A BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED WEBSITE WITH TIES TO THE FAR RIGHT IS TRYING TO "CANCEL" UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS

[CousinIT]

https://theintercept.com/2021/04/10/campus-reform-koch-young-americans-for-freedom-leadership-institute/

. . .

As a matter of policy, Hatemi never gets involved in student groups no matter their affiliation, he said, but he thought it his responsibility to make sure that the student was aware of the group’s ties to far-right extremists. So he declined the request and offered some advice. “Your timing, frankly, could be seen as offensive to many,” he wrote, referring to the January 6 assault. “It might be time to reflect on what you stand for and what your organization stands for.”

Hatemi said he put quite some thought into his two-paragraph response. “The right thing to do was to say, ‘Hey, you need to take a look at what you’re doing and this group you belong to,’” he told me in an interview. “If I say nothing, what kind of educator am I?”

Within days, Hatemi’s email to the student was published on Campus Reform, a conservative website that bills itself as the “#1 Source for College News” and whose stated mission is to expose “liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.” The article accused Hatemi of having “lashed out” at the student and “responded harshly” to his request. Quotes from Hatemi’s email also appeared in right-wing publications like The Federalist, The Blaze, and the Post Millennial, and they spread on social media, where they were manipulated and stripped of context. A deluge of hate mail followed, directed at Hatemi as well as at his university’s administration. Some of it threatened violence, prompting campus police to intervene, though Hatemi declined to comment on the details. The university did not respond to a request for comment.

. . .

“It is Penn State YAF’s constitutional right to exist on campus – whether this professor likes it or not,” the group wrote then. “To attack all conservative students and YAF by accusing them of supporting riots and violence with no evidence is disgraceful and unbecoming of a professor at an institution of higher education.”

Campus Reform is published by the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit that has trained conservative activists for four decades through the generous funding of billionaire donors like the Koch family. . . .

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[SheltieLover]

2. Putibs wet dream

To do away with academic freedom!

[Initech]

3. Fuck the billionaires.

[niyad]

4. We have evidence of your support. . Your lack of condemnation of the reichwing,

conservative riots and violence.

[Fullduplexxx]

5. They're doing that in florida, when the law is enacted in july

[PortTack]

7. They may enact the law, it will never stand in the courts!!

[spooky3]

6. Hey kids - that same "constitutional right" gives your profs the

right to tell you what they think, too.