EXCLUSIVE: Antifa protesters disrupted a pro-life candlelight prayer vigil Monday night on the campus of the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton.
The protesters, who reportedly numbered in the hundreds, chanted blasphemous slogans and attempted to drown out the small group of students gathering to demonstrate against abortion, as seen in video obtained by Fox News Digital.
The vigil had been organized by the UNT chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT), a student group that has existed in some form since 1980.
Kelly Neidert, who founded the UNT chapter of YCT and has chaired it since 2019, is unsure where all of the protesters came from but speculated they might have been summoned by an advertisement that circulated on social media earlier in the day. The ad was emblazoned with the three-arrow insignia of Antifa.
"Fascists are organizing in your area," read a release apparently directed to members of Antifa in the area of the university, which is approximately 40 miles north of Dallas. "Tonight the young conservatives have invited groyper influencers & white nationalists such as Lance Johnston to a pro life 'vigil' in supporting christo-fascist abortion legislation."
Explaining they were expecting only 10 or 20 protesters, Neidert told Fox News that she and her fellow demonstrators were caught off-guard by the size of their opposition.
"They harassed us, they were throwing things at us," she said. "They were chanting things. They brought all sorts of instruments that they were playing to drown out whatever we were saying. They brought their megaphones, they brought whistles."
Neidert said some of the protesters tried to pick fights with the pro-life students, told them to kill themselves, and followed them to their cars to harass them.
In one of the videos obtained by Fox News, the pro-life students chant, "Christ is king!" to which a protester responds by chanting, "F*** your God!"
In another video, a protester screams through a megaphone that she "loves sacrificing children."
Neidert noted that some protesters also expressed hatred for Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, who recently signed a controversial law banning abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat.
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UNT spokesperson Leigh Anne Gullett told Fox News in a statement: "A few hundred students with opposing views gathered on campus Monday evening to exercise their free speech rights. The gathering ended without incident."
Demonstrations by YCT against abortion have been repeatedly vandalized. In March 2020, the group placed 1,000 pink flags on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, each flag representing approximately 60,000 of the babies aborted each year in the United States. Within 12 hours, all the flags had been removed.
In October 2020, video captured students plucking up flags from a similar display at UNT.
Neidert has come to fear for her safety on campus, where she said other students often recognize her and flip her off.
"I think they just really hate anybody who doesn't agree with everything that they believe," she said of her opponents. "And they just really don't know how to cope with other people who have different beliefs. So they want to silence us and say that we're wrong, because they just don't understand that some people believe differently."
In July 2020, alleged practitioners of witchcraft sent Neidert direct messages on Twitter that threatened her with hexes and references to the devil.
The threats came in response to an initiative by which YCT encouraged students to celebrate National Coming Out Day by "coming out" as conservatives. They also made a point about affirmative action by holding a bake sale that charged different prices based on the customer’s ethnicity.
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Neidert, a Christian, described the threats as "pure evil, especially when they make references to Satan and they think it’s funny.
"It’s not funny, and I’m definitely more concerned for them than I am for myself, if they think that’s okay," she added.