By JAMES MARSH
Dr. Tom Alter, a respected and tenured university professor, was fired by Texas State University (TSU) President Kelly Damphousse on Sept. 10, 2025, for remarks he delivered at a socialist conference in his capacity as a private citizen. After clips of his comments were taken out of context and circulated online by a self-described fascist streamer, they came to the attention of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who politically pressured TSU to fire Dr. Alter. He was fired without due process, in violation of both Texas State University policy and Texas state law.
This attack is another in a wave of politically motivated attacks on professors and teachers as part of what is often called the New McCarthyism (referring to the Red Scare-era attacks on free speech in the 1950s). These attacks today are attempting to strangle free speech in schools and academia by rewriting history and restricting what can be taught to ideas that are palatable to the far right.
Speaking about his termination at a forum at Haymarket House in Chicago this March, Dr. Alter stated, “Damphousse fired me over comments I had made three days earlier in a presentation I gave during an online socialism conference. And I made this presentation on my own time, in my personal capacity, online from my home office on a Sunday morning…”
“In his Facebook post announcing my immediate termination, Damphousse claimed I was inciting violence. … The student newspaper at Texas State University published a transcript of my conference talk, and the overwhelming public opinion from those that read the transcript or happened to view my talk online was that I was in no way inciting violence.”
The clip in question of Dr. Alter had plainly been edited to cut from a discussion of his politics to an off-hand comment about working at TSU. The footage was doctored so that far-right commentators could fabricate claims that he was advocating violence in his capacity as a Texas State professor. The claim is fundamentally false.
In short, President Damphousse carried out a flagrant political attack that misrepresented Dr. Alter’s comments and trampled on his right to speak as a private citizen as part of a far-right witch hunt.
At another talk, at a community bookstore in Chicago in January, Dr. Alter discussed the hearing he was given by President Damphousse in which he presented evidence in his defense. “After I explained to him that the fascist video was edited to make it seem I was discussing my employment at Texas State, he asked me, ‘But what does it look like?’ As if the truth does not matter, just how things appear on the internet.”
Dr. Alter is one of many teachers, professors, and student activists on the front lines of attacks under the New McCarthyism, especially targeting the teaching of ideas about gender, race, and settler colonialism in Palestine. These attacks are only escalating as the ruling class increasingly turns to authoritarian methods.
Why does his fight matter?
The stakes of fights like these are clear. If progressive forces cannot defend themselves and their right to openly organize, then the movement can be dismantled.
But the forces of the working class that can defend civil liberties from far-right attacks are powerful. The vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Jackson Potter, speaking alongside Dr. Alter at Haymarket House, provided one such example of far-right attacks on civil liberties: ”I think it’s high time that we start thinking about what Tom has got fired for. … How do we protect and defend the remnants of democracy, and then how do we advance them? And this election is not guaranteed.”
Potter went on, “So, what are you willing to do about it? When we asked that question the last couple of weeks in mass trainings, everyone says, if there is election interference, we’re ready to shut it down.
“And that’s what they did in South Korea, right, in 2024, when a similar situation occurred? A president declared martial law, the union movement leadership was the first arrest warrant they issued, and the general trade-union movement then shut down that country in a general strike—and 10 days later that guy was in jail where he belonged. So I think we know our trajectory, don’t we?”
The working class must defend its power to speak freely and organize openly. Civil liberties were not written into the Constitution with the working class in mind. The freedom envisioned by many of the drafters of the Constitution was freedom for slave owners. But these civil liberties were seized on by the working class, and it has been a long hard fight to defend every inch of maneuvering room for the movement for workers’ power.
The New McCarthyism threatens these civil liberties inside schools, universities, and elsewhere while a broader range of attacks on the free expression of activists threatens the working class as a whole. An injury to one is an injury to all. The fight for free speech must extend to everyone in the working class, inside and outside of the classrooms, or the rollback will erode the rights of anyone trying to organize.
Dr. Ellen Schrecker, a historian of McCarthyism in the 1950s,spoke alongside Dr. Alter about this New McCarthyism. “People keep asking me…” she said, “You know, how is what’s happening today different from McCarthyism? Is it a replay?”
“I’m a trained historian, and I believe in nuance and complexity, and putting everything into context. And now I have to say, no more context, no more nuance. It’s worse. It’s much worse than it’s ever been. … And I’m talking mainly about higher education here, but it’s applicable everywhere, and we know it.”
