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U. Central Florida Fires Dissident Prof. Charles Negy After 8-Month Retaliatory Investigation

U. Central Florida Fires Dissident Prof. Charles Negy After 8-Month Retaliatory Investigation

Charles Negy should be an academic freedom and free speech cause around the nation, but sadly, some academic freedom and some free speech matters more than others in the age of Black Lives Matter.

https://youtu.be/ofOcVxEvulA

Defenders of academic freedom and freedom of speech throughout academia should be rallying to the defense of University of Central Florida Professor Charles Negy after egregious retaliation against him for expressing constitutionally protected views on Twitter.

The American Association of University Professors, the premier faculty organization defending academic freedom, should be marshalling its substantial resources and committees behind Prof. Negy, as it has done for other professors over the decades. Public interest lawyers and law professors across the land should be volunteering their services.

Instead, Negy stands almost alone against the administrative and legal weight of the massive publicly-funded UCF.

There has been near silence because Negy’s protected speech was critical of the prevailing campus racial politics. In the age of Black Lives Matter dominance on campuses, anything that questions the prevailing racial narrative could be a career-ender.

Readers of Legal Insurrection are familiar with the Negy story, because we have covered it several times, starting with The administrative torment of UCF Prof. Charles Negy:

Negy’s alleged crime that sparked the controversy was two tweets questioning the orthodoxy of systemic racism and white privilege.

One tweet, which no longer is available,said:

“If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?”

second tweet, also no longer available, said:

“Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on much needed feedback.”

Legal Insurrection Foundation already has obtained substantial public records from UCF pursuant our joint effort with Judicial Watch, but we have a long way to go before we complete review, and we are owed many more documents.

Negy’s tweets, which UCF admits were constitutionally protected and for which they could not punish Prof. Negy, set in motion a particularly vicious online and on-the-ground mob, which included participation in protests by senior UCF administrators, including the President of UCF, Alexander Cartwright.

What resulted was a retaliatory investigation of Negy seeking to find a reason UCF could fire him, including the solicitation by the UCF administration of complaints regarding his 22-years on campus and in the classroom. The investigation took 8 months, consummed several hundred witness interviews and thousands of pages of documents, all in an effort by UCF to find a pretext to fire Negy without having to admit it was the tweets and the online mob at issue.

Predictably, at the end of the investigation, UCF found Negy to have committed wrongdoing, as released in an over 240-page Report and accompanying notice of intent to terminate, which we covered in Prof. Charles Negy: Investigative Report is “UCF’s attempt to justify getting rid of me because I have become a political liability”. Read that post for all the details, including Negy’s rebuttal, which read in part:

This letter serves as my written response to your Notice of Intent to Terminate dated January 13, 2021.

In the response below, I will address each of the four major categories of allegation in the Notice of Termination. Before I do that, however, I want to clearly state the following:

This investigation was initiated – by a public message from top administrators openly soliciting complaints against me – in retaliation for my constitutionally protected speech on Twitter. Knowing that it could not fire me for those tweets, UCF has obviously gone to great lengths over the last seven months to try and find legitimate grounds for my termination. I challenge you to find any UCF employee, yourself included, whose entire life could withstand the type of scrutiny mine has been put through in UCF’s attempt to justify getting rid of me because I have become a political liability. And make no mistake, that is precisely what UCF has done: We have President Cartwright on video agreeing with a student protester that I should have been fired before I got tenure. We have on video the UCF Provost telling students through a megaphone that the way to avoid “this type of problem” is to let UCF know: “…you have to file a complaint about discriminatory behavior.” And we have on video the UCF Chief Diversity Officer telling students on UCF’s official Twitter account that “#UCFFireHim…I understand all of that, but the fact of the matter is it’s not going to happen overnight.”

