David Scott Anderson of In Search of Utopia (and who isn't?) has uncovered one of those deliberate right-wing plots where a bunch of freepers or neocon boosters or just plain dingers get together to torpedo some liberal they don't like who said something the didn't care for or did something of which they didn't approve. In this one, 'egregious' doesn't begin to cover it.

The site is called Wizbang and the guy they're after is a professor at Utah State University named David Hailey. They're organizing--or threatening to organize--a phone and email campaign to get Hailey fired. Kevin, one of the Wizbang group bloggers, actually called the head of USU's English Dept and complained. Professor Hailey's dastardly crime? He offered the opinion, after re-creating CBS' supposed forgeries on an actual typewriter from the 70's, that they could have been legitimate. Kevin went apeshit. It isn't that he disagrees with Hailey's evidence, although he does. What really pisses him off is that somebody would dare disagree with him and the other right-wing bloggers who represent the Holy Truth, and he wants the bastard punished.

It's the standard fascist bullshit¹ we've come to expect from today's radical conservatives who will brook NO dissention once they've decided what The Truth is. This tactic of ganging up on an enemy's employer when he says something you don't like, used with great success during the Reagan years (and since) to muzzle the press, is now being used to turn colleges and universities into bastions of conservative ideology where liberals are not just unwelcome but forbidden. This is only the most recent incident in this trend, and it needs to be stopped or the dingers will turn higher education into the same corporate kiss-ass wimp the media is.

This is David's original post where there are links to the rest of this attempted mugging. Don't let 'em get away with it.

Notes:
1. For the record, please note I did NOT call Kevin a fascist; I said what he DID was fascist, and so is what Wizbang is trying to do.