The Question of Barack Obama's Socialism

Rick Moran argues that Barack Obama is not a socialist and he says he detests "conservatives throwing around the words “socialism” and “Marxism” when it comes to Obama."

Well, with due respect to Rick, he taking a jab at me in his post!

Actually, while I don't think Obama's an orthodox Marxist-Leninist in the Soviet sense, I do think he's socialist in terms of "welfare state socialism," a form of social democracy that advocates a heavy role for the state in a mixture of government planning, market regulation, and social provision.

Such democratic welfare state socialism is in fact institutionalized in the U.S., particularly in New Deal-era programs like Social Security, agricultural subsidies, workers' compensation, welfare (public assistance), and deposit insurance. Because these policies have become institutionalized and expanded with bipartisan support, we tend not the think of them in terms of "socialism."

What makes Barack Obama different, and why it's not inaccurate to speak of him as ideologically socialist, is that by background and inclination he'd like to expand the American welfare state toward the European model, in countries like Denmark or Germany.

Obama speaks in terms of socialist ideology: He stated during the primaries that "the chance to get a college education is the birthright of every American," and during the primaries, and again in Tuesday's presidential debate, he argued that health care should be a right.

As Investor's Business Daily points out, Obama's essentially a collectivist in outlook:

It's clear from a close reading of his two books that he's a firm believer in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich at the expense of the poor.

Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old.

Of course, Obama is too smart to try to smuggle such hoary collectivist garbage through the front door. He's disguising the wealth transfers as "investments" — "to make America more competitive," he says, or "that give us a fighting chance," whatever that means.

Among his proposed "investments":

• "Universal," "guaranteed" health care.

• "Free" college tuition.

• "Universal national service" (a la Havana).

• "Universal 401(k)s" (in which the government would match contributions made by "low- and moderate-income families").

• "Free" job training (even for criminals).

• "Wage insurance" (to supplement dislocated union workers' old income levels).

• "Free" child care and "universal" preschool.

• More subsidized public housing.

• A fatter earned income tax credit for "working poor."

• And even a Global Poverty Act that amounts to a Marshall Plan for the Third World, first and foremost Africa.

His new New Deal also guarantees a "living wage," with a $10 minimum wage indexed to inflation; and "fair trade" and "fair labor practices," with breaks for "patriot employers" who cow-tow to unions, and sticks for "nonpatriot" companies that don't.

That's just for starters — first-term stuff.

Obama doesn't stop with socialized health care. He wants to socialize your entire human resources department — from payrolls to pensions. His social-microengineering even extends to mandating all employers provide seven paid sick days per year to salary and hourly workers alike.

You can see why Obama was ranked, hands-down, the most liberal member of the Senate by the National Journal. Some, including colleague and presidential challenger John McCain, think he's the most liberal member in Congress.

There's also the question of Obama's ideological training and past associations. In many respects, one is defined by the company they keep and the activities they pursue. We often hear criticism of the attacks on Obama's past as "guilt by association," but it's not just a radical aquiantance here or an early Marxist mentor there: It's the over-time acclimation to and identification with doctrinaire socialist ideology and practice.

As Jawa Report notes, regarding the controversy surrounding Obama's past relationships:

Aren't we seeing a pattern here? One interaction with one old communist isn't particularly troubling. A handful of sporadic interactions with a handful of radical left-wingers may not be particularly troubling. But a lifelong pattern of extended associations and alliances with scores of fringe, America-hating radicals is very, very troubling indeed.

Just to be clear:

It's not just that Barack Obama's father was a Marxist economist or that his mother Stanley came from radical far-left roots.

It's not just that Obama's childhood mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a famous communist poet.

It's not just that Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor, counselor and spiritual mentor of 20 years is a racist, America-hating radical.

It's not just that Michael Phleger, Obama's other spiritual mentor is every bit as extreme as Wright.

It's not just that his wife Michelle has never been really that proud of America, or that she thinks this country is "mean".

It's not just that Obama refused to wear a flag, or that he refused to salute it during the national anthem.

It's not just that Obama's political and financial benefactor William Ayers is an unrepentant radical socialist terrorist.

It's not just that Bernadine Dohrn regrets that she didn't kill more people back in the 1960s.

It's not just that Alice Palmer, Obama's political mentor in Chicago, was a communist propagandist.

It's not just that Obama was a member of the radical socialist New Party or that he ran as a candidate for public office under their far-left platform.

It's not just that Obama was an agitator, trainer and attorney for the corrupt and radical-left ACORN.

