Harrison vs. higher ed: How one lawmaker is weaponizing social media to eradicate LGBTQ+ curriculum

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A few days after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a video was posted on social media of a Texas State University student mockingly re-enacting the conservative activist’s death.

Rep. Brian Harrison saw the video and got to work.

He pulled up the university’s online course catalog and found a class called LGBTQ+ Communication Studies, where students were to learn about how “communication sustains both discrimination against LGBTQ+ people and their resistance,” according to the course description.

Within the hour, Harrison shared the video of the student on his X account alongside the image of the offending course description.

“Despicable!“ the Midlothian Republican wrote in his post to his 86,000 followers. “WORSE... I just found out that Texas State University is literally indoctrinating students in TRANSGENDER ’RESISTANCE’ and TRANSGENDER ’JUSTICE!’ Why are @GregAbbott_TX’s Regents at @txst allowing this!!??”

After sparking the online outrage with his post, Harrison appeared on Steve Bannon’s show later that day to fan the flames, railing against the San Marcos-based university for offering the course. Shortly after, Texas Scorecard, a conservative website followed by many state legislators, wrote about Harrison’s efforts, naming the professor and further dissecting her syllabus.

Texas State removed the course from its catalog the day after Harrison’s post. It’s unclear if the course is permanently removed. The university refused to explain its decision and the professor did not respond to requests for comment.

This chain of events has become a standard playbook for the North Texas lawmaker, who is increasingly seeking to make an impact through his prolific social media posts over his work in the Legislature.

For more than a year, Harrison has been on a crusade against Texas universities, scouring course catalogs and university websites for examples of “gender ideology” or LGBTQ+ curriculum, riling up his X followers about the use of taxpayer dollars to fund “liberal indoctrination” on campus, and calling out university leaders and members of his own party for allowing the coursework to stand.

In the Capitol, Harrison is a loner. Republican officials publicly deride him and his lack of legislative success — he passed zero of his own bills this year — or they disregard him entirely. But last month, Harrison notched a major victory for himself, drawing attention to a dispute that led to the ouster of a Texas A&M professor teaching about gender identity, and later, to the resignation of the university president.

“Nobody thought I could do it,” Harrison said in an interview with The Texas Tribune in his Capitol office last month. “Everybody was mocking me — I’ve become used to that down here. People didn’t think I’d be able to get the professor fired, much less … the president of the university — one of the biggest universities in America — fired. And then look at the ripple effects.”

After the Texas A&M incident, Texas Tech University officials limited classroom discussions about transgender and nonbinary identities. The University of Texas System confirmed it was reviewing all its courses across nine universities that discuss “gender identity.” And the University of North Texas, Texas Women’s University, and the Texas State University System announced course audits.

Harrison took credit for it all.

“Everything you’re seeing at Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Angelo State University — that is 100% a result of my actions,” Harrison said. “I’m not gonna stop until this is all done.”

His alma mater

No university has taken more heat from Harrison than Texas A&M, his alma mater and the place he credits with giving him his political start.

“I love A&M. People forget that,” said Harrison, who transferred to the university in 2002.

During the summer of 2003, he took a constitutional law class where they discussed the recent Supreme Court decision to strike down the state’s ban on consensual gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas. Two decades later, Harrison was one of the few House Republicans to vote to remove the anti-sodomy language from state code, a move he said he supports because it results in less government. The bill passed out of the House this session, but died in the Senate.

Harrison said that professor — whom he described as a liberal who didn’t force his personal politics on students — wrote him a letter of recommendation for a White House internship. That opportunity took him to Washington, D.C., and sparked his career in government after he graduated from A&M with an economics degree in 2004.

He worked in the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services Agency, and as a special assistant in an office of Vice President Dick Cheney during George W. Bush’s presidency. After a stint at the U.S. Department of Defense, he moved back to Texas. During that time, he worked in multiple public relations firms, helped his dad with his home building company and, briefly, he and his wife bred and sold labradoodles.

Harrison moved back to Washington in 2017 to again work for HHS under Trump, where he became Health Secretary Alex Azar’s chief of staff in 2019.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Harrison was involved in overseeing the Trump administration’s vaccine rollout.

At the time, Reuters published an article that Trump had appointed a labradoodle breeder to lead a pandemic taskforce, presented as evidence that the administration was mismanaging the COVID response. It led to additional coverage and a joke at his expense on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, marking the first time Harrison was widely ridiculed by the media and cast as ineffective.

