The Lynching of Phillip Lowcock
Tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail
The Story1
Phillip Lockwood was a lecturer at KU in the Department of Health, Sport, and Exercise Science, although press accounts also called him an “instructor” and a “professor.”
At some point in addressing one of his classes (when this happened is uncertain), Lowcock expressed his utter contempt for sexist men who “will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president.”
To emphasize how lowly he regards such chauvinist bags of severed phalluses, Lowcock said, “We could line all those guys up and shoot ‘em. They clearly don’t understand the way the world works.”
Immediately—in the very next sentence—he realized he’d probably be perceived by some to have crossed some professional line, so he added, “Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording. I don’t want the deans hearing that I said that.”
Recording? Yes, there was a recording. Probably for students not in attendance that day, probably a standard practice of some sort.
Despite the extraordinarily clear context of Lowcock’s remarks, the Worst People On The Planet pounced.
On October 9, Ned Ryun, son of former Republican U.S. Representative Jim Ryun of Kansas, posted the video clip on Xitter (Twitter if you’re Old School, X if you’re fashy). Ned tagged Kansas Senators Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall to offer them this layup:
“Seriously @UnivOfKansas? You’re letting this be said in your classrooms? That men who won’t vote for Kamala Harris for President should be lined up and shot??”
So at its birth as a viral witch-hunt, Ned intentionally (okay, maybe not; maybe he’s really so ideologically poisoned that it’s eaten all his speech comprehension neurons) lied about what Lowcock said, which of course, led to who-knows-how-many others to follow suit. (The video was seen by well over 4 million users; 13,000 reposts of the clip from Ned’s tweet alone.)
Lowcock never mentioned Kamala Harris. Or Trump. Or MAGA. Or all men. Or either political party. He spoke of men who won’t vote for a woman because they believe all women, as a sex, are intellectually inferior to all men.
That’s patent, definitional sexism, biological essentialism, really grotesque and hard personal sexist discrimination in action. What was clearly Lowcock’s expression of hyperbole about how shitty this subset of “men” are got morphed into advocating that we should actually go out and shoot all Trump voters.2
So: from the beginning, the scandal bears all the hallmarks of bad-faith, misinterpretation and lies.
That, of course, didn’t bother my former U.S. Rep, now Senator, one iota. Roger Marshall, perhaps to shore up his reactionary bona fides as he deals with his own scandal of more or less living in a sybaritic pleasure dome down in Florida instead of here in humble old Kansas, railed on the same day:
“Disturbing video from a @UnivOfKansas professor. Anyone saying men who don't vote for Kamala Harris should be ‘lined up and shot’ is deranged and shouldn't be around students nor academia. I trust that the @UnivOfKansas will take immediate action and fire this professor.”
Like our boy Ned, Roger inserts Kamala Harris into Lowcock’s remarks, as well as a literal call to action that wasn’t there, reinforcing a literal misinterpretation of what the lecturer was saying over what a five-year-old could grasp was his true meaning.
Within two hours of posting, the Xitter account Libs of TikTok retweeted the video clip to its legions of rabid incels and sickos. LoTT has crowd-sourced violent threats and attacks across the country on individuals and institutions over Drag Story Time, Gender Affirming Care and much more through the course of its vomitous existence. It’s like a spotlight showing all the Nazis and crazies where to attack next.
There was prompt intervention from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an outfit that tends to protect the worst right-wingers in academy far more zealously than any progressive: they issued a statement defending Lowcock’s remarks as a nothingburger in terms of First Amendment protected speech.
Lowcock himself immediately apologized to the higher-ups at KU for his gaffe and explained that, yes, he was hyperbolically condemning sexism, but did so injudiciously.
And faster than you can say “pink slip,” Lowcock resigned, after the shortest ever administrative leave on record. Ned Ryun posted the video on Wednesday. Lowcock was out by Friday.
That day, Roger Marshall crowed:
UPDATE: I am glad to report that the professor who called for men to be ‘lined up and shot,’ declaring open season on people who don’t plan to vote for Kamala Harris, is no longer an employee at KU.
