to female-identifying students interested in politics. Hattie, Shivani, and Kinsey — who have all been involved in student government, local and national politics, and/or community organizing — decided to change that. The three women decided to create their own club, Stanford Women in Politics (SWIP), an organization designed to uplift, inspire, and empower a previously overlooked community on campus: women motivated to get involved in government and to support other women’s involvement in government. In an interview with Stanford Politics, Shivani made clear that SWIP is “not just for networking, it’s not just to meet people,” but rather “it’s to have this community of people who think like you and want to do things like you that you can always fall back on.” Since its inception in 2016, SWIP has undergone the typical growing pains associated with starting a new organization on campus, including low member retention and difficulties in acquiring funding. This year, however, it appears as though the club has hit its stride, even winning a ‘Campus Impact Award’ for being “transformative of the University community.” With about 200 community members and a core group of 30 women, the group has been able to host impressive events, including a highly-attended conversation with Danica Roem, the first transgender woman elected to a state legislature seat. Additionally, the group has secured a sizable grant to better pursue their goals. They’ve already worked to develop an internship program, which will begin next year, and in the coming years, the women told Stanford Politics, they hope to create a mentorship program, which they plan to be involved with as alumni, within the organization. After they graduate this June, these three women will take their political zeal beyond Stanford to congressional campaigns and fellowships in local government, but they all hope to stay connected with SWIP, advising the next wave of campus politicos. A

06 Emma

POLITICOS

Johanningsmeier Senior, Comparative Literature and Italian Studies The Fountain Hopper, or FoHo, is likely the most-read email newsletter at Stanford. However, from its origins as a tabloid-esque gossip and campus life hacks provider to its growing reputation as a source for hard-hitting investigative reporting, the Fountain Hopper is at an inflection point in its existence. Emma, the anonymous editor behind the Fountain Hopper this year and an aspiring journalist who has interned with the Omaha WorldHerald and the Wall Street Journal, has pushed to take the popular unofficial student publication in a more journalistic direction. The Fountain Hopper, which Stanford Politics has written about more extensively, has broken a number of important stories this year, often about administrative corruption or impropriety. And although the Fountain Hopper still struggles to employ basic journalistic ethical norms — including separating news from opinion as well as identifying sources — it has certainly become an important force of accountability reporting on campus.

Gabe Rosen

Junior, Public Policy

Most student government (ASSU) senators are disenchanted with the role by the end of their first terms and few run for reelection. That’s far from the case with Gabe Rosen, who was recently elected a third time in a row. As appropriations chair both this past session and the next, Rosen has been instrumental in overseeing the implementation of ASSU funding reform, including a complete overhaul of the way student groups get grants. Funding clubs is, after all, the primary responsibility of the elected body. When he was a first-term senator, Rosen says, he saw the then-appropriations chair have to pull $100,000 from the group’s reserves to make ends meet. Under Rosen’s subsequent leadership, he’s sought to ensure that the guidelines the Senate has in place are followed more strictly, and he’s successfully not just stayed under budget but also stemmed the trend of rising annual grants, ultimately saving every student from an exorbitantly rising (more so than at the rate of inflation) ASSU fee. Furthermore, as Rosen begins his second consecutive term as the only returning senator, he brings institutional memory and knowledge to the body, guiding new senators in best practices that he’s witnessed throughout the years, particularly as it pertains to funding. Lastly, in a role separate from student government but nonetheless political, Rosen has served as president of Stanford Democrats, bringing (among others) California gubernatorial candidates Antonio Villaraigosa and Delaine Eastin to campus. A consistent Politico, this is Rosen’s second appearance on Stanford Politics’ ‘most influential undergraduates’ list.

Kimiko Hirota Sophomore, Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity

Kimiko Hirota has made a name for herself on campus by bridging the gap between activist groups and student government, working, as she puts it, “both inside and outside the system.” She has become an important voice on campus regarding both funding and resources for community centers as well as how to support survivors of sexual violence. Her involvement on campus is extensive: She was a senator on the 19th Undergraduate Senate, a member of the ASSU Sexual Violence Coalition, and the organizer of the Community Center Coalition campaign, as well as a member of the Stanford Asian American Activism Committee and a member of the Students for the Liberation of All People. Perhaps her most wellknown work is in the service of community centers on campus, coordinating meetings between the leaders of the community centers to develop an organized campaign to

persuade the Vice Provost of Student Affairs to increase funding and resources for the community centers. Hirota and the other organizers of the Community Center Coalition Committee are currently waiting for a response to their proposal. Her work as a Senator also cannot be ignored; she wrote and passed a bill to ensure that the Senate acts as an advocate for sexual violence survivors and recommends changes to the Title IX reporting processes.The potent mix of both working directly with Stanford’s administration, such as through the Senate, as well as organizing direct action — such as the prison divestment campaign during Homecoming Weekend, the Robert Spencer walkout, and the Charles Murray counter-rally — has made Hirota a powerful force on campus when it comes to effecting change.

POLITICOS

Alexis Kallen Senior, Political Science

Last year, Alexis Kallen was awarded a prestigious Truman Scholarship, and this year as a senior, she received a Rhodes Scholarship to pursue graduate study at the University of Oxford. But Alexis is much more than her accolades. Most notably, Alexis is the mind behind Stanford’s Scary Path Task Force. “Scary Path” was an unlit, unpaved 528-foot path, winding amongst looming trees between two Stanford fraternities near the location of where the infamous Brock Turner rape occurred. Upon walking along this path at the beginning of her freshman year and feeling scared for her safety, Alexis immediately began what turned into a two-year campaign to make “Scary Path” less scary. After assembling a team of advocates from across various campus communities, attracting national media attention to the issue, and spending countless hours working with administrators to convince them of the importance of taking action, finally, in December of 2016, pavement and lighting for the path was approved and funded, and construction was finished this past fall. Alexis — who has personally persevered through a childhood of financial difficulty and has Cerebral Palsy — was also the most-recent chair of Stanford in Government, one of campus’ largest political organizations. She is committed to public service, which she plans to pursue through human rights law.

Ravi Veriah Jacques Sophomore, History

Almost every year a student (or group of students) tries to start a new publication. Most years, that publication gets no traction and the creators move on to other endeavors. Once in a while, however, a new publication shows that it has the potential to stick around. This year, that publication is the Stanford Sphere. When Ravi Jacques arrived on campus in 2016, he saw a Left that he believed to be “disorganized.” Dissatisfied with what he characterizes in an interview with Stanford Politics as liberals’ “overwhelming urge to constantly act and engage in activism rather than think before acting,” Ravi sought to “really change the Left...and make it a bit more thoughtful, and that will make it far more effective in its actual activism.” Ravi tells Stanford Politics that when he created The Sphere this past fall, he wanted it to be (and still does) “the voice of the Left on campus.” However, as much as The Sphere’s founders keep saying “the Left,” most of their critiques appear to be reserved for that very side of the ideological spectrum, which it claims to represent. The website’s about page even unambiguously states: “Indeed, the founders understood that there existed two fundamental problems with political discourse on campus; first a claustrophobic ‘liberal consensus’ dominated discourse thereby constraining meaningful and interesting debate. Second, Stanford lacked a strong left-wing intellectual presence. The Sphere was designed to remedy both these problems.” Ravi understands this seeming contradiction, telling us: “The response has been quite divisive, to be honest.

Certain people within activist spheres have taken objection to our criticisms of the Left, but others within those same circles have really enjoyed us.” The Sphere may be struggling to immediately establish its identity, but it certainly has at least been the subject of much conversation, Ravi points out, noting that it has been mentioned multiple times in Stanford Politics, the Stanford Review, and the Stanford Daily. It is undeniable that The Sphere is seeping into campus political discourse. On another note, Ravi has also been influential this year through his role as one of the members of the student steering committee for the Cardinal Conversations speaker series. Ravi says that he is personally friends with the series’ former organizer, Hoover fellow Niall Ferguson. The series has been controversial for its alleged conservative leanings, so Ravi sees his role as one of the few self-identified leftists on the committee as all the more important, crediting himself in large part for the series’ invitation to Dr. Cornel West for an event next fall.

