The most memorable images from last week’s campus protests at the University of Mississippi will come not from the pro-Palestine activists who held a 30-person rally in a barricaded area, but from the much larger opposition they met: jeering white students, bedecked in patriotic clothing, overwhelming in numbers, mocking the protesters for their physical appearance, cheering for Donald Trump, clearly having quite a good time.

In one video, shared proudly by Georgia GOP Rep. Mike Collins (“Ole Miss taking care of business”), a sea of white men yells “lock her up” at a Black student protester. Some of the young men captured in other videos chant “Lizzo” at a Black woman, yelling, “Fuck you, fat-ass, fuck you, bitch.” One of the young men, who would later be kicked out of his fraternity, hops in the video Collins shared, imitating an ape, hooting monkey noises at the Black woman. In a tweet, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said the counterprotesters, who in the video he linked were singing the national anthem, warmed his heart.

These kinds of counterprotests—less serious than the violent outsiders who attacked students at the University of California, Los Angeles, but more clearly organically student-driven—also materialized at other campuses across the South.

At the University of Alabama, occasional homophobic comments could be heard among the counterprotesting students, who were also yelling “Fuck Joe Biden.” At Louisiana State University, young men drowned out pro-Palestinian students with chants of “USA” and mockingly told the students to “get out of our country.” At Arizona State University, fraternity brothers exuberantly dismantled an encampment while police watched.* In a video shot at the University of North Carolina, they told protesters to “lose some weight.” After UNC fraternity brothers fought with protesters over an American flag, politicians praised them as “patriots,” conservative media heralded them as the hope for the country’s future, and Sen. Lindsey Graham sent them Chick-fil-A. A GoFundMe for those fraternity brothers called “UNC Frat Bros Defended their Flag. Throw ’em a Rager” raised more than $500,000.

To understand these particular displays that are exciting red America and find out more about the role of fraternity brothers in the history of campus politics, Slate spoke with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. Shepherd, an instructor at the University of New Orleans, has researched the legacy of conservative student activists who organized during the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Slate: What do you think when you look at the conservative counterprotests happening on campuses now?

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: It’s extremely resonant of some of the more famous instances of campus backlash I studied. At Cornell in 1969, there was a strike from Black students saying, We want to increase Black enrollment, we want more representative curricula, we want to create Black Studies programs. As a backlash to that, someone—or a group of people—set a cross on fire outside a residence hall for Black women students. Some Black students took over a hall, and there was this clash on campus with a group of fraternity brothers. This happened to be during Parents’ Weekend. And it just became this media spectacle as the police came in and escorted the Black students out of the building.

Where do you specifically see these conservative counterprotests as similar to those in response to the Civil Rights and anti-war student movements?

I mean, there’s some extremely specific parallels. For example, the flag thing. At UNC last week, the American flag was taken down and replaced with a Palestinian flag, and the fraternity members put the American flag back up. And back in the ’60s, there were all these instances of fraternity members getting in physical fights at the base of a flagpole: Someone from, let’s say, Students for a Democratic Society would raise the flag of North Vietnam or would try to lower the American flag, and then the frat bros were all there, at the base of the flag, having a tug-of-war. So there’s such a clear parallel to what’s happened in the past.

There’s another thing that there’s similar parallels to in the past: You’d have older people, people in the campus community, writing Op-Eds in the local paper in support of the young men for their patriotic activities, or whatever it was. This crazy GoFundMe [for fraternity brothers at UNC] raised like half a million dollars to throw the young men a rager.

And it was, specifically, people from fraternities who were counterprotesting?

Yeah. In the ’60s, fraternities were all over these counterprotests. They didn’t show up wearing their letters, they didn’t show up as members of Sigma Chi; they showed up as members of patriotic campus organizations like Young Americans for Freedom. Or sometimes they come up with these ridiculous names, like Students for Americanism or Students for Freedom of South Vietnam or whatever, that gave them an affiliation that didn’t put their chapter on the line. Now, when you look at what happened at UNC recently, when you look at what happened at the University of Mississippi, they’re not talking about their fraternity, but you only have to scratch the surface a little bit to figure out that’s what they’re affiliated with.

I think in the popular imagination, big state-school fraternities focus all their energy on partying. I don’t necessarily think people think about them organizing politically.

No, it’s a big thing. I’ll speak from my own experience: I was a member of Phi Mu and pledged at Mississippi State in 2007. At that time, we were gearing up for the 2008 presidential election. I can remember all of the houses on frat row had Ron Paul banners. Most of those guys were involved in the [student government]. They had tight-knit political ties through their own family members and business connections. If you interviewed a college student working for, say, a Southern senator or representative in D.C., it would be very uncommon if that person were not in a fraternity or sorority.

Are you saying that there is some degree of organization that comes from the fraternity itself, or just that it attracts students interested in and equipped for political activity?

I think it’s kind of all in the mix, with social power and class power and political power. Greek organizations tend to have very high standards for their members. They demand a minimum GPA, chapter attendance, service hours. Members are set up to be social and political elites whenever they finish their time on campus. And they’re going to be lifelong members, so they’ve got these connections through the organization, and they get jobs through these organizations. It’s a great way to network—literally for your entire life.

Fraternities are only one half of Greek life. Are these recent counterprotests a largely male movement?