Marshall may not have achieved much in office, either as a congressman or a senator, but by god, we can be proud that he could so spryly join an internet pile-on bandwagon launched by someone else and driven by stochastic terrorists to force a teacher to quit his job. Who knew Florida Man had such courage?
Some Morals of the Story
So many things occur to me in my sadness of watching the story of Phillip Lowcock play out. I’ll just rattle them off…
We Just Allowed a Tar-and-Feathering.
Within the space of 48 hours, give or take, a guy whose job was teaching young people about whatever is involved in Health, Sport, and Exercise Science was forced to hit the bricks thanks to opportunists, liars, and terrorists. Phillip Lowcock is a Kansas martyr in the fight against MAGA insanity, digital pogroms, so-called “culture war”3 disinformation, bad-faith capture of one of the two major political parties in America, and, yes, rising authoritarianism.
There’s really no difference, aside from the level of technology involved, between this and the mob of torch-and-pitchfork wielding delusionals descending upon the local jail to drag out the poor sap busted and serving his time for a misdemeanor, the law be damned. The evidence warrants a night in the pokey—maybe—but the mob demands blood and inflates the crime, through fevered rumor, perverse prejudice, and hateful groupthink, into a capital offense, and metes out vigilante justice as it sees fit.
The Principled Sheriff4 Caved to the Lynch Mob
In the tales of the mythic Old West, the wise and respected lawman would greet the frenzied mob at the door of the jailhouse, his rifle slung across his arm, leveraging his personal authority and ethos, his “y’all know me, and I know you” credibility with the community, to remind folks of their better selves. He would chastise errant townsfolk for thinking their own shit don’t stink, calling to mind the time when So-and-So got falling-down drunk and ended up in the clink himself but didn’t deserve the full hostility of those he’d upset because that’s not what the law dictated. So-and-So would hang his head in shame and acknowledgement, the spell of vengeance shaken.
Maybe there’d be a mini-civics lesson on the rule of law, the role of the judge and right and wrong, and what happens when folks improperly take things into their own hands. If that didn’t work, the sheriff would close with his trump card: those still unconvinced by reason would have to go through him to get to his prisoner, and the force of his reason, his humanity, his embodiment of the principles of the political community’s foundational ideals—not to mention that rifle slung across his arm, which he might cock for good effect—would not only illustrate his commitment, but establish the degree of personal, existential investment the townsfolk would have to muster if they intended to follow through on their temporary madness for revenge. The crowd would disperse, and all would once again be well on the Plains.
But this did not happen. Why not? Well, the Sheriff never stepped up to do the right thing, to call out the insanity sweeping through the crowd, to name and shame those who were behind it for their own selfish ends, to remind folks of their better selves or the principles they claimed to believe in when they weren’t in the grip of the fever.
So who’s the Sheriff here? Well, we don’t have one. Insofar as this was a digital lynching, Xitter is owned and operated by a nazi fan-boy who’s turned the site into a playground for bots, sadists and people who delight in cruelty. If we lived in a simpler time, we might have the ability to allow for a media and community discussion among the people affected by the Lowcock story to weigh in and deliberate. That is, the people of Kansas. But no, literally within hours, the video clip and its perversely twisted framing spread to more people than live in our entire state.
If every single Kansan had risen up to stand in the doorway of the jail, rifles across their arms, saying “Hold up, pardner,” it would not have mattered against a crowd of this size. Hell, most of us almost certainly missed this travesty of justice, so quickly was Phillip Lowcock run out of town on a rail. We lacked the time to grab, let alone load, our Winchesters. Rifle? Hell, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Lowcock was covered in pitch and chicken feathers while we were still rubbing the sleep from our eyes.
If anyone could have served as Sheriff in our story, it was the University of Kansas. Only they had the authority and the position to stand up for Lowcock’s rights and the reality of his situation. An Institution of higher learning can parse Lowcock’s remarks on the tape without breaking a sweat and grasp in an instant what’s going on. A university in the midst of a war on education led by right-wing arsonists across the country should be ready and able to defend itself and its people against bad-faith smears, with receipts to fight back.