Justice Tention

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Senior, Mathematical & Computational Science

& Vicki Niu Senior, Computer Science

Doris Rodriguez Sophomore, Sociology

Chapman Caddell Sophomore, History 23

JOHN RICE-CAMERON WANTS TO

MAKE STANFORD GREAT AGAIN Roxy Bonafont & Jack Herrera

Original Photography by Hanan Yajoor A

ohn David Rice-Cameron tells us to meet him outside the Hoover Institution. He’s there 15 minutes before we had planned, working in the deserted courtyard behind the Traitel Building. In the late afternoon sun, the president of the Stanford College Republicans (SCR) looks dignified, if a bit old-fashioned, in a button-down shirt tucked into khakis. He does not remove his large dark sunglasses until more than halfway through the interview, after the evening shade has passed over him. While the person known around campus as “JRC” has a reputation as a vociferous right-wing agitator, the sophomore we sit down with is polite, amiable, and direct. Rice-Cameron is eager to talk about SCR and his time as the organization’s president. He’s excited to frame his conservative beliefs, which, as he speaks, develop confidently into a clearly ordered and coherent worldview. Much of what he says sounds like something he has probably said before, coming across with the easy elegance of a well-crafted stump speech. Like many campus political types, he tends to talk in monologues. Rice-Cameron is also quick to lavish praise on Stanford’s “brave” campus conservatives. Sometimes, the subject of that praise is himself. “There’s two types of people who enter politics,” Rice-Cameron says, a few minutes into the interview: “the people who only care about power — they only care about themselves, their brand, and they like the feel of manipulating people and whatnot — and then you have people who care about principles and care about ideals and care about making the country a better place or making it align better with those principles and ideals. I’m one of those people, I think.” This distinction is crucial to Rice-Cameron, who, despite his current status as Stanford’s number one politico, claims he has no plans to enter public service in the near future. An economics and history double major, Rice-Cameron says that he intends to work in finance after graduation, telling us that he spent his summer interning at a venture capital firm. He also notes that Philip Eykamp ’20, the vice president of SCR and Rice-Cameron’s closest friend at Stanford, is an electrical engineering major and that neither of them see the club as a means of building their resumes. “We purely do it because we care about promoting liberty and promoting conservative ideas on campus and beyond and advancing the cause of the conservative movement,” Rice-Cameron says, “and those people who do it almost selflessly are, I think, the most effective leaders and the kinds of leaders that the conservative movement has and needs and the kind that the country needs more of.” Rice-Cameron’s dedication to his principles is consistently evident. However, despite his repeated avowals that he remains uninterested in leadership titles or media notoriety, it’s no accident that Rice-Cameron has become the best-known political activist on Stanford’s campus. It took the sophomore less than two years to become president of SCR. An effective and successful leader, his focus on recruitment and visibility has seen the club’s membership explode and its public profile shoot up. Today, the organization is better known than anytime in recent memory. During that same time, Rice-Cameron has developed a penchant for finding himself at the center of media stories. Though the undeniable liberal dominance of campus politics provides a stark background to anyone who leans right, Rice-Cameron’s reputation as

a bold conservative voice has grown beyond the relatively low-stakes environment of campus politics: In the last year, he’s been quoted in not just the Stanford Daily and this magazine, but also in Fox News and right-wing blog the Gateway Pundit. Some of the attention he receives may be out of his control. In a sense, Rice-Cameron was born in the spotlight. His mother is Susan Rice ’86, former US Ambassador to the United Nations and former National Security Advisor during Obama’s presidency. However, this fact — well known on campus, though rarely reported in the media — is not the root of his notoriety. Rather, it’s the particular brand of politics Rice-Cameron has helped bring to Stanford. In his first two years here, Rice-Cameron has ushered in a new and boisterous kind of conservative activism on campus. Under his leadership, SCR — once dedicated to quiet weekly meetings and canvassing for conservative politicians — has become a fully-fledged activist organization. They’ve invited divisive speakers who were almost guaranteed to provoke campus outrage. They’ve set up tables in White Plaza arguing for pro-life, pro-gun, and other traditionally leftistopposed policies, and they’ve published Facebook posts condemning “sexual degeneracy” and “so-called gender fluidity” at Stanford. In April, an SCR delegation attended a state California College Republican (CCR) convention in Santa Barbara, where they rubbed elbows with the far-right super-troll Milo Yiannopoulos and saw their organization awarded best new chapter of the year. Rice-Cameron subsequently became CCR’s activism chair for the entire state. People around Rice-Cameron say he often talks about “sticking it to liberals.” However, while he’s had undeniable success in his goal to embolden campus right-wingers, some campus conservatives tell us he’s rubbed more traditional Republicans the wrong way. For instance, one member of SCR told us that Rice-Cameron’s rise in the club has been marked by threats and “coup attempts.” While “coup” is an inevitable hyperbole when it comes to rocky leadership transitions within a college student group, much of the disgruntlement comes from the fact that Rice-Cameron has been at the forefront of a brash, new kind of conservatism on campus. Old McCain-style or Kasich-esque Stanford Republicans have been steamrolled by new Tea Party types. Today, vocal campus rightwingers (like Rice-Cameron himself) fit less in the William F. Buckley mold and more within the playbook offered by figures like Ben Shapiro or Ann Coulter. Some of these changes may seem distinctly Trumpian, which is not an association Rice-Cameron has shied away from. His first major undertaking as SCR’s newly-minted president is an upcoming event titled “Make Stanford Great Again.” The event’s Facebook page describes its political message unambiguously: “Trump is great. Build the wall. Deport criminal illegals. Guns save lives. There are only two genders. Abortion is murder. Defund sanctuary city San Francisco. Taxation is theft. Affirmative action is racist. White privilege is a lie.” The event will star the Twitter-famous conservative provocateurs Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, both part of Kirk’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a national campus activist organization; and it is already subject to a hive of controversy. Suspecting some students reserved tickets with the intention of walking out in protest, RiceCameron deleted many specific student ticket orders (in a possible violation of Stanford’s rules governing student group-led events). RiceCameron defended this measure to Stanford Politics, insisting that

everyone was welcome to attend the event but that he wanted “to make sure that people who are deliberately trying to sell out the event aren’t able to do so.” For Rice-Cameron, the middle of a media storm offers a familiar home. Indeed, during his rise over the last year, Rice-Cameron has spent much of his time at the center of a series of high-profile controversies on campus.

“Trump is great. Build the wall. Deport criminal illegals. Guns save lives. There are only two genders...” As an outspoken conservative on a liberal campus, much of the outrage that follows Rice-Cameron can be attributed to liberals’ distaste of his politics. However, even after accounting for liberal overreaction, the list of scandals that follows him is dramatic: In the fall, Rice-Cameron glowingly introduced a campus speaker that the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a racist hate figure; in the winter, a Stanford professor accused Rice-Cameron of “yellow journalism” after Rice-Cameron co-wrote a Stanford Review profile that resulted in the professor receiving death threats; and finally, in the spring, investigative outlet the Fountain Hopper (FoHo) claimed Rice-Cameron was using connections with deep-pocketed donors and sinister right-wing political organizations to funnel money to student government Manchurian candidates. While we do eventually cover all of these allegations (you can skip ahead to section III to read more), the most interesting part of all these stories is the person at the center of them: the person we first sat down with behind the Hoover Institution.

I. All In The Family Rice-Cameron would be worth profiling even if he wasn’t Stanford’s top student politico. He inspires an intrigue that exists outside of his role as Stanford’s most outspoken political provocateur. First, there’s the contradiction of his origins: His mother served as Ambassador to the UN and then National Security Advisor for former President Barack Obama. His father, Ian Cameron ’83, is a former executive producer for ABC News and is also a Democrat. His mother, who refers to Rice-Cameron by his family name, Jake, summarized their political differences for us: “I would characterize Jake as a conservative — and a more traditional conservative, not a populist conservative. And I would characterize myself as a progressive liberal.” (Rice notes that, today, some might call her a moderate liberal in contrast with someone like Bernie Sanders.) Rice-Cameron is happy to talk at length about his principles, but he can simplify them to three essential words, borrowed from the classical liberal philosopher John Locke: “life, liberty, and property, in that order.” “Everything that I do on campus from a standpoint of conservative activism projects, every single thing that the Stanford College Republicans does, is in some way designed to protect those principles of individual liberty, to protect those fundamental three natural rights,” Rice-Cameron says. “And that’s literally every conservative position; every truly conservative position under the sun is derived from a belief in those principles, and is designed to protect those principles and rights for people.” Interestingly, this doctrinaire position sets Rice-Cameron apart from both traditional conservatism and the new right alike: Conservatism originally grew out of skepticism toward abstract and universal principles like those Rice-Cameron champions, and Trumpism has challenged Republican adherence to classical liberal dogma.

RICE-CAMERON

ne particularly frustrating misconception for Rice-Cameron is that his beliefs formed as a means of reacting or rebelling against his mother; rather, he insists, he was raised in a household “that encouraged debate and encouraged different opinions.” “There’s no animosity towards my parents at all that would lead me to embrace the ideas I embrace,” Rice-Cameron says. “I simply embrace them because I believe [them] to be true. I believe them to be right.” Rice agrees that her political differences with her son do not reflect a rift in their relationship. “I love him very much and I’m very proud of him,” she says. “And even though we may differ on substantive issues — many substantive issues, not all — that doesn’t get in the way of my ability to support and encourage him and love him the way you would hope any parent would.” Though Rice-Cameron grew up in a Washington, D.C. household with a future cabinet member, he says that his interest in politics didn’t initially extend beyond studying geographic voting patterns. “I would say until about I guess 2009, 2010, I never really thought deeply about major questions of policy, major questions of morality even; I wasn’t really thinking too much about those things,” RiceCameron recounts, “but I was very interested in politics. I was interested in looking at all the red and blue maps and figuring out which places vote for which party, and that kind of thing.”

