Get your claws off my future!

I keep reading Horowitz's name. How is it possible that our entire pedagogical system is affected by one man (and several other with the same Right ideologies) and his power over society? How have we allowed this to happen? How can we break this cycle? The influence of politics and money has taken a direct hit on freedom of speech and academic freedom. We always talk about how deep the neoliberal project runs but, it is hard to think about its creepy claws inside my mind and surrounding my Beering Hall. What can we do? I think that this is a violence that has been ignored for long enough. This is something we must challenge. We cannot leave other scholars who strive to make changes and resist the conservative dominant ideology which has its grip on our knowledge and knowledge producing practices alone to fight the battle that silences scholars who speak out against this epistemic violence.

We read in class about how to fight fire with fire. We read that in order to have a dialogue with violence you have to come prepared with violence. Malcolm X taught us this. Although Churchill discusses instances in which Right scholars have been cited with academic misconduct and have not suffered nearly the consequences that scholars on the Left have, he does not provide us with a call to action. I wonder if Left scholars focused as much time on these efforts if it would be effective in either ending the bombardment of false accusations or at least get some of those neoliberal talking heads away from pedagogical positions? How does one fight an ideology that is everywhere?

On another note, Schueller (2007) quotes Pipes "Fears of a Muslim influx have more substance than the worry about jihad. West European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned people cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene" (p. 56). Does this sound familiar to anyone? How about taking a look at the AZ bill 1070 which allows police officers in Arizona to ask anyone who looks suspicion (read: brown, Mexican) for their papers. This has gone too far. What resistive strategies do scholars, new scholars, have to fight these sort of blatantly racist and fascist actions taken against people, hidden under the name of national security?