ASU folks - still some open seats, open to undergrads and grad students - also a Barrett thesis pathway for any Barrett students looking to write a thesis on some aspect of gun violence or gun culture!
This got more traction than expected so let me be clear that I’m glad he won and think he will do a better job than at least 99 of our current senators
Promoted to senior lecturer today. Not a big "pleased to announce" guy, but I think it's important for people struggling on the job market to realize there's a lot of potential meaningful careers out there between the poles of the TT dream and an untenable adjuncting situation.
As someone who has been studying the fiction of the radical right, people should know that there are multiple survivalist novels that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies that pose a bungled pandemic response as the event that kicks off an armed right wing insurgency
Rufo speaking at the DeSantis launch should be red-alert news for university faculties and everyone who cares about the future of inclusive higher education in the United States.
My colleagues and I at Barrett Honors College are embroiled in an escalating controversy involving this event. I'll explain some of it here, but the main point: we are being targeted by violent threats from the far right, & need solidarity from folks at ASU and beyond. 1/
TPUSA is a hate group. This kind of harassment and violence has no place on university campuses. We have done everything we can to speak out against them; it's time for ASU to act to protect faculty and students.
Deputies have contacted several groups of residents in Corbett who have set up checkpoints and are stopping cars. While we understand their intent is to keep the community safe, it is never legal to block a public roadway or force other citizens to stop.
Re Trump’s “shooting” tweet?
Our community is hurting. Hurting for justice & charges for George Floyd.
Vandalism must stop. But we need systemic reform. Like a full scale DOJ pattern/practice investigation of Mpls. Police like I’ve called for.
So much better than a tweet.
Two more pro-Palestine protesters were arrested. Seemingly for trespassing, but ASU PD refused to tell me what specifically they had been arrested for.
Police began pushing some protesters in order to arrest others.
What we are asking for now is simple: the strong support of our colleagues at ASU and around the country as we defend our academic freedom to express an opinion about the operation of our own unit in the face of these attacks. Please reach out to me if you’d like to help. 9/
wrote about tradwives, seed oils, sourdough, ballerina farm, baby eugenics contests, and other things of that nature for
@thebafflermag
’s food + agriculture issue ✨
I don't know who needs to hear this, but the paramilitary right is not a working class phenomenon, no matter how badly guys like this want to believe it. The kit you see on most of those guys engaged in "armed protest" costs more than the average US worker makes in a quarter
White liberals in the US hold on to their myths about frontier violence so fiercely because they need a script to justify their contemporary dependence on extralegal violence to protect their own privilege
Our society seems to have become seriously complacent.
100 years ago in SF people were publicly hung for their crimes. Often by vigilante groups that wanted to send a message.
The hangings worked. Crime would plummet after a few of them. Often for many months at a time.
Once more for those in the back: the Bundys and their ilk are not "antigovernment." They only oppose the state when the state doesn't serve white supremacy with the aggression they believe themselves entitled to.
This is inane & insulting to contingent faculty but exemplary of the problem with most TT academics’ “solidarity” with our situation: they think it can be ameliorated via a liberal politics focused on representation rather than a labor politics focused on material redress
A gentle PSA for graduate students, faculty, & staff: We no longer say "alt-ac" (short for alt-academia) but "career diversity" or (my preferred phrase) "career pathways." "Alt-ac" implicitly continues to privilege the TT faculty position as the coveted outcome of a PhD program
For that reason, the following letter to our administration was written and signed by a supermajority of Barrett faculty. You’ll notice the absence of calls to “cancel” or “boycott” the event (as if 30-odd contingent faculty had “cancellation” power in any case) 4/
Many faculty members found the fact that we were not consulted in selection of speakers or even notified of the event until less than 2 weeks before it was to take place concerning. We expressed those concerns. We did not receive answers about how & why this was happening. 3/
NO AZGOP ELECTION AUDIT: Kelli Ward said there's “no procedure, process, rule that allows for it to be done, and you certainly don’t allow a challenger who lost an election to demand something that they don’t have the right to, and we don't have the responsibility for providing.”
Academic Twitter we need to abort this chain restaurant discourse immediately. We’ve got full profs on here today like “Don’t tell me about hardship!!! I had my 12th birthday at Applebee’s”
We became aware of the event on 1/26, when it was posted to Barrett social media. It was at this time we noticed it was being promoted by the speakers as having a very different focus than the one advertised in the ASU marketing. 2/
“A person commits the crime of unlawful use of weapons if he or she knowingly: [...]
