It’s back-to-school season and that means kiddos across America and Canada are ponying up tens of thousands of dollars each for degrees in super-useful fields like gender and race and OK, maybe some STEM subjects. Some of these students will be taught by Professor Lars Maischak, according to GV Wire, who tweeted last year “to save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better.”
About a year and a half ago, I broke the story of Fresno State history professor Lars Maischak, who, in addition to saying “Trump must hang,” also wrote “Justice = the execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant” and “has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?”
Now here at Campus Unmasked, I’ve always been very careful to make the distinction between free speech, which includes opinions expressed with hyperbole or satire, and then genuine incitement to violence. I’m pretty sure that some of those remarks fall into the latter category and I’m also very sure that you would never find people in positions of power making similar comments about Hillary, Obama, or Trudeau.
After I published his comments, Fresno State put Lars on paid leave and banned him from the classroom for the fall 2017 semester. The school let him finish out his contract, which expired in May 2018, by teaching courses online, just not on campus. And now he’s apparently signed a new, three-year contract with the school, but will still only teach online.
Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar said that people should break into and throw explosives at white nationalist Richard Spencer’s house. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of Spencer and I think identity politics of all varieties are cancer, but bad ideas should be countered with good ideas, not violence. Randa doesn’t seem to have quite the same view.
Many other outlets instead focused on Randa’s comments about Barbara Bush the day the former first lady died. The professor called her an “amazing racist” who raised a “war criminal” and said she’s “happy the witch is dead.”
OK, so those aren’t the kindest things to say, but then, when she was getting backlash, Randa proceeded to tweet out what she SAID was her personal phone number, but was actually a crisis hotline number. This, of course, clogged the crisis line, potentially preventing them from getting to people who actually needed help. Randa further demonstrated that trademark liberal tolerance and compassion a few months later with this erudite remark.
“At some point, all of us in the literary community must DEMAND that white editors resign. It’s time to STEP DOWN and hand over the positions of power. We don’t have to wait for them to f**k up. The fact that they hold these positions is f**k up enough.”
That was apparently in response to a poem published by a PROGRESSIVE news outlet. But anyway, despite all of this, some people were still thrilled to see Randa return to the classroom last week after her paid leave, according to CBS47.
Last week, right after former First Lady Barbara Bush passed away, my good friend Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar, who’s as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside, called her an “amazing racist” and said she’s “happy the witch is dead,” reported The Daily Caller News Foundation. Now a video’s come out in which it seems like Jarrar is advocating terrorism and inciting violence.
“Resistance fighters in the 60s and 70s, they didn’t kill anyone, but they scared the shit out of people,” she says. “You know, they would hijack a plane and be like, ‘we’re not gonna hurt anyone on this plane, but we are gonna fucking hijack this plane.’”
Or how about this statement, in which she seems to advocate violence against Islam expert and favorite target of the left Robert Spencer or, more likely, white nationalist Richard Spencer.
“Like, why is Spencer’s house still standing?” asked the professor. “I don’t understand. Like, it needs to be fucking broken into, people need to fucking throw grenades into it. I don’t give a fuck!”
You know, the only thing more beautiful than Randa is her vocabulary — she must make an awesome English professor at Fresno State. Bigots think that if your every other word is “fuck,” you must not be very smart, but it’s actually a sign of empowerment. Like here, why discredit Richard Spencer’s arguments with facts when you can save a lot of time and energy thinking by just cussing and throwing grenades? Wow, I’m learning so much.
Not even a few hours after Barbara Bush passed away on Tuesday, Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar called her an “amazing racist” who raised a “war criminal” and then said “PSA: either you are against these pieces of shit and their genocidal ways or you’re part of the problem. That’s actually how simple this is.”
“I’m happy the witch is dead,” she said. “Can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million Iraqis have. Byyyeeeeeeeee.” Now, professors have free speech, sure, but what about the freedom of students? The problem with comments like these is that you can bet Jarrar would punish or has punished students who say anything pro-Bush and if that’s a microaggression, praising Trump would probably be — what, a macroaggression?
The professor bragged “I work as a tenured professor. I make 100k a year doing that. I will never be fired. I will always have people wanting to hear what I have to say.” I think she means she’ll always have people who are forced to hear what she has to say because of a policy that prohibits Fresno State from firing her no matter how popular she is. Though not necessarily…a Fresno State admin clarified that tenured professors still could be fired. Anyway, after getting some feedback on her scholarly critique, the professor tweeted out what she claimed was her phone number but was actually the number for a crisis hotline at another university. Because the compassionate left really cares about people who are suicidal and actually need help.
