Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Most crucial is whether this becomes a long-term trend or lasts only for a few years. Trump's exposed the Republican Party's psychotic insanity in a way that nobody else could have. Will the collective memory of the people whose lives get destroyed last beyond his time in office?
edited 9th Apr '18 8:30:46 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"While defectors from key GOP demographics are great, there's an even better aspect. This trend, and many others, suggests that another decent sized portion will stay home. If that's combined with high Democratic turnout, it might overcome gerrymandering and the Democrats okay but not great general ballot lead.
Ask Clinton what a "supporter" who doesn't vote for you is worth.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.There are still a lot of obstacles to overcome:
- Gerrymandering is going to be a long-term project to resolve, especially if the administration gets its way with the 2020 census.
- Russian interference is likely going to continue in 2018 and 2020, and with the administration and Congress doing nothing to stop it, we'll be left with state and private efforts, which won't be as comprehensive as needed.
- Voter suppression efforts are ongoing in red states and will likely only get worse.
- Republicans continue to sabotage the institutions of government at all levels — in particular, the judiciary branch is in deep trouble and isn't something that can be repaired overnight. A lot of the critical positions are lifetime appointments.
On a national level, the game is rigged so that Democrats don't just need to win races, they need to win with huge majorities at all levels, and do so repeatedly. The energy needed to sustain this movement isn't something we can take for granted.
edited 9th Apr '18 8:53:16 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Florida governor Rick Scott officially announces bid for the seat of Senator Bill Nelson.
Scott is definitely competitive, and the man is loaded so he can force the Dems to divert money to Florida.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/09/politics/rick-scott-bill-nelson-florida/index.html
Thankfully Nelson and the DNC knew this was coming at least.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.This reminded me of a story I read years back about a young Mike Tyson asking Trump for some financial advice in the mid-80s. Supposedly they talked for a few minutes, and later Trump sent Tyson an enormous bill for his "services".
A few items from last week I never got around to posting:
In New York, the so called "Independent Democratic Conference", a small group of breakaway Democrats who have been mostly allied with Republicans in a blatant power grab, (they like to call themselves a bridge between parties, but the truth is that a group of State Senate Democrats who either wanted positions of greater power or were pissed at losing those positions shopped themselves around to see who would make the better offer for their votes) announced they were returning to the fold within the Democratic party, which would give Democrats a 1 vote majority in the State Senate. Democrats also control the State Assembly and the Governor's office.
Said announcement, suspiciously, comes shortly after the budget process is finished, meaning most of the good this might do is delayed at least a year, and is done when members of the IDC are facing organized primary challenges. What an odd coincidence. Also of note, they previously made a pledge to rejoin Democrats after 2014 elections but stayed with Republicans come the 2015 session. Lastly, they would still potentially have kingmaker powers, since the edge they'd give Democrats is so slim that they'd be able to make outrageous demands in return for votes, especially since one member of the IDC has been caucusing with Republicans ever since first getting elected.
Personally, I hope every member of the group gets primaried out. Considering the endemic corruption in Albany, ([[start researching the names of major players ever since the 2009 leadership crisis
, and almost all of them either go to jail, end their political careers in disgrace, or have major reputations for... ethical lapses) I also hope someone is taking over the work Preet
Bharara
did in fighting public corruption and is holding everyone's feet to the fire.
“What unites us is more important than what divides us,” Cuomo said, as the IDC’s leader, Sen. Jeff Klein, agreed to get in line behind the Democrats’ long-suffering Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins.
Anyone not closely following politics in New York likely missed the drama. Until recently, most New Yorkers were unaware of the IDC, too.
But in the aftermath of the 2016 election, the state’s many restless, growing liberal organizations aimed to make the IDC infamous, defeat its members in primaries, and give New York a Democratic trifecta that could uncork bills from marijuana legalization to the Dream Act to single-payer health care. That same movement powered Cynthia Nixon’s entry into the Democratic primary for governor, turning a sleepy Cuomo coronation into one of the country’s most closely watched races.
“Andrew Cuomo likes to put himself forward as bipartisan, and that’s not the case,” Nixon said last week in an interview with The Washington Post. “He can barely work with Democrats. He seems to be working for the Republicans. There’s a host of issues he says he cares about — campaign finance reform, early voting, the campaign for fiscal equity for schools . . . and it’s unclear whether he really cares, because if he did, he wouldn’t have handed power to the Republicans.”
