Cancelled, Condemned, Criminalized, Cracked — the four “c’s” of our latest and some of us with arrested development! Scarlet Letters for Almost Anything tied to revolutionary anti-authoritarianism !
Apr 30, 2026
Note: Just out in the Lincoln County Leader, AKA Newport News Times. Read the article with enhanced images below.
Second note: I have been cancelled here, from teaching at the college (community) and from substituting at the K12 District.
My crimes? I was teaching years ago, subbing for high schoolers (I wrote about that here at DV). The sick English teacher was on the phone, and he was fine with me teaching Animal Farm and Of Mice and Men, since that IS my specialty — college-level writing and literature classes.
Subs with some flair, me, get asked, “What did you do before you came here?” So, social services case manager for adults with developmental disabilities worked with houseless veterans; worked with houseless ex-convicts, worked with foster youth, worked with drug and substance abuse clients; worked with clients with felonies and those with sexual offences on their rap sheet.
The experiment was to see how many people judged the character in Of Mice and Men:
In John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the main character killed at the end of the novella is Lennie Small. George Milton shoots Lennie in the back of the head to spare him from a brutal lynching by an angry mob led by Curley, after Lennie accidentally kills Curley’s wife.
- Lennie Small: Shot by George in the final scene to protect him from a worse fate.
- Curley’s Wife: Accidentally killed by Lennie, who breaks her neck while trying to silence her.
- Candy’s Dog: Shot by Carlson earlier in the book, foreshadowing Lennie’s death.
- A Puppy: Accidentally killed by Lennie before the death of Curley’s wife.
I talked about how some people in their own county, their own town, have confronted me with some of my clients, whispering in my ear that “give me your guy there, and I’ll take him crabbing. I’ll bring a few cinder blocks. And, once he has his fun, I’ll just tie him up and throw him overboard. Two for one: He’s out of his fucking miserable life, with that Down Syndrome, and, two, we get to feed the crabs.”
Now, that triggered some student who kept going out of the class and coming back in: a high school senior, a young woman, with a friend, and alas, guess what? She lied to her mother, who is on the school board, making calls in the main office, telling her that I was saying that all the people in Waldport want kiddos killed, those who have autism or Down syndrome.
Ahh, then the next period, the same kiddos, and we were talking about Animal Farm. We talked about why addiction is a big thing in small towns, and some relayed deaths they knew about in their circles. I heard one say, “We’d never get into drugs.”
I did a thought experiment: “Okay, so, statistically, not literally, at least 6 out of you 20 will struggle with addiction. Maybe even more will struggle with depression. And, alas, some in that group might become homeless.”
Alas, the half-brain empty set of girls went out again, and the next thing, halfway through 3rd period, the bulldog of a vice principal opened the door, and asked me to leave: “Mister Haeder, can you collect your bag and come with me?”
No recourse, no defending my teaching to anyone, no mitigation with the misinformed and certainly pathological kiddos who lied about my teaching. I was banned from the high school, then the elementary school, and then, bam, from all 11 schools in Lincoln County.
Imagine that, just like that, end of $150 a day, and alas, the fucking school system is hurting for subs, bus drivers, custodial, food preppers, and, drumroll, full-time teachers.
Okay, then, we’ll see how this plays this week:
McCarthyite Mischievousness even in Podunk Towns
“Tenured Jewish Faculty Axed for Supporting Palestinian Causes.”
“Tenured US professor fired over pro-Palestinian protests.”
“Berkeley Suspends Lecturer for Pro-Palestinian Comments.”
“University of Washington professor fired from director job after Iran war criticism.”
Even in the Jewish State: “Israeli teachers are losing their jobs for criticizing the war.”
From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall be Free: Maura Finkelstein from Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College may have become the first institution since Oct. 7, 2023, to oust a tenured faculty member for such statements.
Collective memory in the United States of Amnesia (Gore Vidal’s tag) is powerful, and for most Lincoln County residents, they forget that in the months after the onset of Israel’s genocidal campaign, hundreds of thousands of people mobilized in the streets, at their workplaces, and on campuses across the country in support of Palestinian liberation and to demand a permanent ceasefire and an end to US support for Israel.
