A Fateful and Portentuous Meeting
The letter I wrote and the letter I sent were very different beasts. I knew I had to nail my message in 600 words. Yet, I had made points in the 1200-word version that needed to be read as well, but not necessarily by all the people of Tulsa. After a second I realized that I actually had two audiences to write to: the moderate conservative readers of the Tulsa World who longed for the return of Dubya, if not Barry Goldwater, and the administration of Tulsa Community College. So I wrote the short version and the longer version and sent them both to their respective audiences–like a goddamn fool. In both letters, I more or less raised the question of whether TCC should be forced to platform hatred and stochastic terrorism that speak against the institution’s values and mission statement. But in the letter to the TCC administration, I pointed out that even if TCC is forced to platform hatred, they should prioritize protecting our marginalized students and mitigating the threat on campus posed by a potential upswing in violence against them.
TCC’s response to the Milo Yiannopoulos mess ended up being pretty incredible. The college president ended up addressing, in a Tulsa World Op-Ed, the concerns I raised in my email, so that the discussion could be out in the open and take place in the community, where it belonged. TCC did, in fact, book Milo and send him a contract, as they were obliged to do in the time frame given. But they had also reasoned, with perfect legal standing, that while they were constitutionally obligated to host Milo Yiannopolous, they didn’t have to pay all of the overtime and the extra security and logistics expenses incurred to keep EVERYONE safe before, during, and immediately after the event. Those expenses were enormous. After they were tacked onto the costs of the event, it became prohibitively expensive. Faced with this economic reality, the event promoter–fascist, gun-lover, and failed 2018 Oklahoma Gubernatorial candidate Christopher Barnett–knew he had to cancel. With the security costs, it had just become impossible for him to continue.
The speaking engagement fell apart spectacularly. Yiannopolous eventually took to his Instagram to explain how he’d been screwed over by the promoter, Barnett–who had failed to make payment in the specified time. Almost as if the threat had never existed, the entire situation evanesced. Just like that, the danger to TCC and its students was averted. TCC deserves a lot of credit, actually; they did a really amazing job of honoring their legal obligations to the extent of their financial ones. In retrospect, they also did an incredible job trying to protect me, but everything they did just wasn’t enough.
Chris Barnett was a very dangerous and ruthless individual. He had BIG family money and dozens of malicious nuisance lawsuits–against innocent people who had “crossed” him–going all over town. He was even suing the University of Tulsa over a free speech issue (that in my opinion, actually had legs). But then he was also suing Tulsa Community College for…borrowing props from the TU theater department (RIP) and conspiring to destroy Barnett’s theater major husband in the process, somehow, for some reason. He couldn’t force TU to do anything because it is a private school. TCC is a public school, however, and this is why Barnett had chosen to force Tulsa Community College to platform his Milo Yiannopolous hate speech event.
Because Barnett is as putrid and foul of a troll as has ever lived, he had a favorite tactic to use against the professors he targeted: he would send an Oklahoma State Open Records request for all digital and phone communications records pertaining to a professor he especially hated. Within days of my sending the letter to the Tulsa World, Barnett filed an Open Records request with the state to secure all of my digital communications and my cell phone and text records pertaining to my adjunct gig at TCC. None of that was legally in his purview to do, as it turns out, but it did not matter. The point is that in these documents, Barnett accused me of trafficking in particularly gruesome and illicit contraband out of my TCC office and using my TCC computer. Every part of that is pure nonsense, but because he filed an official form with the state and I am unable to combat it, the accusations are basically like a note on my permanent state employment record. If I try to work again as a public school teacher in Oklahoma–or for any state, federal, and municipal agency for that matter–that putrid open records request will turn up in my OSBI background report and likely keep me from being employed. This is exactly as bad as it sounds; THAT was Barnett’s end biggest goal…finding more dirt to bury me with would have just been gravy.
I was not the only TCC employee to weigh in on that fiasco in the editorial pages of the Tulsa World. While I did include my name and doctoral credentials in that letter, I chose not to disclose the fact that I taught for TCC. Somehow, though, I was the only one of us that Christopher Barnett came after like he did. There was a reason for this: some alert local fascist shared my editorial on Milo Yiannopolous’ Facebook page, and then another then local fascist doxed my social media, Google Voice number, my class times and places, and at which campus I was teaching. From that, Christopher Barnett was able to get the information that helped him come after me. Now, it would have been just as easy to find that information on the professors who had disclosed their connection to TCC but I’m the only one he really went after. I suspect that of all the letters that were sent to the editor regarding that topic, mine is the one that most influenced his funders. They might have read it and then either refused to give him more money or possibly pulled their funding altogether. THAT is the only thing I can think of that would make me, of all people, worth this much of his precious and evil time.
Of course, I had no idea any of this was even going on. I sent the letters and forgot about it. Until I got a very strange email from Dr. K, Liberal Arts and Communications Division Chair right before class one day. I opened it and read it and then felt incredibly concerned and disturbed. Dr. K was inviting me to a meeting at the Metro campus to discuss some pressing matters. She added that I wasn’t in any trouble, it was just that they really wanted to speak with me. That part seemed especially shady and suspicious; I stewed on it all during class. The fact that we happened to be discussing how Richard Lloyd Jones’ Tulsa Tribune stoked the fires of race hatred with oceans of yellow journalism that ignited the massacre only made things harder. By the time class was over, I felt pretty sure that I would be getting an institutional smackdown of some sort. The irony of that was almost overwhelming. In all likelihood, I would spend tomorrow afternoon having my free speech squelched because I questioned the legal and moral basis of TCC being forced to platform the “free (stochastic terror) speech” of a dangerous hate-monger. Nobody knows better than I the danger of going loud, public, and embarrassing about the wrong thing and the wrong people–the response I expected from TCC admin absolutely made sense politically even if it felt morally bankrupt.
My thoughts had so engrossed me that I remained in the room after class was over for the night. The motion-sensor light had turned off, and I was so crouched so far down at my classroom computer that nobody looking in would have noticed me. I was staring at that email, trying to decide how to answer it. As I typed my response, I heard something strange. I heard what sounded like my name being spoken by someone in the hall. Then I heard another voice say something. At first I thought, this must be one of my students, and rose to go see about them. Then, an angry anarchist sort of thought occurred to me: my workday was OVER and if it was really students, they would email me and I would help them with it tomorrow. I needed to answer this email now, and that thought sat me back down. I answered simply that we could meet the next afternoon at 4 pm and left my number so that she could call the next day to confirm. Then, I hit “send.”
As I was leaving the classroom, I felt like I should check to see if they really had been my students. The guard was friendly, and he said that two young men he did not recognize had been looking for my office. He saw that the light in my classroom was off and thought that I had gone for the night, so then told them I wasn’t there. I’ve had students stop by after class on many occasions–even night classes. This wasn’t really all that unusual after all, so with a sigh of relief, I made my way out of the building. As I opened the door leading to the parking lot, another thought struck me: the guard had called them “young men,” and not “students.” Usually, support professionals at the TCC campuses talk about “students,” not “young men” that they “didn’t recognize.” The more I thought about it, the more the thought unsettled me. I didn’t sleep much that night.