None of these facts, by itself, tells you that much about Barack Obama. A reasonable person should, however, be able to look at this motley crew of left-wing communists and America-haters, realize that Barack Obama's rolodex is a veritable Who's Who of American Socialism, be very, very disturbed by that fact and ask some very probing questions about WHO Barack Obama is, WHAT he believes, and WHY this gang of radical America-haters considers Barack Obama such a good friend.

Thus, in both policy and associations, it's clearly not unreasonable to identify Barack Obama as socialist, and not just of the democratic welfare state variety.

If elected, the Illinois Senator may very well take American government further to the left than in any time in U.S. history, not just in terms of market regulation, but in the fullest sense of the democratic socialist model of European-style welfare states.

The Left vs. the Liberals

From Sean Wilentz, at the New York Review:

Michael Kazin’s new book about American leftists and their impact on the nation over the last two centuries presupposes, as its subtitle suggests, that this impact has been enormous. But Kazin is a judicious scholar without bluster, a professor of history at Georgetown, and coeditor of Dissent, and his assessments are carefully measured. Kazin concedes that radical leftists have often been out of touch with prevailing values, including those of the people they wish to liberate. He concludes that American radicals have done more to change what he calls the nation’s “moral culture” than to change its politics.

And yet, even as Kazin tries to avoid romanticizing the left, his book leaves unchallenged some conventional leftist conceptions about American politics and how change happens. These conventions begin with a presumption about who controls American political life, what C. Wright Mills called the “power elite,” an interlocking directorate of wealth and bureaucracy at the top. Kazin refers to this directorate interchangeably as the “establishment” or the “governing elite.” Unless challenged by radicals, this elite, in his view, is slow to right social wrongs; but without the support of the elite’s more enlightened elements, the radicals remain in the political wilderness.

Occasionally—as with the abolition of slavery, the rise of the New Deal, and the victories of the civil rights movement—momentous changes supported by radicals have indeed come to pass. Yet Kazin argues that the liberal components of the governing elite have supported major reforms strictly in order to advance purposes of their own. Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans, he writes, embraced emancipation only halfway through the Civil War, when it became clear that doing so “could speed victory for the North” and save the Union, their true goal. Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed labor’s rights only when he needed to court labor’s votes.

Even when they are successful, Kazin writes, the radicals—“decidedly junior partners in a coalition driven by establishment reformers”—end up shoved aside as the liberals enact their more limited programs and take all of the credit. Prophets without honor, the leftists return to the margins where they and later radicals dream new and bigger dreams until another social movement jars the establishment.

Some radical historians—most famously the late Howard Zinn—have described this pattern as a chronicle of thoroughgoing oppression. In their view, the reforms initiated by radicals have practically always turned into swindles, orchestrated by clever rulers to preserve and even reinforce their power. Kazin, who also despairs about the current state of the left, has a more positive view of liberal reformers and their reforms: the Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act, he insists, were important political advances and not establishment ruses. But a basic pattern still holds for Kazin as it does for Zinn: radicals challenge the privileged; liberals co-opt them, claiming the glory. In effect liberals are the enemies of fundamental political change.

Most of American Dreamers consists of crisp and useful summaries of nearly four decades’ worth of historical research about American radicals and radical movements, including Kazin’s own work on the amorphous populist strain in American politics. For Kazin, the left consists of anyone who has sought to achieve, in his words, “a radically egalitarian transformation of society.” The definition embraces an enormous array of spokesmen and causes, and Kazin’s account runs from the abolitionists and workingmen radicals of the Jacksonian era through a succession of socialists, women’s suffragists, Greenwich Village bohemians, and civil rights protesters, down to today’s left-wing professoriat.

There's a lot more at the link.

If the left consists of folks looking for "a radical egalitarian transformation of society," one might think Barack Obama would fit the bill. But as the essay points out, Kazin treats Obama as a mainstream centrist Democrat.

That will be an interesting question in the years and decades ahead, the degree of Obama's left-wing radicalism. But read the whole thing. According to Wilentz's thesis, traditional anti-Communist social democrats have contributed much more toward that radical transformation that Kazin hopes to achieve than he's able to recognize. And for historians the key will be to sort out exactly what kind of Democrat this president is. He's not a neo-liberal in the Bill Clinton mold, and indeed, in ideological pedigree Obama's way more radical than President Lyndon Johnson ever was, even if he fails in achieving as lasting change as the great Texas Democrat did. But we could have four more years of this president, and as a lame duck he could tear off the mask and govern from the full-throated ideological radicalism that his upbringing and pedigree indicate. He promised a radical transformation, and he's off to a damn good start, to the detriment of liberty and traditional decency of the American political system.

Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism

Stanley Kurtz's new book is out. I started it last night. I'm loving it. Click the image to order your copy.

