Opinion | Political profiteering is undermining higher education

Daniel Espiritu, junior political science major

A profiteer is a person that garners a profit by exploiting a bad or unusual situation.

We often reserve this term for people who profit off of the scarcity of necessary goods during famine or wartime.

Similarly, a political profiteer is someone who profits from exploiting a bad or unusual political situation.

Since the election of President Donald Trump in November 2016, racial and political tensions have risen. The FBI noted an increase in hate crimes in 2016compared to those reported in 2015. These tensions, among other things, may have provided the opportunity for conservative-leaning misinformation to become a lucrative industry, which has resulted in a number of individuals and organizations that seek to profit.

Alex Jones is a prime example of a political profiteer. He has made a living as a radio show host for Infowars, a conservative news media company, and came under scrutiny after the parents of a six-year-old child who was killed during the 2013 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting filed a defamation lawsuit against him. The parents reported death threats and online harassment after Jones began circulating conspiracy theories claiming that certain school shootings were an elaborate hoax.

Political profiteering can also take shape on social media. Conservative 101 is a right-wing clickbait-style site that publishes articles with inflated claims and little substance. The articles are then circulated by Facebook pages like Conservative Hub, which has more than 1.2 million “likes”.

Here’s an example. Conservative 101 published an article Aug. 27 with the headline, “Comey could face up to five years for what he was just caught doing.”This article is based on information in this article published by the online magazine The Federalist. The article provides no source for the information included in the article.

By training readers to jump to conclusions, it becomes easy for them to dismiss the arguments of the opposition because they aren’t in line with those of the organizations they follow in the media, or on outlets like Facebook and Twitter.

Organizations like these Facebook pages are an example of political profiteers who are spreading misinformation that negatively affects the academic discussion about politics. Some profiteers, like Turning Point USA, go as far as to challenge not only the credibility of academics, but of higher education in general.

Turning Point USA does this by sharing a number of memes on its Facebook page, one of which urges young people to avoid attending a university because certification from a trade school is more valuable and less expensive. The dollar amounts in the meme are not attributed to any specific schools or credible statistics.

Turning Point USA has also compiled a blacklist of professors with which they disagree as part of a project called the Professor Watchlist. The project’s aim is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” according to its website.

After taking a look at some of the entries, I’ve noticed that a majority of the professors on the list merely have opinions that Turning Point USA disagrees with (such as one professor thinking her university’s slogan is sexist).

It’s odd that the same organization associated with college students dressing up as crying babies to protest the existence of safe spaces in Feb. 2018, has now compiled a list of professors they disagree with and cried “discrimination”. To make matters worse, providing evidence is optional when nominating a professor for the watchlist, and some professors have received death threats as a result of being named on the list, according to CNN.

It’s imperative for us, as members of an academic community, to identify the issues caused by political profiteering and inform our fellow students about its harmful effects. These profiteers are crowding political discourse with false information and discrediting academics without evidence. I’m not suggesting that anyone should attempt to silence these profiteers – because that would be a violation of their freedom of speech and expression – but I encourage people to look out for the signs of political profiteering, choose your media sources carefully and discuss this topic with your fellow students.