Faceless, nameless, leaderless, these are some of the qualities that typically come to mind when discussing Antifa. But the vigilante men in black have documented supporters in academia.
Stanford professor David Palumbo-Liu and Purdue professor Bill Mullen started the Campus Antifascist Network to “stem the rise of fascism, whether proudly displayed in hateful exclusionary slogans and posters, or disguised as ‘free speech.'”
The Campus Antifascist Network lists endorsements from around 30 organizations and 50 individuals. If you scroll down, you’ll see a law professor, a few sociology professors, and several English professors. But disciplines such as science, technology, engineering, and math do not seem to be represented.
There are some pretty famous — or infamous — scholars on the list. There’s George Ciccariello-Maher, the “white genocide” Drexel University professor who said the Las Vegas massacre is what happens when white people don’t get what they want.
There’s Sujata Moori, the Middlebury College professor who teaches Playing Dead: Feminist Readings Of Crime Drama, a very useful class definitely worth your tuition money to learn how to apply “a feminist lens” to “explore the grammar of this genre in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality.”
There’s also Johnny E. Williams, the Trinity College professor who called white people “inhuman a**holes” and said “let them f***ing die.” Williams shared an article describing how “a lesbian black woman helped take down the man who shot Steve Scalise.” The article suggests that purported “victims of bigotry” should not help defend alleged “oppressors.”
Palumbo-Liu, one of the professors who founded Campus Antifascist Network, frames his vision for the group as one of “defense in various forms of those who are being threatened by fascists,” but who is a fascist and what constitutes a threat? It’s precisely this nebulous language that allows Antifa to justify responding to“hate speech” or some kind of “verbal violence” with actual, physical violence.
If you’re a young millennial or old zoomer — that’s Generation Z — SpongeBob SquarePants probably brings to mind days of childhood bliss, a time unmuddied by politics. But that’s not the case for University of Washington professor Holly Barker, who recently published a nearly 10,000-word study called “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” reported Campus Reform.
Now, if you remember, SpongeBob takes place in Bikini Bottom, and Holly’s upset that this is apparently a reference to Bikini Atoll, a Marshall Islands coral reef used by America during the Cold War for nuclear testing. Indigenous people were moved during the testing and radiation ultimately rendered it uninhabitable.
Holly complains about SpongeBob’s supposed “privilege” of “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs,” saying “the detonations do not cause concern for the characters, as they did for the Bikinians, nor do they compromise SpongeBob’s frequent activities, like visiting hamburger joints or the beach with friends.”
Yeah, uh, that would be because it’s a kids show.
But here’s the thing: Holly isn’t just mad that the show doesn’t hit children on the head with the full historical context of a place from which it takes half its name and I’m not sure what else. She calls the characters living in this setting an “occupation,” terms it “symbolic violence,” and says “SpongeBob’s presence on Bikini Bottom continues the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables U.S. hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era.”
A protester tried to shut down a Northeastern Illinois University event featuring former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, according to Campus Reform.
“You’re a Nazi!” “No, you’re a Nazi!” That’s pretty much how the discourse has devolved. And then when force is used to address a disruption, as it should be, they complain about it being a bit uncomfortable. But what’s really funny is that Sean Spicer wasn’t the only somewhat controversial speaker at Northeastern Illinois.
That’s right — Donna Brazile was also there. You remember Donna, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman who shared debate questions with Hillary Clinton? And yet Donna wasn’t the one getting protested and cussed out.
Also in recent campus news, the head of Freedom University, a school which apparently operates out of an undisclosed location in Georgia, gave a speech at St. Olaf College in Minnseota. Director Laura Soltis said nation states “should not exist” and called citizenship “completely arbitrary.”
Remember Jeff Klinzman? You know, the Iowa professor who responded to a tweet from Donald Trump calling Antifa out for attacking people with baseball bats by saying “yeah, I know who I’d clock with a bat” and who outright told ABC9 “I am Antifa”? He parted ways with the school in late August, but is now planning on suing Kirkland Community College and is still taking a paycheck, reported Campus Reform.
Klinzman had some other pretty disturbing stuff on social media, liking several Antifa-related Facebook pages and quoting a poem reading “kill them all, and bury them deep in the ground, before millions more are tortured to death” when talking about Evangelical Christians who, according to him, “fill [him] with rage, and a desire to exact revenge.”
Now, it’s weird because Kirkland Community College said it made a “decision to remove Mr. Klinzman from the classroom,” citing safety concerns, but then said “We have spoken with Mr. Klinzman this afternoon about this matter and have accepted his resignation.”
And this little incongruity here — how did someone who was removed from the classroom also resign? – is part of the professor’s planned lawsuit against the school. Klinzman said that he believes his First Amendment rights were violated and that the college communicated to him that he could resign or it would fire him. An email from the college showed that Klinzman did, in fact, resign, but he did so on the condition that he still earns his full salary of $3,624 for the 16-week semester.
