Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Gettr, Truth Social, Twitter

The University of Connecticut held a public forum to discuss the 2024 presidential election under the banner of "social and critical inquiry" earlier this week.

The October 8th session, “Historic Firsts: The 2024 Presidential Election”, was centered around the "historic significance" of this year’s election. 

Three UConn professors were featured on the panel, which was moderated by Catherine Shen, the current host of Connecticut Public Radio’s podcast “Where We Live”:

• Evelyn M. Simien, a Professor of Political Science who studies African-American politics and is author of several books, including Black Feminist Voices in Politics, Gender and Lynching: the Politics of Memory and Historic Firsts: How Symbolic Empowerment Changes U.S. Politics.
• Christopher Vials, an Associate Professor of English whose work thus far has focused on class, race, and social movements in the 20^th century United States; he has spoken widely on the topics of domestic extremism and political violence of the far right and American fascism.
• Manisha Sinha, an American History Professor whose research interests lie specifically in the transnational histories of slavery, abolition, and feminism and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction; she has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Huffington Post and appeared on mainstream media news outlets.

During the 90-minute discussion, the panelists addressed questions like: What is the significance of the Nov. 5, 2024 election in US history and politics? and What should voters pay attention to as they vote?

Ms. Simien kicked off the conversation by addressing what she thinks makes this an historic election: identity politics. Yep, the election is all about Kamala's "identity at the intersection of race and gender" as the first South Asian woman "to assume" the presidential nomination and "to assume" the US presidency.

Simien celebrated another historic part of the election: how Joe Biden "made a decision to put country first and sort of career second in the sense that he decided not to run for reelection."

That's a really interesting way of framing the coup that enabled Kamala to "assume" the spot as the Democratic candidate for president.

Mr. Vials was up next.

His TDS was immediately apparent when he alleged the election is historic because Trump is "formatted for authoritarianism" and he "doesn't believe in the rule of law."

Vials went on to push democrat talking points about Project 2025, which Trump has repeatedly said is not his plan, and claimed Trump will replace "Deep State" employees with loyalists who "will not abide by legal norms" as they implement Trump's agenda.

Ms. Sinha chimed in and celebrated Biden for his "extraordinary" decision to not only "sacrifice his own political ambition" but to endorse Kamala.

She then recalled an article she wrote for CNN in which she compared Trump to Andrew Johnson, suggested Trump was a white supremacist and cited the "very fine people" hoax that has been handily disproven as her evidence. It's far from the only Trump-hating article she has penned. Heck, Sinha even signed an amicus brief to disqualify Trump from the ballot, that's how much she hates Trump.

As a reminder, Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History for UConn.

Vials then discussed what he referred to as “facist-esque politics” and said he didn't think fascism was likely to become "mainstream again" but changed his mind two years later.  

“There are debates, very smart debates, about whether or not MAGA is in the fascist tradition,” he said, referring to the Make America Great Again movement.

“I would say that it brings together this mix of anti-Marxism, of masculine fetish for action, of authoritarian drive for national renewal. All of these things that put it within range, very much so,” Vials continued in his comparison of MAGA to fascism.

“I didn’t expect to see that," Vials said, seemingly in shock over how popular the MAGA movement has become.

Vials then suggested that people close to Trump are "starting to literally break the Hitler taboo" but admitted that Trump himself hasn't "fully crossed the line" at this time but cautions "we're really close."

Shen asked Simien about what Kamala represented as the “first woman, first African American, first South Asian" presidential candidate, and how those "firsts" impact the "psychological decision making" of voter behaviors.

“There’s something to be said about the progress that is made when someone from a historically disenfranchised group emerges on such a platform to assume commander-in-chief,” Simien said, hinting at the tired and untrue "systemic racism" narrative. 

Sinha adds that she thinks Kamala offers "the perfect foil" to "what Trump is saying nowadays, the misogyny, the nativism, the racism."

"She really does represent... the future of what this country could look like, and I think this project of an interracial democracy is an old project," said Sinha. "Not just the fact that ... her identity is not white or male, but the fact that she represents ideas even that are diametrically opposed to what he [Trump] is saying."

Simien brought up how "heartwarming" it was to see RINOs endorsing Kamala's campaign.

It was kind of striking how many times the professors brought up Project 2025. You'd think college professors would at the very least be able to perform basic fact checks on Trump's platform. But instead they serve as mouthpieces to amplify the democrat party agenda.

The panelists discussed a variety of left-wing ideas on "expanding" voting rights and access, and then misled the audience by suggesting the League of Women Voters is bipartisan...when the League squarely backs democrat positions like eliminating voter ID.

Then Sinha made a bunch of wild, false claims about Trump -- including that he would outlaw the right to protest, conduct mass deportations of political opponents, and that he was "colluding with Russia" -- to scare young people into voting for Kamala to save democracy.  

She even argued that "right-wing populist rhetoric" disguises what exactly Trump and his team "have in mind in terms of economic elitism" with respect to "billionaire" tax cuts.

Sinha clearly dislikes the orange man as much as Simien, who doesn't want to "go back" to the days of Trump.

The same with Vials, whose closing remarks focused on "how many times people of color have had to save American democracy." And how striking it is that "the people who have been marginalized and excluded the most" are the ones who have to "step up to save the American experiment."

"It's like, oh my God, if African-American and Latinx and Asian-American voters don't show up to vote, wow," said Vials. "You don't want people who look like me [a white male] deciding everything, right?"

The panelists then turned to another favorite topic of democrats: misinformation and disinformation.

Sinha doesn't like Elon Musk or X/Twitter, which she called, "the site for disinformation" and alleged Elon's goal was never free speech. Instead, Sinha argues that his intention was "to amplify right-wing fake news."

Wonder what Elon thinks about that accusation?

She went on to cry about how the mainstream media, for which she frequently writes and opines, has been branded "fake news" by conservatives.

Vials added a comment, expressing concern over how "the far right and fascism is fundamentally image-based" how that lends itself to "quick memes, quick memes, quick memes, that they're very adept at using."

Then Vials accused Trump of "spewing just a fire hose of BS more or less constantly" which he said "corrodes the entire political sphere...even the left."

At one point when asked for ideas of what students could do to get involved in local politics, Vials recalled a story about how people in his town of Willimantic formed an organization that raised money for illegal immigrants facing deportation after Trump's first election.

The last question came from a YouTuber who asked the panelists for their thoughts about the "religious fervor of the MAGA movement" and the sense from MAGA conservatives that "Trump is divinely anointed for the presidency" at this particular moment in time.

Vials brought up the Project 2025 trojan horse once again, calling it the "blueprint" for policies preferred by the Christian right, a group that Vials says, with some disdain, wants to "restore the family" and take off on Sundays for the Sabbath.

"This has old roots because the defense of slavery was developed based on a fundamentalist literal reading of the Bible," said Sinha, who jumped into the conversation.

"We need to reclaim Christianity from this kind of fundamentalist, really skewing perspective which has become dominant in these mega churches," she said, arguing that Christian fundamentalists want to keep women at home, barefoot and pregnant. And also alleged they are associated with racism.

'I don't think we should cede anything to MAGA and their distortion of Christianity and of religion," said Sinha.

UConn had an opportunity for a historic first -- it could have presented a balanced set of views for students to consider, and allow the students to make their own decisions about Trump and Harris.

Instead, the panelists who were assembled under the banner of "social and critical inquiry" just echoed democrat propaganda and talking points, telling students what to think and how to act in order to save the democrat party's brand of democracy.

‘NO AD’ subscription for CDM!  Sign up here and support real investigative journalism and help save the republic!‘