“Antifa Thugs Find a Champion and Leader in Stanford Professor.”
This was the Stanford Review’s headline, sprawled above a photo of ominously masked protesters, for a Jan. article that called for David Palumbo-Liu’s resignation.
Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature and the vice president of the American Comparative Literature Association. In Aug. 2017, he and Bill Mullen, a professor at Purdue University, founded the Campus Antifascist Network (CAN), a group of faculty, staff, and students from universities across the United States who are devoted to opposing the rise of fascism.
CAN was created in response to the Charlottesville white nationalist rally last summer that involved the death of a peaceful protester after James Fields, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, drove a car into a crowd of people who supported the removal of a Confederate statue from a park near the University of Virginia. CAN’s initial purpose was to unite those who sought to address the drastic change in political discourse on college campuses since Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency and to create broader discussion of what free speech is.
“Donald Trump’s election truly struck me because a large number of people began talking and acting in ways that were quite troublesome,” Palumbo-Liu tells Stanford Politics. “As more and more disturbing events occurred on college campuses — Milo Yiannopoulos [at Berkeley], Richard Spencer at [the University of Florida], and the Charlottesville attack, which was the most graphic and disturbing incident of white supremacist violence on campus — we felt we had to organize something to prevent this type of violence.”
However, Palumbo-Liu’s actions led him to be described by The Review as “an antifa ring-leader… championing violent resistance,” and his organization was called “a chapter of a terrorist group.”
This was not the first time Palumbo-Liu was targeted by The Review. Two years ago, he was accused of propagating anti-Semitism in an article entitled “Stanford’s Most Radical Professor Strikes Again.”
In an op-ed for the Stanford Daily, Palumbo-Liu said he should have known better this time than to answer The Review’s questions. Palumbo-Liu corresponded with The Review days before the article was published, but his responses to their questions were largely misconstrued.
In the Daily piece titled “Why we have free speech on university campuses, and why I will never take a call from the Stanford Review again,” Palumbo-Liu calls The Review’s piece “right-wing propaganda” and “classic yellow journalism.”
Of his correspondence with The Review, he writes: “I was recently approached by the Stanford Review to comment on the Campus Antifascist Network… I engaged with the reporter and answered her questions. I even commended her on her astuteness with regard to one question. We were polite, professional. Imagine my surprise, then, when I clicked on the link she sent me and found yet another sensationalistic headline, worthy of any cheap tabloid one might find at the bottom of a shopping cart.” He also condemned The Review’s conflation of antifasicm with antifa violence.
Nevertheless, a few days after The Review article was published, its co-author and the editor-in-chief of The Review, Anna Mitchell, appeared on a segment of Fox & Friends where she expressed no remorse for its accusations, claiming, “If any professor tried to start a ‘campus alternative right network’ and claimed that it was not affiliated with the alt-right, he would be laughed out of his seat.”
The questions Mitchell asked of Palumbo-Liu, by email, before the article was published — as well as his responses — are copied and stylized below, courtesy of Palumbo-Liu:
AM: Were you present at the Berkeley Milo Yiannopoulos protests?
DPL: Not at the one where he appeared
AM: How do you define “fascism”?
DPL: If you are sincere in your question, I cannot give you a sound bite (sorry-remember, you asked a professor!):
I think the best definition of the kind of fascism we are confronting today is from Shane Burley, author of Fascism Today. He has a concise phrase which captures it well: “Inequality through mythological and essentialized identity.”
He goes on to explain:
“Standing before the London Forum in 2012, Richard Spencer said that the defining characteristic of the Alt Right was inequality. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created unequal,’ he said, making a clear break with the foundational document of American political independence that the conservative movement clings to as their moral authority. For fascists across the board, the defining factor of their ideology is more than the conservative de-emphasis of equality: inequality, for them, is critical, crucial, and correct. They believe that people are of different abilities and skills, qualities and characteristics, and that those differences should be ranked vertically, not horizontally. How this inequality is interpreted often shifts between different schools of thought and political movements, but they often take antiquated notions about race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, body type, and other qualities to show that groups of people, defined in a myriad of ways, can be ranked as ‘better or worse.’ Even between those groups, such as inside of the ‘white race,’ people are not seen as fundamentally equal. Equality is a social lie that leads to an unhealthy society where the weak rule over the strong through democracy.”
I would only add to this elements of what might be called “classical” definitions of fascism, which point to structural phenomena like the convergence of powerful state and business interests that consolidate power away from citizens and into special interests that opportunistically take advantage of “inequality” and argue that the free market is a place for the best to become better, while hiding the structural and historical forces that have kept wealth circulating amongst the very very few. The empirical proof of this is clearly evident in the ways wealth is now concentrated in the hands of the very few. This did not come out of talent or special intelligence, it came from structural phenomena that preserve power and wealth.
AM: The “anti-fascist” part of your group’s name is commonly associated with violent protesters who shut down speakers they disagree with. Do you worry about setting a bad precedent to students who might interpret your organization as also supporting such violence?