He points to his ideological genesis as rooted not in the strong Democratic influence of his mother (who received her Senate confirmation and joined Obama’s cabinet in 2009), but in the Tea Party movement emerging at the same time. Rice-Cameron identifies the Tea Party as his first exposure to a “bold articulation of true conservative principles.” He talks about the early impact the radio host Rush Limbaugh had on his political beliefs, and he points to Mark Levin (another arch-conservative radio host and author) as the person who had the most “profound influence” on his worldview. Rice-Cameron also names Glenn Beck, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee as sources of ideological inspiration. (Rice-Cameron “has a lot of political books, especially by prominent conservative talk show hosts,” according to his roommate, Isaac Kipust ’20.) When asked about how Rice-Cameron began to engage with conservative media in their decidedly blue family home, Rice explains her family’s political open-mindedness. “We don’t censor media in our household,” she says, though adding, “we also don’t have Fox News on in the household on a daily basis either. … To the extent that he’s picked up his views through conservative media … it’s not because that’s what’s been on the family television. But we also never sought to constrain his ability to read or listen to what he wanted to.”

Outside of politics, Rice-Cameron is also an avid traveler, photographer, and bird-watcher.

Rice also comments that she’s seen her son’s political views develop considerably throughout his life. Though Rice-Cameron did not mention it to us in his interviews, his mother says he was not always a conservative. “In case he forgot to tell you, there was a time when Jake willingly and enthusiastically campaigned for Barack Obama,” Rice says, laughing. “What he will tell you is that in 2012 it was more out of a sense of obligation than enthusiasm, but in ’08 it was genuine, I can attest.” Rice also noted that her son has amiable personal relationships with prominent figures on both sides of the aisle, including the former president himself. “President Obama has been incredibly sweet to him, as you would expect,” she says. “And … in the Senate, plenty of Republican members of Congress with whom I’ve worked and that he’s been introduced [to] have also taken him under their wing. So he’s been very lucky in that respect.” “Barack Obama is a good man, and I respect him, despite disagreeing with most of his policies,” Rice-Cameron told us in an email. “We had a cordial relationship, and he has always been incredibly friendly to myself and my family.”

“INTELLECTUAL FIREPOWER”

ice-Cameron also spoke positively about his relationship with another political figure: the one he shared a home with. RiceCameron says his relationship with his mother is “fantastic.” He says the two talk on the phone “basically every other day,” and that Rice gives him advice on how to deal with the press and pitch new ideas to SCR. “When he seeks my advice or input on how to go about things, I certainly try to offer it,” Rice says. “I don’t know that we have a 100 percent track record of him taking every piece of my advice, but I’m always happy to offer it, and I’m glad that he feels that I and his dad are folks he can turn to for … our perspective and judgment, since we both have a fair bit of experience with things in the public life.” Though their political differences do not define their relationship, both Rice-Cameron and Rice tell stories about how they’ve managed to have open and respectful conversations about politics. Last summer, Rice-Cameron and the former ambassador exchanged books as a means of better understanding each other’s worldviews. Rice asked her son to read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance as well as a book about motherhood and American race relations, while Rice-Cameron in turn offered Rediscovering Americanism by Mark Levin. “We spent hours over the summer, on weekends and especially after my internship, just talking about them, and it was great,” Rice-Cameron tells us. “It shows how people with different ideas can have respectful disagreement and even find common ground on a lot of these things. Actually, we found ourselves agreeing more than we disagreed on some of them.” Rice says she and her son can often find this kind of common ground. She says that, like her, Rice-Cameron is “an internationalist,” with a belief in free trade and strong American leadership on the global stage. In the domestic realm, she says she and her son share a passionate belief in constitutional and civil rights. “Jake, like me, is an African-American and of mixed parentage,” Rice says. “And he understands, as I do, the importance of the equality of rights for all. That’s an area where we share a strong commitment.” There’s also another area where they share a strong commitment: The mother and son share an avid belief in the necessity of free speech, particularly on college campuses. “Even though I disagree with Jake on a number of policy issues, I’ve been supportive of his efforts to bring opposing views and diverse

A friend of John Rice-Cameron's posted this picture on his Facebook profile, thanking him for the book recommendations. Rice-Cameron noted in a comment on the post, "These are some of the greatest conservative books of our era, providing the intellectual fire power for the conservative movement." The photo includes books written by Glenn Beck, Mike Lee, and Ann Coulter. Rice-Cameron’s roommate tells Stanford Politics that RiceCameron “has a lot of political books, especially by prominent conservative talk show hosts.” Rice-Cameron and his mother also exchanged books last summer in attempts to better understand their political differences. He recommended his mother read Rediscovering Americanism by talk-radio host Mark Levin.

RICE-CAMERON discussion to campus,” Rice says, “because I think we are doing ourselves a disservice — both as we educate our young people but also as we try to grow as a nation — if we refuse to hear views that we differ with and if we treat opposing views with protest and shouting them down rather than thoughtful dispute and argument.” She says that one of the things she admires most about her son is his ability to have those thoughtful debates: his “willingness and interest in respectful discussion.” She thinks this disposition comes from growing up in a home surrounded by liberals, noting that her teenage daughter, Rice-Cameron’s sister, is ideologically even further to the left than she is. “I think one of the byproducts of growing up in a family where his views are in the minority,” Rice says, “is that he’s had to learn to hold his own but also to listen and to acknowledge and respect views that differ from his.”

II. Ideological Foundations Speaking to Rice-Cameron and his mother, one gets the sense that, while Rice’s politics may not have rubbed off on her son, his childhood and his family history have left a deep impression on his worldview. Rice-Cameron says that his mother’s ancestors were slaves, and many of the stories he tells us show his deep and passionate appreciation of the history of black people in the United States. His upbringing as the child of a diplomat also broadened his perspective on the world. Rice-Cameron has a worldliness few college sophomores can claim. Besides relationships with American politicians, both Rice-Cameron and his mother tell us about how he grew up traveling the world: He’s been to countries in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. (An avid bird watcher, Rice-Cameron has photographed hundreds of avian specimens during these travels.)

etween his globe-trotting childhood and long family history, Rice-Cameron’s politics have grown in a ground littered with complication and, at times, contradiction. For one, his opinions on racial politics are particularly unique. Citing the historic (and earned) mistrust of police in AfricanAmerican communities, he expresses some sympathy with the issues raised by the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement. (“Obviously, black lives matter,” he says.) However, he argues that BLM only increases the scorched-earth divide between American police and black people by inflaming communities’ anger at police. That said, he’s also critical of the racial rhetoric of some Republicans, such as Bill O’Reilly, for being what he describes as “not only insensitive but completely irresponsible.” At the heart of Rice-Cameron’s opinions on race is his serious concern about “identity politics.” He says that framing politics in matters of personal identity fosters a sort of tribalism he finds dangerous. His travels with his mother helped foster this belief. In many ways, his travel-filled childhood was a global studies practicum: He saw many different examples of how racial politics could play out in different countries. In particular, a childhood trip to South Sudan led him to believe identity politics can only end in disaster. At 12 years old, Rice-Cameron traveled to South Sudan as his mother’s plus-one as she attended the newly-formed country’s official independence ceremony. In South Sudan, he arrived (on the same jet as former Secretary of State Colin Powell) to a young nation full of hope. However, two years later, the world’s youngest country was plunged into civil war following an ethnic rift in its government. RiceCameron believes that some of the people he stood next to during the independence ceremony are now likely dead due to their tribal affiliation. Experiences like this one, Rice-Cameron tells us, inform his deep mistrust of American identity politics.

a look through time

1993-1997: Susan Rice served at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration

July 1997: John Rice-Cameron is born

Dec. 2008: Susan Rice nominated by Presidentelect Obama to serve as the 27th US Ambassador to the United Nations

John Rice-Cameron is 11 years old

Between his globe-trotting childhood and long family history, Rice-Cameron’s politics have grown in a ground littered with complication and, at times, contradiction. “Look what happens to a country when this ethnic tribalism tears it apart,” Rice-Cameron says. “That’s why, looking at America, I get so concerned when people start talking in racial terms about everything, because America is really the only large multi-ethnic diverse country that has lasted and succeeded for as long as we have.” Rice-Cameron believes identity politics — which he calls “racist” — threaten that enduring success and have “instilled fear and hatred and resentment in so many communities across America.” “There is no difference between that and the Alt-Right,” RiceCameron declares. Rice-Cameron condemns the “racial balkanization” of the country and dreams of a colorblind society. However, while he doesn’t “like the idea of forcing Americans to align with different racial groups,” he says he does identify as black. “I feel a deep and profound connection to the struggle … of black Americans in this country to be respected and regarded as Americans just like everybody,” Rice-Cameron says, although he emphasizes that he doesn’t view the identity as something that “transcends other stuff.”