“Maybe there was a reason I went through what I did before I got here,” Harrison said of that time period. “I want to make a difference … They have to castigate, they have to impugn my motives. Because, if I’m right, what does that say about them?”

In 2021, Harrison ran for the open congressional seat in his district and ultimately lost to then-state Rep. Jake Ellzey. He then ran in the special election to replace Ellzey in the state House and won.

Harrison’s first legislative session was in 2023, around the same time that conservative higher education activists were starting to rally around ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Texas lawmakers prohibited DEI offices, staff and programming at public universities, but carved out exceptions to still allow teaching and research about topics of race and gender. Harrison voted for the legislation.

But quickly after the law was implemented, he turned his attention to the classroom.

An early victory

Harrison got an early taste of an internet-driven victory when Texas A&M eliminated an LGBTQ+ studies minor months after he started posting about it.

“Texas A&M is offering a MINOR in this?? What. The. Hell,” he wrote in January 2024 on his X account, declaring he would find out if the state was using taxpayer dollars on these programs.

In this instance, Harrison went to the school directly. He said he met with A&M Provost Alan Sams in January last year and asked the university to end the program, or otherwise explain its justification for keeping it. The university refused to get rid of the minor at the time, stating that any elimination needed to go through a formal process. So he took his case to X.

But before the next legislative session arrived, A&M took action.

In September 2024, Harrison was the first to publicly announce the minor was going away when he said on X that Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp told him the university was eliminating the program.

“Proud to have helped deliver this victory for Texas taxpayers, who should never be forced to fund,” Harrison wrote.

At a faculty meeting a few weeks later, university leaders denied that political pressure played a role and repeatedly stated that the minor would be cut as a result of low enrollment. Yet faculty questioned why the university wasn’t taking a stronger stance to correct Harrison’s narrative.

“Rep. Brian Harrison is publicly taking credit for shutting down the minor,” professor Sarah Beck said at the meeting. “There has been no statement from the provost office rebutting Harrison’s rhetoric.”

Despite the optics, university officials are loath to credit Harrison’s actions alone for their moves. And Harrison isn’t the only one putting pressure on schools to take stronger action. Gov. Greg Abbott called for Texas A&M to fire the professor who taught about gender identity, and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called Welsh’s handling of the situation “unacceptable.”

“Everyone has a motive for a lot of things they do. I will probably never understand his motives,” Robert Albritton, chair of the Texas A&M board of Regents, told the Tribune. “But A&M is much bigger than one individual.
And we will continue to be bigger than one individual, and so, we will take all criticism, we’ll evaluate it, and we’ll move forward.”

Texas Tech University System Board Chair Cody Campbell also denied their recent decision to prohibit conversations about transgender identity had anything to do with Harrison.

“The things he said didn’t have any impact on anything we did,” Campbell told The Tribune.

Meanwhile, some faculty who have closely watched Harrison say that he’s just one player in a broader movement of conservatives using their online platforms to push America’s college campuses to reimagine themselves in their image.

“He got something to kind of stick with what happened to A&M, and so in that way, he’s maybe stood out above the crowd a little bit,” said Karma Chavez, department chair in the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies department at the University of Texas at Austin. ”But I really do just see him as a symptom of a broader trend in political culture right now in Texas and around the country.”

“It’s only a matter of time”

Jessica Pliley often wonders if she could be next.

The Texas State University history professor, whose scholarship focuses on gender and sexuality, has watched her colleagues on campus and around the state become social media targets as their public comments or classes have been misconstrued or taken out of context for political gain. The result is a culture of fear and silence instead of open discussion and debate, she says.

“I have been having a lot of conversations with my partner about what will happen when somebody like Brian Harrison targets me,” she said. “Part of me is thinking, ‘it’s only a matter of time.’”

Recently, she’s taken steps to protect herself from potential online harassment. And she canceled an annual lecture she gives on campus around Halloween about the European and North American witch trials. She worried the themes discussed — patriarchy, capitalism, and poverty — could be taken out of context and used against her.

She thinks Harrison is using his online platform to target any idea he disagrees with, which she called “anti-democratic” and a violation of student’s ability to choose what they want to learn.

“It’s extraordinary,” she said. “He wanted to get rid of all these courses in the Legislature, and because of the political process, he was not able to do that. So he is moving to a different process of leading a witch hunt through social media to achieve the same goals.”