(4) Exhibits, in the presence of one or more persons, any weapon readily capable of lethal use in an angry or threatening manner”
- Missouri Revised Statutes
The results of this carefully orchestrated far-right media campaign have been predictable. We are being deluged with threats online, via phone, and email, to our lives and livelihood. All of us are on contingent contracts and are anxious about the university response. 8/
@OlufemiOTaiwo
A friend once told me that her grad school mentor told her that "it doesn't matter what discipline you're from, so long as you're embarrassed by it." I think about this almost every day
A failure to recognize that mass shootings actually went up, substantially, during the Pandemic is more than just an innocuous mistake of the the liberal commentariat. The inability to see any gun violence except for these spectacular public events is an ideological framing. 1/
Could not get a more crystalline picture of what dem elites offer us in a moment of emergency: an insistence that no fascistic horror is too great to shake their faith in settler nationalism.
Can
@asu
and
@michaelcrow
clarify, because I'm confused: is this a university-sponsored event about personal development (as it has been billed on ASU channels) or is it a private event at which Kiyosaki, Kirk, and Prager can trash education and enrich themselves?
RU Sick, Tired, & Disgusted with Education in schools? So are we. The REBELS of EDUCATION
@charliekirk11
,
@DennisPrager
, Robert Kiyosaki & others speak @ ASU’s Health, Wealth & Happiness seminar at Gammage Theater Feb 8th 7 -9 pm. Get tickets here:
Not only does
@dougducey
obstruct ASU from implementing the vaccine policies that would protect our students and our community, but
@9thFloorAZ
can’t even keep their story straight as to why. A total failure of leadership.
In June, Gov
@dougducey
’s spox told
@azcapmedia
that the reason universities can require MMR, but not COVID vaccine was full FDA approval.
So I asked if FDA’s recent approval of Pfizer vax means things now change.
Answer: no.
Nice to be back stateside where I can enjoy traditional holiday activities like [checks notes] demanding the closure of the concentration camps on our southern border at ICE HQ in 105 degree heat. Solidarity to
@LUCHA_AZ
&
@AZjews4justice
#closethecamps
Kari Lake has now joined the pile on. You’ll notice all of these pieces engage with our letter very little, and are animated by a kind of paint-by-numbers culture war rhetoric: again, we called for neither the cancellation of the event nor a boycott 7/
I knew SC had sold the last shreds of its dignity to its development team during the final year of my PhD, when I encountered the endowed urinals in the new student center
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk is gearing up for an anti-MLK campaign next week to coincide with the holiday, saying the Civil Rights Act was a "huge mistake."
@SamAdlerBell
It's hard to overstate how hard she had to work to lose in AZ. Weak opponent, and a huge surfeit of name recognition and goodwill after her tenure on local news. She wasn't just chasing polls, she was playing to the crazy even when that was clearly a bad move electorally
The inability of most liberals to put two-and-two together re the increasingly mainstream backlash against BLM that articulates itself as a violent insistence on the defense of property as a transcendent social imperative is terrifying
must be a coincidence how some folks rally around litigating the 1619 project in a moment when those demanding that black lives matter are being met in the streets by murderous vigilantes who justify their own violence as a preemptive defense of the order of "property"
The remarkable thing about the replies to the original tweet is that they demonstrate just how many white guys read Black people in public space declaring their right to be there w/o being gunned down by cops as a prima facie threat to property rights
Sure, you may be having a rough day, but are you a 39 year old who just got asked by a Safeway clerk if he would be applying his over-55 senior discount? ☠️
If you doubt that we live in exceptional times, consider the fact that
@businessinsider
just published this brilliant piece by
@PatBlanchfield
contextualizing the McCloskey incident in St Louis’s long history of racial and colonial violence.
This is the home of Joseph Morrison, one of the Michigan men recently arrested for his plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Can we acknowledge that maybe economic circumstances play a role in radicalizing people?
1/7 That the main "coalition" national groups which local groups put their faith in to make the call for mass direct actions today is still silent is a repeat of Florida in 2000. The strength of the Democratic Party Industrial Complex cannot be underestimated.
@ThePlumLineGS
Thanks for putting this in the national spotlight. Watching his apocalyptic border ads on local news every night then watching the national coverage often made me feel like I was living in the upside down
Employees at ASU are organizing against our administration's reckless reopening plan and the lack of employee representation in our institution more broadly. Please follow
@asu_c3
and help us amplify our message! If you work at ASU, join us!