And here's Kurtz at National Review, "Obama's Radical Past":

On the afternoon of April 1, 1983, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, made his way into the Great Hall of Manhattan’s Cooper Union to attend a “Socialist Scholars Conference.” There Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his life.

The conference itself was not a secret, but it held a secret, for it was there that a demoralized and frustrated socialist movement largely set aside strategies of nationalization and turned increasingly to local organizing as a way around the Reagan presidency — and its own spotty reputation. In the early 1980s, America’s socialists discovered what Saul Alinsky had always known: “Community organizing” is a euphemism behind which advocates of a radical vision of America could advance their cause without the bothersome label “socialist” drawing adverse attention to their efforts.

A loose accusation of his being a socialist has trailed Obama for years, but without real evidence that he saw himself as part of this radical tradition. But the evidence exists, if not in plain sight then in the archives — for example, the archived files of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which include Obama’s name on a conference registration list. That, along with some misleading admissions in the president’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, makes it clear that Obama attended the 1983 and 1984 Socialist Scholars conferences, and quite possibly the 1985 conclave as well. A detailed account of these conferences (along with many other events from Obama’s radical past) and the evidence for Obama’s attendance at them can be found in my new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.

The 1983 Cooper Union Conference, billed as a tribute to Marx, was precisely when Obama discovered his vocation for community organizing. Obama’s account of his turn to community organizing doesn’t add up. He portrays it as a mere impulse based on little actual knowledge. But that impulse saw Obama through two years of failed job searches. Clearly he had a deeper motivation. The evidence suggests he found it at the Socialist Scholars conferences, where he encountered the entrancing double idea that America could be transformed by a kind of undercover socialism, and that African Americans would be the key figures in advancing community organizing.

The 1983 conference took place in the shadow of Harold Washington’s first race for mayor of Chicago. Washington was not only Obama’s political idol, he was the darling of America’s socialists in the mid-1980s. Washington assembled a “rainbow” coalition of blacks, Hispanics, and left-leaning whites to overturn the power of Chicago’s centrist Democratic machine. Washington worked eagerly and openly with Chicago’s small but influential contingent of socialists, many of whom brought the community organizations and labor unions they led onto the Washington bandwagon.

America’s socialists saw the Harold Washington campaign as a model for their ultimate goal of pushing the Democrats to the left by polarizing the country along class lines. This socialist “realignment” strategy envisioned driving business interests out of a newly radicalized Democratic party. The loss was to be more than made up for through a newly energized coalition of poor and minority voters, led by minority politicians on the model of Harold Washington. The new coalitions would draw on the open or quiet direction of socialist community organizers, from whose ranks new Harold Washingtons would emerge. Groups like ACORN and Project Vote would swell the Democrats with poor and minority voters and, with the country divided by class, socialism would emerge as the natural ideology of the have-nots.

Figures pushing this broader strategy at the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference included ACORN adviser Frances Fox Piven and organizing theorist Peter Dreier, now a professor at Occidental College and an adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. That is to say, Obama’s connection to socialist ideologues didn’t end with his recruitment into the ranks of community organizers. It began there and blossomed into a quarter century of intricate relationships with both on-the-record and in-all-but-name socialists. I’ve spent the last two years in the archives unraveling the connections ....

As we move into the first national election of the Obama presidency, Americans are confronted with a fateful choice. Either we will continue to be subject to President Obama’s radical and only very partially revealed plans for our future, or we will place a strong check on the president’s ambitions. Knowing the truth about Obama’s past is the best way to safeguard our future.

Islam is Dominated by Radicals?

The Rosenkranz Foundation sponsored a debate in Islam this past week in New York, entitled "Is Islam Dominated by Radicals?"

The moderator, Robert Seigel, suggested that survey data are "not encouraging," and goes on to pose the age-old question of this decade, "Are we engaged, in Samuel Huntington’s formulation, in a clash of civilizations?"

The "clash" thesis was offered in the mid-1990s, and while he engendered tremendous controversy at the time, Huntington was later thought prophetic in his analysis of the main axis of world cultural/political conflict at the dawn of the 21st century.