National Democrats, including the Democratic National Committee’s vice chair, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), had begun to criticize the IDC, and arguments about it spilled over into the party’s debates about rules for the 2020 presidential primary. And the IDC’s opponents do not believe that this saga is over. Here’s what they’re fighting about.
What was the IDC? Founded seven years ago, after Republicans won control of the New York state Senate, it began as a coalition of four Democrats who, in Klein’s words, “could no longer in good conscience support the present Democratic leadership.” They lost nothing by breaking with their minority-status party; they gained clout by working with Republicans. In 2012, Democrats won a majority of state Senate seats, but the IDC stayed in formation, and the odd coalition continued for years, with even more Democrats climbing on board.
Why did it disband? Ask a liberal, and they’ll say it was the pressure that 60-odd progressive groups, eight primary challengers, and Cynthia Nixon put on the governing coalition. Ask Cuomo, and he’ll say it wasn’t that at all — it was about Democrats rediscovering what they stood for. Ask the reporters who exposed how IDC membership was helping some senators pad their salaries, and they’ll tell you the politics became unsustainable.
Are liberals happy about this? No, they’re not, for three reasons. One: They worry that this will sap momentum for their primary challengers. Two: The Senate’s work is largely finished this year, after last week, when the IDC-empowered Republicans signed off on a budget that funded some liberal priorities but left big ones — early voting, the Dream Act — on the cutting-room floor. Three: They do not trust Cuomo or Klein, and this is not the first time they’ve been told that the IDC is packing up.
Who runs the state Senate now? Republicans. Even if Democrats win two special Senate elections this month — they held both seats previously — they will have 32 members to the GOP’s 31. The wrinkle is that one of those Democrats is Sen. Simcha Felder, who decided almost immediately after winning that he could deliver more for his conservative Brooklyn district by sticking with Republicans — a position he reaffirmed Wednesday. And Senate rules require 38 votes to change a leader in mid-session, ensuring that Sen. John J. Flanagan, the Republican leader, will stay in power through the 2018 election.
I haven't seen this posted about here, so I'm going to post a couple of different links from over the last year and a half: The alt-Reich is recording and editing
lectures and comments by professors
, (naturally, often out of context or misleadingly edited) and then embarking on attempts to intimidate and fire those professors
, as well as coordinating with Fox News and various websites to gin up the outrage over these issues
Lately, he doesn't like to listen to the messages by himself. When he presses play, it's obvious why. Here are a couple of messages:
"Albert Ponce, you are a piece of s*** f****** gutter slug that needs his neck snapped, OK? Call me if you need me. I'll do it for ya.
"F****** race-baiting f****** piece of trash."
Ponce teaches political science at Diablo Valley College, a community college in California's East Bay. It all started in October when he was invited to give a public lecture on campus on an area he specializes in: race and politics.
In the speech, which was filmed, he called the United States "a white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist system." He also mentioned Karl Marx in passing, praised civil disobedience and referred to a white supremacist in the White House. The result: attacks on Facebook and threatening voice messages and emails.
Colleges are meant to be a home for free inquiry. But these days, not all professors feel that freedom. Across the country, in the past year and a half, at least 250 university professors, including Ponce, have been targeted via online campaigns because of their research, their teaching or their social media posts. Conservative professors have been attacked from the right and the left, both with equally dire language.
Ponce says his ideas, in context, are "not controversial at all" in his circles of academia. For example, when he talks about white supremacy, he says, he is talking about a system of power, not about individual white people.
But in today's highly polarized political climate, almost any statement about race or diversity can prove extremely controversial. Here are a few examples:
Josh Cuevas, an associate professor in the school of education at the University of North Georgia, came under inquiry from his congressional representative after getting into an argument on Facebook about President Trump and voter turnout. Eve Browning, the chair of the department of philosophy and classics at the University of Texas, San Antonio, was targeted, as was her entire department, when a student surreptitiously recorded a disciplinary conversation that touched on his negative comments about Islam. Laurie Rubel, a professor of education at Brooklyn College, published a National Science Foundation-funded research paper about race and mathematics education. Rubel tells NPR that she was looking at how to support high school math teachers who teach in hypersegregated urban schools, in part by being critical of the concept of meritocracy. The on-air take of Fox News commentator Greg Gutfeld was: "A math professor ... claimed that merit-based education is ... a tool of evil whiteness."