KU Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor (doesn’t that just sound like royalty?) Barbara A. Bichelmeyer instead accepted the framing of the liars who painted Lowcock’s remarks as an actual call to violence and responded with typical CYA institution-speak:
The free expression of ideas is essential to the functioning of our university, and we fully support the academic freedom of our teachers as they engage in classroom instruction. Academic freedom, however, is not a license for suggestions of violence like we saw in the video. While we embrace our university’s role as a place for all kinds of dialogue, violent rhetoric is never acceptable.
Absolutely no effort to push back against what is manifestly an intentionally twisted misinterpretation of Lowcock’s comments made in explicitly partisan bad faith. It is 100 percent capitulation to the smear campaign. I see no real difference, at base, between Bichelmeyer’s underlying assumptions here and the statement of the Kansas Young Republicans, in their retweet of Ned Ryun’s video:
This type of rhetoric is exactly what has caused TWO assassination attempts against President Trump.
This is pure unreality. This is what the Sheriff in our mythical Old West tale has to debunk, perhaps in earthy language, perhaps calling to mind the time when the mob spokesman once swore to the whole town that he believed “the Little People” were stealing his underwear.
The Sheriff Snuck the Poor Sod Out of the County
What KU did, I suspect, is sat down with Lowcock and confess to him that they were abdicating any and all power and responsibility to aid him. This doubtlessly came, not in the tone of an honest confession, but as a statement of a sad reality, with frequent reminders that Lowcock had screwed up, which he’d already freely and promptly, and no doubt in fear for his job, admitted.
Look, Phil, you have to know there’s no way we can put you back in a classroom after this. You’d become a media spectacle. How could you possibly teach with a million phone cams recording your every word? With a million little would-be right-wing influencers hoping to make their bones by asking you gotcha questions and trying to catch you out on some answer they could twist? You’re not Amy Wax,5 with tenure and a boatload of big-money right-wing think tanks and donors ready to go to bat for you in court or the press. Let’s face reality here.
What you did isn’t even fireable. We all know this. But seriously, what kind of future do you see yourself having here after all this? We could keep you on, but any capacity where you’d be public facing would just be pure hell for you—and yes, sure, for us, but we’re willing to fade that heat, of course, of course because we believe in academic freedom—but let’s think this through.
What we’re proposing, we think, is better for everyone involved. You resign, and we offer you really good severance package to keep you on your feet for a good while as you move on to your next opportunity. Hell, we know this was at most a venial sin, so we’ve even got some recommendations for you, some contacts, some quiet places where you might find something that will get you out of the spotlight.6 And as you said, you know this was all kinda your fault to begin with….
This is all a guess, but firing Lowcock would potentially mean a wrongful termination suit under academic freedom and first amendment arguments, maybe with FIRE lending aid. Lowcock resigning, however, especially with a decent farewell package—that might let the guy pay his bills a while, and the poor fellow seems conscientiously upset that his gaffe landed him in all this hot water under such a pile-on in the first place, so he probably wants it all to go away. And because KU can No Comment the details of Lowcock’s departure because it’s “a personnel matter,” and Lowcock has no incentive to talk about the terms of the split, either, we’ll never know.
What chafes here is the University throwing one of its people under the bus. What chafes is an ostensibly powerful institution, one that supposedly stands for things like Knowledge and Education and Truth and Integrity and an Inclusive Community7 utterly caving to what is obviously and transparently a bad-faith campaign of lies by the world’s worst operators. KU knows this for what it is. Lowcock probably does, too, but he’s just one guy, prey to the personal doubts and regrets each lonely human being is heir to, so he’s more vulnerable to intimidation and manipulation and pressure, while a big and powerful outfit like KU should be able to take a principled stand.
It won’t, however, because it’s afraid of bad PR and weaponized fake outrage over made-up bullshit that could be used, once again, to crack down or punish it, much like the anti-DEI panic that swept the Kansas legislature this past year led to capitulation and please-rub-my-belly behavior by our public colleges. Or a donor or alumni backlash to hit them in the pocketbook. Or some other heinous fuckery the Right could cook up. Or they’re afraid of a second Trump Administration and all the horrific things it’s been threatening, so they engaged in anticipatory compliance.