DPL: Your statement fuses two things together (when you say “violent protesters”). “Violence” implies physical acts of intimidation, “shut down” in this sense could be construed to be damaging buildings and attacking people physically. That is not what we advocate and we have made that clear. On the other hand, shouting at speakers is part of free speech, just as much as their shouting at protesters is within their rights.
AM: You state that you only support self-defense by those threatened by fascism, not outright violence. Could you describe what sort of acts justify this self-defense: do only direct, violent attacks meet this criteria, or anything more?
DPL: That is a great question, and gets to an important point. As you know, the vast majority of alt-R work does not take place physically, but rather online. Their online presence sometimes facilitates physical acts, but mostly they are interested in doxxing people, harassing them, intimidating people from speaking out by making examples of those who have. This is done not through simply quoting things people have said, which is fine-it is by creating “fake” news stories that mischaracterize the comment, or cite it so selectively and in such a distorted manner that in does not represent the speaker’s idea. Milos announced that he was going to reveal the names and addresses of undocumented students at Cal. Is this something we want to defend? How would you feel if something you wrote was misquoted and distorted, your family’s home address published online?
So I have been urging college administrators to become more informed about how the alt-R can hack into personal and private accounts, create disinformation, draw large crowds with false information. The University of California is already doing this. That is the kind of self-defense that we should all take part in, especially journalists like yourself.
Basically, this is a safety issue, not a free speech issue. I have no problem having Richard Spencer speak at Stanford—he can come, and I would help organize and protest.
Here is a piece I wrote for Huffington Post, and another good one (not mine) that appeared in Politico:
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/26/white-nationalists-antifa-university-violence-305014
Good luck with your story, and Happy NY,
DP-L
In an interview with Stanford Politics, Palumbo-Liu says: “According to the American Association of University Professors, anything that a professor says on social media that is inflammatory or ill-advised is extracurricular speech and should not be included in their academic work. I’ve defended professors before based on first amendment issues although I do not necessarily agree with what some of them have said. That has been the landscape up until the Palumbo-Liu case. This takes it exponentially out of that field of play. I have done nothing. I have said nothing that can be in any way construed as violent or promoting violence. In fact, the evidence points to exactly the opposite.”
There have been no complaints filed by any of his students. Furthermore, there are no Stanford students who are members of CAN. Palumbo-Liu’s work at Stanford is well within the boundaries of academic convention as evidenced by the fact that he has been named to multiple high-level committees within Stanford despite the administration’s knowledge of his extra-curricular activity.
“Professor Palumbo-Liu’s involvement with a political advocacy organization is his personal choice,” Persis Drell, the Provost of Stanford, tells Stanford Politics. “It is not the business of the University to interfere. Professor Palumbo-Liu has done nothing wrong,” she says.
In the time since the article has been published, however, Palumbo-Liu and his family have been the subjects of death threats. Unfortunately, he is not alone. Within the past few years, the number of liberal-minded professors that have been singled out by conservative groups and targeted with death threats has exponentially increased. Most notably, in 2016, Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watch List” was founded with an aim to “list U.S. professors deemed to discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” In an article for The Guardian, Palumbo-Liu likens this to the McCarthyism targeting communists in the mid-20th century.
“[Turning Point USA] comes and recruits students to report on their professors,” Palumbo-Liu tells Stanford Politics. “This is a classic case of McCarthyism. It’s character assassination based on irresponsible pronouncements. We don’t treat people that way. I cannot dredge it out of my own soul to speak about anyone the way that I have been spoken about. This is far different from agitation from the right. This is a well-programmed machine.”
In opposition to the harassment that Palumbo-Liu has received, a petition was started in late Jan. by members of the Stanford community to “Stand Against Intimidation of Faculty.” It has garnered over 700 signatures and counting.
Provost Drell seems to agree with Palumbo-Liu’s concerns, expressing that “the cases in which members of our community have become subjected to the taunts and hatred of the Internet have been very troubling – no one in our community would desire to inflict that experience on another.” She adds: “I do believe that it is the responsibility of each of us to reject that kind of discourse and the paths that lead to it. It is unfortunate that on social media and in some of our public discourse, facts are distorted and a complete view of a given situation is often hard to discern.”
“As an educator, I think this is a good learning experience,” Palumbo-Liu said. “I’m relatively well protected. If this had happened to a junior professor, he/she could not do what I have done. I’m exercising academic freedom, which is a tool not for self-protection but for advancing knowledge. I want this to be a benefit for the Stanford community.”
More so than the lack of journalistic standards, Palumbo-Liu is bothered by the bizarre premise of The Review’s article condemning his political advocacy.
“The legacy of antifascism goes back to fascism,” Palumbo-Liu says. “It was a resistance to totalitarianism and the idea that one group of people is the definition of one nation and that everyone else is a non or lesser citizen. It’s a strange twist in history that now the term antifascist is a bad term. The heroes we all celebrate on Veteran’s Day were all antifascists. They were fighting for democracy.”
Amber Yang, a freshman studying physics, is an associate editor for Stanford Politics.