A cop-hating professor at Clemson University has again said that all Republicans are racists and xenophobes and in May publicly asked for the address of a man who wrote a letter to the editor with which the professor disagreed.
Bart Knijnenburg, a member of the “human-centered computing” department, urged others to disclose the writer’s address under a link to the letter on his Facebook page.
And his latest hate-the-GOP rants aren’t his first, Campus Reform reported. Supporters of President Trump are “racist scum,” he wrote three years ago, and he advocated violence against those he calls “Nazis,” which would likely mean Republicans given that he thinks one is no different from the other.
Trump Is a Racist
The latest from the professor, Campus Reform reported, is unsurprising given the tenor of the American professoriate.
“Trump is xenophobic and racist,” he wrote on Facebook on July 7. “Trump’s administration is xenophobic and racist.”
But that’s not all, Campus Reform reported about the since-deleted hate posts.
All Republicans and anyone who votes for Trump or Republicans is a racist, the unhinged pedagogue wrote:
The Republican Party is xenophobic and racist.
Anyone who voted Republican in 2016 is xenophobic and racist.
Anyone who still calls themselves a Republican despite all this is xenophobic and racist.
As well, anyone with which Knijnenburg disagrees might well be subject to doxxing, particularly if they don’t like Knijnenburg.
When alumnus Paul Gilbert wrote a letter to the editor that said Clemson should ban Chinese nationals from the university, Knijnenburg flipped his lid on Facebook.
“What the actual f**k,” he wrote under a still-published post that linked to the letter. When a Facebook friend asked whether anyone knew where Gilbert lives, the professor replied this way: “lemme know if you find out his address.”
Knijnenburg didn’t say why he wanted to know Gilbert’s address, but the answer might be found in another series of FB posts that also called Republicans racist and, again, advocated violence.
Punch a “Nazi”
“All trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum,” the professor wrote in August 2017, Campus Reform reported.
“All republicans? Yes,” he continued. “Your complacency made this happen. Pick a side: denounce your affiliation, or admit you’re a racist.”
When a Facebook friend wrote that “we must be careful not to generalize as this is arguably the root cause of the extreme right’s existence,” Knijnenburg was unrepentant and insulted his neighbors. “You should come live in the south for a while,” he wrote. “It’s exhausting. The republican ideology of ‘everyone is equal and nobody deserves a handout’ is naive at best, covertly racist at worst.”
A few days before that exchange, he likened Trump voters and Republicans to “Nazis” because they are “all racists,” Campus Reform reported.
“I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy,” he wrote. “Violent or non-violent #PunchNazis.”
Those posts inspired Gilbert — who wrote the letter that so incensed Knijnenburg — to tell the College Fix the school should fire him.
Question is, what would Knijnenburg have done with Gilbert’s address if Nazis and Republicans are all alike, and Nazis must be punched.
Knijnenburg’s Twitter account announces this: “BLM | ACAB | Burn it Down.”
BLM, of course, means Black Lives Matter, while ACAB means “all cops are bastards.”
YouTube Expert
Whether Knijnenburg actually teaches anything of value at the university is open to question.
He teaches something called the “Fundamentals of Human-Centered Computing,” whatever that might be, and his biography says he is a “researcher on privacy decision-making and recommender systems,” which undoubtedly involves the type of high-end thinking required for nuclear physics and molecular genetics.
“Our online lives are full of small but difficult decisions,” the angry professor explains. “Which app should I install? Should I post this on Facebook or not? Which YouTube video should I watch? What will this e-commerce website do with my personal information? In my research I try to understand the psychological principles behind these online decisions. Using Big Data and Machine Learning principles, I try to make these decisions a little easier with better user interfaces and ‘smart defaults.’”
Knijnenburg did not, apparently, consult “Big Data and Machine Learning principles” before posting hateful commentary threats of violence on Facebook.
Image: Tero Vesalainen/iStock/Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
