FIRE fascists save campus kooks' Howard Roark devotional cult
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” — John Rogers
Any wonder why Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) staffers consistently conflate hate speech with free speech? Note the glaring lack of diversity—may be a melanin deficiency issue, no?
Write about education and other public policy issues long enough and you'll end up on everyone's press release (PR) list. To be sure I receive PR from right-of-center organizations like Center for American Progress (CAP) and National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), all the way to fringe-right outfits like the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Unlike "reporters" employed by the corporate media, I occasionally call the contact persons on the PR and ask fairly innocuous questions like "is the study you mention in your PR actually juried research, or is this just a policy paper?" The response is inevitably the latter, and I've documented such encounters with CAP and NCTQ in previous Schools Matter installments. Too bad "journalists" from organs like the Broad Foundation Newslett… uh, I mean the Los Angeles Times don't question these groups' PR before publishing their misinformation uncritically to the public.
One of the more lamentable groups sending me PR is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Somewhere on the political scale between Randian libertarians and unapologetic fascists, FIRE champions the "rights" of bigots, racists, nativists, misogynists, and other assorted reactionaries to spew various forms of hate speech unabated on college campuses across the nation. Their press releases typically celebrate victories over policies that would prevent exercising of oppressions over those whose educational experience is stifled by said oppressions. FIRE sends press releases celebrating calls to eliminate co-ed mandates, gushing defenses of rape culture, and apologetics for arch-reactionaries Karl Rove and war criminalCondoleezza Rice.
Late August FIRE sent me a PR that simultaneously caused me to retch and laugh — they were able to rescue the Ayn Rand Cult, I mean Club, at The University of California, Davis (UC Davis). The near vomiting experience is natural for any educated person having to hear Rand's name or of her associated "works." The laughing reaction came from the notion that any college Schools Matter: FIRE fascists save campus kooks' Howard Roark devotional cult: