The latest casualty of the new thought police is Mike Adams, longtime Townhall columnist and eternal advocate for free speech. Adams, 55, was found dead in his home yesterday.
I never met Adams, but I read him with admiration, and wrote about him once in 2018 when he was “disinvited” from an official lecture co-sponsored by the University of Montana’s School of Journalism. The lecture went on, thanks to the support of one brave woman, but the journalism school put its tail between its legs and hid when free speech was under attack.
(My 2018 column about Adams is reprinted below. It is included in “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?”)
We don’t know yet what happened to Adams, but it is easy to surmise that his life ended in despair. In May, the prolific author was forced out of his job at the University of North Carolina, where he had been a professor of criminology but most importantly an opponent of campus groupthink and liberal orthodoxy. The story in USA Today announcing his death said he had “resigned amid controversy over his ‘vile’ tweets.”
Just what were those vile tweets? Here are the highlights as selected by USA Today:
“He drew backlash in May after tweeting that people who wear masks in public look like ‘fools,’ and for calling North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper a ‘fascist,’ among other criticisms, for his response to the coronavirus pandemic. He also tweeted that women’s studies is a ‘nonessential major’ and pushed for the separation of states from the country.”
My goodness! Talk about being targeted for #TweetingWhileConservative! If anyone is still confused about how little freedom of expression we have left, that should end the discussion. Of course, Adams could actually be much more vitriolic than those tweets suggest. He was a true firebrand who would not be tamed by political correctness. He also had the uncanny knack of usually being right.
A brief tribute to him has appeared at Townhall.com. More will surely follow. You can access an archive of his writings here.
Why would a journalism school be afraid of free speech?
February 03, 2018
By FRANK MIELE
If there are two institutions that should support free speech without reservation, they would be journalism and higher education.
True journalism cannot exist without freedom of expression, and particularly the freedom to speak openly about any topic without fear of reprisal.
Likewise, the college campus only has meaning as something more than a steppingstone to a salary if we acknowledge that the free exchange of ideas is the fundamental raison d’etre for “the academy.”
It was, therefore, doubly disturbing to find out last October that the dean of the University of Montana Journalism School had weighed in against the appearance of conservative columnist Mike Adams that was planned for this month.
Adams, who is a criminology and sociology professor at the University of North Carolina, was invited to be the featured speaker at the 10th annual Jeff Cole Distinguished Lecture Series. Cole was a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, and his widow, Maria, is a major benefactor to the J-school in Missoula. It was she who invited Adams, who writes for Townhall.com and has been widely condemned on the left for his outspoken defense of traditional values. Cole said she doesn’t agree with everything Adams writes, but she admired his opposition to censorship and vigorous defense of free speech on college campuses.
“I could hear my husband going ‘Now it’s time to step up. I was about freedom of speech. I was about the First Amendment. I lived opposing censorship every day,” Cole told NBC Montana.
So, in honor of her husband, Maria Cole stuck to her guns and insisted on Mike Adams giving the Jeff Cole Distinguished Lecture even when the journalism school backed out of its co-sponsorship.
Larry Abramson, the dean of the Journalism School at the University of Montana, told Cole in an email: “I think we can find a speaker who will talk about free speech issues, without running the risk of offending students.”
Abramson told KGVO-AM in Missoula that “the J-school does not have to invite people that we think don’t match our priorities or our values as a tolerant, welcoming school.”
That discordant justification of intolerance didn’t sit well with either Adams, who has written three subsequent columns about “Grizzly bigotry” (referencing the school’s mascot), or Maria Cole, who has donated more than $1.2 million to the journalism program over the past 15 years. She opted to shell out a bit more money and booked the 1,100-seat Dennison Theater on the university campus for the night of Feb. 13.
To her credit, the university’s interim president Sheila Stearns early on said she disagreed with Abramson’s decision, but had not been involved in it.
“Fear of controversy I don’t think is and never should be a characteristic of a university,” she told the Missoulian. “We’re never afraid of ideas. I would say … make sure the event is well-planned and safe.”
Nonetheless, Stearns gave Abramson considerable cover when she issued a joint statement with him saying that the School of Journalism opted not to co-sponsor this year’s Jeff Cole Lecture because, according to the Missoulian report, “Adams is not a journalist and is not addressing any specific journalism concerns.”
That was a cop-out. Adams is a nationally recognized opinion columnist, an essential element of journalism, and he is addressing restrictions on learning and fighting bias, two issues which are essential not just to journalism, but to a free society.
So what makes Mike Adams such a lightning rod for criticism on the left? Well, he’s smart and a good writer. That’s a combination that is intolerable to the tolerant left, which promotes diversity of gender, religion and skin color but is terrified by diversity of ideas.
Most notably, Adam drew the ire of Social Justice Warriors at the University of North Carolina and beyond for his 2016 column entitled “A ‘Queer Muslim’ Jihad?” That column told the story of how the Secret Service had been called to the campus in Wilmington prior to an appearance by Donald Trump because of a Facebook post that raised concerns for the candidate’s safety.
Adams pointed out with some humor and a lot of derision that the supposed threat emanated from a woman who was both the founder of the Muslim Student Association and the former president of the university’s gay PRIDE group. Considering that homosexuality is not tolerated by fundamental Islam, it was Adams’ implicit thesis that the woman was more a danger to herself than anyone else, yet she had been empowered by the university’s policy that students have a “right to be unoffended.”
The conclusion of that column by Adams can easily fit as the conclusion of this one as well:
“Despite what the diversity proponents tell you, all ideas are not equal. Some are more dangerous than others. Thankfully, the chickens of diversity appear to be coming home to roost.”
Let’s hope that Dean Abramson got the message. His students deserve to hear from all sides, and as future journalists they should insist on that opportunity.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: The lecture proceeded despite all the efforts to shut it down. You can read an account of the event in a liberal Montana blog here.)
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Heartland Diary is solely operated by Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will consider purchasing one of my books. They are available through the following Amazon links. My new book is “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” and is now available in paperback and as an eBook. It is 536 pages long and chock full of research on the progressive movement and the patriotic heroes who have fought against it. My earlier books include “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” and the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” As an Amazon Associate, I may earn referral fees for qualifying purchases through links on my website. Also consider subscribing to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use. My goal is to reach 1,000 subscribers.
I attended his talk in Missoula. He said nothing that could be construed as offensive to any organization or group. The people who harassed him here did not express any cogent reason for doing so.
I hope that you will tell us about how and why he died. Three of my friends are dead at the hands of environmental extremists. One of them was poisoned through the use of a rare chemical. It always helps to get some idea of the causes for anything.
No word on his cause of death yet, but circumstances suggest suicide is possible. Still he just got a settlement from university to retire early so he had no external reason to want to kill himself. Anything possible at this time.
Other than Frank’s articles, journalism has no truth and has turned into fake news. The Professors have no guts to right this wrong about teaching truth in journalism even though they have Constitutional protection which they use in the opposite; Lies not Truth = fake news. Facts appear to scare them. Why in the world would a journalism department let the students run the zoo? The answer is that both professors and students have morphed into anarchy as their favorite message to call their students to anti-American, seditious action. Every single person in America has seen the danger of the kind of rhetoric that journalists and students spew. Think Socialism as it is the first step to Communism and all have seen, if not experienced, this sophistic, evil, ideology in some form during their lives. If they select that form of governance for their future families and as their northern star of life, they should move where they can obtain it, as they will be quickly invited. Thank goodness for the few like Frank and Mike Adams. They are the bright stars of of Journalistic Heaven! RLS
Too kind, Rick. I’m flattered.