Jonathan Turley is just asking questions

Should a history department continue to employ a Holocaust denier? Let me sharpen that up a bit: Should a history department continue to employ a Holocaust denier whose academic speciality is the Holocaust?

Because that’s essentially what George Washington Law School is doing right now:

To pursue this analogy further, Turley is the kind of mendacious troll who would just ask questions about whether the gas chambers and the death camps really existed, while of course acknowledging that many Jews — maybe even hundreds of thousands! — died because of “harsh conditions” in the concentration camps etc. etc. so you’re actually libeling him by calling him a Holocaust denier etc. etc. (BTW before anybody gets to that I don’t know or care whether Turley himself is Jewish, or whether he lost family in the Holcaust etc. etc. because the analogy is valid in any case m’kay snowflakes?).

Jonathan Turley testified as a defense witness in the Donald Trump impeachment proceeding 37 years ten months ago. He is now going on national TV telling lies to promote a paranoid conspiracy theory believed by tens of millions of Americans: that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump by massive amounts of voter fraud. (Note that a minimum of nearly 80,000 ballots in three states would have to have been intentionally mis-recorded in Biden’s favor for this to be the case, while all available evidence indicates that the actual number of illegal votes for Biden was zero.)

Alan Dershowitz is playing this same game, but Dershowitz doesn’t hold an active teaching position any more, so he’s more of the David Irving rather than the Jonathan Turley of this analogy.

What to do about this kind of thing is a difficult practical question. If Turley were a contract faculty member it would be appropriate to fire him immediately for promoting paranoid conspiracy theories directly related to his area of purported professional competence, as the University of Miami’s law school apparently just did with this nut. (In Ravicher’s defense he appears to be frankly delusional rather than, as in Turley’s case, spreading conscious lies that are undermining the American legal and political systems in the service of the higher cause of promoting Jonathan Turley’s career).

It’s s tricky question, but it’s a real one, and Turley should at a minimum be excoriated and shunned by anyone in legal academia in possession of a brain and a conscience.

. . . Beer Hunter adds this fascinating detail to this incredibly sordid little story:

I don’t know if I have posted this, but that county in MI, Antrim County, is home to MI alt-right superstars Trucker Randy Bishop, Triston Cole, and a handful of those lunatics who tried to kidnap Whitmer. The county is run top to bottom by the worst “conservatives”. Any error was caused by typical RW nutjob incompetence. I feel that fact is not adequately disclosed in most mentions of this story.