Even before the January 6 fiasco, I avoided voting for Donald Trump because he seemed autocratic to me. Nothing in Trump’s recent behavior makes me reconsider that opinion.

Also, there are things I like about Vice President Kamala Harris, who was a tough-on-criminals prosecutor.

However, I cannot vote for the vice president because his administration and many in his party want to fire me because of my political views. For this university professor and Republican John McCain, democracy cannot mean professional suicide. I will not vote for my retirement.

To win my support and that of other centrists, Harris will have to come out in favor of free speech, not only for Hamas sympathizers but for the thousands of normal conservatives and centrists increasingly excluded from Higher Education. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott empirically show in “The Undoing of the American Mind” that ideological purges brought down more teachers than Senator Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare in the 1950s. I am a Republican, but not too partisan. I worked for the Clinton administration, as the Democratic mayor of my town, and I received support from many Democrats both times I ran for school board. In 2020, I voted, albeit reluctantly and perhaps mistakenly, for Biden.

Lately, though, I’ve been reminded why I fear many Democrats, especially California Democrats like Harris, who have little experience working across partisan divides.

In her recently published and deeply disturbing book “On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretenders, and Smart Warriors,” Elizabeth Weiss, a former professor of anthropology at San Jose State University, details how her state of government pushed him to leave. academy Weiss’ crimes include defying California state regulations that allow Native American activists — including “claimants” who do not belong to any recognized tribe — to veto archaeological research that conflicts with indigenous religious beliefs, according to which the tribes still have occupied their claimed territories. As Weiss wrote in “The Objective Standard,” the Biden administration expanded these regulations across the country.

Weiss also offended activists by pointing out that, like most people, some Indigenous people were involved in unpleasant activities such as war and slavery. Until Weiss filed a Title IX complaint, California also imposed tribal requirements that prohibited “menstruating personnel” (women, like Weiss) from handling archaeological sites.

In comparison, neither California nor the Biden administration would ever allow Christian creationists to block scientific research into evolution because it might contradict the Book of Genesis. (Of course, now that the precedent is set, someone on the right might try.)