Free Speech

This History Teacher's Rant About Needing To Bring Back Racial Terror Is Probably Going To Be The Big New Free Speech Thing

For people complaining about censorship, White Christian Nationalists can't seem to shut up.

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Constitution constitutional law We the PeopleCollege is known for many things. A chance to break away from the nest, being one of the last few third spaces, and being an opportunity to pursue one’s education. It has recently been slandered by many a talking head as a liberal thought conversion camp — the folks at PragerU have made a whole career off of it. If you took them seriously, you’d think that colleges are uniform thought centers dedicated to Teen Vogue and CRT. But fear not, there is in fact thought diversity on campus and in the teaching staff. How else could you explain this?

A Wallace State Community College history instructor has been placed on administrative leave after posts and messages she created on social media in response to the upcoming Cullman Comes Out event were made public. Screenshots of Leigh Ann Courington’s posts have been shared widely on social media channels.

A post attributed to Courington said: “The devil is attacking our beautiful town of Cullman now apparently…and the police chief is in on it? I heard he was a crazy-ass liberal but this??? We need a rally by the you-know-what to put an end to this foolishness. Of course, it may be as well-attended as the Juneteenth event the white liberal weirdos tried to do a few years ago in Hanceville.”

Just to be clear, the implied “You-Know-What” this history teacher is invoking is the Ku Klux Klan. You know, the White Christian Nationalists that bombed Black churches. For those who don’t know, Sundown towns were places where segregation was so brutally enforced that Black people couldn’t safely walk around at night. She also implies that the Nazis did something right by being nationalist, “opposing sexual deviancy,” and going full Ethnostate.

Racists do a racism — that’s nothing new. Courington isn’t the only racial instigator normalizing alt-right talking points to the general public; Amy Wax and Ilya Shapiro are testaments to that. What is interesting is that she said this while teaching at a public institution, and her firing may actually be a free speech issue. Granted, there’s the purely practical matter of how comfortable Black, Queer, and or Jewish students would feel taking a class with a professor who openly stated a parade was worth summoning domestic terrorists for. I mean… just take a look at the notes someone allegedly took from one of her classes.

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As of now, Prof. Reich was merely put on administrative leave, but even this is unlikely to prevent the “Academic Freedom Brigade” from rushing to protect her from “cancel culture.” And by that, I mean the people fighting for the right to slander minority groups in the name of liberty, or some shit. No, really, why are so many invocations of academic freedom done just to be able to use slurs carte blanche? Are they still using that tired tongue-in-cheek defense? A few of them, like Courington here, are openly just leaning into claiming white superiority, but a couple other folks are more coy. Maybe they’re just waiting on tenure first.

WSCC Instructor Placed On Leave Following Inflammatory Messages [Cullman Tribune]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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