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Members of the radical left faculty at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College have organized a petition against an event featuring Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author and PragerU founder Dennis Prager, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
The event is scheduled to be hosted on February 8 at the ASU Gammage Auditorium and will feature a panel discussion surrounding “solutions to the human pursuit of health, wealth, and happiness.”
Tickets for this event are available online!
Students will receive free admission at the box office upon presenting their high school, college, trade school, or community college student ID.
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The mere existence of these speakers on ASU’s campus has already sparked outrage among Marxist faculty members and students at the college.
As reported by ASU’s student-run propaganda rag, Arizona State Press,
The T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at Barrett, The Honors College is hosting an event titled “Health, Wealth and Happiness” on Feb. 8 at ASU Gammage headlined by controversial political figures Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk and embattled personal financial guru Robert Kiyosaki.
The Barrett-sponsored event sparked debate online, in the classroom and around campus when information was posted to Twitter on Jan. 26 about the ethics of opinion inclusivity and has raised questions among faculty about Barrett’s commitment to upholding its values.
In response, Barrett faculty organized a petition to disassociate the event from the honors college. The petition has been signed by 37 out of 47 Barrett faculty members as of Feb. 2.
ASU Barrett faculty affiliate Irina Levin told the paper, “I do not think that the decision to host these speakers at ASU’s premier venue is in congruence with Barrett’s principles as an institution.”
The Gateway Pundit exclusively obtained a copy of the “letter from Barrett faculty concerning the TW Lewis Center event ‘Health, Wealth, and Happiness’” signed by rogue faculty at ASU Barrett, addressed to Barrett Dean Tara Williams, and shared with students. In the letter, scheduled speakers are labeled “white nationalist provocateurs,” and their viewpoints are labeled “bigoted and anti-democratic,” “anti-intellectual,” and “The Big Lie.”
The letter cites George Soros-connected Media Matters and other left-wing sources for their slanderous attacks on the conservative speakers.
Professor April Miller, who appears to be spearheading the cancelation of these incredible speakers, sent the following letter to students, expressing her opposition and accusing the speakers of “spreading: hateful rhetoric that is harmful to many marginalized communities; anti-public education platforms; and health/medical disinformation.”
Miller also used her public Twitter account to call the event “an outrageous embarrassment” and accuse ASU of selling its soul for “money over ethics, donors before students.”
Other signatories of the petition, including Faculty Chair and Honors Faculty Fellow Jennifer Brian and Honors Faculty Fellow Alex Young, have used their Twitter platform to push disinformation and denounce the event. They are likely helping to lead this protest against free speech on campus.
The full letter states,
Letter from Barrett faculty concerning the TW Lewis Center event “Health, Wealth, and Happiness”
February 1, 2023
Dear Dean Williams,
We, the undersigned Barrett faculty, write to condemn the “Health, Wealth, and Happiness” event the TW Lewis Center for Personal Development is scheduled to host on February 8th, 2023, and to express a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the Lewis Center. We do not take this position lightly, as all of us believe Barrett should be a place where our students encounter a broad diversity of voices and viewpoints. This event marks the culmination of a long history of choices made by the leadership of the Lewis Center, the sum of which demonstrate a vision for the center that runs contrary to the core values of the Barrett community.
While we applaud and support the work our faculty colleagues have performed in developing the Lewis Center’s academic curriculum (often in spite of the Lewis Center leadership’s efforts to curtail their academic freedom), our concerns about the intellectual value of Lewis Center’s public programming are long standing. We have objected to speakers brought to campus to promote topics ranging from demonstrably fraudulent “speed reading” methods to anti-scientific claims about affective medicine that do not reflect the commitment to critical thinking central to Barrett’s education mission. Our concerns with the appearance of Robert Kiyosaki, whose key claims in his bestselling book have been widely debunked and whose public speaking engagements on wealth generation have been exposed as sales schemes, at the 2/8 event are in this vein.
Our objections to two of the scheduled speakers at the “Health, Wealth and Happiness” event, however, exceed those previous worries by an order of magnitude. Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk are purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, as well as the institutions of our democracy, including our public institutions of higher education. By platforming and legitimating their extreme anti-intellectual and anti-democratic views, Barrett will not be furthering the cause of democratic exchange at ASU, but undermining it in ways that could further marginalize the most vulnerable members of our community.
