When Hate Finds a Bulletin Board at Georgetown | The American Spectator

While Georgetown University administrators should be lauded for removing the violence-promoting recruiting flyers that were posted throughout the Catholic campus for the ANTIFA-affiliated John Brown Club, it is important to determine how the hateful flyers were allowed to be posted on buildings and bulletin boards in the first place. Carrying the slogan  “Hey Fascist, Catch This!” along with a recruitment QR code,  Georgetown students, staff, and faculty were confronted with the flyers as they walked through campus last week.

Emerging on September 24th on flyer boards in Village A, a Georgetown student housing complex, the second wave was posted in broad daylight the next day on campus activity boards and public posting areas throughout “Red Square,” the Georgetown University central free speech area on campus. Obviously fearful of retaliation for attempting to remove the violence-promoting posters on a campus that has stifled the speech of many conservative students for decades, no one attempted to remove the hateful posters until sophomore student  Shae McInnis, Treasurer of the Georgetown College Republicans, discovered the posters and reported them to university authorities.

Describing the posters as threatening and explicitly referencing the assassination of Charlie Kirk, McInnis stated that the flyers were a “direct threat to conservative students” and called attention to their violent rhetoric, including slogans such as “Hey fascist! Catch!” The posters proclaimed themselves to be the “only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.”

In a comment to reporters at Fox News, McInnis said:

I read this immediately as a threat, not only for me but for everyone on this campus … Every conservative, everyone that just doesn’t subscribe to the prevailing leftist orthodoxy. This is a direct threat against them. It means that there are students on this campus who would want to see conservatives dead rather than engaging with their ideas.

The Independent reported that the QR code on the hateful flyers posted at Georgetown led to a contact form which reads: “We’re building a community that’s done with ceremonial resistance and strongly worded letters. If you want to make a real change in your community, let us now [sic] below.”

Activists from the left-wing Georgetown John Brown Club — likely an affiliate of the John Brown Gun Club — most likely chose the university as a “safe space” for their hateful recruiting posters because of the its long history of promoting progressive causes, and the school’s historic willingness to stifle the speech of campus conservatives. There have been several attempts to silence conservative voices on campus including a well-publicized 2017 incident when a Catholic student group called Love Saxa came under fire for publishing an op-ed in the student newspaper promoting Catholic teachings on marriage between one man and one woman.

Accused of promoting hate speech, the LGBTQ organization on campus demanded that Love Saxa lose student affairs recognition and funding from the university. And although the group was able to retain its funding from student affairs budget, the group never recovered from its stigmatized status on campus. As of 2025, Love Saxa is no longer publicly listed among Georgetown’s active student organizations and there is no recent evidence of its continued presence on campus after the attempts to shut it down.

Due to a growing number of speech-related controversies, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has given Georgetown University a poor rating for campus expression. In its 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, Georgetown received an overall “F” grade, placing 129th out of 257 institutions. Ironically, Charlie Kirk had been scheduled to speak at Georgetown University but the event was cancelled due to progressive protests on campus and “concerns for safety.”

Because of the difficult environment that conservative students face on campus, it will likely be even more difficult to determine exactly who posted the hateful flyers. What is clear is that the John Brown Gun Club is rapidly expanding its presence on social media and making inroads onto progressive college campuses. With provocative slogans like “Gun Rights are Trans Rights,” the group promotes armed resistance and has circulated rhetoric that appears to endorse violence against ideological opponents.

While the John Brown Gun Club may present itself as a loose coalition of community defense groups, its reach is anything but marginal. Dozens of chapters operate across the United States, from Puget Sound to Central Florida, with active cells in Texas, California, Ohio, and the Northeast — as well as the Washington DC metro area. They are quickly spreading throughout the United States.  A chapter in West Virginia, John Brown’s Mountaineer Gun Club, launched in August 2022 and has amassed 1,180 followers just on Twitter.  Describing themselves as providing “leftist direct action,” and committed to  “anti-racist, queer liberating, fash-bashing, rural representing” causes.

What is identified as the DMV John Brown Gun Club affiliate — referring to the regional chapter of the John Brown Gun Club operating in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) area — is part of the network of far-left, anti-fascist groups that promote armed community defense, often with a focus on racial justice and opposition to police and state authority. The DMV John Brown Gun Club gained some publicity back in in 2022 when a member of the DMV chapter tweeted that, “The Supreme Court justices should not know a moment of comfort.”

Though loosely affiliated, all chapters of the John Brown Gun Club share a common ideological framework rooted in anti-police, anti-fascism, and armed resistance. Originally formed in Kansas in 2002, the John Brown Gun Club has since spun off into an assortment of John Brown Gun Club groups that purport to be heavily armed and devoted to promoting racial equality and social justice.

Taking their name from the famous — and violent — abolitionist John Brown, several of the chapters have now adopted a pro-trans ideology. On several of their websites or Twitter pages, John Brown Gun Clubs display posters proclaiming that “Gun Rights are Trans Rights.” The Elm Fork chapter of the John Brown Gun Club, based in Texas, is one of the most vocal and visible branches advocating for trans rights. Known for its left-wing armed presence at drag events and LGBTQ+ gatherings, Elm Fork positions itself as a defender of marginalized communities, particularly trans individuals.  A few years ago, armed members of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club provided armed guards at the Drag Show Brunch in Texas.

While other John Brown Gun Club chapters may share similar values, Elm Fork stands out for its public activism and willingness to use armed resistance to anyone who is protesting Children’s Drag Queen events. This alignment between armed resistance and trans advocacy underscores the group’s broader strategy of blending progressive identity politics with militant tactics.

On February 25, 2025,  The Washington Post reported on the movement of transgendered activists to advocate for arming their community. The article caused concern for many of its readers because the published interviews with photos of gun-toting trans individuals in the article revealed suicidal — and even homicidal — ideation. One of those interviewed, May Alejandro Rodriguez,  told a Post reporter that:  “A lot of trans people kind of share the sentiment of death before detransition … If our hormones are taken away, we’d rather just kill ourselves. So, we’re not going out without a fight.”

Once they were notified, Georgetown’s leadership acted swiftly to end the extremist messaging on its campus bulletin boards. In addition to the recruitment posters, there were posters on campus explicitly celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk with a photo of his face with his eyes blacked out and the words “Follow your Leader” and “Rest in P*ss” under his picture. The  fact that the flyers for the John Brown Club were posted and allowed to remain for two days — while the entire community walked past them — suggests that the university’s ideological intimidation has chilled speech sufficiently so that no one, except for the courageous Shae McInniss, felt compelled to do anything about them.

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