Commentary: “Burn the College’s Buildings to the Ground”

April 13, 2023 1 min read

Commentary: “Burn the College’s Buildings to the Ground”

Aaron Hillegass attended New College of Florida as an undergraduate, had a successful career as a software engineer, and returned to the school this January to teach in its new data science program. But there was one problem for him: Florida governor Ron DeSantis. On Saturday, he resigned, releasing a dramatic public statement that compared DeSantis with the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

These stunts are designed to drive left-wing media narratives (“Professor Resigns in Protest of DeSantis’s Fascism”) and to boost the profiles of their attention-seeking authors. The playbook is well-worn, and yet Hillegass, a data scientist, made a simple mistake. In his rhetoric about “burn[ing] the college’s buildings to the ground,” he revealed the ugly truth about modern “anti-fascism”: it believes that violence against the right targets is perfectly legitimate.


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