Of course, the notion that Islam's fundamentally radical and hostile to the West, and that the religion works to convert or destroy all non-believers, remains contested. But scriptually, these notions are at the core of Muslim doctrine, according to Asra Nomani, a participant at the Rosenkranz panel who argued for Islam's essential radicalism:

So I would say assalamu alaykum to all of you, but according to the prayer book that I was handed when I went on the pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, I’m not allowed to say this peaceful greeting to those who aren’t Muslim. When I see that headline: Islam is dominated by radicals, I don’t hesitate in believing it to be true. The opposite side wants to suggest that we can’t tell you stories from the trenches. But it is, in fact, in the trenches where we know what is happening, that we know that the radicals are, in fact, intimidating, silencing and paralyzing the moderates. I know it from my lifetime in the Muslim community and I know it from stories and anecdotes, sure, and historical and country cases. When I was given this proposition I asked my mother – a grandmother, who has taught me my Muslim prayers, who is teaching her grandchildren the prayers – I said, Do you think that Islam is dominated by radicals? You can dismiss her as an anecdote. You can dismiss her as somebody who isn’t pundit enough but she’s got her finger on the pulse of what’s going on in our communities. And she didn’t hesitate in saying yes. For the last thirty years that I have known, since the exportation of Wahabiism from Saudi Arabia to the far reaches of our Muslim world, I know that our community is dominated by radical ideology.

I know that it is an ideology that has taken root in countries from Pakistan to states in Nigeria to provinces in Indonesia with laws that put women in second class status, that give women criminal punishments because of sexual crimes. In each instance you could say that there’s a political purpose. But at the end of the day it is done in the name of Islam. I don’t stand up here and condemn my faith. I fight for it every single day. I fight for a progressive interpretation of our faith. But at the end of the day our religion, our institutional Islam out there in the world -- from my home town of Morgantown, West Virginia to Islamabad, Pakistan to Indonesia to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – we are controlled and dominated by radical ideology. The moderates don’t want to lose their status. They don’t want to lose their place in the community. They don’t want to lose their invitation to the potluck dinner parties and wedding halls that they get to go to.

It’s an issue of social dynamics. At the end of the day it isn’t worth it to them to take on the radical ideology because there’s too much at stake. You risk your own safety and then you risk your social standing. I know this as a woman in the faith. I know that what we are struggling with is a situation where more mosques in America than in the 1990s are putting women in separate sections. Two-thirds of mosques in America versus half in the 1990s have women separated. And you could argue that that’s not radical ideology. But at the end of the day it is part of a continuum of an interpretation of Islam that takes a literal read that says a woman is sexual temptation, that a woman is sexual distraction. You take that interpretation and it isn’t that long that you have to also add up to an interpretation that says that you can’t be friends with the Jews and the Christians, that violence is acceptable.

Why do I know this? Because I’ve heard it from my pulpit. I’ve heard it from the sermons that are downloaded on college campuses across this country and across the world. There is an exportation of this ideology. We may watch our borders, we may check the visas of people who come into this country but I know that there is an ideology that says that a woman is half the witness of a man in criminal cases, that that is law in countries of our, of our religion, that there is interpretation that says that a woman gets less inheritance. When we put women -- half of our population, in particular -- in second class status around the world, you can call it anything you want. But I consider it unacceptable and I call it radical ideology. It’s unacceptable to have tradition become religion with female genital mutilation. It’s unacceptable to have honor killings, as we are, from Canada to Texas to Turkey. You can call those anecdotes but it’s a trend.

It’s a trend that’s happening because our Islam of today is dominated by radicals. We don’t have mosque leaders who are keeping that kind of ideology in check. We are, in fact, having leaders who accept preaching from the pulpit that says that we cannot imitate the dis-believers, that we cannot say assalamu alaykum to those who are not Muslim. At the end of the day what I want you to know is that I stand up for Islam as a faith. I stand up for the principles just like every other religion. But like Judaism and Christianity have evolved so that there is a continuum in institutional religion, so that there is a reform synagogue along with the orthodox synagogue, our mosques are defined by an institutional puritanical interpretation that to me is very radical and very unacceptable. And I encourage you to vote to support this motion because we need a truth telling. We need to be honest.

Read the whole thing.

Nomani's thesis is challenged by panelist Reza Aslan, who argues that all religions distill complex world socio-political controversies into simple dichotomies of good versus evil:

As I say, this is true of every society, ours especially. And if you don’t believe me, I suggest you ask Karl Rove.

Classic moral relativism. The Rovian smear is shorthand for left-wing America-blaming, which is standard fare for those on the radical left who apologize for the unparalleled brutality of Islam in the world today.

For more on Aslan, see Robert Spencer, at Jihad Watch, who suggests that Aslan's academic program consists of a "shallow and distorted depiction of Islamic teachings."

Note too the audience results from the debate, on the motion, "Islam is dominated by radicals":

Before the debate:

For the motion: 46%

Against the motion: 32%

Undecided: 22%

After the debate:

For the motion: 73%

Against the motion: 23%

Undecided: 4%

Why Doesn't Feminism Accept 'Normal' as an Identity?

