Fraternities at the University of Texas-Austin have become targets of a new wave of vandalism sweeping the campus by liberal fascists who keep tagging their houses with the words “racist” and “rapist.” Now, the group responsible is speaking out in an open letter introducing themselves as “barbarians at the gates" threatening to take down the walls of the university. As you read through their manifesto, you’ll see they’re much more than the vandals they claim to be.

“We are a collection of friends and co-conspirators belonging to our local communities,” begins the anonymous statement posted at ItsGoingDown.org. “This action is claimed by us as rogue actors, and came from no organizational authority.”

“We believe in the spontaneity of action, in the possibility for direct acts led by small affinity groups to achieve broad effects and inspire other insurgent acts,” it continues. “We publish this, not to claim fame or reap benefits from the recent vandalism of notorious fraternities in West Campus. We are publishing this statement to clear up some misconceptions, to clarify why these taggings happened, and to inspire others.”

The group goes on to explain that no one incident spurred them to action, but that they are “responding to the everyday crisis that is rape culture, white supremacy, and elitism.” To them, fraternities represent all those things and need to be held responsible: “It is no accident that so many fraternities take the style of plantation homes—the institutions of Greek life are themselves colonial, bourgeois, patriarchal structures, founded to preserve the reproduction of elite classes.”

Minority students, LGBT students, and female students are all in danger, the letter argues, and that’s why the group feels the need to exist — to step in and deliver justice for all the “[c]atcalls, racial slurs, rape jokes… the daily realities which go unspoken and uninvestigated by either the police or the University:”

When the administration and police fail to hold accountable powerful institutions with deep financial connections and when their crimes go unnamed, we will hold them accountable. We will name our enemies, and do so loudly for the world to see. We will break the silence and the taboo around these institutions. We will make clear to survivors that we support them and will fight for them by any means necessary. 

And then the “vandals” reveal their true identities as political terrorists:

Let us be bolder in naming our enemies. Let us tell students at orientation the truth about the crimes of these institutions. Let us catalog the violence of the frats and the administration, so that there is never a period where students forget who their enemies are. Let us make it impossible for the administration and frats to simply wait out the occasional uproar, and let us constantly agitate against them and make their lives hell. Let us make racists, frat bros, and the administration afraid again—afraid of students, afraid of the marginalized and harassed, afraid of the exploited and excluded.

In the midst of resurgent fascism and ongoing colonial legacies, we must become the unruly, improper, unrespectable “barbarians at the gates.” Our attempts to appeal to the institutions to include us, to show that we can be like them, have and always will fail. It is time to jettison all such illusions and instead construct new communities and ways of living that amplify our power here, as students and collectives, until we can overrun these institutions themselves.

We are labelled “vandals”—placing us in a lineage that extends to the “barbarian” Vandal tribes that sacked Rome. We will accept this charge, for we seek the destruction, looting, and emptying out of these halls of power by the force of the unruly masses—the excluded and exploited. And we hope that individuals such as Gregory Fenves can only watch and play the fiddle while Rome burns.

Then the recruitment message for lone wolves:

Our message can perhaps best be summarized as: Every Student Can Tag. Anyone can be The Vandals of West Campus. Buy some spray paint, with cash of course, can’t have a debit card trail. Turn off location services on your phone. Don’t take photos of your handiwork—wait for someone else to do so (quick shout out to the frat bros who got the best photos of the tags out of anyone—thank you so much for that propaganda work!) Have a change of clothes. Mask up and wear unidentifiable clothes so you can’t be tracked through video surveillance. Make sure you have a secluded spot to change in and out of costume. Aim for the darkest, quietest targets. Stay in small groups so you can defend each other in case confronted. Scout out the house before hand and be aware of any police or frat patrols.

We hope that you will become one of us. Take up our name and sign off on your actions, put out report backs. We hope that through generalized student action and preparation, the efforts of the pigs and the administration to catch “culprits” will be thwarted, as the entire student body itself becomes a threat.

And one final threat:

To the fraternities and University: Prepare yourselves. We are at your gates. Your walls will fall. And you will be sacked.

—The Vandals of UT Austin

Let us fix that for you: Signed, The Terrorists of UT Austin.