This New McCarthyism is targeting many sectors of progressive social movements. Palestine activists like Leqaa Kordia, only recently released after a year in ICE detention for peacefully protesting at Colombia University, or Dr. Idris Robinson, also fired from TSU by President Damphousse for speaking about Palestine in his capacity as a private citizen, have faced sustained repression on and off campus. Professors of race and gender presenting critical viewpoints have been purged from teaching positions, as at the New College of Florida, where a far-right purge attracted media attention when one of the college’s newly appointed board members announced he was abolishing the gender studies program and dumping the books in the garbage, and where Dr. Erik Wallenberg was dismissed in 2023 for writing publicly about how this purge restricted students’ ability to learn Black and Queer history.
Dr. Wallenberg, speaking alongside Dr. Alter, stated that this purge was part of “the right-wing dream of remaking education,” and warned of the likelihood that “there’s going to be a lot more firings. There’s going to be a lot more intimidated people. … It’s not just a question of Texas and Florida. This is happening across the country. … It’s not just a Southern problem.”
These attacks are part of a general strategy by the far right to exert political control over educational curricula and silence free speech by intimidating teachers and professors—restricting educators who would challenge the ruling-class interests in keeping the working class divided, in controlling what is included in acceptable discussion, in limiting how students understand their histories and their futures.
The University of Texas Board of Regents this February called for limits to university programs so that students can graduate without confronting “unnecessary controversial subjects,” but without defining what constitutes a controversial subject. This strategy targeted everything from Queer filmmakers to Plato, which a professor at Texas A&M University was ordered to remove from their curriculum this January for touching on “gender ideology.”
The New McCarthyism in our schools is only one front in far-right attacks on civil liberties and free expression as the ruling class grows more authoritarian in repressing challenges to its power. In the streets, immigrant rights activists have seen cases from Dr. John Caravello, who faces a misdemeanor charge baselessly escalated to a felony for protesting against ICE, to Alex Pretti and Renée Good, murdered by ICE agents for their resistance to ICE raids in Minneapolis. Entire cities from Chicago to Los Angeles have been occupied by the National Guard as part of the creation of a quick reaction force to quell imagined “civil disturbances,” while Washington, D.C., continues to be occupied. The Trump administration is threatening to “nationalize” local elections, and his advisors recommend sending ICE to police polling stations, disrupting the electoral process and threatening democracy.
This is where Dr. Alter’s firing connects to the struggle against capitalist authoritarianism in this country. This wave of repression must be fought at every turn or the civil liberties the working class has fought so hard for will be dismantled.
The movement in the streets must defend itself. The path to establishing this capacity is by building as broad a base as possible to defend against these attacks on civil liberties, establishing connections between unions, civil liberties advocacy groups, grassroots community organizations, socialist organizations, and all groups invested in the defense of the ability of the working class to speak and demonstrate freely and openly.
Dr. A. Naomi Paik, the co-founder of the community organization Sanctuary For All, spoke alongside Dr. Alter in Chicago about the importance of organizing to defend civil liberties in the face of ICE terror. She underlined that “one of the most important steps” to prepare for ICE attacks and attacks on civil liberties in general is “relationship building. … None of the other shit matters without relationships.”
What can we do?
Dr. Alter’s defense campaign provides a model that only grows louder when people like President Damphousse try to silence progressive political views in flagrant attacks on the free speech of private citizens. This turns attacks into a chance to bring new people into the movement to defend civil liberties, to establish relationships between defense groups, and to organize a powerful fightback against the New McCarthyism and the rise of capitalist authoritarianism underway in this country.
Dr. Alter’s defense campaign includes whoever stands for free speech for all. It aims to defend the power of the working class to organize freely and openly. Check out the Committee to Defend Tom Alter to donate (helping support Tom and his family in this difficult time) or join the defense campaign.
Dr. Alter’s speaking tour, which has taken him to events across the country from California to Chicago to Texas to speak alongside other activists part of the struggle to defend civil liberties, will continue in Connecticut next week, Austin on April 22, Philadelphia on April 25, New York City on April 27, and elsewhere in the months to come. For details, see the Committee to Defend Tom Alter website.
The post Defend Tom Alter and fight the New McCarthyism! first appeared on Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores.
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