The goal from the day #UCFFireHim began trending was to terminate my employment with UCF because of my unpopular views conveyed in my constitutionally protected speech. The investigation/inquisition that followed was nothing less than “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” If this unlawful effort to terminate me stands, not only will it severely chill the speech of faculty and students at UCF who might wish to express controversial views, but I will have no choice but to pursue legal action.

With that said, I would like to address each of the four major issues raised in your Notice and explain why they do not constitute legitimate grounds for my termination. I would also like to state that I am more than happy to discuss in greater detail any of the individual findings in the OIE report that comprise these broader findings: while you stated in your Notice that they are “too numerous to fully document here,” I am prepared to defend against each and every one of those findings in detail and, to the extent your ultimate decision relies on one or more specific findings not covered in my response here, I would appreciate the opportunity to address those specific findings.

UCF now has followed through, and fired Negy in a letter (pdf.) distributed by UCF to media without redacting what appears to be Negy’s home address despite protesters having approached his home in the past (we have redacted from our image below), and posted by media outlets including the UCF student newspaper, Knight News:

#UCF just gave us this letter confirming the school fired Prof. Charles Negy today.

On January 27, 2021, just before Negy’s termination letter but when the outcome was obvious, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wrote about Negy’s treatment, UCF is killing academic freedom to punish tweets it didn’t like. Read the whole thing, here is an excerpt:

The University of Central Florida is trying to fire tenured professor Charles Negy for his speech, and if they succeed, it will undermine the concept of academic freedom. No UCF professor — and, if a court permits this termination, no professor in that jurisdiction — will be able to rely on it.

To be clear, UCF does not want you to think Negy is being punished for his speech. They’ve written a 244-page report, which involved interviewing over 300 people over seven months about incidents covering more than 15 years, to convince you otherwise.

But this is all either theater or self-delusion by UCF administrators who want to think they aren’t motivated by a desire to censor a controversial professor. The entire process of preparing this report was motivated by complaints about Negy’s tweets. Nobody interviews 300 people over seven months about incidents covering 15 years unless they’re desperate to find something, anything, to use against their target. UCF’s lack of sincerity in their investigation of Negy’s tweets — which, technically, was what they were investigating, based on the spurious allegation that Negy’s offensive tweets were required reading in his classes — is reflected in their decision to investigate allegations as far back as 2005, the year before Twitter was founded.

No, nothing was going to stand between UCF and Negy’s termination: not the First Amendment, not due process, and not academic freedom. That’s why Negy was set up to fail the nine hours of interrogation he went through and why UCF’s conclusion rests on a nonsensical implementation of academic freedom so razor-thin as to be transparent.

Negy has started a Go-Fund-Me page, trying to raise $50,000 to cover his living expenses now that he is unemployed, and his legal fees. His full response to the termination, posted at the fundraising page, also is reprinted at the bottom of this post.

[UPDATE – NEGY’S GOFUNDME PAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED – Was active when this post went live, taken down around 8:30 p.m. Will report details of what happened when I find out.][Further update: His page apparently was taken down by GoFundMe for violating its terms of service because you can’t raise money to defend yourself against charges of discrimination (seriously). He has set up a PayPal account, let’s see how long that lasts.]

https://www.gofundme.com/f/fight-for-free-speech-and-academic-freedom?qid=36cfa839b955642f9a4b86d523fd4183

He’s going to need a lot more than that. The only reason the Gibson family was able to take on Oberlin College was because they has a contingency fee law firm that could bear the carrying costs. In the end, both the Gibson’s lawyers and the college’s lawyers (presumably paid by insurance) ran up $5 million in lawyer time and expenses each, and that was only through trial.

UCF wants to destroy Negy every bit as much as Oberlin College wanted to destroy Gibson’s bakery. I have little doubt that the people behind and implementing the retaliatory inversigation will continued to expend taxpayer money persecuting Negy to the ends of the earth, unless some political force says taxpayer money should not be spent to supress academic freedom and freedom of speech.