Robert Stacy McCain is posting at Medium, "Gender, Sexuality and Psychological Maladjustment" (via the Other McCain):

One of the most remarkable controversies of our era is the conflict between transgender activists and radical feminists. Michelle Goldberg outlined this dispute in an August 2014 article for the New Yorker:

Trans women say that they are women because they feel female — that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”

Having written a book (Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature) critical of feminist ideology, I cannot be accused of supporting Lierre Keith’s ideas about patriarchal oppression. Nevertheless, in their disputes with the transgender cult — and yes, the movement has developed a cult mentality in recent years — radical feminists are on the side of scientific truth. “Male” and “female” are biological categories, determined by chromosomes and anatomy. This is simply science, not politics, and the rhetoric of the transgender cult is not actual feminism, but is instead a weird mutant strain of postmodernism, heavily influenced by the “gender theory” popularized by Professor Judith Butler. Radical feminists have taken alarm at the way transgender activists have used the Internet— blogs, YouTube channels and other social media — to promote “transition” as a panacea for every problem young people may experience with their sexual identity. There now exists a vast online community of amateur advice sites on every aspect of transition. Medical providers of “treatment” — hormones and surgery — are now encouraging transgenderism even among preschool children, and some misguided parents appear to be exhibiting Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, by pushing their children toward “transgender” identification.

What is happening here? The rise of transgender mania — for which Bruce “Caitlin” Jenner is the celebrity poster boy/girl — can best be understood as a belated consequence of culture shifts that occurred 40 or 50 years ago, especially in the field of psychology. Whereas once heterosexuality was officially understood as normal, and homosexuality defined as deviant, this understanding was cast aside by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973. If there was no such thing as normal sexual behavior, then it was no longer possible to describe any sexual behavior as abnormal. Pandora’s Box had been opened, and the potential results of this were difficult to predict.

Parents who have more or less traditional expectations for our children find ourselves compelled to protect our children against a culture which increasingly condemns “normal” as a synonym for oppressive. Progressive intellectuals consider you a very bad parent if you expect your boys to be masculine and your girls to be feminine, and you are simply hateful if you expect your children to be heterosexual. Advocates of “gender-neutral parenting” denounce parents who encourage their sons to play sports or who permit their daughters to watch Disney princess movies (which are full of “heteronormative” messages, Women’s Studies professors warn us).

“Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of ‘normal’ as an achievement,” I wrote in April 2015 after examining the way gender theory is taught in universities. As our society has lost any consensus of what “normal” adulthood should entail, a growing and quite vocal segment of the culture have demanded that the traditional family and religious morality must be destroyed. This cultural conflict produces profoundly confusing messages for children growing up in a society where there is no generally accepted definition of what kind of adult they should grow up to be.

Amid this confusion, it has become apparent that, in many cases, the transgender cult is exploiting the vulnerability of young people with serious mental illnesses. Many young people buy into a prevailing attitude that “transition” is a cure for problems of identity and social maladjustment. Many of the harshest critics of the transgender movement are those who are “destransitioned,” having quit the process of sex-change “treatment.” One mentally ill 21-year-old lesbian who abandoned this process described herself as “angry as hell” about her experience with “transition-happy therapists and doctors” who “decided to try to medically correct” her, based on their belief that she would “stand a better chance at being a more normal man than a normal woman.” But what is “normal”? And who is qualified to decide?

The egalitarian mentality — the idea of that social hierarchy is always oppressive and that liberation is always the answer to our problems — tends to undermine every source of authority in society. When ordinary people are unable to distinguish between right and wrong, between normal and abnormal, they are compelled to appeal to “experts.” But how do we decide who is qualified as an “expert”? In regard to transgenderism, we find that many people seeking “treatment” end up in a worse condition than they were before they resorted to this expert-approved process. And now we have activists seeking to require schools and other public facilities to accommodate transgenderism despite concerns for women’s safety. What we realize, eventually, is that sane people are being compelled to adjust their own expectations in order to accommodate the demands of mentally ill people who are unable or unwilling to adjust to reasonable standards of social behavior...

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism."

Radical Activists Touring for Revolution in Venezuela

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Venezuela's become the magnet for social revolutionaries around the world, activists who're drawn to the regime of Hugo Chavez, where the air of anti-Americanism hangs over daily activities throughout the country:

Caracas in the early 2000s has become what Petrograd was under Lenin in the early 1900s. It's what Havana was in the early days of the Cuban revolution. It's what Chiapas, Mexico, became for a time in the 1990s when "Subcomandante Marcos" launched an armed struggle to help the indigenous people there – a magnet for socialists and students, radicals and revolutionaries, leftists and a few Hollywood luminaries.

