Last Friday, Syracuse Professor of Communication & Rhetoric Dana Cloud spoke to faculty and staff about free speech issues on college campuses. Her talk, titled “External Threats to Academic Freedom,” focused on how institutions should respond when members of their faculty are targeted for their political beliefs.

Before her talk, Dr. Cloud and I sat down to discuss her history of political activism and how to effectively challenge far-right groups. Her message is clear: to protect the right for professors to speak out on politically divisive issues. In her own words, “faculty should be able to say things in a political context.”

Dr. Cloud has frequently been a source of ire for right-wing pundits. In 2002, she came out as an opponent to the Iraq war, and later found herself on David Horowitz’s “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” for her outspoken liberal beliefs. “I had gone through three rounds of this before the Trump era,” she noted.

She most recently found herself at the center of controversy in 2017. Alt-right activists had come to Syracuse for a protest, and “were surrounded by armed militia of the hard right,” according to Cloud. As part of a counter-protest, she tweeted out a message calling on community members to help end the conflict. “When confronted with actual organized white supremacists,” she said, “I become very angry.”

The tweet read: “We almost have the fascists (sic.) on the run. Syracuse people come down to the federal building to finish them off.” The alt-right group had dwindled in numbers and were nearly gone, and Dr. Cloud was looking to put an end to the whole thing.“That was my only intent,” she said.

However, the message went viral in alt-right media circles and was treated as a call for violence. “It ended up on like, Ann Coulter’s twitter feed, so 2 million followers.” As it was passed around, people began bombarding her online. “They started tweeting and emailing me like crazy, and doxing me,” Dr. Cloud recalled. She received multiple threats against both her and her dog.

This time, the threats came from what Dr. Cloud called, “actual organizing white supremacists and neo-Nazis whose ultimate goal is to squash and silence the Left, and to purge those seen as inferior from society.”

Most of the accounts sending messages had symbols which are used by far-right groups, including the double lightning bolts of the SS and Pepe the Frog.

Despite the extreme polarization of today’s political climate, much of the Right’s strategy is not new or unique to the Trump era. According to Dr. Cloud, anti-intellectualism has been a staple of right-wing politics since the 1980. “This is actually a tactic and strategy of the Right… to find these snippets of things and then circulate them.”

Recently, far-right organizations have been working across the country to spread their message onto college campuses and challenge the Left and intellectuals.“The campus culture wars,” noted Dr. Cloud, “are an intentional, organized, and systematic strategy of the far right.”

When it comes to fighting back against the Right, Dr. Cloud provided a strategy for effective protest. The Right “appeal to free speech as a pretext for a message about shutting down others,” says Dr. Cloud, but that does not mean their voices should be censored. She believes the best way to combat their speech is with more speech, as protesting Right wing speakers often leads to reducing their appearances.

Cloud also states the biggest issue for the Democratic Party and the Left today is communicating with the disgruntled voters they lost to Trump. “People communicate at the level of their experience, their emotion,” something she believes the Left struggles with.

She is optimistic, however, about the new faces of the American Left. She sees the message of Bernie Sanders, and the election of new left-leaning politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar as a move towards a strong Left. “Their insurgency represents a popular will… to talk about politics differently.”