The vast right-wing conspiracy just devastated UNC-Chapel Hill

Today’s announcement that Nikole Hannah-Jones will be accepting a position at Howard University rather than the University of North Carolina is an unalloyed disaster for the state’s flagship campus. Once considered North Carolina’s crown jewel and broadly supported by the state political establishment, Chapel Hill is now faced with full-scale war by the people who are supposed to be its caretakers. To be snubbed by one of the school’s most prominent alums sends the message that America’s intellectual class has reduced its estimation of UNC and now prefers to go to private colleges that lack Carolina’s political vulnerability and undeniable racism. We can thank the right-wing conspiracy whose octopus-like tentacles grasp virtually everything about public life in this state.

The assault on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s hire began in the war rooms of Art Pope’s James Martin Center for Academic Renewal. This group, its name an oxymoron and its funding source a long-time reservoir of fuel for the right-wing fire, came after the distinguished journalist for her 1619 Project. The Project was provocative and intellectually bold, exactly the kind of endeavor that a great university should welcome as fuel for intellectual debate. The free speech-obsessed Martin Center would have none of it, decrying Hannah-Jones and her magnum opus as an affront to the patriotically correct dogma preferred by Pope and his fellow champions of “Western Civilization.”

From there it was a quickly metastasizing campaign against this acclaimed journalist that eventually enlisted nearly every figure in the right-wing echo chamber. Carolina Journal beat the drum. Right-wing Twitter warriors went into attack mode. The assault reached a fever pitch by early summer, and it had an effect, with the politically appointed UNC Board of Trustees rejecting faculty recommendations that Nikole Hannah-Jones receive tenure. The backlash against this obscene attack on academic freedom and racial equality was so intense it arguably rivaled the worldwide denunications North Carolina faced for its 2016 foray into transphobia, the infamous HB2.

You’d have to be pretty dense not to perceive a political influence behind this orchestrated attack on Hannah-Jones. Rumors continue to swirl that NC’s autocratic political boss Phil Berger was the ultimate force driving the campaign. After all, Berger and his (all-white) caucus have sought to infect and obliterate every formerly progressive space in the state they dominate. As Gene Nichol, whom Berger has tried to drive out of UNC, put it, “all hail the new totalitarians.” North Carolina is now officially a hostile state for any independent scholar.

Read more: https://www.politicsnc.com/the-vast-right-wing-conspiracy-just-devastated-unc-chapel-hill/