most of the silas video

Silas Tennis from Kansas State University recounts challenging the university's funding of a drag show using student money. Despite initial success in stopping funding, university faculty intervened and forced a revote, resulting in continued funding privately. With support from state legislators, the decision was eventually overturned. Silas publicized the issue and received backlash, but remained proud of the efforts to hold the university accountable. the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, before we get into the story, tell me a little about yourself, who you are, what you're studying, and how you got involved with YAS at K-State. Yeah, my name is Silas Tennis. I'm from Amarillo, Texas originally, but I go to Kansas State. I'm majoring in political science. And that's always kind of my thing. I've always loved debating, always loved arguing and kind of standing up for my conservative beliefs. And Kansas State is a great place to do that. I got involved with the YAS really early on after seeing a guy who had a YAS that I actually also had. So I kind of just went to the first meeting and it was history from there. We've had a lot of great things happen at K-State. Great. Now tell me your story. Walk me through everything that happened at K-State from the beginning, all the way to where things stand right now. So what happened is, our school has a drag show, an annual K-State drag show that they've done for almost 25 years. It's actually ridiculous. I wouldn't have assumed that it has been going that long. But a drag show hosted by a club at the university and funded by the university. So what they do is every single year, they'll apply for funding at our student government that gives allocations, and our student government then gives them at least $10,000 or that's what they've been giving in recent years for this event. And that money comes directly from student activity fees, which is student money, it's tuition. So obviously, we had known about this for a long time. And it's of course, absolutely absurd that our university is funding something that has zero educational value. Literally, drag shows are the farthest thing from what a university should be spending student money on. And we were brainstorming with how to take this down. I was talking with some of my allies, me as in K-State, yeah, we've talked about this at our meetings all the time. We have several different friends who were in the student senate, student senators who are conservative and who agree with us. We were thinking, how are we going to take down funding for the drag show? So we brainstormed it, and they decided that they were going to challenge it in the student senate session in March this year. So one of the student senators argued it for a long time. But we all kind of thought, man, this is a long shot. I totally tuned it out because I was like, you know what, we're going to have to try to take this on some other time when we have a little bit more of a conservative presence in the student senate. But by some miracle, after debating it for a long time, the drag show funding did not get the 25 votes that it needed to actually pass in the senate. And it was like this crazy big deal. They were texting about it in the group chat. I wasn't there, of course, but I was like, oh my gosh, what the heck? One of the student senators said that it was so quiet in the room with shock that you could hear a pen drop. Everyone was like, what? Did we really just do that? And what happened after that, after the motion didn't pass and didn't get the votes that it needed, was that the faculty that oversaw SCA came in and actually stopped the legislative process. And they said, and this is according to the student senators who were there in the room at the time, they said we need to vote again. You guys need to vote again because this is a thing that has to go through. In order to avoid possible negative retribution or repercussion from other groups on campus on the basis of discrimination, we need to vote yes. They didn't tell the students to vote yes, but they basically said that this has to go through. So they mandated that they re-vote and everyone re-voted and the vote passed because everyone basically voted yes because they were just told to. That's ridiculous, of course. So that night, the student senators, the conservative student senators texted our conservative council group chat that we have with K-State EF and other conservative orgs and they were like, we need an emergency meeting now. So I, as well as some of the other senators and campus leaders, got a meeting the next day. They gave me the entire spiel and it was shocking. I was like, this is absolutely crazy. And I was actually a little bit excited because I was like, this is the type of blatant trash that the university needs to do to get in trouble. This is the type of stuff that gives us the license to really go after them. So the strategy was, of course, we can't let this stand. How are we going to go after them? The student senate voted one way and the university chose to ignore students' voices and override them. So after talking about it a while, we decided that we needed to publicize it, first of all. But we needed to do that in a strategic way. And what was the most important thing was to tell everyone about what had just happened but also to actually reverse the action and make sure that the $10,000 goes back into students' pockets or agrees with what the student government decides to do with it. So the first thing we did the very next day was we knew a couple of state legislators, Megan Steele and Brad Starnes. They have been great with KSU-YAF and other student orgs at Kansas State. And they're extremely supportive. So we texted them the next day. And I got on the phone with Megan Steele. And she was extremely helpful and was, of course, absolutely astonished by what the university actually had done with the whole situation. So she talked to me as well as one of the other student senators and was like, all right, well, here's the plan. I will reach straight out to the university after discussing it with some of the other representatives. And we're going to get to the bottom of this. And I'm going to ask what happened. And if it coincides with the story you're telling me, then we're going to make them stop this. And we're actually really lucky that we live in the state of Kansas, where we have a conservative majority, Republican majority in our state legislature. Because otherwise, I mean, we'd kind of just be screwed, unfortunately. So W Kansas. Anyway, about a week later, she told us not to publicize anything. She said, don't, don't hold off on your social media posts until we figure out what happened. She met with several university administrators, the people overseeing the SGA, as well as deans and other people higher up in the administration. And the argument that they used against it was, they used the same argument at first, I believe. But they also used an argument that said that they had to, they had to fund the event because it was considered to provide educational value somehow. And that in order to dismiss it, you'd have to change the exact parameters of what provides educational value. Pretty much our SGA policy is, student government policy is super blurry, and it's gross. Whatever. Of course, that's a BS excuse. So the state legislatures, state legislators, forced our school to override the decision. They totally agreed at the very end, after much deliberation, to fund the event privately. So the drag show still happened, but it was funded not by students, not by student fees, not by mandatory tuition. It was funded by other private actors. Of course, the drag show commenced as requires regular, just by somebody else's $10,000. And we kept silent about it. I was like, well, we need to wait for the right moment to publicize this. I thought about making an Instagram post. But the right moment came when I was here at EF, and we were writing New Guard articles, and I was like, this is the perfect story and the perfect way to break the news. So I wrote the story about it. It's perfect. Yeah. Then I made an Instagram post. And that was kind of the first time that the school itself, like K-State students, especially the liberals and the people who are, I guess, the primary audience for this type of drag show, saw my K-State Yass Instagram post and absolutely flooded the comment section. It was actually quite hilarious to see them flail and claim that they are being silenced or oppressed or who knows what. All kinds of wild stuff. This is just the most reasonable, straightforward act of students that could have possibly happened at K-State. And I'm really proud of all the people who helped make it happen. I'm really thankful for our state legislators, for our student senators, for Kansas State Young Americans for Freedom, and other conservative orgs on campus.