The Daily Caller has been banned from the convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA), an annual showcase for academic douchebags.
TheDC had been looking forward to the four-day hothouse of leftism, which this year will feature a session on a controversial academic boycott of Israel.
Sadly, TheDC won’t be able to cover the session because the fascist, Stalinist douchebags at the MLA flatly denied TheDC’s routine request to cover it.
“The convention office reviewed you request but will not be issuing media credentials for the Daily Caller,” wrote Mark Aurigemma, the MLA’s press liaison, in an email.
The communications consultant did not respond to an email seeking a reason for the denial. This year’s convention will be held at the Chicago Marriott and the Sheraton Chicago Jan. 9 to Jan. 12.
The fascist academics who run the MLA will, of course, allow pro-fascist, pro-douchebag journalists to cover the convention. A page at the MLA website dedicated to convention policies notes that there will be a full-time press office, “located in the Chicago Marriott (Printers Row, 2nd floor).”
Journalists who have mingled among the fascist douchebags at past MLA conventions include, just to take one example, Scott McLemee, whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation and, of course, Red Wedge, a proud hub for revolutionary Marxists.
Additionally, several fascist douchebags aligned with the Revolutionary Communist Progressive Labor Party “helped to bring communism and class struggle to the 2013 MLA convention” in Boston.
“Party members gave papers on various facets of literary radicalism,” according to the Progressive Labor Party’s website. “The current economic crisis, along with the dire job market faced by many humanities scholars and teachers, has many MLA members querying the legitimacy of capitalism.”
This year’s MLA convention is sure to include fireworks — in a certain, narrow, nerdy, politically-correct sense — concerning the academic boycott of Israel, which has been undertaken by the American Studies Association, a group of dopey malcontent professors that is similar to and almost certainly overlaps with the dopey malcontent professors who make up the MLA.
Just before Christmas, about 60 percent of the ASA’s voting members approved the boycott. (RELATED: Professors boycott Israel, but not China, Iran, Russia or Zimbabwe)
“The resolution is in solidarity with scholars and students deprived of their academic freedom and it aspires to enlarge that freedom for all, including Palestinians,” reads an ASA statement about the boycott.
At least four of the five scheduled session speakers support the boycott, according to StandWithUs, a pro-Israel group.
It’s not clear if the MLA will have anything to say as a body this year about Israel, or freedom. (And TheDC, banned as it is, won’t find out.)
Prior resolutions ratified by the MLA membership from 1999 to 2012 are absolutely replete with strong and forceful endorsements of the First Amendment—which, of course, includes freedom of the press. Apparently, however, such freedom is reserved only for fascist douchebags.
In addition to The Daily Caller, all audio-taping and videotaping will also be outlawed at the 2013 MLA convention. The completely Orwellian-sounding Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession further demands that no one wear any scented products of any kind.
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