‘Asian hate’ writer suspended from campus paper

Max KarsonAccording to the Rocky Mountain News, Max Karson has been suspended from Colorado University’s Campus Press newspaper. But maybe that’s not really the news here. Maybe the real news here is that this kid had a history of authoring hateful, denigrating but supposedly satirical works about women, the Virginia Tech shooting, all before this hullabaloo about him being racist against Asians. Heck, this kid is famous for running at the mouth — he even has a Wikipedia page.

So — whose fault is it really that that article got published in the Campus Press?

Don’t get me wrong — the conclusions Max Karson reached about Asians are amazingly, appallingly stupid and just about on par with Kenneth Eng (I shudder to think he would find that to be a complement). I can’t imagine how sheltered he is, jumping to the conclusion that Asians as a whole community (never mind the number of ethnicities and cultures under the umbrella of Asian) simply, blindly hate white people. I mean, I’m sure there are some, but you don’t see them writing about it in the college paper.

In fact, I’m going to say that Max Karson can say what he damn well pleases. This is after all, a free country. I’m free, after all, to say he’s a hate-mongering idiot, so he’s likewise free to say, oh, I don’t know, I’m a crazy, typical California chick who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. I’ve heard worse.

The line, in my opinion, should have been drawn by the editors of the Campus Press. Did no one see the warning signs? No one Googled Max Karson? No one read the damn piece before it got in the paper? C’mon. I’m not sure what the sin is here — laziness or the ignorance.

I mean, seriously. It was not even a year ago when he got arrested for comments he made after the Virginia Tech shooting:

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, it’s one thing to make this particular joke (which was directed more at the media) only a few hours after the incident, but quite another to introduce alleged satire into a college classroom a day or two after the shooting. Well, that’s just what a University of Colorado student did the other day.During a discussion of the shooting in a gender and race class, Max Karson made comments sympathetic to the VT shooter, saying “if anyone in here says that they’ve never been so angry that you wanted to kill 32 people, you’re lying,” and that he was “angry about all kinds of things, from fluorescent light bulbs to the unpainted walls, and it made him angry enough to kill people.” Karson was also reportedly asked: “Would you kill all of us?” His response: “No. Not all of you.”

Obviously, the comments scared the bejesus out of his classmates; students left class crying, scared for their lives, and shaken up. Even today, students are questioning whether to return to that particular class, though I understand there will be a police officer standing guard. But given the circumstances, the school made the only logical decision it could: It had Max Karson arrested and jailed for a day, before he was released on bail. The charge: “Interference with staff, faculty or students of an educational institution.” He’s also been suspended and banned from campus. He has since pleaded not guilty to the charge.

The ACLU, apparently, was called in to bail him out every time he made these offhandedly outrageous statements. Ugh. Don’t get me started on the ACLU.

Bottom line: stop publishing this guy’s droll. If he publishes his own newsletters, has his own blog, starts his own paper, whatever — more power to him. But everyone else who doesn’t want to lose whatever credibility they have — steer clear of Max Karson.