She says people who face the barrage of calls, emails and social media messages when they are in the online crosshairs suffer personal consequences to their mental health. Pliley said she reached out to the Texas State professor who taught the LGBTQ+ communications course Harrison posted about and described her to be in “deep deep distress.”

Capitol “Cockroach”

In the wake of the president of Texas A&M’s ouster, hard-right national figures celebrated Harrison’s efforts.

“We got a scalp — a big one,” Steve Bannon told Harrison on his podcast. “Thank you, brother. Great work.”

“Brian Harrison might be the most impactful state legislator in America,” former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida posted on X.

Meanwhile, most of Harrison’s Republican colleagues in Texas went on ignoring his social media feed, just as they largely ignored him during the legislative session.

That’s because in Austin, Harrison is viewed as a gadfly, with few legislative victories or allies.

He’s introduced numerous bills to prohibit public universities from offering courses about LGBTQ topics. But none of his bills advanced in a Legislature that still generally requires its members to go through the process of doing the work to win favor from peers.

“There have been times when people are extremely sympathetic with his stances, but he’s so combative that they don’t want to ally with him,” Rep. Carl Tepper, R-Lubbock, said in an interview. “And it’s actually counterproductive to what he’s trying to achieve.”

Harrison passed zero of his own bills this past session but posted hundreds of times on social media, claiming that Texans were being “betrayed” by their Republican leaders and that his fellow lawmakers were not working hard enough for their constituents. In an article declaring Harrison the session’s “cockroach” — a framed printout of which he has proudly displayed in his Capitol office — Texas Monthly calculated that he posted on X more than 3,500 times over the course of the 140-day session.

Harrison rejected the idea of passing legislation as a metric of effectiveness — arguing instead that a lawmaker’s ability to do so was simply a reflection of kowtowing to the “uniparty” leadership.

“Anyone can pass a bill. It takes no skill,” he said.

Harrison has frequently tried to rile up his social media army against members of his own party, railing against Abbott and House leaders over property taxes, DEI in higher education, and the so-called empowerment of Democrats in the Legislature.

“A stark reminder that show horses show. And work horses work,” Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen, posted on social media, calling Harrison “totally and completely absent” in discussions about the state’s ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates — an outcome Harrison takes credit for.

Some of Harrison’s allies, meanwhile, say he’s effectively squeezing lawmakers to align with the conservative base.

“Brian’s role is honestly to put pressure on other members through his voice on social media,” Rep. Steve Toth, R-Conroe, said. “It’s how we all play together.”

Freshly emboldened

After Welsh announced his resignation from Texas A&M amid the controversy over a professor teaching about gender identity, Harrison took a victory lap on social media.

“WE DID IT! TEXAS A&M PRESIDENT IS OUT!! Another MASSIVE victory for the LIBERTY BOTS against the Austin Swamp Rats! ” he posted. Liberty Bots are what he calls his conservative online followers.

He immediately turned his attention to campaigning against Christian Hardigree, the newly-hired president of Texas A&M University-Victoria.

Harrison said Hardigree advocated for DEI in her resume because she said she hired a range of faculty from diverse backgrounds in a previous job.

“Are @GregAbbott_TX’s Regents at @tamusystem about to hire another DEI advocate as President of A&M Victoria!??” he wrote.

But this time, A&M leadership pushed back. Chancellor Glenn Hegar publicly defended Hardigree’s conservative bonafides, fundraising prowess and leadership achievements, taking a swing at those who criticized her.

“Critics who scour her CV for politically charged buzzwords miss the bigger picture: Her life and career have been defined by service, accountability and results,” Hegar said. “That’s the kind of leadership Texas A&M-Victoria needs.”

Harrison took another jab at the University of Texas at Austin, resurrecting posts from earlier this year when he staged an “undercover” investigation at an event organized by the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department that discussed barriers to health care that transgender people face and mentioned gender affirming care.

UT-Austin did not respond or make any changes when Harrison first homed in on the event in March, posting images of booklets and saw on campus that mentioned transgender people.

But Harrison is freshly emboldened — and unapologetic about the effects of his posts.

“My job is to be a voice for 200,000 people and to maximize their freedom and their liberty,” he said. “I lose no sleep about it. Like, I did the right thing. I know it. And the response has been overwhelming.”

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