Until recently, they didn't have anywhere to go. Socialism was in retreat, "revolutions" scarce. Then along came Mr. Chávez and his gambit to forge a "21st century socialism." Suddenly, Caracas is the new leftwing petri dish. "This is the most interesting social experiment in the world taking place today," says Fred Fuentes, an Australian who moved to Caracas last July, as he sips from a mug with the government motto "Rumbo al Socialismo" (On the way to Socialism). "Venezuela is the key place to be observing."

Since being sworn in as Venezuela's president in 1999, Chavez has championed the cause of the poor, making them the protagonists of his policies. He calls his crusade the Bolivarian Revolution, after Simón Bolívar who helped liberate Venezuela from Spain in the 1800s. His supporters say he is the only one who has ever cared about them. Critics call his peasant-class evangelism posturing – a man with too much oil money using politics as a personal sandbox.

Either way, he has given a sense of hope to and unleashed a fervor among millions of Venezuelans. "This is truly a revolution," notes Cira Mijares, a Caracas resident who says she found her voice when she joined a community council, a Chávez initiative to boost the poor.

It is this same sentiment that foreigners are arriving to steep in. At the International Miranda Center, which sits on the top floor of a hotel suite that houses large numbers of Cubans, who have been in Venezuela providing medical care and baseball training to the poor, visitors from around the world – with government aid – prepare conferences and papers on the merits of the country's social revolution. They talk politics, quote Lenin, and discuss the new cooperatives and councils....

The waves of wandering leftists usually co-incide with domestic upheaval in their own country. In the 1930s, when many trekked to the Soviet Union, it was widespread economic collapse around the world. In the 1960s and '70s, the Vietnam War and social unrest drove some dispirited Americans to socialist outposts. More recently the Iraq war has caused people to pack up their political tenets, such as Cindy Sheehan, the peace activist, who visited Chávez in 2006.

Other high-profile people have made brief appearances here, too, including actors Danny Glover and Sean Penn. But most are people like Jordan Winquist, who was working as a waiter in Philadelphia after college. One day searching Craigslist he found a job teaching English in Caracas. But politics was the real reason he journeyed here in 2006.

I wonder if people like Winquist genuinely understand the movement to which they're so romantically attracted.

As regular readers know, I do a lot of blogging on the radical left.

I found an interesting article recently on the antiwar movement, which has emerged during the Bush administration as the spearhead for the worldwide anti-capitalist revolution.

John Tierney, in his essay, "The Politics of Peace: What’s Behind the Anti-War Movement?", has some background on the membership and goals of today's "romantic" revolutionaries:

The irony of the modern “peace” movement is that it has very little to do with peace— either as a moral concept or as a political ideal. Peace is a tactical ideal for movement organizers: it serves as political leverage against U.S. policymakers, and it is an ideological response to the perceived failures of American society. The leaders of anti-war groups are modern-day Leninists. As Lenin used Russian war-weariness in 1917 to overthrow the Czar, so American street evolutionaries use reactions to the war on Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein as a way to foment radical political change at home.

The current peace movement is “neo-Communist,” says David Horowitz, the onetime radical-turned-conservative. This is a revealing and accurate label. In fact, the movement is heir to the Commu nist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), even though the party’s global base—the Soviet Union—no longer exists.

A variety of CPUSA splinter groups claim the mantle of the Left even as they spin-off a dizzying series of front groups and issue-oriented action “committees.” ANSWER is only the largest of these groups, which also include United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, Not In Our Name,the Green Party and the Institute for Policy Studies. The Bush Administration’s war on terror, which includes the Iraq war, has prompted all of them to form coalitions and seek allies. Their aim is a “struggle” against “oppression” and “imperialism,” code words in the lexicon of revolutionary socialism. Not In Our Name (NION), a satellite of the Revolutionary Communist Party, decries the War on Terror as a Bush Administration ploy: “We will not stop until all of us are free from your bloodthirsty domination.”

After the attacks of 9/11, when the enemy targeted Americans for terror and death, the need for a “peace movement” vanished. Remember the isolationist group America First? On December 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor, it honorably disbanded, declaring “The time for military action is here.” But the current movement just does the opposite. As this study demonstrates, many of today’s antiwar organizers used to support the Soviet Union and its proxies such as the Vietcong, the Sandinistas, North Korea, Castro’s Cuba and the Communist guerrillas in El Salvador. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern peace movement is composed of the ideological remnants of Communism. These groups are motivated by anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Semitism and anti-globalization. They are enamored of socialism, world revolution and class solidarity.

One of the great benefits of the Democratic Party's long nomination fight is that as the race grinds on, the public's offered penetrating revelations on just how deeply the modern Democratic Party base is rooted in the most radical forces on the contemporary political scene.

For example, ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers, whose relationship to Barack Obama is receiving intense scrutiny in the press, is an unbowed revolutionary who has said that ''I don't want to discount the possibility" of returning to direct violent action against the United States.