...
On the right, though, a network of outside groups and sites has mobilized against academics. Their views range from libertarian to conservative to white nationalist.
Sites such as The College Fix and Campus Reform pay student reporters to contribute stories titled: "Meritocracy is a 'tool of whiteness,' claims math professor" (Campus Reform) or "History professor calls for repeal of Second Amendment" (The College Fix).
Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix, told NPR that the site's purpose is to train future journalists, not to foment hate. "The College Fix has publicly denounced any vile emails that a professor might get," she said. "I'm sorry if professors received that kind of backlash." In reference to Ponce, of Diablo Valley College, she added, "It appeared the lecture was not balanced and didn't do academic inquiry and debate justice."
The College Fix is run by the Student Free Press Association. The association has had Education Secretary Betsy De Vos' son listed on its board of directors and is funded by an anonymous conservative donor fund.
Campus Reform is a project the Leadership Institute, a conservative think tank. Professor Watchlist, which lists more than 250 professors who advance what it calls a "radical" left-wing agenda, is maintained by Turning Point USA, an on-campus group that has been labeled "alt-right."
Campus Reform and Professor Watchlist did not respond to requests for comment.
The Red Elephants is a pro-Trump "alt-right media collective" founded in November 2016. Founder Vincent James Foxx has reportedly denied the Holocaust and been accused of urging violence at rallies. The site posted an edited video of Ponce's talk on You Tube with commentary calling it "Marxist, Communist, disgusting rhetoric that they spew in these classrooms to indoctrinate these children." It used the video to kick off an initiative called "Film Your Marxist Professor."
The administrator of the "Film Your Marxist Professor" Facebook page, who gave his name as Aaron Burr, told NPR via Facebook message: "We receive around 10 submissions per day. Our goal is to stop the anti-white and anti-American rhetoric that is being spewed on college campuses all across the country."
From these specialized sites, content travels to alt-right media sources like Breitbart and Infowars and neo-Nazi sites like Stormfront, and then, sometimes, to Fox News and the New York Post, CNN and other outlets.
Meanwhile, harassment is coordinated out in the open on anonymous, uncensored forums like 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, where self-identified "trolls" uncover and post people's personal information, known as doxing, and try out strategies of attack. Cuevas at the University of North Georgia obtained screenshots of the 4chan forum on which people were fabricating social media posts in an attempt to paint him as anti-Semitic and racist or, alternatively, as pushing anti-Trump views onto his students.
"Their stated goal was to get me fired," he says, but he fears that is not the worst of it: "Georgia had just passed the campus carry law [for firearms], and what worried me was a lone nut case."
Two days later, Essex County College suspended Durden, and last week she was fired. Because of Durden’s appearance, school president Anthony E. Munroe wrote on Friday, “The College was immediately inundated with feedback from students, faculty and prospective students and their families expressing frustration, concern and even fear that the views expressed by a College employee (with influence over students) would negatively impact their experience on the campus…. While the adjunct who expressed her personal views in a very public setting was in no way claiming to represent the views and beliefs of the College, and does not represent the College, her employment with us and potential impact on students required our immediate review into what seemed to have become a very contentious and divisive issue.”
This justification for Durden’s firing, while disappointing, didn’t surprise me. I’m also a college professor, and appeared on Carlson’s show in April to defend my New Republic article about why colleges have a right to reject hateful speakers. While my appearance didn’t generate the same controversy as Durden’s, a wave of people contacted my school, Colby College in Maine, in an attempt to have me fired (they apparently missed the irony of trying to get someone fired for their speech, about speech, because you disagree with that speech). In addition, my colleagues in the English department, plus a few lucky senior administrators, have been hapless recipients of racist and anti-Semitic diatribes, thus burdening our IT staff.
Meanwhile, I received thousands of insults and threats. Beginning mere minutes after my appearance, I was deluged with emails and instant messages calling me a “fucking liberal idiot,” “pussy snowflake,” “ignorant and hypocritical cunt,” “fucking Nazi,” and “Jew fag.” Strangers threatened to break my legs, scalp me, and make me “eat a bullet.” One wished, in all-caps, “Hopefully you get robbed and killed by an illegal immigrant that was deported five times and he leaves you to bleed to death slowly so you have time [to] realize how fucking stupid you were all along.” There have also been repeated and likely actionable defamation attempts, which I’m still dealing with. (It’s also worth noting that I’m a straight, white, male, tenure-track professor at a top-tier institution that supports my public engagement, which is to say my experience with strangers eroticizing my slow death has been less traumatic than most professors’. I can only imagine—though I’d rather not—the bile directed privately at Durden.)