Charles Negy should be an academic freedom and free speech cause around the nation, but sadly, some academic freedom and some free speech matters more than others in the age of Black Lives Matter.

 

————————————-

Charles Negy Statement on GoFundMe Page:

My name is Charles Negy. I was a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida (UCF) and I was terminated on January 29, 2021, despite having been employed at UCF for 22 years. Because of my conservative views and critical comments about so-called “social justice” ideology, I am a victim of wrongful termination and I need $50,000 to survive and to pay for prospective legal fees. What is at stake here is free speech, academic freedom, and the principle of tenure. Your donation would be greatly appreciated.

———–Background———–

My research has been dedicated to the study of cultural and minority groups for over 30 years and I have mentored hundreds of students (especially minority students) during my time as a professor, helping them to gain research experience and obtain admission into graduate programs across the country.

I am a data-driven scholar. Evidence matters. Even when data take us places that make us uncomfortable or cause us to question our cherished beliefs, data must be respected. In my classes, I have consistently conveyed to students the importance of examining data and forming opinions based on evidence, not based on what makes us feel comfortable. That process has caused some students discomfort on occasion, but also led to their deeper understanding of the complexities of human behavior. I will note here that I have obtained three major teaching awards while at UCF and I have received “Outstanding” on my Annual Teaching Evaluations for 17 out of 22 years.

I also believe in the dignity and respect each individual and each cultural group deserves. That belief includes the conviction that minority groups, at the individual and group levels, have their own agency. They have both a free will and the power to make judicious decisions in life that will facilitate their ability to improve their own conditions and fulfill their unique human potential.

That said, there are students who dislike my coverage of information about problems that disproportionately afflict their specific group. As just one example, I address at an appropriate juncture in class the fact that the number one cause of death for African American males between the ages of 15 and 35 is homicide, typically committed by a fellow-African American (https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls). There are some African American students who strongly protest my mentioning of such facts in class due to, presumably, their own sensitivity, and because they may believe that such negative information unnecessarily stigmatizes their ethnic group. I respectfully disagree. Discussing vexing problems in society that afflict one or more cultural groups is the only way we might generate viable solutions to ameliorate such social ills.

———–Current Problem———–

“Cancel culture” – groups of people who, if they dislike what your views are or what you express — believe they have a right to have you fired from your job (i.e., “cancelled”). On June 4, 2020, shortly after having read some Twitter comments that individuals engaging in cancel culture deemed “racist,” the “social mob” descended upon me and on the university demanding that UCF fires me. The comments I had made were in line with the questions I typically raise in my class(es). One such comment was: “Sincere question: If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?” As indicated, social activists disliked such comments and called for my termination. UCF students began proclaiming that they did not feel “safe knowing I taught at UCF.

UCF’s newly-installed President, Alexander Cartwright, seems to have made it a personal mission of his to impose his “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology and policies on the entire UCF campus. I’ve been publicly critical of those policies because I believe the way they are implemented actually contributes to further types of discrimination. Consequently, the UCF President told a group of UCF student activists protesting on June 14 – before he had any idea if their allegations against me were valid – that I should have been fired before I obtained tenure. In fact, the UCF President, Provost, and their Chief Diversity Officer all are on video, denouncing my “values” and “comments” as “vile” and “hurtful,” but most importantly, proclaiming that I will be terminated (for more information about their behavior, please read: https://www.thefire.org/ucf-is-killing-academic-freedom-to-punish-tweets-it-didnt-like/).

How was UCF going to achieve their goal of terminating my employment? On June 4—just one day after the Twitter campaign #UCFfirehim began—the university posted on its website an announcement for all 70,000 students to read. In that announcement, they condemned my “racist” tweets, denounced my “values,” and at the end of the announcement, encouraged anyone who has ever experienced any racial harassment or discrimination by any professor to call their Integrity Line. Students, faculty, and staff were even encouraged to file such complaints anonymously (see: https://www.ucf.edu/news/addressing-intolerance-in-our-community/).

