The Attack on Marco Bassani | Abbeville Institute

You may remember a meme circulating widely after the U.S. presidential election last November with a picture of Kamala Harris and the following comment: She will be an inspiration to young girls by showing that if you sleep with the right powerfully connected men then you too can play second fiddle to a man with dementia. It s basically a Cinderella story.

The political theorist and historian Marco Bassani, Professor of History of Political Theory at the Università Statale di Milano, was one of many who reposted the meme on a personal social media page. When this was brought to the attention of his university, the administration initiated disciplinary proceedings that finally reached a conclusion this past week after over six months. The verdict, reported in the Italian news, was that Prof. Bassani was found guilty of sharing sexist and highly offensive content, not only toward the directly interested party but toward the entire female gender. As punishment, his university teaching and salary were suspended for one month.

Yet the penalty was apparently not simply for reposting the meme in question but for the nature of his social media posts more generally, since the press relates that he was also told what happened does not constitute an isolated episode, since it is your custom to publicly express strong opinions on social networks, sometimes with extreme content.

Prof. Bassani reacted to the sentence with the following statement as reported in the press: This clearly shows that I have been punished because I am not aligned with the banalities of the contemporary post-left. Furthermore, the verdict had already been written even before the commission was created. In the end, it is good that it happened to me since I am over 50 years old and a full professor. Had it happened to a young scholar at the beginning of their career, they would have been shredded to pieces. But I want to turn this madness into a battle in defense of the values of freedom, because this new Inquisition is really dangerous.

Prof. Bassani s Italian colleagues are in the process of writing an open letter that they will circulate widely and ask supporters to sign in a gesture of solidarity. They have also set up a venue to collect donations to help offset the legal fees required to fight against this measure.

Below I share the English version of an open letter that I have sent to an Italian publication:

via www.abbevilleinstitute.org

They don’t have a First Amendment in Italy but they might have academic freedom. Marco is going through something similar to what I went through. At the end of this blog post there’s a letter you can sign, as I will.