Kevin Bird

Academic activist

Bio:

Kevin Bird is a post-doc, who has publicly supported Antifa, incited mobs to get distinguished academics fired, and declared his support for destroying private property and political violence during the 2020 riots in the USA.

The Receipts:

Background:

Kevin Bird is a post-doc, who has publicly supported Antifa, incited mobs to get distinguished academics fired, and declared his support for destroying private property and political violence during the 2020 riots in the USA (tweets archived here).

While he was a graduate student at Michigan State University, Bird was president of the Graduate Student Union, and organized the campaign to fire Steve Hsu from his position as Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Michigan State University.

During the summer of 2020, Bird initiated a Twitter mob and spearheaded a petition that systematically misrepresented Hsu’s views. Rather than arguing that Steve Hsu’s views are empirically incorrect, or ethically misguided – which is what scholars are expected to do –Kevin Bird simply dismissed them as “racist” and “eugenicist” and implored activists to try to destroy Professor Hsu’s career. For the record, Steve Hsu has never argued that some races are better than others, but only that human populations differ genetically. And Hsu has never argued for coercive or state-sponsored eugenics, but only for the view that couples who use IVF should also be able to use genetic information about their embryos to minimize the chance that their children will suffer from a debilitating disease.

Kevin Bird’s malicious attack resulted in Steve Hsu being pressured to resign from his administrative position at Michigan State. Despite Professor Hsu enjoying widespread support among colleagues, MSU yielded to the mob and accepted Hsu’s resignation.

Kevin Bird not only attacks senior faculty but also tried to prevent a doctoral student named Colin Wright from getting an academic job. While his role was less significant in this case, Kevin Bird used social media to relentlessly attack and slander Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who studies sex differences, for his view that men and women are different. It is not surprising that Kevin would deny sex differences. He has gone on record saying that he has little interest “in knowing or attaining truth” when the truth conflicts with his political ideals and has openly called for science to be politicized for activist purposes.