The entire rule of law, the parable of the lost sheep, the notion of majority rule tempered by minority right—these things are based on the idea that you don’t sacrifice the one for the sake of the many, and you don’t bow to the pressures of the mob that’s wrong over the welfare of the individual who’s right. This is, at base, how and why we have this country. This is, at base, how and why we have public institutions like state universities. Speaking truth to power and opposing unjust exercises of power is incumbent on everyone who morally, ethically, civically supports these principles. When institutions and individuals cover their asses instead, we all lose, and we lose a little piece of the whole thing.
The Quakers Quaked
I haven’t watched 1956’s Friendly Persuasion in a dog’s age (hell, it’s probably waay problematic by now, dammit), but I can’t help thinking about the basic dynamic in the wake of Phillip Lowcock’s tale of betrayal. The central conundrum on the film (and Jessamyn West’s book) is Quaker pacifism in the face of the Civil War.
Why is this relevant? Because poor Phillip Lowcock had the singular misfortune of expressing his deep disdain for sexist pigs in the language of guns. This prompted many of those who might have come to his defense to quail and faint and run away from his cause and case in disapproval and desperation to preserve their own propriety. In doing so, of course, these folks fell into the same liar’s framing that painted Lowcock as actually calling for violence when he was doing nothing of the sort, and their retreat from his defense because of the dreaded G-word (or reference, really) helped feed the both-sides narrative that MAGA nutbags push, which claims “the radical Left” is rarin’ to put all “real Americans” against the wall.
Look, I have many friends involved with Moms Demand Action. They do good work, and I support them. But there is an undercurrent in some quarters—not just or even especially in that movement—that’s positively phobic about anything gun-ish. It’s so bad that when Lowcock said, “We could line all those guys up and shoot ‘em,” these folks mentally severed any chance of coming to his defense. He’d crossed a line of some kind, by using gun-rhetoric or violence rhetoric—forget the fact that it was hyperbole, forget context, forget everything. Invoking a gun is enough to trigger the anaphylactic shock that sends such folks into paralysis, making them useless as defenders of someone whose attitudes are probably completely sympatico with theirs. Whoops, he said this toxic thing. We can’t defend him. He sure screwed the pooch on that one. Sad, but whatcha gonna do?
It’s like half the good townsfolk, the ones who might join the Sheriff in opposing the torch-bearing mob (unarmed, of course), just decided to stay home on the night of the lynching. It’s like they were…unreflective Quakers. Kneejerk pacifists mistaking the trappings of violence for the real thing. The real violence is what was done to Phillip Lowcock by the weaponized systems of social media pile-ons and pandering pols, by the capitulation of KU. It was not in any way the frustrated solidarity for women (huge victims of gun violence and the threat of same, BTW, often at the hands of…men who…wait for it…view them as less-than in much the same way Lowcock was describing) that our KU instructor was expressing.
Gary Cooper would be so disappointed.
There’s so much more that could be added here, if only I had more Old West tie-ins.
There’s the willful blindness, the gaslighting: how Lowcock made a reference in frustration to the contemptibility of chauvinist idiots and the Right turned it instantly into a forged, both-sides proof-text that the libs were indoctrinating kids to assassinate Trumpists. This despite the documented violence MAGA hordes have committed and are committing as we speak, and the far more blatant and literal calls for violence and law breaking by far more powerful and influential figures on the Right.
Here’s one that happened on the day Lowcock resigned, and it’s directly partisan, in a swing state, and actually involved shootings:
Democrats shut down Arizona office after shootings
by Ashleigh Fields - 10/11/24 10:56 PM ET
Arizona Democrats closed their field office in Tempe, Ariz., after three shooting incidents. The office served as a base for the Sun State’s congressional campaigns and Vice President Harris’s presidential effort in recent weeks.
The Tempe Police Department said the latest incidents on Oct. 6 involved gunshots fired at the Democratic campaign office at around 12:30 a.m. They said no one was inside the building. Officers are now looking for a silver Toyota Highlander with an unknown plate, which was seen on the premises.