July 2013: Susan Rice sworn in as the 24th National Security Advisor, selected for the position by President Obama

John Rice-Cameron is in high school, 16 years old

Rice-Cameron proudly recounts the story of his family, who ran a plantation themselves after their master died in the Civil War and, after the war ended, became very active in the Republican Party. When the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) forced part of his family out of South Carolina, he says, they founded a trade school for African-Americans in New Jersey. RiceCameron says this ancestry inspires him to meet adversity head-on. “If you have an ounce of self-discipline and drive to succeed, as my family history shows, then you will make it,” Rice-Cameron states. “And that’s kind of what I really believe in strongly as far as identifying as African-American. … That past, that history is what I definitely identify with.” When it comes to righting the wrongs of that history, RiceCameron says that those on the right offer the only way forward. Because of its individualist values, Rice-Cameron believes that true conservatism is colorblind and that the concerns raised by the BLM movement can never be addressed through the “racial balkanization” perpetrated by the Left. “Conservatives are the only people who can unite the country,” Rice-Cameron says. “So when I see conservatives using irresponsible rhetoric when it comes to community-police relations or whatever, I think it’s really unfortunate, because we’re missing an opportunity there to unite the country when it comes to Black Lives Matter.” Though he believes conservatives have the chance to unite the country, Rice-Cameron sees many people on the right failing in matters of race. In anticipation of Charles Murray’s appearance on campus this February as part of the Cardinal Conversations series, RiceCameron criticized the political scientist’s racialized theory of IQbased success in an article for the Stanford Review, arguing that his “racial determinism” is, in fact, a “progressive” mentality. His condemnation of Murray sets him apart from much of the Right,

Jan. 2017: Rice finishes her term as National Security Advisor under Obama, as Trump takes the presidency

Nov. 2017: John Rice Cameron starts his sophomore year at Stanford, introduces controversial speaker Robert Spencer to campus

RICE-CAMERON where Murray is often hailed as a significant thinker. Rice-Cameron concluded the op-ed by noting, in a nod to his unwavering support for the promotion of ideological discourse no matter how distasteful to some, “I strongly disagree with Charles Murray, and therefore I will certainly be attending tomorrow’s event.” “Anybody who wants to come here and speak, whether they be vile people from the extreme Right or the extreme Left, they all have a right to be here,” Rice-Cameron tells Stanford Politics.

III. Separating Fact from “Fake News” In our multiple conversations, Rice-Cameron condemned racist rhetoric and, in particular, the “Alt-Right” as antithetical to conservative principles. However, on campus, he’s been at the center of a series of controversies that resemble the threatening rhetoric and dangerous actions of the Right’s more unsavory elements. This past November, campus activists accused Rice-Cameron of bigotry: They claimed he promoted Islamophobia after he helped bring “anti-Muslim propagandist” Robert Spencer to campus. In January, Professor David Palumbo-Liu condemned a profile Rice-Cameron co-wrote (with Anna Mitchell ’19) about him in the Stanford Review as “right-wing propaganda” and “yellow journalism,”

John Rice-Cameron’s Stanford Review Headlines ANTIFA THUGS FIND A CHAMPION AND LEADER IN STANFORD PROFESSOR

CHARLES MURRAY IS NO CONSERVATIVE INCLUSION OR DIVISION? WHY WE SHOULD RE-THINK ETHNIC THEMED DORMS

after the article went viral in national conservative media and resulted in death threats against the comparative literature professor (full disclosure: Palumbo-Liu once wrote a letter of recommendation for this story’s co-author Jack Herrera). The unambiguous hit piece alleged that Palumbo-Liu was a “ringleader” of Antifa “domestic terrorists” on campus; RiceCameron and Mitchell’s evidence was that Palumbo-Liu co-founded an organization called the Campus Antifacist Network (CAN) and that the word “Antifacist” is equivalent to associating with Antifa. Finally, in spring, a typically sensationalist FoHo article claimed that Rice-Cameron has connections with deep-pocketed donors and sinister right-wing political organizations. The newsletter alleged that Rice-Cameron was working as the campus mastermind to help TPUSA run an underground coup in Stanford’s student government. TPUSA (founded in 2012) commands an $8 million budget and has a presence on more than 1,000 high school and college campuses across the country. It’s been at the center of a series of controversies, including claims of racial bias (its former national field director was caught sending text messages saying “i hate black people. Like fuck them all . . . I hate blacks”); potential campaign finance violations; and scandal on college campuses. The FoHo’s unnamed reporters, citing a page on TPUSA’s website that gives a playbook for conservatives to run for student government, alleged that Rice-Cameron surreptitiously assembled and helped fund a collection of far-right ASSU candidates who ran under deceptively vanilla platforms. However, the reporters alluded to no other sources besides the webpage — and, of course, the general spectre haunting TPUSA. Rice-Cameron did confirm to Stanford Politics that he helped conservative candidates run for ASSU, but he argued that there was “no shame” in doing so and insisted that TPUSA was uninvolved (though he added that he didn’t “know why that would be a bad thing”). Additionally, in a Stanford Daily op-ed, one of the supposed Manchurian candidates flatly (and convincingly) denied claims made by The FoHo. As coverage about him proliferates, Rice-Cameron has developed a healthy distrust of campus media. Much of this distrust is fair: The portrayal of “JRC” in The FoHo and The Daily — and subsequent dorm room conversations — often takes on the tenor of rumor and sometimes even hysteria. After all, Rice-Cameron is a college sophomore in Palo Alto; he is not a high-powered political operative. And given the relatively limited influence of the ASSU, allegations of sinister meddling by a national organization seem far-fetched, let alone inconsequential. However, not all of the accusations against him are frivolous. The possibility that Rice-Cameron is opening up the campus to hateful and threatening people ought to be taken seriously. First, there’s the claim that Rice-Cameron is an Islamophobe. In November, Rice-Cameron gave a glowing introduction for Spencer, who the Southern Poverty Law Center regards as a hate figure. RiceCameron does not just support Spencer’s right to speak at Stanford — he enthusiastically supports Spencer’s views. “You have this ideology of radical Islamic terrorism, or radical Islamism, … that seeks global domination, the installation of a global caliphate worldwide, and government according to the principles of Sharia law, or Islamic law,” Rice-Cameron explains animatedly. Rice-Cameron shares Spencer’s unsophisticated view that the Quran encourages violence against non-Muslims — “unsophisticated” because many of the worlds’ religious texts, including the Bible, espouse violence, making modern interpretation a different, more complicated matter. That said, Rice-Cameron appreciates part of this complication;

he says no religion is perfect, and he acknowledges that fighting what he calls “radical Islam” could require allying with moderate Muslims. RiceCameron says that if liberals gave Spencer a chance, they’d find similar good points in Spencer’s work. However, even if Rice-Cameron was willing to concede that Spencer is a racist, that would not be enough for him to want Spencer barred from campus. “There are obviously actual racists out there,” Rice-Cameron says, but “I don’t want to drive them off campus because they kind of have a right to exist, too.” “You know I certainly don’t like their ideas, and I condemn their ideas in the strongest possible terms,” he emphasizes, “but I don’t want to drive anybody off of campus.” Rice-Cameron shares this belief as he defends the Stanford Review’s article that resulted in death threats against Palumbo-Liu. He stands by his claim that Palumbo-Liu is an “Antifa ringleader,” even though, in the Stanford Review article, PalumboLiu is quoted as stating that “damaging buildings and attacking people physically … is not what [CAN] advocate[s].” Palumbo-Liu does claim that CAN opposes racist speakers coming to campus and works to resist their foothold at universities, to which Rice-Cameron tells us that “driving people off campus” is “the same agenda as literally every other Antifa organization in the country,” sticking by his Review article. Although Rice-Cameron has repeatedly emphasized his support for the free expression of even extreme political views, he admits that part of the goal of the article was intimidation of faculty, specifically to discourage them from associating with the violent Antifa movement. He says he hopes that “professors on other campuses or on this campus might think twice before endorsing or getting involved with an Antifa network because [they’ll think], ‘Hey, I don’t want to get the same negative publicity that Professor Palumbo-Liu got.” The intimidation of faculty is a method Rice-Cameron shares with Kirk’s TPUSA (last year, the organization’s media arm pressured — somewhat successfully — the University of Nebraska to fire one of its English instructors for protesting an on-campus TPUSA recruiting table). Rice-Cameron has also been associated with TPUSA for more direct reasons. In May, Kirk himself was reported by The FoHo to be photographed with Rice-Cameron at one of SCR’s regular “change my mind” tables set up in White Plaza. Despite this, Rice-Cameron says he does not have as strong of a personal relationship with Kirk as people think he does, though he tells us they’ve been communicating about the upcoming TPUSA event at Stanford. “I would love to have a more personal relationship with Charlie Kirk, would love to get involved more,” Rice-Cameron says, “but the allegation that I’ve been involved with Turning Point for some time is just not true.” In a special edition newsletter, The FoHo claimed that RiceCameron’s ties are much deeper, suggesting that he has concealed his true, long-standing involvement with TPUSA and may have even funnelled their money into campus for right-wing political purposes, a report that, while intriguing, remains based on speculation.