As Captain Ed point out, just last September Bernardine Dohrn, addressing an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the SDS, spoke of her movement's continuing radical activism to "overthrow" this government's "hateful structures" (at about 2:50 minutes):

Today, of course, top radical commentators around the left blogosphere have formed a tacit alliance with the most implacable antiwar and revolutionary activists on the scene.

Under the banner of "progressivism," radical bloggers like Jane Hamsher, and groups like MoveOn.org and the United for Peace and Justice coalition, have adopted electoral poltics as the most acceptable, mainstream method of overturning the traditional capitalist status quo.

Hard Truths About the Culture War

I'm reading Robert Bork's, A Time to Speak: Selected Writings and Arguments, which is a collection of Bork's life work dating back 50 years.

This afternoon I read Bork's 1995 essay, "Hard Truths About the Culture War," which despite its age, is the best essay on the rot and decay of American culture I've ever read.

Modern liberalism is most particularly a disease of our cultural elites, the people who control the institutions that manufacture or disseminate ideas, attitudes, and symbols-universities, some churches, Hollywood, the national press (print and electronic), much of the congressional Democratic party and some of the congressional Republicans as well, large sections of the judiciary, foundation staffs, and almost all the "public interest" organizations that exercise a profound if largely unseen effect on public policy. So pervasive is the influence of those who occupy the commanding heights of our culture that it is not entirely accurate to call the United States a majoritarian democracy. The elites of modern liberalism do not win all the battles, but despite their relatively small numbers, they win more than their share and move the culture always in one direction ....

What we are seeing in modern liberalism is the ultimate triumph of the New Left of the 1960s - the New Left that collapsed as a unified political movement and splintered into a multitude of intense, single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual groups, multiculturalists, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, and many more. In a real sense, however, the New Left did not collapse. Each of its splinters pursues a leftist agenda, but there is no publicly announced overarching philosophy that enables people to see easily that the separate groups and causes add up to a general radical left philosophy. The groups support one another and come together easily on many issues. In that sense, the splintering of the New Left made it less visible and therefore more powerful, its goals more attainable, than ever before.

In their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. These translate as bread and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion, while people are diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex ...

Read the whole thing, at the link.

The groups mentioned by Bork as "splintering into a multitude of intense, single-issue groups" are almost the complete roster of organizations composing the Obama administration's hard left-wing coalition called "Unity '09."

Bork was not optimistic in 1995, at the time of the essay's publication, of stanching the left's destruction of American culture. Yet the early backlash to the administration in tea parties and public opinion is certainly an encouraging sign for those hoping to reverse the bleak future promised by the radical left's culture warriors who have have seen the culmination of power in this administration.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls Declares 'War' on Radical Islam

Well, thank goodness somebody over there's declaring war on radical jihad.

At NYT, "French Premier Declares ‘War’ on Radical Islam as Paris Girds for Rally" (via Memeorandum):

PARIS — Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared Saturday that France was at war with radical Islam after the harrowing sieges that led to the deaths of three gunmen and four hostages the day before. New details emerged about the bloody final confrontations, and security forces remained on high alert.

“It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,” Mr. Valls said during a speech in Évry, south of Paris.

The authorities started the day hunting for the companion of one of the killers, only to learn later that she appeared to have fled to Turkey and then probably to Syria days before the first assault in Paris on Wednesday. The police had suspected that the woman — Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, the girlfriend of Amedy Coulibaly, believed to be one of the gunmen — might have played a role in one or more of the attacks.

“We are 99 percent sure that she traveled to Syria from Urfa,” said a Turkish intelligence official, referring to a city in southern Turkey. “There is no evidence that suggests she was involved in the terrorist attacks in France this week.”

France remained on edge a day after security forces killed Mr. Coulibaly, who the police said was responsible for the deaths of four hostages at a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes in eastern Paris on Friday, and Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the brothers who fatally shot 12 people on Wednesday in and around the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper.

The French government said it would put 500 additional troops on the streets over the weekend amid preparations for a giant unity rally in Paris on Sunday. A number of European officials said they would attend, including Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, the most prominent Muslim leader scheduled to be there, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people marched in Paris, Toulouse, Nice and other cities in a show of solidarity, and rallies were held in places as far away as Madagascar and Bangui, Central African Republic.

Top ministers in the French government held an emergency session to discuss measures to prevent a repeat of the attacks, which shocked the country and raised questions about why law enforcement agencies had failed to thwart terrorism suspects well known to the police and intelligence services.

