But Tell Us About That Terrible Leftist Cancel Culture

 

Protesters in Austin, 2013, against back-door creationism in public schools. Photo by Patrick Michels/Texas Observer.

This was some headline, in the Texas Tribune, which is a treasure of an online newspaper:

Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in lecture

Like an "accusation" of such a crime is enough to get you in trouble with the administration.

The professor, Joy Alonzo, an expert in opioids, wasn't even at her own institution; she was giving a guest lecture at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, to a class of first-year medical students including the daughter of Dawn Buckingham, Texas Land Commissioner, a former state senator from the time when Dan Patrick was a state senator too, and a friend of Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp. Shortly after the lecture ended around noon and she was driving home, Buckingham was on the phone with Patrick, and also to the system's vice chancellor for government relations; Sharp opened an investigation, sending Patrick a text a couple of hours later:

“Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.”

At 4:22, the course coordinator in Galveston had sent an email to the class with a "STATEMENT OF FORMAL CENSURE":

“The statements made by the guest lecturer do not represent the opinion or position of the University of Texas Medical Branch, nor are they considered as core curriculum content for this course,” the email said.

“UTMB does not support or condone these comments. We take these matters very seriously and wish to express our disapproval of the comment and apologize for harm it may have caused for members of our community,” the email continued. “We hereby issue a formal censure of these statements and will take steps to ensure that such behavior does not happen in the future.”

The email did not specify what statements/comments it was referring to, and it's really not clear what Alonzo said—the lecture wasn't recorded—but students texting each other were able to come up with some ideas:

According to one student who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the school, some students wondered if it was when Alonzo said that the lieutenant governor’s office was one of the reasons it’s hard for drug users to access certain care for opioid addiction or overdoses.

A second student who also asked to remain anonymous for the same reason said Alonzo made a comment that the lieutenant governor’s office had opposed policies that could have prevented opioid-related deaths, and by doing so had allowed people to die.

Which does sound pretty harsh, but true—Patrick has held up legislation even Governor Abbott supports, legalizing fentanyl test strips, which allow users to determine whether the substance they're using has been cut with fentanyl, which certainly do save lives (in just two years in the fentanyl ascendancy between 2019 and 2021, overdose deaths in Texas rose 400%, so it's death on a pretty big scale).

Patrick also has a special association with questions of academic freedom in general. He was instrumental in an effort to end tenure in public colleges and universities in Texas, which failed in the Texas House, and proposed in the meantime to take away the tenure of any professor found guilty of teaching "critical race theory".

This kind of sweeping assertion of ideological control over state employees goes right along with the petty personalization with which he leapt into action against one professor accused of disrespecting him, with his network of informants and flunkies.

I stress this especially because of its affinity with the Trumpies' plan for a second Trump term, as described in a recent article by Brynn Tannehill, as it was in the first term,

daily chaos, naked power grabs, corruption, pandering to religious extremists, weaponization of government for personal vendettas, degradation of our democracy, and the constant assault on the rights of women, persons of color, and LGBTQ people,

only more systematic:

the plan to reinstitute Schedule F for federal employees, which would allow the administration to fire any federal employee with policymaking authority. In practice this means that a Trump administration would replace vast swathes of the federal government bureaucracy with sycophants and ideological fellow travelers bent on implementing pro-corporate, pro-religious, and anti-minority agendas. This weaponizes the entire federal bureaucracy against women and LGBTQ people.

Texas and Florida are the storyboards for how it's going to work.