This scared the hell out of the Zionists and the Jewish State of Israel supporters in both US parties. There was a drastic shift in the popular narrative on Palestinian rights and freedom, as people increasingly affirmed the right of Palestinians and their allies to oppose Zionist settler colonialism.
There has been historically repeated pushback to this upsurge of mobilization: state and institutional actors launched an unprecedented McCarthyite campaign of anti-Palestinian repression targeting the solidarity movement in the US in an attempt to criminalize dissent and censor pro-Palestine speech and advocacy.
I could bet a few thousand dollars that at the Newport OCCC campus, if students and faculty launched a protest on one of the school’s strips of lawn, one where they had posters of Netanyahu, Trump and Biden burning in effigy and hanged by the neck, we would see the County Sheriff called out.
It is racism and dehumanization that have made possible Israel’s killing of at least 85,000 Palestinians and counting; the displacement and starvation of nearly the whole population of over 2 million people in Gaza; and the complete devastation of its infrastructure. It has also enabled the US’s continuing complicity in these crimes and the 78 years of oppression that preceded them.
There have been dozens of Israel advocacy groups—including the racist Anti-Defamation League (ADL)— resorting to smear tactics in an attempt to discredit pro-Palestine advocacy. I have been accused of supporting terrorism through my advocacy of Palestinian self-determination and my many references to resistance to Israel’s 78-year colonization and occupation of Palestine.
Swiftly, on October 11, the ADL and other Israel advocacy groups wrote to universities, baselessly claiming that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters at their universities may be engaging in “material support for terrorism,” and calling on them to investigate and withdraw recognition and funding for SJP, an action that would violate students’ constitutional rights
Despite the swift debunking of this threat by civil rights and liberties groups, in the months that followed, multiple universities gave in to these demands and sought to suspend or block recognition of SJP and other pro-Palestine clubs on their campuses.
There’s an old saying I have always used in my college classes as a teacher (1983 to 2023): “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it” by Upton Sinclair (The Jungle).
I was an adjunct faculty organizer on several campuses, finally with SEIU, the big union which hired me on in Seattle to organize part-time faculty. Time and time again, even at Georgetown and George Washington universities where I also organized, faculty were always in support of a part-time union, but also afraid of retribution by the administration and admonishments by the full-time faculty.
We are called precarious faculty, and we are now the new majority, many of whom make less than $20,000 teaching college classes. Precarity has infected the land since my early days at the University of Texas in 1983. Exponentially, most all jobs are now on the chopping block, and it’s as if every aspect of American life has turned into a constant emotional, economic and existential T-bone crash to the gut.
I was at the Flamy Grant concert in Yachats, and several people I know mentioned the last commentary I wrote for this newspaper – “Poetry in a Time of Genocide.” They thanked me, and one woman was shocked that I would be cancelled from teaching community ed classes. She asked why, then said, “Was it antisemitism?”
[A MAGA Preacher Condemned a Drag Queen. Then Her Album Topped the Christian Charts
Flamy Grant’s “Good Day,” and her LP Bible Belt Baby, briefly hit Number One on Apple Music after she was called out by Sean Feucht]
The irony at the concert, with opener Heather Mae, was that Heather got arrested in the Tennessee state capitol for “singing.” She was there with others protesting HB754, a bill forcing medical providers to report private information about transgender patients to the state — creating a publicly accessible database and putting lives at risk.
Six state troopers roughed her up, and she’s now got a court case for “singing in the rotunda of the people’s capitol in Tennessee.”
The term “McCarthyism” is used today as a noun for political witch hunts or unfounded accusations. For my generation, people often know the “ism” without necessarily studying the specific senator from Wisconsin.
Gen Z? They now have other causes – ICE out of our Town, From the River to the Sea, and, of course, in general, advocating for climate change action, racial equity, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender equality.
Leave it to the older generation to label Gen Z as “the intolerant ones.” What a bloody smear is that. Well, maybe not: Not tolerating racism, gender discrimination, rampant pollution and climate change capitalism, and being for the rights of all humanity to be free of war, of sanctions, and of economic hijacking?
Bring it on, Z.
“Gen Z is not wrong to feel uneasy about the future they are inheriting. In many ways, they are simply acknowledging a reality that the rest of us would prefer not to confront.”
Paul Haeder, Author 