ice-Cameron denies that there are rich organizations or donors funding SCR’s work; Stanford’s fundraising rules forbid such financial support. That said, Rice-Cameron tells us he has “powerful” potential funders waiting in the wings. “We do have a number of potential donors,” he says. “I’m not going to go into necessarily who they are — I don’t think that’s appropriate — but we have a number of powerful donors both on the local level and on the national level who are exceedingly interested in the work we’re doing and want to help us any way they can.” While Rice-Cameron says the club has yet to see funds from these mysterious outside donors — saying, “we’re going to be embarking on the long and annoying and tedious process that SAL [Student Activities and Leadership] has for ultimately landing those donations in our accounts” — SCR has worked closely with at least one deeppocketed right-wing organization. In our reporting, we found that the conservative activist organization Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) has provided significant material support to SCR. Just i n Hsu an ’ 18, R i c e Cameron’s predecessor as president of SCR, told us that YAF — whose self-described mission is to ensure “that increasing numbers of young Americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values” — was behind the Spencer event. Hsuan says that YAF has a “speaker series” that helps bring conservative icons to campuses, a practice that is advertised on YAF’s website and has been recently reported on more extensively by PBS. “Request a date and time and our YAF events expert will help you bring your event to reality,” the organization’s web page displays. Hsuan says that YAF’s role in bringing the “[Spencer] event to reality” was essential: Spencer was the cheapest speaker they could find, and YAF offered to handle almost every part of bringing him to campus: “YAF was like, ‘We’ll talk to the guy, we’ll handle his flights, handle his hotel, drop the legal contract. All you have to do is make sure that you deal with the administration on your end, and [that] you can get the funds from ASSU.’” Rice-Cameron was only a freshman board member of SCR when the Spencer event began to take shape in spring of 2017, but he still finds his way into the center of the story. He became the club’s financial manager (the first person to hold the position that has typically been vacant in recent years) that same quarter and worked closely with YAF. Indeed, it seems the event had its origin in Rice-Cameron’s work. Elise Kostial ’18, who was president of SCR in spring of 2017, told us in an email, “It was John who discovered the YAF speaker series and pursued bringing Robert Spencer to campus.” In the same email, Kostial said she would prefer not to comment further on Rice-Cameron specifically. However, both Rice-Cameron and Hsuan say Kostial resigned her position as SCR president largely in response to the event. Kostial’s resignation marked the last time SCR has been headed by an elected president. Hsuan was Kostial’s vice-president of the club and took over the leadership alongside Travis Lanham ’18 when Kostial

The possibility that RiceCameron is opening up the campus to hateful and threatening people ought to be taken seriously.

RICE-CAMERON

resigned. Then when Hsuan graduated early at the end of last quarter, just a couple months ago, he appointed Rice-Cameron as president. It thus took less than two years for Rice-Cameron to rise to the top of the club. However, those in the group say that Rice-Cameron’s bid to become president began well before the leadership transition this winter.

IV. Making SCR Great Again Rice-Cameron’s remarkable rise within SCR has coincided with a period of more drama than usual within the normally quiet campus club. The streak of instability began when Kostial resigned her position. In her email to us, Kostial explained the resignation. “I officially resigned over the summer of 2017, when SCR began voting on and planning events for the upcoming academic year,” she wrote. “I resigned because the direction the club was taking did not align with my vision for the organization.”

Rice-Cameron says her exit from the club’s leadership could not come soon enough. “Elise was a miserable failure as a president of the Stanford College Republicans,” he tells us. “[Under Kostial’s leadership,] the club had had no meetings, the club had no members, there was no energy in the club, … the club did absolutely nothing.” Much of Rice-Cameron’s grievance with Kostial comes from her decision to go abroad while still serving as president of SCR. RiceCameron, then a freshman board member of the club, saw this as a clear violation of the club’s constitution. He and Eykamp, also a first-year board member at the time, approached the other officials in SCR’s board. This is where the story starts to get fuzzy, inviting some to use the characterization “coup attempt.” One board member says that Rice-Cameron and Eykamp threatened both Kostial and Hsuan, with the two telling Hsuan that his appointment to the presidency violated the constitution. In this board member’s dramatic retelling of events, the two freshmen claimed they

contacted a private attorney and were considering bringing a lawsuit; they purportedly handed Hsuan a paper they claimed was a legal document. Rice-Cameron calls this account bogus. He says that when Kostial went abroad, he contacted CCR’s appointed parliamentarian to confirm the constitutional violation. (This parliamentarian is apparently a sophomore at UC Irvine, not a private attorney). Rice-Cameron says he did then bring a document to a board meeting in the spring, but it wasn’t a legal document; rather, it was part of SCR’s constitution. (After Rice-Cameron denied the board member’s claims, we contacted the same member again. The source told us that RiceCameron’s version of events was conceivably true, offering that it’s hard to remember what exactly happened a year ago.) owever, while it seems no private attorneys were involved, RiceCameron’s decision to accuse Kostial of a constitutional violation did seem like a threat. Rice-Cameron says he wasn’t trying to depose her, but rather encourage her to get on board with his vision of the club: a club with broader membership, more energy, and a greater profile on campus. “The goal in doing this was essentially we bring the club in a new direction,” that direction being, he tells us, “more direct conservative activism, really going out and promoting conservative ideas, really inviting speakers, doing tabling, aggressively recruiting members.” However, according to multiple accounts we heard of Kostial’s tenure, SCR’s previously quiet presence on campus seemed more out of design than out of failed leadership. As president, Kostial did not seek to clash with liberals on campus. Instead, she led meetings where the group would discuss topics that past members describe to us as “wonky” — debates about complex policy, evaluations of the GOP’s electoral techniques, etc. She also organized canvassing for Republican politicians. Hsuan says that when he took over, he pursued a similar strategy: The self-described Paul Ryan-style Republican says he wanted to focus on policy, rather than fighting the culture war. He said he had no interest in inflaming other people on campus. “I can’t say I’ve ever lost a single friend due to political differences,” Hsuan tells us. “I have beliefs; I’m interested in politics; I get involved in political events. But I don’t wear it on my sleeve; I don’t shove it in people’s faces. It’s not life and death for me in the way it is for some other students.” Hsuan says that he was interested in debating specific policies and determining “what works and what doesn’t” on the national stage. However, he says that as soon as he took over, he found that some of the younger members of the club wanted something different, something more brash and confrontational — something more in line with the country’s new president. Hsuan offers his impression of these members, beginning with what he saw as a lack of interest in the actual work of politics: They think, he says, “Oh, the Hoover [Institution] guys can talk all day about policy A versus policy B, but that’s not what we’re interested in. We’re interested in really taking it to the liberals and triggering a bunch of people; fighting political correctness on the ground level as, you know, true soldiers.” Rice-Cameron seems quite obviously to be one of those people Hsuan attempts to characterize. While Rice-Cameron tells us that he’s not interested in calculating what will cause the most outrage to the Left on campus, he says he does believe that being vocal and bold is necessary to help encourage conservatives to feel safe sharing their views on campus.

“The way to really get college Republicans off the ground is you need to break this shell of fear that a lot of the members have early on,” Rice-Cameron says, continuing, “which is that fear that if they’re found out to be conservative or with a conservative organization, they may lose some friends, they may get lied about or misrepresented in the campus press.” “People are understandably afraid, and they’re afraid that people will make fun of them,” he goes on, articulating his vision of a model leader that he seems to try to embody. “Leaders of the organization really need to go out there and be willing to put themselves out there and be willing to take heat on behalf of the organization from others.” Hsuan says that he admires Rice-Cameron’s passion and he’s impressed with how Rice-Cameron has raised the club’s profile. However, he adds that Rice-Cameron represents an entirely different kind of conservatism from what he hoped to see in SCR. “I think he represents a brand of conservatism that is very different from mine, and it’s one that I’m deeply uncomfortable with,” Hsuan says, describing Rice-Cameron’s brand as “a very activist approach.” “It centers around media attention. It centers around [as] explicitly large contrasts with the opposing side as possible. It thrives in ad hominem attacks. It never touches the realm of policy.” Hsuan goes on: “The questions it asks are not, ‘Does this work? Does this help people?’ Instead, [the questions it asks are,] ‘Is this something that will offend the liberals? Challenge political correctness? Is this something that will get me Instagram likes, retweets, yada yada yada.’” Hsuan’s description of Rice-Cameron’s brand of conservatism might equally describe that of President Trump (if Trump can be said to have any coherent vision of conservatism). Hsuan says that RiceCameron has taken the emotional politics of SJWs (an acronym for “Social Justice Warriors” that is often pejoratively used to describe leftwing activists) and slapped a MAGA hat on it. Through speaking with members of SCR, we found that the divide in campus Republicans is the same kind of rift that’s appeared in the Republican Party since the 2016 election: a division between an older-style politics of manners and responsibility and that of Trumpian Tweet-storms, blustering provocations, and boisterous ad hominems. According to Hsuan and Rice-Cameron, Stanford Republicans have shifted their focus away from policy discussions at the Hoover Institution. Rice-Cameron’s leadership is what’s changed SCR from the small, timid (but respectful) organization it once was to the fullthroated political-activist organ it is today. In some sense, he has made Stanford College Republicans Great Again.

