RIP Mike Adams
Professor Mike Adams’ death has been ruled a suicide.
No doubt many people will consider this a coverup for a homicide. I am not one of those people, and it would take some new revelation to make me cross over to that camp.
Professor Adams fought the fight for so long against those who would destroy him, and he was about to leave the field and retire. Who knows what can spark feelings of depression powerful enough to cause a person, seemingly strong, to commit suicide? The human heart is a great mystery.
William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection – a man who knows something of the pain of being ostracized by colleagues for political positions – writes:
[Adams] “seemed like” a happy warrior, but who knows? It’s a miserable, unrelenting, stressful life, as the friends fall away and the colleagues, who were socially distant years before Covid, turn openly hostile. There are teachers who agree with Mike Adams at UNCW and other universities – not a lot, but some – and there are others who don’t agree but retain a certain queasiness about the tightening bounds of acceptable opinion …and they all keep their heads down. So the burthen borne by a man with his head up, such as Adams, is a lonely one, and it can drag you down and the compensations (an invitation to discuss your latest TownHall column on the radio or cable news) are very fleeting…
RIP, Mike Adams.
I believe it is fair to say that he was driven to take his own life by the unrelenting attacks from the hateful SJW Twitter-mobs (as well as by the the cowardly attitude of his own school; compare the grotesque treatment of the classicist Joshua Katz by the spineless Eisgruber and by most of his worthless colleagues at Princeton), although it is certainly true that no-one can ever truly know what lies within another’s heart (in the words of Hesse, “No man knows the next man/Each is alone”).
I am late to this story. I had never heard of Mike Adams before nor had I heard about his death until just now. I read Jacobson’s LI post Neo linked to, but otherwise I’m still pretty much in the dark about this fellow.
He was forced into retirement, at age 55, with a settlement which wouldn’t even amount to five years’ pay. I hope the administration at UNC-Wilmington is deeply ashamed of hounding a decent man into despair and suicide. But alas, I’m sure they’re not ashamed.
I’m afraid I had never heard of him. As such, here is no way I could make any kind of constructive comment. But yes, R.I.P.
Neo, I think the quote you cite came from Mark Steyn’s column: https://www.steynonline.com/10482/mn.
I used to read Professor Adams’ columns all the time. (After be began focusing on his pro-life beliefs, I started to follow him less and less.)
For the longest time, this guy took crap from no one. When he was denied tenure because of his beliefs, he sued and won..
His biggest sins used to be his pro-Second Amendment, pro-Western articles. He was regularly excoriated on every social media platform out there. He often had the best, and often caustic, responses/retorts, doubling down every time he pushed back. The man seemed fearless.
Like so many, I was happy to let him carry the burden of fighting back.
He had no children and had been married only briefly during the course of his life. He had friends in the local area and a few proximate relatives (brother, niece, nephew, and a couple of maternal-side uncles). Supposedly there was a gf in Charlotte. Evidently wasn’t enough to keep him here.
Since they had no legitimate reason to fire him, I have to wonder how he was buffalo’d into taking a rather suboptimal early retirement deal. He should have received the discounted present value of twelve years worth of salary and benefits (based on a reasonable projection of future nominal values).
What gets you is the mendacious and vitriolic quality of the denunciations of him. There was nothing out of the ordinary about his political and social viewpoint. He was playful with other people’s pieties. NB, Wilmington is a mid-card state college located in a small Southern city. You might think it would be measurably closer to the American median than other sorts of places, and, yet, the culture of the place is frankly lunatic. North Carolina Republicans, heckuva job.
When he was denied tenure because of his beliefs, he sued and won..
He was denied a promotion to full professor. He was granted tenure around about 1999.
I’m really sorry to hear this. As a fellow academic I’ve been following him for years. I was shocked when I heard he died. I think Neo is correct. This death lies totally with the faculty and administration of UNCW. Of course they will celebrate they destroyed this good man. Disgusting people.
I reported his death in the other thread last night
it was only this morning that i found out it was deemed a suicide..
understandable given the way he will be remembered by the media which means how he would be remembered forever…
I believe it is fair to say that he was driven to take his own life by
He was 55. He’d married quite late in life (to a woman > 15 years his junior) and the marriage produced no children. His career as a teacher was over. Retooling is challenging at any age, especially at 55. He was very engaged with the public sphere, which is demoralizing inasmuch as you’d be hard put to identify a time more steeped in perversity and mendacity. He made a Christian profession (likely a reversion) in his middle 30s. The thing is, you’re a Christian, you’re on your own. Congregations are full of people just getting through life and clergymen are tiresome NGO functionaries without a serious thought in their head.
RIP.
Now in theory, the Hillsdale College types, Heritage Foundation, various other supposedly ‘Right’ think tanks should have been all over a guy like this. Surely a bargain hire experienced foot soldier to snap up. Think of all the possibilities.
Crickets. Of course. Cucks, Cowards, Bow-tied Eunuchs, Grifters all.
Zaphod:
You don’t know that.
It may be that various other places tried to hire him, and he refused because he wanted to stay where he was. He’d been there a very long time.
There aren’t many positions available at think tanks. He has scholarly chops, however, in contradistinction to many of the characters who work in those joints. I’d have been pleased to see him replace Mona Charen at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, provided he produced working papers and only occasional topical commentary.
As one of the odd minority on the right in sociology, he’d have been an asset at a college with an architectonic mission such as Grove City. I have a suspicion, however, that most such places are now run by inner ringers intent on wrecking them.
Steyn references a post about Nick Sandman.
I recommend reading it.
https://stream.org/nick-sandmann-wasnt-supposed-to-survive-he-was-meant-to-end-up-like-mike-adams/
Related:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2020/07/28/pangs-and-fury-of-despair/
Because the kind of leftists who dug up Adams’ columns from 20 years ago to goad him to his grave aren’t finished with Nick Sandmann.
I doubt you could goad Adams to his grave with 20 year old columns. (Adams wasn’t a great talent in the realm of topical commentary, but he did have a distinctive voice, twenty years ago and more recently. Without a doubt, he enraged people by refusing to take them seriously).
The NC legislature should undertake an inquiry into his severance arrangement, which was chintzy. If the provost was blackmailing him, that needs to be addressed with a criminal prosecution.
He wasn’t alone. Just two days off the radar screen and friends came looking for him. His across the street neighbor also noticed something amiss. Faculty and administration in higher education are chock-a-block with the world’s sh!ts, but 99% of the world does not work in those trades.
I wouldn’t hunt for those truffles around the faculty and administration at UNCW, or the media outlets who recycle their attitudes. They’re a waste of space and organic matter. I’d look for those truffles among the people you’d expect might care about him (in his amatory history, especially).
I just now read this post, and am so dismayed! I did not know about Prof. Adams’ death until just now, and I feel so sad. I started reading his opinion pieces when I was a freshman college student, 20 years ago, and I loved reading his work! I learned a great deal from his articles, and was grateful for them. How awful that he took his own life.
I’ve never heard of Mike Adams either.
Links to his Good Stuff?