Twitter has suspended Georgetown University associate professor C. Christine Fair after she posted a
violent diatribe targeting white GOP senators at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing last Thursday.
The university also spoke out and issued a statement on her conduct.
What’s the latest?
If you attempt to visit
Fair’s Twitter page at the time of this writing, no tweets are visible and you are redirected to an “account suspended” landing page.
Fair’s Twitter page — prior to the suspension — described her as a “[s]cholar of South Asian pol-mil affairs, inter-sectional feminist, pitbull apostle, scotch devotee, nontheist, [and] resister.”
Twitter presumably suspended Fair’s account after outcry over her inflammatory tweets about GOP senators deserving “miserable deaths” for their roles in the Kavanaugh hearing.
Georgetown University issued a
statement on Fair’s tweets on Monday.
A spokesperson for the university said, “The views of faculty members expressed in their private capacities are their own and not the views of the University.”
“Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable,” the statement continued. “While faculty members may exercise freedom of speech, we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”
What did she say, anyway?
On Saturday, Fair wrote, “Look at thus [sic] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps.”
She concluded the graphic tweet with “Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
According to a Sunday post by
Campus Reform, Fair responded to a female reporter’s request for comment in a lengthy post on her blog, “Tenacious Hellp***y.”
In her response, Fair wrote, “There is a war going on against women and you, and your despicable herd of so-called journalists seeking to protect male privilege and shame women for our victimization or our rage are complicit in this war.”
Fair explained that she was not calling for violence against any senators and was “merely speaking to what my spirituality says these vile souls deserve.”
A little bit of her history
In January 2017, Fair was involved in a
Twitter dispute with
Asra Q. Nomani. In response to Nomani's tweet that as a Muslim, she voted for President Trump, Fair tweeted that she had "written [Nomani] off as a human being" and that Nomani had "pimped herself out to all media outlets." Nomani responded by filing a complaint with Georgetown University, Fair's employer, alleging discrimination and harassment.
[20]
In May 2017, Fair began an altercation with white nationalist
Richard B. Spencer at a gym in
Alexandria, Virginia. While the two were working out, Fair approached Spencer and accused him of being a
Nazi, along with a number of other accusations, leading a third gym patron to intervene on behalf of him. This incident resulted in Spencer's membership being terminated by the manager of the gym.
[21]
In January 2018, Fair was involved in an incident at
Frankfurt Airport. When her bag was flagged for possibly containing explosives, it was searched and
German Federal Police instructed Fair that she would have to dispose of a liquid
deodorant or transfer it to her checked bag. German police stated that Fair was uncooperative, as she accused them of sexism and of being Nazis and thugs, and directed expletives at them. Fair was charged with slander under Germany's
defamation law. She subsequently published an article on
HuffPost partially rejecting the police account of the incident.
[22]
In the midst of the
Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings in September 2018, Fair, referring to
Republican members of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, tweeted that they were "entitled white men justifying a serial rapists' arrogated entitlement" and that they "deserve miserable deaths while
feminists laugh as they take their last gasps." She made additional comments expressing support for post-mortem
castration and corpse desecration.
[23] At least one student expressed the fear that Fair's comments would cause students, who hold opposing views, to feel threatened. Georgetown University responded by saying that her expressions did not violate the university's policies.
[24]
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