This was all in response to my careful argument about how campuses should handle invitations to speakers who are intentional provocateurs. Indeed, I had to remind Carlson and his audience no fewer than three times, in a roughly seven-minute TV segment, that I stand emphatically opposed to any sort of violence, from the left or the right, that would shut down free speech. While the right was calling for my job (and my head), I was meeting and corresponding with members of Colby’s chapter of the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization, to discuss campus free speech issues. Over five years, in hundreds of pages of teaching evaluations by my students, I haven’t received a single complaint about political bias.
Campus Reform’s pieces are often stamped with the hallmarks of nonpartisan journalism. Its reporters reach out to the professors, and sometimes to their institutions, to seek comment. But the stories run beneath shareable, quote-strewn headlines that tend to offer a thumbnail sketch of a more complicated statement: "American patriotism is ‘drenched in whiteness,’ prof claims." "Prof blames ‘Trump and trumpism’ for Scalise shooting."
Then, and often quite quickly, a thriving conservative-media industry delivers a signal boost. Longstanding industry leaders like The National Review and edgier newcomers like Heat Street and The Blaze offer their own write-ups of the controversies, often drawing from the Campus Reform reports without contributing additional reporting.
As the signal is boosted, it is slowly but inexorably mutated, as in a game of telephone. A Campus Reform headline describes a professor’s essay as arguing that white marble in sculptures "contributes" to white supremacy. Two days later, a Daily Caller piece, citing Campus Reform, has the professor "equating" white-marble statues with white supremacy. Two days after that, a site called Truth Revolt — now citing another account from Heat Street, which had also picked up on Campus Reform’s report — is blunter: "Professor: White Marble Statues Are Racist."
The end result, much of the time, is reporting from more-conventional national outlets. A professor, now at the center of a firestorm, gets a call from the producers of Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News: Would she like to come on the air and defend her views? A pundit, reading a local newspaper’s report on the incident, folds it into an essay on the state of the academy. Or The Chronicle reports on threats of violence the professor or her institution has received since her comments made their way through the assembly line.
About those threats: They’re increasingly common. The assembly line of outrage doesn’t just expose faculty statements to a national audience; it also calls forth an id. Readers disgusted by what they view as the social-justice agenda of higher education barrage professors and their colleges with invective and promises of personal or campuswide violence.
The mission of the watch list, according to its website, is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The site invites users to nominate candidates, asking that they “submit a tip” about the nefarious pinkos who teach them (that’s S-C-H-U-M-A-N with one n, by the way). Some of the professors on the list have responded thoughtfully to their inclusion; others on social media have trolled the list with complaints about Indiana Jones and Jesus. Like any soulless golem, I love a good Jesus joke, but today even I can’t muster up the laughter.
Just four years ago, in 2012—the year Charlie Kirk, then a Chicago-based 18-year-old who skipped college altogether, co-founded Turning Point USA—the watch list would have been great fodder for yuks, on par with David Horowitz’s obnoxious 2006 book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, inclusion in which was often a point of pride. Today, though, the Professor Watchlist causes me to fear for the safety of the people on it.
I contacted Kirk, asking him whether the timing was intentional, and whether the watch list was intended to intimidate, harass, or otherwise harm the people on it. He dismissed my suggestions as “preposterous,” and we had a brief, civil chat on the phone. His organization, he was quick to emphasize, is a mainstream conservative student outreach group, devoted to the usual jazz about free markets and bootstraps and other sundry Rush lyrics. That is: While its website looks like a stock agency for photos of self-satisfied young white people, Kirk stresses that Turning Point USA is in no way affiliated with alt-right or similar hate groups, and is instead a mild-mannered fiscal-conservative outreach group that “believes that every young person can be enlightened to true free market values.”
He told me in no uncertain terms that he “denounce[s] completely” last weekend’s nauseating neo-Nazi Woodstock, and that the watch list’s launch had been planned for “months.” Its dovetailing with the white nationalists’ coming-out party—and the corresponding rash of grim, incredulous press coverage—was an unfortunate coincidence, and one that caused an unanticipated surge of traffic thanks to heightened media attention in the wake of the launch’s inauspicious timing. The intention, he said, is not to threaten or harm the professors—his commitment to free speech means he’ll “fight to the death” for their right to disagree with him—but to raise “awareness” for students and the parents who often pay their tuition.