As part of the university’s supposed “investigation,” UCF subjected me to a 2-day, 9-hour interrogation, asking me about comments I had allegedly made in my class dating back to 2005 (over a 15-year time span). They completed that “investigative interview” in August of 2020. In the meantime, they sat on the results, in all likelihood, not knowing what they could “hang” me for. One of their major hurdles was trying to explain why none of the most egregious allegations about me do not appear on any of my end-of-the-semester student evaluations. That is because all of those egregious allegations were lodged after UCF publicly solicited allegations against me. It took UCF 6 months to finally announce that due to a wide-range of infractions, they would terminate me with just a notice of 7 business days.

UCF claims they are not terminating me due to my tweets. But the fact of the matter is, those tweets caused them to encourage students to lodge “racial and gender harassment” complaints against me and for them to launch a bogus, pretextual investigation of my entire work history, hoping to find justification to terminate me.

I will give just two examples here of how insincere their investigation was. One involves them accusing me of having “lied” during the investigation. The other involves accusing me of failing to report an alleged case of sexual assault to an appropriate UCF office.

I was asked during the 2-day interrogation if I had ever used the word “faggot” in class. I naturally assumed the question was specifically about whether I had used that derogative word to refer to gay people which I patently denied (I have never used that word to refer to gay people). Unbeknownst to me, the UCF person leading the interrogation (the Director of the UCF Office of Inclusion and Equity) had a copy of an email message I had sent to students in 2019 in which I told students that the Black Hebrew Israelites who had verbally assaulted the Covington High School kids in D.C. by calling them “incest babies,” “faggots,” and “future-school shooters.” I told students that that was a missed opportunity to confront bigotry, but no one dared chastise those African American men in all likelihood because they were black.

The Director of the UCF Office of Inclusion and Equity should have told me she had a copy of that email so that I could have more accurately emphasized that I personally was not using that term, but was merely reporting how others had used it to mistreat a group of minors. But what did UCF conclude about me denying I had ever used that word in class? That I had lied during their investigation.

The second example UCF is using to justify their termination of me involves a situation that happened seven years ago. In 2014, two female students entered my office and told me that they didn’t feel comfortable being in close proximity to my volunteer undergraduate teacher-assistant (note: they were about to have an exam in my class). I asked what had happened, and they told me they were at a gathering (a party, I believe) and that my T.A. went and sat right next to them and made them feel very uncomfortable. Naturally, I inquired about what he had said or done to upset them. They both told me that he spoke to them in a way as if he wanted them to be interested in him romantically. I then inquired more specifically if he had touched them inappropriately and they both denied it. I proceeded to tell them that they could seek help—perhaps counseling—on campus if they were distressed about that experience, and that at my end, what I could do (and did do) was tell my T.A. to monitor the very back of the auditorium
and they should sit up close to the stage by me, so that he would be far away from them. I recall asking them a second time if he had touched them and they denied it again.

A few days later, I received a call from a UCF employee who I believe, but am not certain, represented herself as an “advocate” and asked me if I knew that my two students had been touched inappropriately by my T.A. and that I, as a professor, had an obligation to report the situation to UCF. I told her: (a) I did not know I was obligated to report that situation to anyone at UCF (we faculty had not yet been trained on the Clery Act procedures), and (b) the two students told me twice that my T.A. had not touched them physically. The woman on the phone said, “That’s because they were afraid to tell you.” I distinctly recall responding to her with “Afraid to tell me? I had put on my ‘clinical hat,’ so to speak, with them and was quite gentle with them. I’m surprised they were afraid to tell me.” We quickly ended our phone conversation and I never heard anything more about this situation. No UCF office ever re-contacted me about my alleged obligation to have reported that situation. No UCF person to the best of my knowledge ever contacted my Chair to address my failure to report the situation. My Chair never mentioned the situation to me. And no mention of my mishandling of this situation was reported in my Annual Review for that year. Now, seven years later, I was taken aback to learn that the woman who had called me (according to the Director of Office of Inclusion and Equity) did not record in her paperwork that the female students were afraid to report to me there was physical contact by my T.A. I was even more shocked to learn that one of those two students (one had declined to be interviewed by UCF), seven years later, attributed statements to me that I deny having made (e.g., “you need to be more conscientious when choosing friends”).

