Trofim Lysenko, the person American academia now most admires,
preaching to Stalin as he destroyed Soviet plant research,
persecuted anyone who disagreed with him, and caused famines
that killed millions.

Today at the Daily Signal one of their writers, Douglas Blair, compiled a list of eight college professors whose lives were destroyed by the intolerant left and its effort to silence all opposition, by any means necessary. That list is as follows:

• Mike Adams: forced to retire early for being a conservative. He soon thereafter killed himself.
• Peter Boghossian: forced to resign for proving many social science journals publish utter garbage.
• Gregory Manco: fired for having an opinion.
• John Staddon: banned from academic email group for having an opinion.
• Bruce Gilley: forced to withdraw a peer-reviewed paper because others disliked his conclusions.
• Charles Negy: fired for expressing an opinion.
• Leslie Neal-Boylan: fired for expressing an opinion.
• Nathaniel Hiers: fired for cracking a joke.

Five of those eight individuals had previously been a subject of my daily column, “Today’s Blacklisted American,” proving that the number of such cases of oppression and blacklisting by the academic left has grown so large that a daily column can’t possibly cover every story.

What struck me about this list however was the petty, ugly, and absurd reasons given for destroying or silencing these individuals. In every single case, the only accusation against them was that each professor had offended someone (often unnamed) by something he or she had written or said. At no point did anyone ever challenge the accuracy of their statements or writing.

In one case the offending remark was simply a silly joke that no normal and rational person would be offended by. In another case the fired professor had simply noted that there are only two sexes. Four other cases the offending remarks were criticisms of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, noting the blatantly obvious fact that both are racist, demonizing whites (merely for their skin color) while lionizing all other minorities as pure, perfect, and oppressed. A fourth professor was pushed out of his teaching position simply because he criticized the vapid nature of all “Woman’s Studies” programs.

And then there were the professors (Boghossian and Gilley) who were condemned because they used the peer-review system to publish papers that offended others. Boghossian was part of project that got a number of obviously fake papers through peer review and published in several well-respected social science journals, demonstrating that the editors of those journals were incompetent and that the material they published should not be trusted.

Gilley wrote a paper demonstrating with facts that colonialism was not all bad, that in many cases it actually benefited the natives. He immediately found himself in a firestorm, the subject of a coordinated campaign to get him blacklisted and fired and the journal boycotted. Soon both he and the journal editor were receiving creditable death threats.

None of the critics of Gilley’s paper cited any errors. Instead they focused entirely on how its conclusions offended them and that it was racist to even state such facts.

From these stories you can only conclude that today’s academic community is utterly bankrupt, dominated and controlled by ignorant, close-minded, and spoiled individuals unwilling to discuss any subject rationally. Instead, if someone says something they dislike, they throw tantrums, and their administration immediately gives in to them. In such a culture free and intelligent thought is impossible. No one in these schools can get a good education. Instead, students are taught that intellectual debate is nothing more than silencing and oppressing those you disagree with.

For this country to survive these institutions must die, now. If it happened yesterday it would not be soon enough.