Chop-chop Video

You may remember a previous blog post a few years back where I interviewed my friend Trung who was, at the time, enrolled in the master's program at University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC). Trung is also a blogger who shares my contempt for the tea party. Well, apparently the ignorant teabaggers have contempt -- actually, violent hatred -- towards Trung's alma mater.

Trung explains the ongoing situation in his blog. It involves Andrew Breitbart (need I say more?) and secretly (actually, not so secretly) video taped lectures of UMKC econ professors. Of course, Breitbart and his minions are up to old tricks. They gave the splice job to these videos in the same way they distorted and minced Shirley Sherrod's words last July.

Breitbart and his BigGovernment web site are using the obviously edited videos to accuse two labor-studies professors of indoctrinating innocent, malleable minds to the violent ways of union thugs. The complete unadulterated videos, however, reveal the exact opposite. One professor tells students to resist violence because it "gives credence" to the argument that "these people need to be controlled."

But facts be damned. In a twist that's not really a twist because it's totally predictable, the teabaggers are actually the violent thugs. Incited by the erroneous videos, they started with phoning in threats to the university but quickly escalated the situation by trespassing on the UMSL (University of Missouri-St. Louis) campus and threatening students with violence:

In order to distract people from the fact that they were busted lying, St. Louis tea party provocateur Adam Sharp, who's blogged on Breitbart's sites before, apparently trespassed on the UMSL campus on Saturday to harass students and instructor Don Giljum. Sharp attempted to film students in their classroom, pestered them as they walked out of class with questions like "do you condone violence," and was arrested and charged with trespassing. Don Giljum was also taken to the police station because there was an altercation, and as students waited outside of the police station, another tea partier approached them and began taunting them and daring them to "take a swing" at him. This is after a week where the tea party violated students' privacy by putting videos on YouTube showing comments made for the purpose of classroom discussion.

Breitbart, in an April 18 interview with Sean Hannity, said he planned to "go after" educators. And there you have it. We've seen ethnic intolerance, religious intolerance, and every other shade of bigotry from these nuts, but now... academic intolerance.

Freedom of inquiry by students and faculty is the foundation of education and our university system. It's all too fitting that the teabaggers go after this.