Interim President of the Dartmouth College Republicans
To members of the Dartmouth community:
My name is Charles Schneider, and I am the Interim President of the Dartmouth College Republicans, an organization which has been in the news a lot lately. It is essential, at this stage, for me to dispel speculation regarding recent developments, particularly since such speculation has made the pages of both local and national news outlets. I am here to provide a transparent, brutally honest, and thorough account of what happened in relation to the Corky Messner event and the resignations of former Chairman Mr. Daniel M. Bring ’21 and Co-Vice-Chairman Mr. Alexander Rauda ’21.
I became Vice Chairman of the Dartmouth College Republicans in May of 2019, and it was soon after that I began to witness, slowly but steadily, the bipartite concentration of power between Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda. They began to operate the Dartmouth College Republicans on their own, without the input of the other Leadership members. The two took over nearly every aspect of the organization, leaving the majority of the Leadership in various states of disarray and miscommunication.
Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda allowed certain members of the board to fulfill certain tasks, but if they saw them as a threat, they were immediately sidelined, oftentimes arbitrarily and without cause. For example, Mr. Griffin P. Mackey ’21 was regularly sidelined by Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda. He was not alone. Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda even went to the extent of creating private group chats, excluding certain Board members if they did not find them agreeable that week.
Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda planned events without the Board’s consent or — in some cases — even their knowledge. They sent out multiple e-mails and communications through our social media accounts without informing the Board or asking its consent, reinforcing their absolute concentration of power. Further, in the few cases in which the rest of the board could contribute, dissent was simply not an option. One was to either agree with Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda’s plans or remain silent.
Although Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda purposely created divides between members of the Board, on February 10, 5 out of 8 members of the College Republicans board were able to escape this division to attend President Trump’s rally in Manchester, NH. During the dinner after, several members of the Board informed me that they had been intentionally sidelined and felt alienated by Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda and their divisive administration. Since becoming Mr. Bring’s Vice Chairman in May of 2019, I too had been deeply uncomfortable and morally troubled. However, in the interest of the organization and fear of removal from it, I remained silent on these issues. It was only at this dinner that I learned the true and full extent of Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda’s machinations and the rest of the Leadership’s discomfort with them.
Immediately after our meeting, I began to write a report detailing the misdeeds of Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda, and their abuse of the power I and other members of the Dartmouth College Republicans had entrusted them with. Upon speaking with other members of the larger organization, I quickly learned that the grievances expressed in this report were not expressed by just myself; rather, this discomfort was shared unanimously by the board and by many of our organization’s members. Our report included many sections and many complaints. Some of the more major complaints were in regard to the repeated removal of board members for arbitrary reasons, objectionable conspiracy theories from Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda, purposely strained and antagonized relationships with the Dartmouth Administration, and abominable beliefs often expressed that were in no way representative of the Dartmouth College Republicans.
On February 13, I presented this report on Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda’s wrongdoings to Mr. Steven King, the head of Dartmouth’s Student Organization Accountability Program. Our report detailed all worries and requested advice on the Board’s options. After consulting with Mr. King, I convened a Board meeting with all members of the Dartmouth College Republicans Leadership, excluding Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda. We reviewed the report and added grievances individual members of the Board had with Mr. Bring or Mr. Rauda, including several hateful and discriminatory comments made directly about members of the Board behind their backs.
At the same time as the Board was in the process of removal, Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda, acting on their own as usual, sent an email to campus on Sunday, February 16, with the subject line “They’re Bringing Drugs …”. As usual, the board did not have prior knowledge or give any consent to such an email. In addition, the email glaringly mischaracterized the policy talk Mr. Corky Messner was scheduled to give. While the majority of the board was not even aware that an event had been planned with Mr. Messner, to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Messner intended to speak on border security for all borders and its relation to the opioid crisis. Further, he was going to speak about the ramifications this lax security has had on not just New Hampshire or the United States, but the entire international community.
From these comments above, the board, excluding Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda, unanimously agreed that the email was a bad idea in poor taste. However, because we found out about the email by receiving it like the rest of campus, we were unable to stop it. Upon receiving massive backlash from the Dartmouth community regarding the email and event, Mr. Bring unilaterally cancelled the event. He refused to divulge any information about the supposedly credible “threats” of violence to anyone on the board. While the Dartmouth College Republicans have had many protests in the past, many of which were indecent and done in an attempt to drown out our speakers, none of these were violent in any way. The entire CRs leadership was thrown into the PR cycle as a result of Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda’s actions, though none of us were ever included on even one of the decisions regarding the event.
Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda provided the board with only their version of events. When the event was cancelled by Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda, social media and the news took over the narrative: one side argued that the College Republicans have a right to free speech, while the other side argued that the College Republicans should accept that if they hosted “hateful” events, they should also accept the consequences of their actions. This was a result of the rhetoric advanced by Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda and not by the leadership of the Dartmouth College Republicans. The news and social media were reacting not to the views and words of the Dartmouth College Republicans, but to the email sent out by Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda and their cancellation of the event due to “credible threats” that no one in the organization even knew to be true or not. Because Mr. Bring gave this story to news outlets and Mr. Messner, they were operating and reacting on bad information at no fault of their own. They believed that they were receiving this information from a unified Dartmouth College Republicans organization. An unfortunate reality, they were actually receiving false rumors from two Leadership members that did not represent anyone else in the organization.
While the Messner policy talk was totally separate from the plans to remove Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda, it only reinforced the urgent need for removal. Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda had managed to advertise an important event poorly, cancel such event, and create a widespread controversy without the rest of the Board being included at any step. Six out of eight Board members are needed to remove a board member; on February 18, the board voted 6–0 unanimously to remove Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda. Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda were allowed the opportunity to resign from their posts, which they did at 10:39 PM that day.
Three days after the resignations of Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda, the remaining members of the Dartmouth College Republicans’ Board elected me to serve as Interim President, with Ms. Claire Azar ’22 as Interim Vice President. As the CRs go forward, it is essential for us to disavow the unilateral power that Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda exploited.
The Dartmouth College Republicans understand that many on campus do not agree with our viewpoints or political opinions. However, that does not mean that we cannot interact; it does not mean we cannot have civil discourse; and it does not mean that we cannot hash these issues out and make meaningful strides in understanding each other. In fact, we should strive to do so, and the new Leadership of the Dartmouth College Republicans will do everything in our power to make this a reality.
I, on behalf of the Dartmouth College Republicans Board, must categorically state that the Dartmouth College Republicans does not stand for or tolerate hatred of any group, without exception. Many members of the Dartmouth community have been deeply concerned by the prior dealings of Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda. I can strongly assure everyone that many of these past dealings did not represent the views of any of the members of the current Dartmouth College Republicans Board. Mr. Bring and Mr. Rauda’s prior words and actions are not ours — this we say without reservation.
Our ultimate goal as an organization is to be a place where conservative-minded thinkers on this campus can go and discuss the issues important to them and create a fellowship with other like-minded thinkers. Our goal is not to spread hateful and divisive rhetoric nor create an environment that gives campus a misconception of what we are as an organization. As a board, we want to ensure campus, the College, and most importantly the College Republicans members that we will do better in the future. The Dartmouth College Republicans Board is working with COSO to rewrite our Constitution and restructure our goals to focus on what is most important to the current Board in the organization: our members, our morals, and our party.
