From Professor Stacey Patton:
I am on Charlie Kirk’s hit list.
His so-called “Professor Watchlist,” run under the umbrella of Turning Point USA, is nothing more than a digital hit list for academics who dare to speak truth to power. I landed there in 2024 after writing commentary that inflamed the MAGA faithful. And once my name went up, the harassment machine roared to life.
For weeks, my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: “bitch,” “c*nt,” “n****r.” They threatened all manner of violence.
They overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office with calls demanding that I be fired. The flood was so relentless that the head of campus security reached out to offer me an escort, because they feared one of these keyboard soldiers might step out of his basement and come do me harm.
And I am not unique.
Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.
Some received death threats. Some had their jobs threatened. Some left academia entirely. Kirk sent the loud message to us: speak the truth, and we will unleash the mob!
That is the culture of violence Charlie Kirk built. He normalized violence. He curated it, monetized it, and sicced it on anyone who dared to puncture his movement’s lies.
And now, in the wake of his shooting, there’s all this national outpouring of mourning, moments of silence, yellow prayer hands, and tributes painting him as a civil debater. But the truth is that Kirk and his foot soldiers spent years terrorizing educators, trying to silence us with harassment and fear!
And now the same violence he unleashed on others has come full circle.
But what i find especially jarring is the dissonance in public mourning for a smug white man whose life work was actively hostile to certain groups. Kirk spent years demonizing LGBTQ people, mocking gun survivors, spewing racism about Black folks, and pushing policies that literally shorten lives.
It is so revolting to watch a bipartisan wave of grief sweep over this hateful racist as if he was a neutral community servant.
They erased Banksy’s mural in London — just like they erase Gaza’s story every day. 💔
Born on this day in 1941: Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and the Unix operating system together with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Un-be-lie-va-ble legacy. Here they are, Ritchie on the right. Ritchie died in 2011, Thompson (1943) is still alive.
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Pol
Ernst Busch: Das Lied vom Klassenfeind