But the photos? I asked. Did Kirk at least understand my unease about the photos? They’re “just stock images,” he said, publicly available, like all of the other information the site has aggregated—aggregated, he emphasized, not created. Plus, “Nowhere do we say they shouldn’t have the right” to express their views; the site has “no calls to action,” whether that be firing or worse.
I’ve no reason to doubt Kirk’s sincerity, but at this point, I also have to wonder whether the intentions of his watch list make a difference—and whether this is a bell that can be unrung. It doesn’t matter if the site wasn’t meant as a No-Goodnik Intellectual Kill List one day after Richard Spencer and his Jungen screeched Heil Trump. Intentionally or not, the Professor Watchlist, simply by being a self-styled watch list, has aligned itself with the ugly, frightening new political status quo.
But remember, it's the left that hates free speech because they don't want people who call for genocide to get mass audiences on campus. *eyeroll*
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |The Party of Nixon and Reagan has become the Party of Trump. The modern GOP has pretty much sold itself out to idolatry of its Dear Leaders, with loyalty to party overriding any concerns for ethics or governance.
Back in the day, though, Republicans were willing to impeach Nixon. Their cards are certainly on the table now.
edited 9th Apr '18 9:35:27 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
That's not really worrying, impeachment has always been a political process and the Republicans were never going to agree to impeachment in any significant numbers.
Actually no
, the Republicans who voted to impeach him were the exception to the rule. See above.
edited 9th Apr '18 9:37:35 AM by Fourthspartan56
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangWhile the Democrats, in some areas, should definitely go after Trump, basing your campaign around impeaching him is probably not a good idea. Because there is no way in Hell they could deliver on it unless A) Mueller finds something incredibly damning and B) quite a few Republicans go along with them. Neither is guaranteed, and the latter is probably never happening, and if they play up impeachment and don't succeed, it could cost them in 2020.
edited 9th Apr '18 9:38:09 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.![]()
Well, there you go.
Impeachment in the House is a definite possibility given the projections for this year's election. Conviction in the Senate is almost certainly impossible if the GOP stonewalls it; there aren't enough Republican seats up for election for Democrats to take the required two thirds majority. 2021 (after the next Congress is sworn in) is our only even remotely possible shot, and that's only if Trump wins reelection.
[Maddowblog]: Our Dear Leader is having trouble getting his military enforcement of border security
, as the governors of several states are refusing his request to deploy National Guard troops, and those that have sent them are falling well short of his promised "4,000".
It's also unclear what those soldiers are actually going to do, as Trump's order was unspecific as to these minor details.
edited 9th Apr '18 9:41:36 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Sorry to correct the "Republicans didn't support Nixon's impeachment" tall tale, but the vote linked here took place before the release of the "smoking gun" tape. And ten of the "no" votes stated that they would support the articles of impeachment in the main House vote.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanThat said, he a climate change denier (though he's smart enough not to be super vocal about it), he's flip-flopped on expanding Medicare as part of Obamacare three or four times, he once instituted mandatory drug tests for welfare recipients as a cost-cutting measure (which lost the state vast sums of money, as administering the drug screenings cost way more than the money saved on refused payments), he dragged his feet as much as possible on a pair of Florida state constitutional amendments banning gerrymandering (which passed overwhelmingly by referendum), he supported laws that make it easier to seek the death penalty in Florida (and removed all potential death penalty cases from a district prosecutor — an elected, not appointed, position — when she said that she would not seek the death penalty for any case because she did not rust the state courts to try death penalty cases fairly and justly), and vehemently opposed gun control of any sort up until the Stoneman-Douglas shooting, when he supported a bandaid bill that mixes minor gun control issues (like raising the minimum age for buying a gun in our own name from 18 to 21) with things like allowing teachers to carry guns in schools.
He's a snake whose primary skill is walking a fine line of being loathsome enough to turn out the GOP base without being vocal enough about it to inspire the left to show up just to kick him out. He makes a big public show of uncontroversial nonpartisan efforts, while quietly toeing the GOP party line in the background. He's also a master of spin, doing things like winning reelection on a platform of raising the level of education funding in the state — nevermind the fact that he was the one who slashed education budgets to the bone in the first place.