*** ***

hile Rice-Cameron often credits his own leadership for SCR’s rise, he feels that people on campus often attack him as a straw man for all their grievances with conservatism generally. As he continually reminded us, he is not the only conservative student on campus; nor did he organize the events like Spencer’s talk single-handedly. (Indeed, at the time of the November event, Hsuan was still the president of SCR.)

RICE-CAMERON Rice-Cameron says that the campus rumor mill has built him into a large-than-life figure, who commands a much more consequential presence than he actually does. He’s not wrong. In the campus imagination, Rice-Cameron is a sinister arch-conservative operative, overseeing a brutal takeover of Stanford’s politics. His reputation is more fitting with President Underwood on House of Cards than the president of a relatively small Stanford political club. Of course, parts of the myth-making sometimes do have a basis in fact: Rice-Cameron is working closely with larger conservative organizations; the figures he’s brought to campus, like Robert Spencer, represent a politics of bigotry and exclusion; and some of the opinions he espouses (and articles he writes) have hurt people and perhaps endangered others (quite dramatically, in the case of Professor PalumboLiu). However, at the end of the day, Rice-Cameron is only a college sophomore, and he deals only in campus politics. Rice-Cameron himself has played no small role in his own embellishment in the Stanford imagination. He presents himself as a selfless patriot pursuing his ideals. He remains outspoken, and, though he claims not to seek out controversy, he has no problem playing the role of Stanford’s foremost conservative. “I have, I guess, become the face of conservatism on campus,” Rice-Cameron tells us. “I’m not saying that to sound arrogant or anything; it’s just sort of been apparent to me.” On Stanford’s campus, being a vocal conservative means outing yourself in enemy territory. Rice-Cameron’s mission — though some will call it petty antagonism — is bold. After talking with him, we developed greater respect for how gracefully he handles all the hatred he receives on campus, because he does, indeed, receive hatred. Though he presents a brave face, his sincere beliefs and high-profile background have made him an easy target for “fuck yous” in White Plaza and rumorbased hit pieces. It’s hard not to wonder how he handles these attacks in the quiet of his own dorm room. “Honestly, I know there’s people who consider me an enemy. That’s fine. If you have enemies in life, good. It means that you stood up for something at some point your life,” Rice-Cameron tells us, paraphrasing Winston Churchill. “If you want to be a leader, if you want to lead people with a vision, and you don’t have enemies, then you’re not a real leader.” Like so many college students, Rice-Cameron can fall into a team sport mentality when it comes to politics. Though he strives to connect everything he does to his three principles — life, liberty, property —he sometimes unwittingly conscripts himself into battles led by people he knows better than. He’s trying to beat liberals in the culture war by aligning himself with people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, but Rice-Cameron is smarter than Limbaugh and more thoughtful than Coulter. And, unlike political Twitter personalities on both sides of the aisle, Rice-Cameron genuinely seems to be aiming for what he believes to be good more than he’s aiming for popularity.

“I think he sees himself as someone who has strong beliefs,” Eykamp tells us, “and thus because he has strong beliefs, he believes that it’s a moral imperative on his part to act on them and that sitting back would be wrong in a moral sense.” Within SCR, his rocky rise to leadership seems to have come more out of an attempt to bring his style of conservatism to campus politics than his desire to see “president” next to his name. (Though, we’re not convinced he doesn’t enjoy the title: In early March, before he knew he was going to be the club’s next leader, he was already introducing himself as SCR’s “incoming president” to Fox News.) While he’s rubbed some older members of SCR the wrong way, his leadership climb in the club seems more fueled by the membership’s genuine enthusiasm than his at-times unsavory or duplicitous behavior. Indeed, his rise to power in SCR found itself empowered and reinforced by a restless energy brewing within the Stanford right — an energy that follows the rise of Trump more than it follows the rise of Rice-Cameron. As Rice-Cameron points out, SCR is far from an outlier of its kind, following a similar trajectory as other California College Republican chapters. Like college Republicans across California, RiceCameron has introduced a tempestuous and confrontational style of politics into the Stanford environment. However, Rice-Cameron rejects the label of “provocateur.” He says provocation for its own sake lacks principle. “When people say, ‘Oh he’s just a provocateur or she’s just a provocateur,’ I think that often just comes from people who don’t like what they’re saying or are uncomfortable with their style,” RiceCameron says, “and who just want an easy way to dismiss it and don’t want to actually wrestle with what’s there.” Whatever Rice-Cameron’s intentions may be, Stanford has nonetheless been provoked, and the rising junior has grand plans for the future. He hints at a “massive event” that will kick off next fall quarter, but he won’t divulge details. “We’re at a state as conservatives where, starting from [the] end of last year, we basically have nothing to lose and everything to gain,” Rice-Cameron says. “There’s only stuff to gain and we’ve gained a lot. … These people have come together and have been emboldened. It’s really a movement on this campus that is growing and growing and growing, and it doesn’t stop growing.”

Rice-Cameron himself has played no small role in his own embellishment in the Stanford imagination. He presents himself as a selfless patriot pursuing his ideals. He remains outspoken, and, though he claims not to seek out controversy, he has no problem playing the role of Stanford’s foremost conservative.

Roxy Bonafont, a freshman studying English, and Jack Herrera, a senior studying literature and philosophy, are staff writers for Stanford Politics. This article was originally published on stanfordpolitics.org on May 28, 2018. PHOTO CREDITS: P. 28 AND P. 29 (JOHN DAVID RICE-CAMERON’S PUBLIC FACEBOOK PROFILE), P. 30 LEFT (JASON GUTIERREZ/ U.S. AIR FORCE), P. 31 LEFT (PETE SOUZA / PUBLIC DOMAIN), P. 31 RIGHT (MONIQUE OUK/ STANFORD POLITICS)

Locker Room Talk? Inside the Politics of Stanford Football in the Age of Trump

Thomas Pfeiffer

FOOTBALL

t’s not new for athletes to make political statements — from Jesse Owens’ Nazi-defying 1936 Olympics performance, to Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the Army, to the more recent controversy over standing for the national anthem spearheaded by NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, athletics has been historically tied to politics. But in an era when Twitter banter, nationally organized protests, and polarizing dialogue seep into unsuspecting sectors of everyday life, it seems reasonable that the athletic sphere has witnessed an inevitable bolster in its presence in the political realm. Moreover, Donald Trump’s divisive election, a rising national concern for social injustices, made more visible by modern media and technology, and the especially engaged nature of college campuses all combine to make it near impossible to remain apolitical — at least unwillfully — at places like Stanford. Thus, this begs the question: How has this more political atmosphere manifested itself for student-athletes, a specific subsection of the larger undergraduate population, in their everyday interactions? While this juncture is dependent on factors such as the demographics of the student-athlete body, the diversity of individual teams, and a broader social context for each respective sport, an excellent case that seemingly encompasses interesting variations of each of these factors is the football team. Additionally, because of the program’s size relative to other organizations and its high-profile nature given the sport’s attention to social issues at the national level, its relevance to the relationship between sports and politics is even more critical. In this piece, we will investigate how the unique geographic and racial makeup of the Stanford Football team results in differing player perspectives about the nature of political interactions both on and off the field. Furthermore, we will explore how these interactions produce enhanced possibilities

for political understanding and, oppositely, hold the potential to exacerbate underlying tensions surrounding political dialogue. Most importantly though, the analysis and discussion of how factors like diversity and demographics play into the team’s interactions will provide a framework for understanding how this bridge of politics and athletes functions for the exchange of ideas and values at the collegiate level of athletics.