Lauren Kuby, a state Senate candidate in Legislative District 8, told USA Today that candidates and staffers quietly moved operations to an undisclosed location to ensure the team’s safety. The incident came days before first lady Jill Biden and former President Obama were scheduled to campaign in the battleground state.
Prior to the October shooting, reports show damage to the property on Sept. 16 and 23, either caused by a BB gun or additional gunfire. Officers are now investigating the destruction and are offering $1,000 to witnesses who can provide more information.
The onset of violence comes toward the end of a tumultuous election cycle in which former President Trump faced two assassination attempts.
The Hill has reached out to Arizona Democrats for further comment.
Then there are the weak and half-hearted defenses of Lowcock, like this one, courtesy of KSNT 27:
Washburn University Professor Bob Beatty said what needs to be considered is the subject, context, and intent.
“Is this something that’s going to be very helpful to promoting the discussion in that class, in that subject? Anything that gets in the way of students’ learning is not productive,” Beatty said.
Insofar as Lowcock’s subject falls within the Department of Health, Sport, and Exercise Science, I can see relevance in discussing alleged biological differences in intelligence between the sexes, and I can see a proper review of the evidence by an instructor debunking any and all claims that women as a group are inherently dumber than men, thus categorically unqualified to serve in high office. Ergo, Lowcock’s aside makes sense to me as relevant and potentially engaging in the course.
Then there’s the contrast between the rapid under-bus-throwing of low-level Lowcock, a mere instructor in a department at one regents university, and the ongoing “controversy” surrounding the president of another regents university, Wichita State’s Richard Muma, who sure as hell seems to have committed numerous instances of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis, an offense egregious enough (we have been told) that it merited the ouster of the heads of far more prestigious universities that WSU could ever dream of being (no offense to you Shockers).
Welcome to Westworld8
But worst of all is the fallout, the ramifications, the lesson that educators and workers in any large institution will take from the Lowcock incident.
That lesson is simple: Forget everything you might have learned through experience or training about making connections with your students or clients as human beings. Never express any sentiment that reveals you possess an authentic human personality or emotion, any actual opinion that can get you hot under the collar, even such an true-American view that women are equal to men in intellectual capacity and ability and those who think otherwise are troglodytes unworthy of consideration, especially given the overwhelming weight of all known scientific evidence.
Never behave like an actual human being to whom students or the actual public can relate, much less bond with. Be a robot, merely dispensing the approved talking points, curriculum, syllabic data. Because should you ever let the android mask slip for even a moment and express an authentic emotional vibe of any sort, it won’t translate into personal connection in the form of “Oh, professor Jenkins, what a loveable old coot! He’d always get his blood pressure up whenever we’d discuss such-and-such.” No, such memories are for, well, Old West times, I guess.
Today, we must all be “professional.” Which is to say, we must stifle and hide, drown and smother, any and all indication of having a well-formed and well-rounded human personality, with fears, hopes, dreams, peeves, frustrations, lest the deans hear about it.
It’s an environment of crushing fear. Fear of being an actual person. Fear of a moment’s human emotion getting taken out of context, broadcast to literal far-flung millions and your human fallibility—no, just your humanity, because not a damn thing Lowcock expressed was really wrong or hard to understand or sympathize with—getting weaponized against you until you’re railroaded out of a job with nary a defender to be seen.
This is what happens when there’s no solidarity. When institutions don’t defend their people or the principles that make it possible for them to exist in the first place. When erstwhile allies faint at imperfect improvisation and pre-emptively cave and cower. When we let the powerless fall under the bus because that’s the way the world is instead of fighting for the world we want to live in.
