A physicist has found himself on the wrong side of the cancel culture mob after liking non-woke posts on social media.
A lecturer at the University of Plymouth in England is in quite the jam – hope that's a politically-correct word – for liking nefarious posts on Twitter that assert such controversial theories as "all lives matter" and "gender has a scientific basis." Mike McCulloch, the aforementioned physicists, recounted his run-in with the social justice warrior mob in a recent post on Unherd.com
"As a university lecturer in geomatics, I can attest to this: earlier this month, I received a polite email from my Head of School stating that an anonymous person had sent a list of tweets that I had ‘liked’ over a 24-hour period to the University’s Equalities Team. My supposed ‘crime’ was that I had liked posts saying ‘All lives matter’, ‘Gender has a scientific basis’ and ones opposed to mass immigration," the physicist writes.
According to McCulloch, the complaint extrapolated from his social media likes that McCulloch was "black-hating, woman-hating, immigrant-hating…etc," which, of course, the physicist says isn't true. A few weeks later, McCulloch was informed that another complaint had been received and the University was opening an investigation into McCulloch's thought crimes. A colleague of the McCulloch's was appointed investigator and a Zoom meeting was scheduled for a disciplinary hearing to decide the fate of McCulloch's continued employment at the university.
Thanks to the help of free speech advocates who rose to McCulloch's defense after the physicist shared his experiences on Twitter, it became clear that the university was in clear violation of the free speech protections afforded to McCulloch under the Human Rights Act. It also became clear the university had no basis upon which to launch their disciplinary hearing. The case was dropped.
"This was an incredibly stressful period for me and my family," McCulloch recalled. "To think that I could have lost my career to a single complaint about my liked tweets shows just how hysterical the present social mood is. Now more than ever, it is vital that we — and in particular the universities — stand up for enlightenment principles and replace fear with reason and fact."
Last month, a now-former chair of the University of British Columbia's Board of Governors resigned following outrage from a student group that was horrified and appalled to learn that the chair had liked several tweets by President Trump, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and a few other Republicans. The board of governors issued a swift apology for the chair's errant Twitter liking, which they characterized as "racism."
"The Board of Governors and [the chair] would like to recognize that this has been deeply hurtful to members of our community and that UBC has zero tolerance for racism and recognizes that real harm is created from both overt and structural racism."
The mission of cancel culture in academia is to expel all sources of non-leftist thought from the universities. No one learns how to think anymore at these "safe spaces." Today's students are told what to think and provided a demonstration of what will happen to them one day if they grow up and like conservative things on Twitter.
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