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When considering the impacts of diversity on political dialogue, especially in a definitive campus context and team setting, demographics make a tremendous (if not all) the difference. For instance, only 7 percent of Stanford’s undergraduate student body is African-American while 36 percent is white, according to the University’s statistics. Geographically, 88 percent of undergraduates originate from the United States, of which 29.6 percent can be characterized as coming from “red” states (for our purposes, any state Trump carried in the 2016 election) while 70.4 percent hail from “blue” states (those carried by Clinton). While it’s obvious red or blue state origin does not exactly reflect one’s political leanings, it can be used as an indicator of the potential for ideological diversity. However, not all aspects of diversity in political discourse can be characterized by numerical indicators. Consider campus debate: While some might claim that it is obsolete at Stanford, the dialogue created by campus publications and political organizations arguably proves otherwise. The presence of publications such as the Stanford Daily, the conservatively-inclined Stanford Review, the self-declared left-wing Stanford Sphere, and investigate entity the Fountain Hopper continually offer contrasting perspectives on campus

HISTORICALLY, SPORTS HAVE NEVER BEEN APOLITICAL.

issues ranging from affirmative action and inclusivity to workers’ rights and financial aid. Furthermore, non-journalistic organizations such as the Stanford College Republicans (SCR), Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and Fossil Free Stanford, to name a few, supplement the conversation, holistically showing that the exchange of ideas is (at least partially) alive on Stanford’s campus today.

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Diversity and variation of perspective are not just unique to the standard elements of geographic origin and demographic identity though. Student associations can be characterized just as equally by their array of identities, and in particular, through the daily habits and experiences of their members. Specifically, among all the different ethnic, racial, religious, political, and interest-based groups abounding on Stanford’s campus, one sphere of students stands apart from their peers: student-athletes. As obvious as it may seem, student-athletes live a starkly different lifestyle than the mainstream student body. Not only do they bear the common burden of academic coursework, but they also have obligations for practice, training, and competition outside of the lecture hall. The act of balancing training and competition throughout the week with seemingly incessant problem sets and response papers, keeping in touch with family and friends, and maintaining personal well-being tends to take a heavy toll on athletes throughout their four years at Stanford. Unlike the mainstream student body though, athletes also have access to privileges not available to the regular student population, including supplemental academic and advisory resources, enhanced dining options (which are open to all students at a fee, but were originally designed with athletes in mind), and most notably, athletic scholarships (of which the football team has the ability under NCAA rules to award 85 annually) that complement need-based financial aid.

The most prominent schism between athletes and nonathletes arguably arises with regards to schedule flexibility and opportunities for involvement in extracurricular organizations. As previously mentioned, athletes must satisfy the time requirements of their sports and are limited in choice when it comes to managing free time off the field and outside of the classroom. Consequently, many organizations across campus, including political ones, tend to see a limited and lower participation of student-athletes in their events and meetings. Thus, the free exchange of ideas that lies at the heart of Stanford University’s values, which is augmented by engagement in a variety of groups and social circles around campus, can be jeopardized for student athletes due to their intense time commitments. As a result, many student-athletes who wish to express their political ideas and values may have little opportunity to do so but in the setting of their sport, of which the fact of being on a team as well as the varying diversity in upbringings, race, and geographic origin can play a vital role.

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As these specific social groups and cliques emerge from the general student population and as different clubs, organizations, and teams stake their claim to their own brand of diversity and expression, political dynamics often become tailored to the individuals that make up that group. While select student groups are able to maintain the variety of perspective present within the entire Stanford undergraduate body, most groups attract sectors of like-minded people, and consequently, people with similar interests and backgrounds.

Geographically, nearly 43% of the players hail from states that Trump won in the 2016 election. Though not self-selected, the Stanford Football team is no exception — players from all positions together form a subset of the undergraduate population, most prominently united from their experiences of being committed to the same sport as each other for several years. However, demographically speaking, the Stanford Football team consists of a diversity far from the norm of the larger student body. In particular, the football team strays from the makeup of the student body in two major ways: an abnormally high percentage of white and black players and an increased percentage of players from red states. Racially, the football team is just under 54 percent white and slightly over 37 percent black. Geographically, nearly 43 percent of the players hail from states that Trump won in the 2016 election, whereas 57 percent originate from blue states, resulting in a ratio of 1.4 blue-state students for every red-state student, compared to the 2.4 to one ratio in the general student body. This dramatic contrast, characterized by a duality of more white and black players and an increased representation from more conservative regions, holds the commanding potential to

FOOTBALL

BY THE

DATA Undergraduate Body by Race 57% 36% 7%

Black

White

Other

Football Team by Race

shape the political environment of the team. But in what ways does this diversity influence the political atmosphere of the team? Is this demographic profile one that produces a beneficial dynamic of mutual political understanding and cultural respect among the players? Or oppositely, does it cater to a network brimmed with underlying conflict and suppressed viewpoints, one that buries the opinions of a few to preserve the image of the team?

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Before evaluating differing player perspectives on the effects of this demographic divide, it seems necessary to first address the degree of political engagement present among the football team. Stanford Politics reached out to 18 current and former players to acquire a variety of player viewpoints on political issues, to which we received responses from only four individuals: two freshmen, a sophomore, and a junior, all on the team’s defense. Many other players didn’t respond or expressed hesitancy to discuss topics not directly related to their gameplay, especially without prior approval from the Athletic Department’s press managers. Stanford Politics also reached out to the communications office for the football team for comment, but they respectfully declined. From the four players we did speak with, however, a broad (and arguably unsurprising) consensus emerged among them about how they perceived the climate of political involvement among their team. Regarding engagement, the players concurred that political associations exist within the team’s social atmosphere. “Absolutely,” said one, “there were actually people in our weight room [yesterday] that were having a conversation about politics.” “It’s not everyday, but players are definitely politically involved,” he recalled. However, even as others acknowledged the presence of politics in weekly routines, a couple of the players were hesitant to characterize it as a pressing issue. “It’s about 50/50 [with regard

Population: Red State vs Blue State

9% 54% 37%

30%

Black

White

Other

70%

43%

57%

Undergraduate Stanford Football Student Body Team

to engagement]. If our teammates are engaged, they try not to show it. Our team tries not to let politics into the locker room because we probably haven’t learned how to communicate about it that well with each other, at least that’s my interpretation of it,” said the sophomore. Even as engagement plays its fair role in the football team’s political network, the distribution of players’ ideologies can’t be ignored in the broader conversation. Nearly every player characterized the views of the team as mixed, with a slight lean to the left (similar to the mainstream student body). However, a more stringent context exists among the politically outspoken individuals of the team — the majority of them tend to be conservative. “I think conservatives feel more outspoken on campus, which I think is fair,” said the junior. “We definitely have guys who supported Trump, so they would definitely feel more outspoken.” Another player augmented this stance by elaborating on how factors beyond ideology often play into the outspokenness of particular individuals on the team. “I can’t tell if it’s more [financial background] or because political views often times stem from the parents,” he mused. Regardless, two key takeaways emerge for political engagement among the football team. First, it is undoubtedly present; second, it is usually supplemented by more pronounced dialogue from the Right.

***

The players are generally very straightforward with their responses about political engagement and ideology on the football team, often giving answers in a simple “yes” or “no” format. But when we dive deeper into how political themes like demographic and geographic divides may affect political dialogue, as well as the role that they believe politics should play in the team’s atmosphere, it’s not surprising that we uncover more thoughtful, albeit varied, mentalities. It should be noted that the interviewees shared a common respect for all of their teammates and recognized a civility present in all political circumstances, despite player differences in opinion. “In general, it becomes a lot harder when you hear someone’s opinion who you don’t know — it’s easier to become upset because you don’t have to see them everyday. We interact so much and have to go through so much together, the [interactions] are pretty positive and there’s definitely differences of opinion, but it’s never negative. It’s usually a conducive conversation,” said one of the interviewees. Others also acknowledged that even if comments pushing along the lines of controversy are laid out on the table, damaging and permanent strains never result from such interactions. “We pick our battles, so a lot of times people will hear something and they’ll keep walking and ignore it, but if it sounds too far-fetched, then comments get made, sometimes there’s a discussion, but it’s never combative and always reasonable,” added a defensive back. Nevertheless, a schism first emerged when one of the players described his take on tensions underlying the variances in players’ backgrounds. Referring to socioeconomic circumstances in particular, he concluded: “Just naturally, it’s hard to communicate

Most players declined to speak with Stanford Politics for this article. Those who did felt more comfortable remaining anonymous.

with others who you might not understand...assumptions get made, and in my opinion, there’s that divide among people who it’s like ‘I understand him better than I would understand that person so I hang out with him more.’ If we’re at the same place together having fun, we will all be around each other, but when it comes to relaxing and chilling and understanding each other, that’s about it.” He colorfully added, “You might have someone from Tennessee and someone from California, and those are two very different cultures. You’re wearing cowboy boots and I’m wearing flip-flops and Toms.” A “siloing-in” of players to backgrounds similar to their own was illustrated by this player as he described how interactions outside of team settings can sometimes be limited in scope and vigor between people of disparate upbringings. However, not all the players held these same attitudes. Indeed, some pushed back from this narrative and focused on how they actually believe political understanding can result from demographic and ideological differences among players on the team. “I don’t think it causes any conflict...I would say that people from different backgrounds don’t hinder discussion or anything like that. I think it kind of opens people up and makes people aware that players are from other places, and because there’s such a wide variety of where people are from, there’s so many different viewpoints that

FOOTBALL people are sort of understanding and recognize the fact that everyone has a different perspective on an issue,” said one of the freshmen. Along similar lines, themes of unity in light of ideological differences surfaced when discussing the potential for verbal conflict (or lack thereof) among politically charged teammates. “I don’t think politics has a big influence on the cohesiveness of our team. I don’t really see much conflict within people just based solely on their political ideology,” said the other freshman, echoing prior views established by his teammate. The effects of demographic divides on the football team’s political environment isn’t the only discord in player mindsets though. A prominent rift in perspective also appeared with regard to the extent to which politics should be present in the team atmosphere. Two of the players prescribed to a train of thought that politics doesn’t have a necessary place in their business, despite recognizing its prevalence in a broader societal context: “I don’t know if it’s necessarily our duty or job to [talk about those issues], but sports teams and players do have a huge influence on the rest of our culture. It carries a lot of weight because there’s so many individuals following these people and looking up to them.”