While their national media profiles are familiar to most, beneath our signatures we have compiled some of Prager and Kirk’s most recent bigoted and anti-democratic public positions. Rather than rehearse those positions at length, we would like to pose several questions regarding the choice to host these speakers:
- How are Barrett faculty meant to impress upon our students the value of an honors education when Barrett is promoting an event by the authors of If You Want to Be Rich and Happy, Don’t Go To School and The College Scam, who are advertising this event, ostensibly focused on personal development, as a chance for them to further their anti-intellectual agenda?
- What kind of impression does it girove our BIPOC students and potential students to see that during Black History Month Barrett is hosting two white nationalist provocateurs who have decried the social prohibition on using the n-word and called for the cancellation of Black History Month?
- How are Barrett faculty to provide a welcoming community for our LGBTQ students when we are hosting speakers who regularly employ anti-trans slurs on air and have suggested that gay people are incapable of thinking “as a person”?
- How can Barrett claim to prepare students for democratic citizenship when we are inviting speakers who regularly attack our democracy, promoting “the big lie” about the 2020 election, and, in the case of Kirk, pleading the fifth when questioned by congress about his role organizing the January Sixth Insurrection?
We hope to hear from you soon regarding this urgently important matter. Our collective efforts to promote Barrett as a home for inclusive excellence demand that we distance ourselves from the hate that these provocateurs hope to legitimate by attaching themselves to Barrett’s name.
Sincerely,
Christiane Fontinha de Alcantara
Don Fette
Joseph O’Neil
Resources and Links
On racial justice:
- ● “If you see the entire video [George Flloyd] is sort of hysterical from the beginning of his encounter with the police who were completely decent with him. He says he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe before they touch him.”
- ● “BLM is a despicable, fascist group…It’s the most racist organization in the country outside of the Ku Klux Klan.”
- ● “The left has made it impossible to say the N-word any longer. That’s disgusting, it’s a farce. It’s the only word that you can’t say in the English language.”
On the LGBTQ Community:
- ● YouTube removed anti-trans PragerU videos for violating hate speech policies
- ● “We have standards in the U.S. military. You shouldn’t be serving there as a transgender person”
On women’s rights:
On democracy:
- ● “January 6 is a smokescreen like the Nazis used the Reichstag fire. That’s all it is.”
- ● “It’s a republic if you can keep it. I’m not sure that we can keep it. And yes, so there might be secession. It’s very sad if it would happen but, personally, I would live in a state governed by Judeo-Christian values versus one governed by left-wing values. And in a hundred years, let’s see who prospers.”
- ● “There is no doubt in my mind there was cheating [in the 2020 election]. I have no proof”
On public health:
- ● “The more young people that get COVID the better it is for them and society”
- ● “Your doctor knows nothing about COVID…If your doctor thinks ivermectin is dangerous, change your doctor”
- ● Heterosexual AIDS Is An “Entirely Manufactured” Myth
On racial justice:
- ● “I don’t believe Black History Month is worth the kind of full month that it is, at all”
- ● “[T]here is a deliberate and venomous anti-white campaign in our country”
- ● “British colonialism was the most benign global empire ever.”
On the LGBTQ Community:
- ● “[T]hey want a drag queen to get attacked and they want to make a huge amount of hay of it and they want to create summer 2020 again off of a drag queen or a trans person or something like this.”
- ● “The transgender movement is an introductory phase to get you to strip yourself of your humanity to mesh with machines”
On women’s rights:
On democracy:
- ● “I think that there needs to be a new [2022] election [in Arizona].”
- ● “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction.”
- ● Charlie Kirk Pleads the 5th When Asked His Age by January 6th Committee
On public health:
On higher education in America:
It appears that more names were recently added to the petition, as reported by ASU’s State Press.
Leftist faculty and Students also flocked to attack @barretthonors’ tweet about this event.
This goes against ASU’s claims of being “an exemplar when it comes to our commitment to free speech.”
ASU President Michael Crow released a statement in November 2019, communicating, “we can share thoughts and ideas without repressing the thoughts and ideas of others. We can speak and behave in ways that serve to inform and enlighten without threatening or intimidating others. We can and should learn from perspectives different from our own.” He continued, “ASU is committed to free, robust and uninhibited sharing of ideas among all members of the university community and we strive to provide an environment that fosters the fullest degree of intellectual freedom and free expression.”
“I am proud that ASU has been noted as an exemplar when it comes to our commitment to free speech,” Crow finished.
No known statements have been made in support of free speech and intellectual freedom in light of this petition. Where is Michael Crow?
This is a developing story.
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