12/29/2023 0 Comments Diablo valley college eric clanton“It was a blitzkrieg, literally,” Ponce said in an interview. His home phone number, address and even pictures of his daughter were posted on Facebook and the internet’s free-speech tarpit, 4chan. A spiteful, systematic troll army set in on him. Breitbart ran a story saying he told students “that its (sic) acceptable to violate U.S. Two weeks later, larger conservative websites began targeting him. “Just trying to not be so predictable, that was key,” he said. He started parking in different spaces, took different routes between his office and car, and reorganized his daily routines. “The attacks on faculty and institutions of higher education we see today have created a climate as hostile to academic freedom in the United States as in any historical period in the 20th century,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, associate secretary for the Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance at the American Association of University Professors.Īt school, Ponce took personal safeguards. While political friction among teachers, administrators and the public is nothing new, the question of how universities should handle public outcry in the age of social media is a daunting new aspect of academia that morphs as quickly as people can type. The recent rise in media maelstroms swirling around educators has raised important issues on the limits of academic freedom – and its distinction from freedom of speech – and the raging battle between the left and right on college campuses across the country. Their offenses have ranged from lecturing on hot-button subjects such as race, gender or climate change to posting provocative comments and news articles on their social media accounts. Ponce is one of dozens of educators – if not many more – who in the past two years have been featured in conservative media pieces, placed on watchlists and targeted by the internet outrage machine. He had entered the nightmarish club of teachers and professors who have been singled out, berated and threatened with violence by anonymous trolls for performing their jobs. What, he asked himself, had he done to deserve this? Ponce had no idea what had started the onslaught of hate speech and death threats. Give that guy some helicopter therapy,” read one Facebook comment, a reference to a series of memes, popular in white nationalist circles, of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of throwing political enemies out of helicopters. They slung racial epithets, told him to return to his home country (Ponce was born in Orange, California) and made thinly veiled death threats. Hundreds of people were calling for his firing. Ponce soon discovered that his Facebook page and personal website were cluttered with nasty comments as well, and his office answering machine was full. “Your (sic) racist, Marxist filth, you ave (sic) been noted and we all know you now,” read another. “I might just take a trip to Mexifornia and sit in on one of your hate speeches,” read one of the hundreds of messages. Instead, he found an inbox full of vitriol. Ponce logged in to his college email account expecting the usual: work messages, a few season’s greetings from family and colleagues, maybe some spam. ![]() ![]() ![]() It started just before Christmas last year. “Only Mom and Dad can touch the mail” became a new house rule.Įach night after putting his daughter to bed, Ponce would peek through the windows of his home to check for strange cars or people outside, “precautionary measures,” he said, after an internet troll army had targeted him. Ponce, a political science professor at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area, and his wife didn’t know how to explain to their 9-year-old that her father was receiving death threats. When the threatening letters started to arrive, Albert Ponce stopped letting his daughter touch the mail. Sign up for our newsletter to get our investigations and reporters’ insights delivered straight to your inbox.
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