In the footage that I’ve seen, there are young women, but you’re not seeing them in the same numbers. And they’re not the ones making the monkey noises. Fraternity culture, broadly speaking, cultivates this sense of hypermasculinity. And so that could explain some of this impulse to show up and be defensive of your campus and defensive of your country and your institutions by being a little bit belligerent towards protesters. So it’s not just showing up to that kind of protest, but to be provocative. It’s all tied in with this ego and hypermasculinity that can characterize fraternities.

And assuming some of these young women are also in Greek life, they would understand that [counter-protesting like this] would get them in a lot of trouble with their organizations. I know, speaking as an alum of Phi Mu, it would be extremely clear in my mind that I could not be present at or participate in that. We had laws from our national organization. In our chapter—and again, this was 2007—if you were smoking a cigarette, you had to be seated with your legs crossed. Or you couldn’t wear your letters out if you’re drinking. Little nitpicky things like that. So just that culture had an understanding of how you need to present yourself in society. That would be enough for these young women to understand: We don’t need to be a counterprotest.

And the men don’t have that culture.

No, not at all. Or if they do, they understand that they can get away with it with a PR-crafted response.

OK, we’ve talked about how these counterprotests were similar to those in the Civil Rights and Vietnam era. How did they differ?

I can’t think of any major differences; it all feels pretty familiar. Oh, except the Jewish fraternity at UNC [that participated in the counterprotest]—you wouldn’t have seen a Southern campus like UNC with its own Jewish fraternity accepted with the other fraternities. In fact, a lot of these schools, and the Ivy Leagues, specifically, used to have quotas for Jewish students. They didn’t want over a certain number. And now because of the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and all of the protests in the 1960s, we have them.

Why do you think, when so many years have passed, the counterprotests seem so similar to their past iterations?

It’s an inherent tendency, right? It’s this political identity bound up with what makes you want to join a fraternity in the first place. Especially a Southern fraternity—there’s politics associated with that. Anytime they perceive that there’s a challenge to the status quo, which is a condition that privileges them, they’re going to attack. And they can do that, knowing whatever the repercussions may be, it’ll all work out for them in the end. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the young men who have been arrested or suspended for all of this, but Fox News has already been interviewing some of these guys.

Did you see the Instagram video Donald Trump posted thanking these students for chanting “We want Trump”? Or his campaign ad on Truth Social praising the “UNC frat guys” and other red-state counterprotesters?

I mean, it makes you ask questions like, “Is this really a defense of Israel?”

Well, Trump weighing in made me wonder: Did the counterprotesters have the same support from presidential candidates back then?

So in ’68, Nixon rode this backlash against the student protests movement. But a big difference today is back then Nixon was running against an anti-war candidate. Trump is not. Nixon said publicly to college presidents that if a student is protesting on your campus and they get arrested, you can expel them, and that has implications for the draft. He was encouraging that sort of thing. And at Nixon’s library, there’s a file folder from Young Americans for Freedom or these other groups that sent in letters of support after the invasion of Cambodia. There was a National College Republicans and YAF campaign to send telegrams to the White House encouraging Nixon because there was such a strong response against that decision. Although, I put an asterisk by it, because he also referred to Young Americans for Freedom as “nutty.”

And Reagan was a big supporter of the counterprotests. In California, anti-war protesters had had their black armbands, and right-wing counterprotesters created their own version, which was a blue button meant to stand for campus order and support for a president to crack down on students. Reagan wore a blue button.

What about the later lives of those counterprotesters in the ’60s—what do we know of them?

The thesis of my book is that through this time on campus, doing battle against the New Left and anti-war and Civil Rights protesters and the Black Power movement, conservative students developed this deep and lasting resentment of democratizing higher education. Some of the people I discuss in my book are people like Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, Newt Gingrich, even David Duke. I’m talking about the New Right. Normally, we date the New Right to getting their start in the 1970s through organizations like the Heritage Foundation. But they were actually already activists when they were in college.

It’s through this history that this cohort of right-wing conservative students cut its political teeth. They went on to take jobs as political consultants on the Beltway, they worked in D.C., they joined the Heritage Foundation, they became legislators themselves. And they used that resentment, and they kept that with them throughout their careers. And a lot of times higher ed is a political target for them because of these experiences.

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You mentioned Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, Newt Gingrich, and David Duke.

And Karl Rove. There’s plenty of others.

Can you tell what those big names were doing during these periods as students?

Karl Rove was the president of his chapter of College Republicans at the University of Utah. Jeff Sessions was at Huntington College in Alabama and was the president of College Republicans. David Duke started three separate neo-Nazi chapters at LSU.

They joined or organized themselves into groups. Young Americans for Freedom, College Republicans, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. They would get their groups together, recruit fraternity members, football players, and other athletes to join what they would call a “majority coalition.” And the whole purpose of the majority coalition was to put up a front to say, Look how many students of the silent majority are opposed to these leftist civil rights demonstrators or the leftist peaceniks.

Newt Gingrich was in this majority coalition at Tulane called MORTS. There was a huge brawl in May of 1972 that had to do with someone trying to pull the American flag down on campus, and Newt Gingrich was involved. And there’s a picture of him and about five other guys in the university president’s office [in a relaxed discussion with him]. It’s so striking to me, because you would never see that today, where students are invited to advise the president on what to do about campus protests.

Any final thoughts from your historian perspective on these campus movements?

We’ve been here before. Protesting is part of the fabric of the history of the American university, and we always look back on these causes as noble and good. The same administrators who are calling the police on the students now—those same administrations issued a mea culpa for the way they treated the peace activists in the ’60s. That story happens all the time, and so we can imagine that 10, 20 years from now, we’ll look back on this moment and say the students were right.