———–Summary———–

I categorically deny the hodge-podge of charges UCF is accusing me of in order to justify their termination of me. I am pro-equality, pro-human, and even a minority myself. I also am pro-science: evidence and truth matter irrespective of any discomfort they might evoke.

UCF’s termination of me for my unpopular views and expressions—both on Twitter and in the classroom—represents a threat to three important cornerstones of a free society: free speech, academic freedom, and tenure. If UCF’s termination of me were to stand in a court of law, the United States would be heading down a dark path whereby not just professors, but citizens in general, may begin losing their constitutional rights to free speech, the freedom to question vogue ideas, and essentially the right to have independent thoughts.

On Friday, January 29, 2021, I received a Termination Letter by UCF. The letter contains their laundry list of charges against me that they believe justifies my termination. I have an attorney who will be challenging my termination, but this will take time. In the meantime, I must survive economically, as I suddenly have no income and no health insurance. My goal is to raise $50,000 to survive on while I pursue legal action. If I am successful in this fund-raising drive, I promise to donate any unused portion of the funds to the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) that works to promote free speech on college campuses.

Thank you for your consideration of this request and kindness.

Respectfully,

Charles Negy

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Comments

The collegiality of Nazis and Democrats, especially those in the academy (so-called), becomes more and more obvious.

Yet again we see it. In The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.” To express dissent from Nazi positions became a matter of taking one’s life into one’s hands. The idea of people of opposing viewpoints airing their disagreements in a civil and mutually respectful manner was gone. One was a Nazi, or one was silent (and fearful).

Today’s fascists call themselves “anti-fascists.” Just like the Nazis, they are totalitarian: they are determined not to allow their opponents to murmur the slightest whisper of dissent. Forcibly suppressing the speech of someone with whom one disagrees is a quintessentially fascist act.

    audax in reply to pfg. | January 31, 2021 at 5:33 am

    Where is the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis??????

    WHERE?????

    Ronbert in reply to pfg. | January 31, 2021 at 8:28 am

    I would advise those persecuting Mr Negy read up on Maximilien Robespierre. What goes around comes around.

    JusticeDelivered in reply to pfg. | January 31, 2021 at 8:34 am

    Democrats seem determined to destroy everything which made America great. They seem oblivious to how they are destroying the economy, violating all norms of decency and that ultimately that will, one way or another hurt them.

    JHogan in reply to pfg. | January 31, 2021 at 9:46 am

    It becomes more obvious day after day that the left is playing step by step from the Nazi’s 1930’s playbook.

    Dimsdale in reply to pfg. | February 1, 2021 at 9:48 am

    I have been in the belly of the beast and saw this coming decades ago. First there was “political correctness,” then “hate speech,” followed by the inevitable language changes and “preferred pronouns.” Tenure is a joke unless you are a preferred group. Facts mean nothing to the cancel culture, as Prof. Nagy demonstrated.

    Every new term of alleged discrimination is from the left, be it “social justice,” “fairness,” “equity,” “diversity,” etc. Social justice is a social disease. None of the other terms even remotely resemble their real, or former, meanings. The tools for discrimination are also leftist, i.e. “doxxing,” “cancelling, etc.”

    TDS has snapped them like twigs, exposing their delusions and lunacy, which sadly, many misguided people voted for, and many more didn’t. They don’t even hide their subjectivity, biases or outright hatred. The Tech Tyrants and the media have shown their outright bias and intolerance, and have totally destroyed their objectivity and their reason for being, unless that reason is to create propaganda and agitprop.

