by James A. Bacon
Last fall Nickolaus “Nick” Cabrera ran for election as a first-year representative to student council at the University of Virginia. His platform was anodyne — showing unity in confronting COVID-19, getting Class of 2024 t-shirts delivered, that sort of thing. He didn’t run on an ideological or partisan political platform, but he didn’t hide anything either. It wasn’t until he was actually elected to a spot on Student Council that people took notice. Horrors! He supported Donald Trump for president! The word went out on the social media tom-toms. Before long, he was a campus villain.
It wouldn’t be long before Cabrera received his baptism under fire as the sole conservative representative in a student council populated entirely by representatives on the blue end of the political spectrum.
UVa erupted in a furor when minority and woke-white students took umbrage at the use of language by a Commerce School professor. Student Council passed a resolution demanding implementation of a “strike” system — three strikes and you’re out — to hold professors accountable for the use of words deemed offensive. Cabrera was the only student to speak against a measure he saw as a threat to free speech and due process. His stand on principle earned him the animosity of other council members, who said in essence he had no standing as a white person to speak on the matter. (I have described that encounter in detail here.)
As Cabrera noted in a letter to the recently appointed Committee on Free Expression and Free Inquiry, he has been subjected to steady harassment online. “The comments I get oftentimes include extremely foul language, unnecessarily sexualized content, radicalism, and especially cyber bullying,” he wrote. “My last name, of Hispanic origin, has been slandered to “c*ntbrera,” “carbonara,” “crabrera,” and more. (Cabrera’s father is Puerto Rican.)
He enraged the campus Left when he posed for a photo with controversial Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at a Conservative Political Action Conference this past February. When a student made an issue of the photo, the Student Judiciary Committee embarked upon a trial that could have led to his impeachment by the Student Council. The case was ultimately “dropped” for unknown reasons, he says.
His unpopular stances have earned him plenty of notoriety. “People definitely know who I am,” he says. Some give him unfriendly stares. He shrugs them off. Dirty looks, like the foul language, comes comes with the territory.
The online harassment is harder to deal with. Cabrera has saved more than 300 screen shots of nasty social media posts. For the most part, the nastygrams come from the same 50 to 100 people tweeting over and over, but it’s unsettling when another 1,000 people “like” or retweet the messages.
“It’s honestly a lot to handle,” he told the Committee on Free Expression. “At times I have found myself depressed, and strongly considered transferring.”
It was not a winning message. Cabrera was defeatedly decisively. But he’s not going away. He plans to attend Council meetings, keep current on student-government issues, and run again. Maybe things will turn out differently next time.
Here is the document Cabrera submitted to the Committee on Free Expression and Free Inquiry. The images embedded in this post come from this compilation of social media post he has saved on his iPhone.