CA Democrats Refuse to Hear Resolution Condemning UC Davis Professor Who Said Cops ‘Need to be killed’

A State Assembly resolution would urge University of California directors to remove a professor who made horrific remarks on social media about killing cops. However, last week Democrats refused to even hear the resolution.

Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City) authored H.R 22, which urges the University of California to remove English Professor Joshua Clover from the classroom and terminate his employment at the University of California, Davis.

The Tweets from professor Clover:

“I am thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age,” showed up on November 27, 2014. 

“I mean, it’s easier to shoot cops when their backs are turned, no?” from December 27, 2014. And

“People think that cops need to be reformed. They need to be killed,” posted on Jan. 31, 2016.

“Can’t we at least agree there is no place for this on our taxpayer funded campus and condemn these hateful statements?” Gallagher asked on Facebook, after his colleague Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez posted a video about his H.R 22 being killed by Democrats. “The Democrats killed that Resolution,” Melendez said. “They won’t even allow it to be heard; they won’t even allow it to be discussed.”

“This is someone in our state schools, paid for with tax dollars…” Melendez said. The resolution simply called for his comments to be condemned by university officials. “Sadly, the Democrats decided no action needed to be taken, and not even to be discussed.”

Assemblyman Gallagher also delivered more than 10,000 petitions to the UC Davis administration from people across the state requesting that Clover be fired.

“Joshua Clover specializes in critical theory, Marxism, political theory,” the professor’s UC Davis profile explains, and “his interests include social movements, social reproduction theory, crisis theory and the end of capitalism,” Globe author Lloyd Billingsley wrote in February. Forthcoming work “focuses on poetry and the transformation of the world-system, and particularly on the dynamic between overdeveloped nations and neocolonialism.”

“Californians have good cause to keep a close watch on UC Davis, which also has a problem with student protesters,” said Billingsley. “In 2011, when students peacefully protested tuition hikes, the administration had them pepper sprayed. The ensuing lawsuits cost taxpayers more than $1 million. No UCD administrators got fired and chancellor Linda Katehi came under fire for spending $407,000 in university funds to shore up her image on the internet.”

Clover’s Tweets about police were revealed shortly after Davis Police Officer Natalie Corona was murdered in the line of duty by a gunman.

“The killing of Natalie Corona changed everything,” Nick Irvin wrote in an article in The California Aggie, the UC Davis newspaper. “Corona, an up-and-coming Davis police officer who was gunned down last month, was the type of person who makes labelling all law enforcement as ‘bad’ a simple exercise in fallacy.”

“I browsed Twitter, always the first stop in a general inquiry, and enlisted a colleague’s help to search for the professor’s elusive interview online,” Irwin wrote.

“Only the intellectually dishonest would even broach such blanketed and violent sentiments — certainly not a highly-regarded professor at a top public university,” Irvin wrote.

Irwin wrote that he emailed Clover to schedule a meeting and learn why he’d made these statements about police, and whether he was aware of their life-threatening implications. “Yet Clover offered little clarity, or remorse. ‘I think we can all agree that the most effective way to end any violence against officers is the complete and immediate abolition of the police,’ he wrote me. His response suggested that he had no regrets about his remarks and would preserve them, as repugnant as they might appear to outsiders.”

This is the text from Gallagher’s H.R 22:

“This is your one-rule party in California at its finest,” Melendez added.