“When we go to football, we are there for football, but we’re not at Stanford only for football.” While most recognized the ability that sports like football have to affect political discourse and spur awareness for social injustices (as seen in instances like the recent national anthem protests), others maintained that, outside of large-scale issues that directly impact members of the team, football players shouldn’t bear a burden to tackle — even only among each other — complex, political issues. “If it’s something notable or trending, it’s definitely talked about. But as far as whether it needs to be talked about more, I don’t really think so. I think it comes up naturally in conversation, I don’t think it should be forced upon more,” said one player. Not all could wholeheartedly agree with these sentiments though. One player depicted an interesting contrast to the aforementioned viewpoints. Specifically, he portrayed a separation between political dialogue among players in a team setting and political dialogue among players in a university setting, suggesting that players should still consider how they can play a role in perpetuating dialogue from a student perspective.“I think it has its balance like anything. When we go to football, we are there for football, but we’re not at Stanford only for football. We should have opportunities to subscribe to whatever beliefs and do as much as we can to take advantage of the Stanford experience.”

***

Interestingly enough, one player did divert from the more apolitical attitudes of his teammates — and quite strongly. Not only did this individual direct attention to the topic of team political dialogue by offering an issue-specific perspective, but he also drew on underlying sentiments of political action by questioning the framework of how players should capitalize on these polarizing moments.“I definitely think it needs to be addressed more. From a police brutality standpoint, there’s a lot of frustration, and definitely for black people on the team, because it’s like nothing is being said to how we should feel or what we should do.” But he didn’t just express views correlating to a responsibility that players should bare in accelerating dialogue. He put forth his vision for a hierarchical dynamic of open communication for political views, one with players actively engaging with one another at the base and coaches directing and encouraging conversation at the top. “I think our coaches should play a part [in bringing awareness to political issues] because they recruit us to come here.” He reasoned further that coaches should be designated with this position to raise political awareness because they seem to have an unparalleled perspective on the contexts and backgrounds of their players. “They see the houses and apartments they walk into to go get certain kids, where it’s either the golden walkway or they see a bunch of bad little kids playing on the side...They should feel the responsibility to take care of us and make sure we’re becoming successful men.” For others, the implications outweighed any potential benefits regarding the idea of the coaching staff leading political discussion. A couple players suggested that bringing in conversations about political issues, which often incorporate themes dependent on personal background and have the ability to bring about passionate dialogue, could very well jeopardize the “professional relationship” common to the team’s social network. One player specifically addressed his deeper concerns about how this hypothetical dynamic would be abnormal and could hold a daunting potential to bring about distress among players with opposing views: “They talk about the climate of college football and how we need to be smart on campus at an individual level, but politically I think that would be weird. It would anger a lot of people one way or the other.” Even though this topic presents yet another contrasting take on the role of politics on the football team, it frames an interesting proposition: Where do the coaches fit in to this puzzle of political dialogue? As much as some of the players insisted that any brand of political awareness shouldn’t be perpetuated through a “topdown approach” and that they would prefer to leave it to players to hash out these issues in other appropriate settings, the coaches still appear to hold a role in this inextricable link between politics and athletics. “We are always on watch for what we tweet, so we can’t really tweet our feelings or tweet that we agree with something. We kind of get told to be neutral about stuff,” recalled one player. Upon

Stanford Football head coach David Shaw during the 2017 season. When interviewed, players held diverging opinions on what role the coaching staff should play in addressing political and social injustices. (CYNTHIA YOCK / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)

further questioning about who the “watchdog” of the football players’ social media is, the player responded, “It’s definitely the coaches and the athletic department, not our teammates.” Thus, it appears as though coaches’ actions — even if devoid of explicit verbal support for or opposition to raising political discussion — can speak louder than words, and often times do. The same player elaborated on how this “watchdog” culture allows the coaches to expediently crack down on controversial rhetoric by discouraging what they constitute as “emotional tweeting.” “If my teammates do say something, I’m quick to support them by quoting it or retweeting it,” the player said, adding, “because our coaches are on us so bad about emotionally tweeting, we try our best to be politically correct in what we’re saying. If it’s completely factual, our coach has a very hard time trying to correct this, because when there are facts, why are you mad?” However, other players pointed to the notion of preserving the team’s image as appropriate justification for the coaches’ roles as censors of political dialogue. Some even extended these concerns to encompass a university-level social context in which players’ comments can be applied. “Obviously we are representatives of the team as a whole and the university, and they don’t want us to say anything that would be controversial or create issues or that’s not politically correct,” said one player, who also outlined the

potential implications that could arise from uncensored social media. His biggest emphasis was on the possibility that it could jeopardize team goals such as cohesiveness. Another player offered, “I understand why they have that mentality of looking out, because we obviously don’t want anything that someone says or does on social media becoming a distraction for what we’re trying to accomplish.” Nevertheless, these competing views provide a larger framework for questioning how and to what degree the relationship should unfold between coaches and players in tense, political situations. Should coaches filter social media to preserve an orderly and distraction-free team image? What about situations when players want to opine about more contentious issues, such as the acceptance of the LGBT community in athletics, which only three years ago was not the most catering to discussion at Stanford; or the polarizing 2016 presidential race, when players recalled great “tension” and “surprise and shock” following the election of Donald Trump? Players say that dining halls at breakfasts were divided between teammates sporting MAGA hats and others sitting separately who felt the election was a “terrible time.” At what point and to what degree do coaches and players possess a duty to address these underlying, political disagreements? While the interviewed players were split on

FOOTBALL their views of this dilemma, it nevertheless poses an interesting conversation with regard to issues of political dynamics on athletic teams going forward, especially in the polarized Trump era where these issues are sure not to cease anytime soon.

***

It seems abundantly clear that the political atmosphere on Stanford’s football team is no exception to the norm of the greater athletic realm in the United States — from perspectives of mutual understanding to observations of underlying tensions, the players and the coaches both hold at least some respective, minimal role in fostering productive dialogue in the face of demographic schisms and broader societal polarization. While this delicate and complicated relationship between politics and athletics may not be as verbally pronounced as it is at the national level with pre-game protests and public advocacy, Stanford Football players are still very much involved — even if that may go unseen to the public eye. Players acknowledge that politics functions as a hot topic in the locker room and in non-football settings from week to week. A few described the outspokenness and willingness of individuals to communicate their perspectives, even in light of unpopular opinion. Some held that politics should play a minimal role in the team dynamic,

Stanford Football’s locker room. (ADVENT RESULTS)

while others disputed that it should serve as a staple of the group’s social atmosphere, regardless of whether it gives rise to a culture of mutual respect or accentuates awkward tensions in a locker room diverse in demographic perspective. Ultimately though, despite potential differences in ideological thought, the impact of demographics on team relationships, and the reluctance of the coaching staff to buy into a team culture fueled by political discussion, all the players echoed a common theme: because of their common identity as Stanford Football players, politics — however prominent for some — remains secondary for all. “Because of the grind, we all love each other,” one player said. “We have our disconnects with one another sometimes, but at the end of the day, we’re just trying to win games and potentially play for a championship.” Thomas Pfeiffer, a freshman studying economics and public policy, is a staff writer for Stanford Politics.

Stanford Politics Podcast WeĘźre just Stanford students who get together on a semiregular basis to talk politics: no agenda, no pretenses, no joke (just kidding Ěś plenty of jokes). And occasionally we have people like Cory Booker or Carly Fiorina join us on the show! So listen and subscribe today: Available on iTunes, SoundCloud, and anywhere else good podcasts can be found. A

JUNE 2018 | ISSUE 05 | STANFORDPOLITICS.ORG

Right Here, Right Now

His mother was in Obama’s cabinet, but he’s on a mission to redefine campus conservatism.

+STANFORD’S MOST INFLUENTIAL UNDERGRADS +THE FOUNTAIN HOPPER’S BIG MOMENT +INSIDE THE POLITICS OF THE FOOTBALL TEAM A