Meanwhile, Bill Nelson (the currently sitting senator that Scott is running against) is a pretty tepid moderate Democrat. He doesn't have anything near the name recognition as Scott, and I couldn't tell you anything specific about his policy positions or what he's personally passionate about. I'll certainly vote for him over Scott, but to be frank, I'm not optimistic about his chances. This race is not one that looks great for the Democrats.
edited 9th Apr '18 9:49:54 AM by NativeJovian
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.CNN has moved the Florida Senate race from Lean Democratic to Toss-Up, and the Tennessee Senate race from Likely Republican to Lean Republican.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/09/politics/senate-key-races-florida-tennessee/index.html
How Scott still has an approval rating in the mid-high 50s is beyond me. Though Nelson is up a few points for now.
edited 9th Apr '18 9:52:37 AM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Reposting from the last page because I think it needs attention and is pretty chilling considering the both the Far Right movements going on and the antipathy of the Right in general to higher education at the moment:
I haven't seen this posted about here, so I'm going to post a couple of different links from over the last year and a half: The alt-Reich is recording and editing
lectures and comments by professors
, (naturally, often out of context or misleadingly edited) and then embarking on attempts to intimidate and fire those professors
, as well as coordinating with Fox News and various websites to gin up the outrage over these issues
Lately, he doesn't like to listen to the messages by himself. When he presses play, it's obvious why. Here are a couple of messages:
"Albert Ponce, you are a piece of s*** f****** gutter slug that needs his neck snapped, OK? Call me if you need me. I'll do it for ya.
"F****** race-baiting f****** piece of trash."
Ponce teaches political science at Diablo Valley College, a community college in California's East Bay. It all started in October when he was invited to give a public lecture on campus on an area he specializes in: race and politics.
In the speech, which was filmed, he called the United States "a white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist system." He also mentioned Karl Marx in passing, praised civil disobedience and referred to a white supremacist in the White House. The result: attacks on Facebook and threatening voice messages and emails.
Colleges are meant to be a home for free inquiry. But these days, not all professors feel that freedom. Across the country, in the past year and a half, at least 250 university professors, including Ponce, have been targeted via online campaigns because of their research, their teaching or their social media posts. Conservative professors have been attacked from the right and the left, both with equally dire language.
Ponce says his ideas, in context, are "not controversial at all" in his circles of academia. For example, when he talks about white supremacy, he says, he is talking about a system of power, not about individual white people.
But in today's highly polarized political climate, almost any statement about race or diversity can prove extremely controversial. Here are a few examples:
Josh Cuevas, an associate professor in the school of education at the University of North Georgia, came under inquiry from his congressional representative after getting into an argument on Facebook about President Trump and voter turnout. Eve Browning, the chair of the department of philosophy and classics at the University of Texas, San Antonio, was targeted, as was her entire department, when a student surreptitiously recorded a disciplinary conversation that touched on his negative comments about Islam. Laurie Rubel, a professor of education at Brooklyn College, published a National Science Foundation-funded research paper about race and mathematics education. Rubel tells NPR that she was looking at how to support high school math teachers who teach in hypersegregated urban schools, in part by being critical of the concept of meritocracy. The on-air take of Fox News commentator Greg Gutfeld was: "A math professor ... claimed that merit-based education is ... a tool of evil whiteness."
...
On the right, though, a network of outside groups and sites has mobilized against academics. Their views range from libertarian to conservative to white nationalist.
Sites such as The College Fix and Campus Reform pay student reporters to contribute stories titled: "Meritocracy is a 'tool of whiteness,' claims math professor" (Campus Reform) or "History professor calls for repeal of Second Amendment" (The College Fix).
Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix, told NPR that the site's purpose is to train future journalists, not to foment hate. "The College Fix has publicly denounced any vile emails that a professor might get," she said. "I'm sorry if professors received that kind of backlash." In reference to Ponce, of Diablo Valley College, she added, "It appeared the lecture was not balanced and didn't do academic inquiry and debate justice."
The College Fix is run by the Student Free Press Association. The association has had Education Secretary Betsy De Vos' son listed on its board of directors and is funded by an anonymous conservative donor fund.
Campus Reform is a project the Leadership Institute, a conservative think tank. Professor Watchlist, which lists more than 250 professors who advance what it calls a "radical" left-wing agenda, is maintained by Turning Point USA, an on-campus group that has been labeled "alt-right."