A footnote on my title. Calling what happened to Phillip Lowcock a “lynching” is in bad taste, offensive, even. I regret it already. Almost. Not enough to change it, obviously. As you will see (if you jumped down here) or already have (if you read through), I make a case that Lowcock was a victim of a mob that piled on through prejudiced, fabulist, deluded hate of the Other (in this case, an ideological Other), fueled by its projected nightmare fantasizes about what it wants to do (and does do) to that Other. They overwhelmed the authorities charged with protecting his rights and safety and position in the community and drove him out, then celebrated and shared news of the result. This is not the end result of an actual lynching, which is horrific beyond belief and culminated in death, usually long, and filled with agony and literal, visceral torture. Phillip Lowcock would probably be appalled at my comparison, and I am, somewhat, as well. I know better, even. As I referenced in my last post here, “They say that dystopian fiction is when you take things that happen in real life to marginalized populations and apply them to people with privilege.” I just did that. My intention (which ultimately doesn’t matter to those I may be harming with this parallel) is to bring home the similarities between mob “justice” in our day and age and the kind lynch mobs meted out with such regularity in the days of Ida B. Wells. My argument is not that Lowcock or anyone similarly situation is now equally oppressed as the term “lynching” suggests. My aim is not to water the term down, though I know it has this tendency. My audience, insofar as I have one and know its composition, is composed of folks who are relatively privileged, who may see themselves more readily in the case of Lowcock than in, say, an unjustly accused Black man in the Jim Crow South. I’m trying to get folks to connect some damn dots here, and us comfortable white folks are particularly dense about this stuff unless and until it gets crudely shoved in our faces. So I’m committing a sin here, and I know it, and if I were writing for a different audience, I wouldn’t. But I’m not, so I hope I will be understood, if not forgiven.
Projection suggests that this is what the MAGA folks wish to do to their opponents. They certainly believe, in their fabulist nightmares, that the evil, radical Left wants to do this to them. What’s most telling, however, is that Lowcock describes a subset of extremely chauvinistic, biologically essentialist patriarchal men…and Trumpists insist he’s talking about them. Lowcock didn’t make that connection folks. Quit telling on yourselves.
Every time you hear the term “culture war,” please engage in the following exercise: replace “culture war” with “human rights.” Too many people use “culture war” dismissively, as if it’s all a distraction from “serious” issues. Tactically, such issues often are. For example, attacks on trans people have been electoral losers for Republicans for at least the last major cycle, per the always excellent Erin Reed, yet the attack ads focusing on trans demonization are all over this year. Why run them then? Well, they help to “flood the zone with shit,” which is always a benefit for the Trumpist. And they probably solidify the resolve of the base so they turn out and do not waver. But they alone are unlikely to rank highly as an issue if conversion of undecideds or independents or moderates is the issue (it’s not, BTW). Strategically, however, anti-trans messaging is wonderful if you desire to cultivate a cultural swing toward demonizing the Other, policing gender binaries and the presentations of same, reverting to stricter adherence to patriarchal sex roles, and preparing the soil for increasing restrictions on bodily autonomy and women’s freedom down the road.
Anyway, “culture war” usually means “attacks on people’s rights.” In the moment, it can serve as a distraction from other stuff, but it never ceases to be an attack on people’s rights. Try the swap-out, and you’ll start seeing what I mean.
Invoking the “sheriff” as the image of law and order and protection is, well, a bit surreal. I mean, aside from all the usual ACAB, there’s all the Constitutional Sheriff stuff that’s been germinating and spreading for at least ten years, as Political Research Associates is documenting, and others have been trying to sound the alarm on before. But again, I’m playing a tune for more normie, less online or specializing folks here, so let me invoke the American mythos, which is full of it, but serves a purpose. Just roll with the metaphor, folks.
Wax's history of discriminatory statements has included her claiming that Black students never graduate at the top of the Penn Carey Law class and that “non-Western groups” are resentful towards “Western people.” Wax has also faced criticism for hosting white nationalist Jared Taylor for a guest lecture and allegedly telling a Penn Carey Law student that she was only accepted into the Ivy League “because of affirmative action.”
And she’s still employed, still tenured, and even her current sanctions have taken years to impose, by her peers, not her superiors.
I strongly doubt this part even happened.
Weren’t our jackass state legislators all concerned this past session about “litmus tests” that would violate the First Amendment and “discriminate” against faculty and students for views that ran counter to prevailing “ideologies” that dare not speak their names? Wasn’t this their tissue-paper excuse for killing DEI in our state?
The Yul Brynner version, not the remake.