    What they did to Nagy, and what they are doing to President Trump would be criminal in a real, Constitutional America. If we put up with it, we accept it. “Evil prospers when good men (and women) do nothing.” The left has demonstrated for all that care to look that they are just plain evil, at least the leadership and their cronies in the media. The base is mostly deluded. Every single thing they claim or allege about conservatives, Trump supporters, and President Trump himself are demonstrable projection. “Build Back Better,” even while plagiarized by Biden, would be more accurately “Bring Back Beijing.”

    For the left, Orwell is a guide, and now, “truth is hate.” “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and 2 + 2 = 5” ring any bells? Big Brother Biden and his Though Police minions. Look at the definition of “doublethink:”

    “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.”

    Sound familiar? How about “Big Brother (Big Brother: the personification of the unseen monolithic leader of the Party of Oceania; correlates to whoever is actually running the Biden administration); “memory holes?” (“a small chute leading to a large incinerator. Anything that needed to be wiped from the public record (embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts) would be sent into the memory hole. As a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith often has to throw things into the memory hole to revise history and keep current with the ever-evolving Party dogma; see the entire media and now academia); “Thinkpol?” (a newspeak word to describe the secret police of Oceania, who are responsible for the detection, prosecution, and elimination of unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the Party. They use audio-visual surveillance via the telescreens and offender profiling to monitor the populace; see Twatter and Fakebook); “Newspeak” (a purposefully ambiguous and confusing language with restricted grammar and limited vocabulary used in Oceania, according or Orwell, “to diminish the range of thought.” For example, in newspeak, the term “plusgood” had replaced words better and great; political correctness and acceptable speech rules; preferred pronouns); and lastly, but most importantly, “Unperson” (someone whose existence has been excised from the public and private memory; President Trump, Nagy, every single conservative website, newspaper and public outlet).

    All of these definitions came from The George Mason University Center for the Arts (https://cfaDOTgmuDOTedu/news/2019-10/big-brother-and-other-terms-1984#:~:text=Even%20to%20understand%20the%20word,leading%20to%20a%20large%20incinerator.)

    Sadly, but maybe predictably, Orwell wrote this as a cautionary tale, but the left turned it into an instruction manual, and I don’t think most of them can even see it.

    Jaftosupremis in reply to pfg. | February 4, 2021 at 5:29 am

    As an Alum of UCF, individual Patriot, conservative second and Libertarian third: I find this disgusting. How dare they fire this man for expressing the TRUTH! Out great Nation, in which I am a Veteran of as well, shudder at this culture we have created. By not stopping the non-sense of the original hyphenation of Americans, we created this. American period. Not African American, Hispanic American, etc. Why can people not just live in the great State of Idontgiveafuckistan, and get along? As a Floridian, De Santis is in a tough spot. Step in the doody and he will be tarred and feathered for being a racist. If I had my real name here, same tarring and feathering. The horror….

Beyond the work Legal Insurrection is doing does Prof Negy have lawyers? Also, does he have fundraising to pay lawyers and if so, where?

    JusticeDelivered in reply to kyrrat. | January 30, 2021 at 9:01 pm

    Sue, sue, sue, I hope he has been lining up contingency litigators. I know a few bigshots in that business, haven’t been in touch for a long time, I think I will look them up. They are already rich, hopefully they are still hungry. And some just like going in for the kill.

      Trouble is virtually all of the contingent fee lawyers in the USA (and the world) belong to the Democrat Party and are enthusiastic supporters of every fascist policy the Left devises.
      The biggest of them all, John Morgan, whose HQ is very near to UCF, and who is a zillionaire, is more likely to represent UCF than Prof. Negy.

The Friendly Grizzly | January 30, 2021 at 8:42 pm

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. I forgot who said that. But what I see coming, is a resurrection of congressional hearings. This time they will Collett “the house unsocialist activities committee”.

