Michigan professor fired over anti-Semitic, racist social media posts

Thomas Brennan, a physical sciences lecturer at Ferris State University, tweeted about a ‘Jewish mafia’ and called the COVID-19 pandemic a ‘Jewish revolution’

By Gabe Friedman 2 March 2021, 8:49 am 2

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A view from the Ferris State campus in 2010. (Michael Barera/Wikimedia Commons via JTA)

JTA — Ferris State University, a public research school in Big Rapids, Michigan, fired a professor last week for using anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic and other inflammatory language on social media.

Thomas Brennan, a physical sciences professor, had tweeted about a “Jewish mafia” and called the COVID-19 pandemic a “Jewish revolution,” according to an article last fall in the university’s newspaper further reported on by USA Today, the Detroit Free Press and other outlets.

Brennan also used the N-word in talking about the prominent Black physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“My defense is that I was acting out and speaking out of despair caused by a personal crisis involving extremely painful migraines, emf sensitivity and a series of repeated break-ins into my home,” Brennan tweeted in response to his firing this weekend. EMF refers to electromagnetic field.