Heh. I'm Cheering 'Professor Watchlist'

Having been on the receiving end of leftist campaigns to have me fired from my teaching job for having conservative views, I can only laugh at the progressive shock to the creation of the new website, "Professor Watchlist."

My view is that as long as left-wing professors treat all their students fairly, then they should be able to spew whatever they want. (But of course they don't treat conservatives fairly.) That, and they have academic freedom too. Of course the humanities and social sciences have been plagued by the radical takeover since at least the 1960s, and even earlier if you consider the German invasion of "critical theorists" at American universities after World War Two. So the problem merits some consideration as to remedies.

I mean seriously, it's like a plague.

I expect the best way to fight back is to simply to expose the left's hated and malevolence. There'll be enough cases of corruption and ideological harassment that left-wing professors will start losing their jobs. Leave it to local districts, and their voting constituents, to do the job. Just make sure that obscene campus ideological indoctrination and politicization is brought to public light and held accountable. It's not like there'll be a shortage of cases.

Here's the list.

I haven't actually skimmed it over yet, although I'm pleased as punch to see that Erik "Homosexual Lumberjack" Loomis has been recognized, and he's not too happy about it, hilariously.

See the idiot's essay at the Nation, "Trumpism Poses the Most Dire Threat to Academic Freedom in Recent Memory":

Thanks to the principle of academic freedom, professors have unusual space in American society to challenge the powerful without fear of retribution. For this reason the right has always resented professors, and for decades it has targeted them as subversives. The election of Donald Trump and the rise to power of the extremist ideologues surrounding him, like Steve Bannon and Rudolph Giuliani, make this a frightening moment for those academics who see fighting for a more just world as part of their job.

In 2012, I found myself the target of a hate campaign after saying a few intemperate things about the National Rifle Association and American gun culture in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. I was upset not only because of the horrors of the event itself—a shocking one for many Americans—but because in 1998 my high-school Spanish teacher in Springfield, Oregon, had been murdered by her son before shooting up his own high school. How many people had to die before anything was changed? Noting on Twitter that I would like to hold NRA leadership accountable for its promotion of high-powered firearms, I said that I wanted to see “Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.” This was obviously a metaphor, but thanks to a right-wing website called Campus Reform, which “monitors” leftists on college campuses, demagogues such as Michelle Malkin started a campaign to have me fired. Hundreds of phone calls and e-mails poured into the university. Luckily, I work on a unionized campus and nothing came of the campaign.

While people still joke about this incident with me, I barely gave it another thought until two weeks ago when a young conservative activist backed by the extremist right-wing organization Turning Points USA created the Professor Watchlist. Listing 195 professors believed to be hostile to the group’s agenda of unregulated capitalism, white-supremacist politics, and opposition to women’s reproductive freedom, it is a rough draft of a possible Trump-era blacklist. I was placed on the Watchlist because of my attacks on the NRA four years ago. Professors across the nation found themselves suddenly targeted by well-connected conservative activists in a nation where increasingly radical Republicans have suddenly captured each branch of government. No one knows what will come of it, but the shock has ricocheted through the halls of campuses all across the country.

So far, the reaction has mostly been an awesome display of solidarity from my students and my colleagues, both at my university and around the nation. Hundreds of professors have reported themselves to the Professor Watchlist, asking to be included, with faculty at the University of Notre Dame even writing a public letter to that effect. This is wonderful. But what happens after Inauguration Day? Will free speech be respected by the Trump administration? Will the right be emboldened to launch increasingly harsh attacks against professors? If there are sustained pressure campaigns against radical academics, will administrations be able to resist giving in?

Still more.

And fuck "radical academics," the bleedin' idiot losers.