Our tech-obsessed and over-connected society is spiraling out of control. Seriously! Stuff of dystopian sci-fi and – like TFGriz points out – the worst parts of history appearing to be following past playbooks, would almost be a laughable parody if it weren’t actually happening!! Just when you thought it couldn’t get crazier….!!!

I can’t believe they took down the GoFundMe for Charles Nagy because I was ready to help. I hardly ever part with a penny but this is a noble cause.

Trumps two lawyers just quit
Does anyone know why?

    JusticeDelivered in reply to gonzotx. | January 30, 2021 at 9:03 pm

    Threatened?

      The Friendly Grizzly in reply to JusticeDelivered. | January 31, 2021 at 10:26 am

      The entire legal team quit, not just two. There was a disagreement with Trump. The lawyers wanted to fight the case based on the unconstitutionality of the impeaching a former president. Trump wanted to bring up the peripheral issue of election fraud.

      My view is a non-lawyer: fight the constitutionality of the impeachment. The fraud election is a separate issue.

        JusticeDelivered in reply to The Friendly Grizzly. | January 31, 2021 at 3:07 pm

        I agree that the cases should be seperate, I am also feel for Trump, the scope of the conspiracy against him, against all of use is unprecidented.

        I understand Trump’s angst, but SCOTUS doesn’t care about election fraud and neither does Congress. Pushing this to the point of your legal team quitting was foolishly shortsighted, especially given how many lawyers won’t work for him because they’re afraid of retaliation by the Democrats. Replacing his legal team will be difficult.

        The problem lies in the impeachment charge – it directly references his “lies” about the “widespread election fraud.” That opens the door to presenting anything and everything no court could allow to be presented, and given the drama, at least a couple of news outlets will cover it live. Someone like Trump cannot resist the opportunity.

        I wish he would include the “insurrection” that has taken place since 2016 – the dossier, the invalid FISA warrants, Strokh & Page, Special Counsel stocked with partisan activists, the faux impeachment on a bogus charge with no fact witnesses, Schiff and his “evidence of collusion in plain sight”, etc etc. Laid out as a story it could be compelling.

      His entire legal team quit because he wanted to challenge the election when the grounds are his behavior leading to and during the attack on the Capitol. The lawyers had their own reputations to maintain, and their standing with the bar. (Remember how Trump urged the morons on their way and promised that he would be with them, but immediately returned to the White House?)

I am surprised that the AAUP has not weighed in on this controversy. The General Counsel of the AAUP is a tenured Cornell professor in the ILR school. This is all deeply saddening.

I don’t know if it is too late for Prof. Nagy, but I wanted to call your attention of S 264, a bill filed in the Florida Senate by Sen. Ray Rodriguez:

Higher Education; Requiring the State Board of Education to require each Florida College System institution to conduct an annual assessment related to intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity; requiring the State Board of Education to annually publish such assessments by a specified date; prohibiting the State Board of Education from shielding Florida College System institution students from certain speech; requiring the Board of Governors to annually publish such assessments by a specified date; prohibiting the Board of Governors from shielding state university students from certain speech, etc.

The bill passed out of the Senate Education committee last week and there is a good chance that it will become law.

    Milhouse in reply to Wing. | January 31, 2021 at 12:24 am

    It wouldn’t help him, because they claim his firing has nothing to do with his speech. Oh, no, it’s purely about these bulldust misconduct allegations that they spent 8 months looking for. Nothing to see here. They have no idea why FIRE would be involved. As for LIF, why, those white supremacists coming to Negy’s defense only proves he’s guilty. Or something.

    hrhdhd in reply to Wing. | January 31, 2021 at 8:34 am

    The Florida College System is the state’s 28 two-year colleges, not the four-year universities.

