John 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 leftist-opposed 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 right-wingers (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, Rice-Cameron deleted many specific student ticket orders (in a possible violation of Stanford’s rules governing student group-led events). Rice-Cameron 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.

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.

One 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,” Rice-Cameron 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.”

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.”

Rice-Cameron also spoke positively about his relationship with another political figure: the one he shared a home with. Rice-Cameron 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 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.)

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. For one, his opinions on racial politics are particularly unique.

Citing the historic (and earned) mistrust of police in African-American 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. Rice-Cameron 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.

“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,” Rice-Cameron 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.”

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. Rice-Cameron 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, Rice-Cameron 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, Rice-Cameron criticized the political scientist’s racialized theory of IQ-based 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, 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,” 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; Rice-Cameron 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. Rice-Cameron 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. Rice-Cameron 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, Palumbo-Liu 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 Rice-Cameron’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.

Rice-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 deep-pocketed 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.

Justin Hsuan ’18, Rice-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 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. Rice-Cameron, 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 Rice-Cameron’s version of events was conceivably true, offering that it’s hard to remember what exactly happened a year ago.)  

However, while it seems no private attorneys were involved, Rice-Cameron’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 Rice-Cameron has taken the emotional politics of SJWs (an acronym for “Social Justice Warriors” that is often pejoratively used to describe left-wing 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 full-throated political-activist organ it is today. In some sense, he has made Stanford College Republicans Great Again.

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While 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.)

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 Palumbo-Liu). However, at the end of the day, Rice-Cameron is only a college sophomore, and he deals only in campus politics.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.

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 rumor-based 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, Rice-Cameron 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,” Rice-Cameron 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.”

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Roxy Bonafont, a freshman studying English, and Jack Herrera, a senior studying literature and philosophy, are staff writers for Stanford Politics. All original photography by Hanan Yajoor for Stanford Politics.