Jeff Klinzman, a Kirkwood Community College professor — or former professor, I should say — who not only made that BAT comment, but also directly told ABC9 “I am Antifa.”
Secret Service said that it was aware of the bat comment, but didn’t say whether they were investigating. But Klinzman has been a busy bee on social media. When describing his dislike for Evangelical Christians, he quoted part of a poem, which said “kill them all, and bury them deep in the ground, before millions more are tortured to death.” He also said “seeing what Evangelical Christians are doing to this country and its people fills me with rage, and a desire to exact revenge.”
The former professor’s Facebook likes include Antifa Nebraska, Heartland Antifascists, Antifascist USA, and various other left-wing pages, according to Campus Reform, but what’s perhaps most bizarre about this story is how Klinzman and Kirkwood Community College ended their relationship. The school said that it made a “decision to remove Mr. Klinzman from the classroom,” but then said “We have spoken with Mr. Klinzman this afternoon about this matter and have accepted his resignation.”
Klinzman has a 2.5 out of 5 score on his Rate My Professors page, with one user from 2018 stating “Very opinion-based class. You either side with him or he will contradict your views.” One from 2017 said “Whatever you do, don’t interrupt him when he’s telling stories about his glory days of protesting, and how much of a rebel he thinks he still is. He’s mean, he’s a bigot, and he’s sexist as heck. He treats the female students who aren’t hairy pitted feminists like they are garbage.”
Now, it seems like people on the right have different opinions when it comes to left-wing profs. There are reactionaries who say, “hey, the left has no hesitations going after what few conservatives there are in academia — why shouldn’t we do the same?” Then there are libertarian types who say “no one should ever be fired for free speech and we should neversink to the left’s standards!” My stance is that if this bias can be proven to impact what’s being taught to malleable minds, then yeah, something should be done about it.
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.
