***UPDATE: July 28, 2020 12:00PM EST***
It’s with a heavy heart that we report that Mike Adams’s death has been ruled a suicide.
Mike Adams, 55, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, was found dead alone in his home Thursday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a friend called New Hanover County sheriff’s deputies to check on him, The News & Observer reports.
Adams had been acting “erratic” in the past few weeks, during which he was “under a lot of stress,” his friend told a dispatcher, according to 911 call records cited by the newspaper.
Sheriff officials said foul play is not expected in Adams’ death, which was ruled a suicide following an investigation, the newspaper reports.
Source: New York Post
***END UPDATE***
Sadly, as we have reported elsewhere, Mike Adams’s life has come to its end. But rather than dwell on those final moments of his life, we’d like to remember him for his uncanny ability to encourage others to stand strong.
Mike Adams died recently. And the cause of his death is now known, he was shot. His death was discovered during a wellness check.
The nature of the death, whether suicide or violence has not been disclosed. But what we do know, in either case, is that he was the focus of an extended and very public campaign against him to discredit and destroy him as a professor at UNCW.
This battle has gone on for years, ever since he was passed over for tenure on account of his private political views expressed away from the campus. He won in court.
Even so, his more recent comment deriding Governor Moore — the same man he fought and beat in his 7-year court battle — over his draconian use of power led to a large petition that got him ‘canceled’.
The following was published on July 2nd. We note that both his job and his reputation were targeted:
UNC Wilmington is paying professor Mike Adams more than $500,000 in an agreement that resulted in his early retirement, which was announced Monday. Adams has sparked controversy at the university for more than a decade, particularly and most recently surrounding his comments on social media.
Adams, a 55-year-old tenured criminology professor, will retire from UNCW on Aug. 1, before the fall semester begins.
…Four different change.org petitions popped up calling for UNCW to get rid of Adams in early June that had about 120,000 signatures.
“(Adams) has a long history of espousing racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and abusive rhetoric. There have been previous demands to remove him, however he remains,” one of the petitions states. — NewsObserver
That was less than a month ago. Now, he is dead of a gunshot wound. Whether it was by his own hand, or someone else’s it is difficult not to speculate a connection between this public destruction of who he is and being forced out of his employment over a derisive tweet to his unfortunate end.
For some better context on why he might have worded the particular tweet that ended his career in the particular way that he phrased it, here he is addressing an outdoor rally for Patriots who objected to the trampling of Constitutional rights in the name of Coronavirus. It was the “ReOpen NC” event… where he called on business owners to exert their fundamental rights.
He used his own fight — and victory! — as a context for other patriots to consider their own situation and ability to stand and fight against violations of THEIR Constitutional rights.
It is only 3 minutes long, but it is, as the kids say, ‘FIRE’.
So…
Is it at all possible that the Professor they were so hellbent on destroying personally and professionally was actually making an intelligent point?
Could he have been addressing specifically Roy Cooper, who even the COURTS agreed had personally violated Mike’s constitutional rights once before, and now was doing so again by creating mandates restricting behavior that did not even bother to go through the process through which any other binding legislation would be obligated to proceed?
A slaveowner is a man who immorally abridges the rights of another man, forcing his compliance in ways for which he has no moral right to do so.
When Adams used the term “Massa Cooper” to describe Roy Cooper’s behavior as Governor, is it more rational to claim that he was being in some way ‘racist’ or in some other sense racially insensitive toward black Americans whose ancestors may have once been owned as slaves, OR is it more rational to believe he was pointing out a different fact about Governor Cooper’s treatment of free American citizens of North Carolina? Namely, that for Gov Cooper to abridge the rights of free Americans in the way that he has stands on grounds that are JUST as morally unjustifiable and legally dubious as the practice of one man owning another?
You’d think a nation filled with people Hellbent on comparing practically EVERYONE to Adolph Hitler would understand how he might have meant the latter.
Perhaps soon we might all realize that this impulse to destroy people over ideological disagreements is turning us into a totalitarian state of a different kind… the kind that historically, doesn’t spare those in the inner circle, but which eventually uses the very same tools of personal destruction to have rivals shot in a nondescript room in the basement of some gulag.
Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s seminal work on the topic if you think there is such a great leap between the two.
I had the distinct privilege of meeting Adams once, many years ago. I was saddened to hear of his passing.