Campus Reform and Professor Watchlist did not respond to requests for comment.
The Red Elephants is a pro-Trump "alt-right media collective" founded in November 2016. Founder Vincent James Foxx has reportedly denied the Holocaust and been accused of urging violence at rallies. The site posted an edited video of Ponce's talk on You Tube with commentary calling it "Marxist, Communist, disgusting rhetoric that they spew in these classrooms to indoctrinate these children." It used the video to kick off an initiative called "Film Your Marxist Professor."
The administrator of the "Film Your Marxist Professor" Facebook page, who gave his name as Aaron Burr, told NPR via Facebook message: "We receive around 10 submissions per day. Our goal is to stop the anti-white and anti-American rhetoric that is being spewed on college campuses all across the country."
From these specialized sites, content travels to alt-right media sources like Breitbart and Infowars and neo-Nazi sites like Stormfront, and then, sometimes, to Fox News and the New York Post, CNN and other outlets.
Meanwhile, harassment is coordinated out in the open on anonymous, uncensored forums like 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, where self-identified "trolls" uncover and post people's personal information, known as doxing, and try out strategies of attack. Cuevas at the University of North Georgia obtained screenshots of the 4chan forum on which people were fabricating social media posts in an attempt to paint him as anti-Semitic and racist or, alternatively, as pushing anti-Trump views onto his students.
"Their stated goal was to get me fired," he says, but he fears that is not the worst of it: "Georgia had just passed the campus carry law [for firearms], and what worried me was a lone nut case."
Two days later, Essex County College suspended Durden, and last week she was fired. Because of Durden’s appearance, school president Anthony E. Munroe wrote on Friday, “The College was immediately inundated with feedback from students, faculty and prospective students and their families expressing frustration, concern and even fear that the views expressed by a College employee (with influence over students) would negatively impact their experience on the campus…. While the adjunct who expressed her personal views in a very public setting was in no way claiming to represent the views and beliefs of the College, and does not represent the College, her employment with us and potential impact on students required our immediate review into what seemed to have become a very contentious and divisive issue.”
This justification for Durden’s firing, while disappointing, didn’t surprise me. I’m also a college professor, and appeared on Carlson’s show in April to defend my New Republic article about why colleges have a right to reject hateful speakers. While my appearance didn’t generate the same controversy as Durden’s, a wave of people contacted my school, Colby College in Maine, in an attempt to have me fired (they apparently missed the irony of trying to get someone fired for their speech, about speech, because you disagree with that speech). In addition, my colleagues in the English department, plus a few lucky senior administrators, have been hapless recipients of racist and anti-Semitic diatribes, thus burdening our IT staff.
Meanwhile, I received thousands of insults and threats. Beginning mere minutes after my appearance, I was deluged with emails and instant messages calling me a “fucking liberal idiot,” “pussy snowflake,” “ignorant and hypocritical cunt,” “fucking Nazi,” and “Jew fag.” Strangers threatened to break my legs, scalp me, and make me “eat a bullet.” One wished, in all-caps, “Hopefully you get robbed and killed by an illegal immigrant that was deported five times and he leaves you to bleed to death slowly so you have time [to] realize how fucking stupid you were all along.” There have also been repeated and likely actionable defamation attempts, which I’m still dealing with. (It’s also worth noting that I’m a straight, white, male, tenure-track professor at a top-tier institution that supports my public engagement, which is to say my experience with strangers eroticizing my slow death has been less traumatic than most professors’. I can only imagine—though I’d rather not—the bile directed privately at Durden.)
This was all in response to my careful argument about how campuses should handle invitations to speakers who are intentional provocateurs. Indeed, I had to remind Carlson and his audience no fewer than three times, in a roughly seven-minute TV segment, that I stand emphatically opposed to any sort of violence, from the left or the right, that would shut down free speech. While the right was calling for my job (and my head), I was meeting and corresponding with members of Colby’s chapter of the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization, to discuss campus free speech issues. Over five years, in hundreds of pages of teaching evaluations by my students, I haven’t received a single complaint about political bias.
Campus Reform’s pieces are often stamped with the hallmarks of nonpartisan journalism. Its reporters reach out to the professors, and sometimes to their institutions, to seek comment. But the stories run beneath shareable, quote-strewn headlines that tend to offer a thumbnail sketch of a more complicated statement: "American patriotism is ‘drenched in whiteness,’ prof claims." "Prof blames ‘Trump and trumpism’ for Scalise shooting."