#asuc3
#slowtheforkdown
A concerned group of nearly ASU faculty, staff, and graduate students has come together to ask
@michaelcrow
to reconsider ASU's reopening plans. Join us as signatories on our letter:
#asuc3
#slowtheforkdown
An update. After representing himself as a beleaguered champion of free speech at the Lewis Center event, Charlie Kirk is now in the process of putting all of the Barrett faculty signatories on TPUSA’s notorious Professor Watchlist. 1/
My colleagues and I at Barrett Honors College are embroiled in an escalating controversy involving this event. I'll explain some of it here, but the main point: we are being targeted by violent threats from the far right, & need solidarity from folks at ASU and beyond. 1/
Seriously though - contrast coverage of the "Reopen" protests, many of which were attended by only a few dozen (albeit heavily armed) protesters, to events in Minneapolis. Check out front pages of major papers, CNN - no one is featuring this. It's bizarre.
To understand rhetoric like this as mere trolling is to severely underestimate how seriously its intended audience reads it. Its intended effect is to build a political community willing to use any means necessary to maintain its racial sovereignty.
@JohnnaCrider1
@stats_feed
Underground tunnels are immune to surface weather conditions (subways are a good example), so it wouldn’t matter to Hyperloop if a hurricane was raging on the surface. You wouldn’t even notice.
ASU and U of A folks - the best time to join
@UCWArizona
to organize against the far right takeover of our institutions would’ve been yesterday. Second best time would be today. The always fragile promises of academic freedom won’t save anyone’s job if Lake wins.
Elon is a creative accountant who rebranded himself as an engineer. Like any fintech grifter, he lives in perpetual fear of liquidity crises, like the one he now faces.
Most prognosticators I'm seeing predict one of two things.
1/8
A recent WSJ editorial has once again focused the ire of the far right on Barrett faculty for speaking up about the public programming of our own college. My colleagues
@prof_jdb
, Michael Ostling and I respond in this op ed:
Tomorrow, the Barrett Honors College faculty will be participating in the nationwide
#scholarstrike
- see website for full schedule and links! I'll be giving a brief talk and leading a discussion on guns and race at 12:30 for those in the ASU community who want to join.
Many Dem voters have zero idea that unions play such a central role in the Dem ground game because Dem candidates (who can’t pretend ignorance) often don’t do enough to acknowledge unions’ role. Pay attention to which candidates proudly acknowledge union support & which don’t.
UNITE HERE had 1,200 members on the ground in NV, AZ, PA, and GA knocking on 2.7 million doors. They played a crucial role in this election. Thank you for fighting for all of us. UNITE HEROES ✊🏻
This is why it is so crucial to historicize the higher ed emergency de jure. Both the ostensibly pragmatic neoliberal threat and the right wing culture war threat are two sides of the same coin - a coin minted by Reagan’s attack on the UC system in the wake of desegregation
Up the union. I’m a big “fight speech with speech” guy when it comes to campus debates, but with this violent attack on David, enough is enough. TPUSA doesn’t deserve university resources to harm members of our community.
UCWAZ commends President Crow and ABOR for condemning Turning Point USA (TPUSA) as a result of repeated harassment and a violent attack against members of the university community, which are in direct violation of the ABOR code of conduct (1/5)
Important to remember in the coming months, as Trump and his noise machine will try to paint 100k or even 200k deaths as a victory, that this could've been us.
@PatBlanchfield
This is why the enforced ubiquity of the “antigovernment” label applied to the paramilitary right is so pernicious. It obfuscates the fact that, on a fundamental level, the state *allows* extralegal violence and coercion from the right to proliferate in the way that it does
I know it wouldn’t solve half our problems but it says a lot about our billionaire class and the bootlickers who support them that their highly publicized vanity projects are space flight shit not, just spitballing here, carbon capture
The AZ House just adopted
@michudall
's amendment to SB 1412, which censors university professors from discussing slavery or Indian Removal with students.
Around 10% of the faculty in my unit now out with COVID, just as many with COVID positive children. It’s only Wednesday. University workers at institutions that haven’t started yet - time to advocate for remote start is now.
As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.
To all my tenured colleagues who have been hesitant to join
@UCWArizona
: think about this. You’re one right-wing organizing push away from ABOR putting you in this position. The time to organize is now. If our profession has a future, it is in solidarity not institutional fealty.
1. 🧵 Tomorrow, the
@BORUSG
is expected to vote to end tenure for Georgia's public universities. The AAUP has warned that this move will destroy protections for academic freedom, which is indispensable for the quality of teaching and research in higher education.