Gentlemen, rev up your (lawyers) and get to it! I can’t wait to see the resulting lawsuit and I hope it costs the university tens of millions of dollars plus all of the resulting attorney’s fees.

In Oberlin news, Meredith Raimondo resigned ger position as VP and Dean of studebnts, she will be taking a sabbatical and coming back at an undisclosed date as a tenured professor.
Their current VP of school communications is moving from a VP position to an assist VP position,
https://www.oberlin.edu/news/leadership-next-phase

“NEGY’S GOFUNDME PAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED – Will report details of what happened when I find out.”

GoFundMe is an eager cancel culture participant. They took down Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense fund. Let this sink in — this was not money going into Rittenhouse’s pocket, it was money to pay for a lawyer to provide Rittenhouse with a “vigorous legal defense” — something the American culture has always maintained is the legal and ethical entitlement of anyone accused of anything. But they shut him down for violating a wet-ink “policy” prohibiting “campaigns in defense of formal charges of heinous crimes, including violent, hateful, or sexual acts.”

Yet GoFundMe continued to run equivalent legal defense funds for contemporaneous terrorists on the left, such as Mattis and Rahman. the “Molotov lawyers” from Massachusetts; Kathryn Patterson, the sorority arsonist; and others.

Do a web search for Jenny Perillo, the drone in charge of enforcing GoFundMe policies, in conjunction with the cancellation of accounts. Make a list of whether the cancelled account is left or right wing. Surprise.

Now that Biden is in office, the floodgates have opened and all these clowns feel empowered to play to their basest desires.

It’s gonna be a bumpy ride!

Maybe it could be an option to have Florida look into this issue? I’m pretty sure they can find some civil rights violation there (given the obvious retaliation aspect) and protect the victim as well as punish the perps.
Florida hopefully has deeper pockets than the University of Central Florida.

When the other example cited costs $5m to litigate that really indicates employment laws are a little bit shit.

I hope the professor can argue his case!

This reads like a nightmare out of Arthur Koestler, and Charles Negy is the new Rubashov. The Washington Post’s motto should be, if it had any integrity, “Democracy Dies in Darkness at Noon.” That’s where we are today.

The Dems/Left/Marxists are using the government, the media, Big Tech, and major corporations to elevate POC to preferred and protected class status.

And relegate whites who object to second class citizen status.

This is a formula for conflict. It’s almost as if they want to provoke division and conflict.

Which explains why there are walls going up in DC. And why they want to target their political opposition as domestic terrorists. Why they want to censor and silence them. Why they want to further restrict gun ownership. Why they want to confiscate guns.

America is no longer a free country. The average citizen in America no longer enjoys the right of free speech. There is a two tier system of law enforcement. Government and corporate America engages in forced political indoctrination. While oppressing and persecuting political wrong think. The courts are becoming almost a useless rubber stamp for a far Leftwing regime.

It is becoming harder and harder to see how this ends well.

GoFundMe is a lefty organization that will stab conservatives in the back. Use other funding sites.

But remember the left isn’t fascist, they just believe in a merger between one party only, the state, industry, the wealthy elite, unions, suppression of speech, permanent state of emergency, use of the military as props to give people the impression they need the heavy hand of the state to intervene in everything, want to disarm the population, and believe strongly in the central importance of race to all things but no they aren’t fascists or anything the difference is uhhhh well this is pretty hard to figure out.

I attended UCF back in the late sixties after returning from Vietnam. It was then known as the Florida Technological University. There were anti-American professors on staff then. I would suggest withholding any government support for this commie infested indoctrination center for openers. Come on DeSantis, let’s get to work.

He foolishly thought academic institutions are interested in free speech. They aren’t, especially when you challenge the sacred cows of the left.

If this kind of thing doesn’t become top priority for every Republican State house the political and legal conflict between Democrat and Republican is over.

This period of our lives will be known as the “American Dark Age” if we actually survive it to have a future where history is accurately told.