Then, and often quite quickly, a thriving conservative-media industry delivers a signal boost. Longstanding industry leaders like The National Review and edgier newcomers like Heat Street and The Blaze offer their own write-ups of the controversies, often drawing from the Campus Reform reports without contributing additional reporting.
As the signal is boosted, it is slowly but inexorably mutated, as in a game of telephone. A Campus Reform headline describes a professor’s essay as arguing that white marble in sculptures "contributes" to white supremacy. Two days later, a Daily Caller piece, citing Campus Reform, has the professor "equating" white-marble statues with white supremacy. Two days after that, a site called Truth Revolt — now citing another account from Heat Street, which had also picked up on Campus Reform’s report — is blunter: "Professor: White Marble Statues Are Racist."
The end result, much of the time, is reporting from more-conventional national outlets. A professor, now at the center of a firestorm, gets a call from the producers of Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News: Would she like to come on the air and defend her views? A pundit, reading a local newspaper’s report on the incident, folds it into an essay on the state of the academy. Or The Chronicle reports on threats of violence the professor or her institution has received since her comments made their way through the assembly line.
About those threats: They’re increasingly common. The assembly line of outrage doesn’t just expose faculty statements to a national audience; it also calls forth an id. Readers disgusted by what they view as the social-justice agenda of higher education barrage professors and their colleges with invective and promises of personal or campuswide violence.
The mission of the watch list, according to its website, is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” The site invites users to nominate candidates, asking that they “submit a tip” about the nefarious pinkos who teach them (that’s S-C-H-U-M-A-N with one n, by the way). Some of the professors on the list have responded thoughtfully to their inclusion; others on social media have trolled the list with complaints about Indiana Jones and Jesus. Like any soulless golem, I love a good Jesus joke, but today even I can’t muster up the laughter.
Just four years ago, in 2012—the year Charlie Kirk, then a Chicago-based 18-year-old who skipped college altogether, co-founded Turning Point USA—the watch list would have been great fodder for yuks, on par with David Horowitz’s obnoxious 2006 book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, inclusion in which was often a point of pride. Today, though, the Professor Watchlist causes me to fear for the safety of the people on it.
I contacted Kirk, asking him whether the timing was intentional, and whether the watch list was intended to intimidate, harass, or otherwise harm the people on it. He dismissed my suggestions as “preposterous,” and we had a brief, civil chat on the phone. His organization, he was quick to emphasize, is a mainstream conservative student outreach group, devoted to the usual jazz about free markets and bootstraps and other sundry Rush lyrics. That is: While its website looks like a stock agency for photos of self-satisfied young white people, Kirk stresses that Turning Point USA is in no way affiliated with alt-right or similar hate groups, and is instead a mild-mannered fiscal-conservative outreach group that “believes that every young person can be enlightened to true free market values.”
He told me in no uncertain terms that he “denounce[s] completely” last weekend’s nauseating neo-Nazi Woodstock, and that the watch list’s launch had been planned for “months.” Its dovetailing with the white nationalists’ coming-out party—and the corresponding rash of grim, incredulous press coverage—was an unfortunate coincidence, and one that caused an unanticipated surge of traffic thanks to heightened media attention in the wake of the launch’s inauspicious timing. The intention, he said, is not to threaten or harm the professors—his commitment to free speech means he’ll “fight to the death” for their right to disagree with him—but to raise “awareness” for students and the parents who often pay their tuition.
But the photos? I asked. Did Kirk at least understand my unease about the photos? They’re “just stock images,” he said, publicly available, like all of the other information the site has aggregated—aggregated, he emphasized, not created. Plus, “Nowhere do we say they shouldn’t have the right” to express their views; the site has “no calls to action,” whether that be firing or worse.
I’ve no reason to doubt Kirk’s sincerity, but at this point, I also have to wonder whether the intentions of his watch list make a difference—and whether this is a bell that can be unrung. It doesn’t matter if the site wasn’t meant as a No-Goodnik Intellectual Kill List one day after Richard Spencer and his Jungen screeched Heil Trump. Intentionally or not, the Professor Watchlist, simply by being a self-styled watch list, has aligned itself with the ugly, frightening new political status quo.
But remember, it's the left that hates free speech because they don't want people who call for genocide to get mass audiences on campus. *eyeroll*
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