Some of the surviving hostages shared chilling accounts of their ordeals at the hands of heavily armed captors, who they said had seemed prepared to die as police forces amassed outside the kosher supermarket and a printing plant northeast of Paris that the Kouachi brothers had seized early Friday.

Mr. Coulibaly, in an interview with a French television outlet not long before he was killed, claimed to be affiliated with the Islamic State, which has its headquarters in northern Syria. Officials identified him as the gunman in the fatal shooting of a female police officer in a Paris suburb on Thursday.

The crisis and its aftermath presented a major challenge to President François Hollande and his government, which are facing deep religious and cultural rifts in a nation with a rapidly growing Muslim population while simultaneously coping with the security threats stemming from Islamic extremists. Large numbers of French citizens have been traveling to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Mr. Hollande, appealing for unity, has warned against seeing Muslims as the enemy, and Mr. Valls called again on Saturday for citizens to join the rally planned for Sunday.

“There needs to be a firm message about the values of the republic and of secularism,” Mr. Valls said in Évry. “Tomorrow, France and the French can be proud. Everyone must come tomorrow.”...

I think they need to figure out how they're going to deal with Islam. It's not "radical" Islam. It's Islam. Smiting the infidels is in the Koran. Get that and they might be going somewhere.

More at the link.

The Problem of Obama's Tenured Radical Friend

There are some interesting developments concerning Barack Obama's relationship to Bill Ayers, the former '60s-era radical who's now a professor at the University of Illinois.

Sol Stern's got interesting piece up over at City Journal, "Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem: The Ex-Weatherman Is Now a Radical Educator With Influence":

Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.

Read the whole thing.

Stern's arguing that Ayers radical pedagogy is debilitating generations of American schoolchildren through the indoctrintation of anti-American radicalism:

Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.

I see plenty of evidence of this on my campus, but Stern, in discussing Ayers' radical classroom agenda, gives Obama a pass on his ties to the former Weatherman.

Not buying it, Andrew McCarthy's posted a response, "Re: Obama's Real Bill Ayers Problem":

Of course it's an enormous problem that Ayers has so much influence. But Stern writes:

"If [Mayor Richard] Daley fils can forgive Ayers for his past violence, why should Obama’s less consequential contacts with Ayers be a political disqualification? It’s hard to disagree." It's not at all hard to disagree. Daley is a hack, while Obama — who claims to be a transcendent unifying figure — wants to be president. Ayers hasn't merely engaged in "past violence"; he is saying in the here and now that he's sorry only that he didn't carry out more terrorist attacks — and it's in the here and now that Obama (who aspires to be commander-in-chief during a global war against terrorists) has cultivated him.

Stern further writes:

Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated.

Baloney! Obama is pretending to be clueless and Stern is falling for it.

As I recounted in this piece, Obama not only served for years on the Woods board with Ayers; he also appeared with him on a panel arranged by Associate Dean Michelle Obama at U-Chicago in connection with which (a) Ayers' "social justice" work to fight against the incarceration of juvenile criminals — which had utterly nothing to do with teaching English — was elaborately described, and (b) Obama was joined with Ayers precisely because his (Obama's) work as a state legislator to fight jail sentences for juvenile criminals dovetailed perfectly with Ayers' conception of "social justice."

Obama did not call Ayers an English teacher because he was confused or misinformed. He called Ayers an English teacher because he was lying. That is, he was intentionally minimizing his relationship with an anti-American revolutionary with whom Obama has been friendly, collaborative and entirely comfortable.

See also, the Chicago Tribune's profile of the tenured radical, Ayers, Though Quieter, 'Still Outspoken'":

Photo Credit, "The door to Bill Ayers' office at the University of Illinois is covered with pictures, cartoons, graphics and various political paraphernalia Thursday morning. Ayers himself was nowhere to be seen after his name came up Wednesday night in nationally televised debates between presidential candidates Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton," Chicago Tribune.

America's Academies for Jihad

From Ayaan Hirsi Ali, at the Wall Street Journal, "A radical imam threatened me with death—and was later hired to preach in U.S. prisons. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been":

Less than a year after I moved to the United States in 2006, I was asked to speak at the University of Pittsburgh. Among those who objected to my appearance was a local imam, Fouad El Bayly, of the Johnstown Islamic Center. Mr. Bayly was born in Egypt but has lived in the U.S. since 1976. In his own words, I had “been identified as one who has defamed the faith.” As he explained at the time: “If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death.”

After a local newspaper reported Mr. Bayly’s comments, he was forced to resign from the Islamic Center. That was the last I would hear of him—or so I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I learned recently that the man who threatened me with death for apostasy is being paid by the U.S. Justice Department to teach Islam in American jails.

According to records on the federal site USASpending.gov and first reported by Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller, the Federal Bureau of Prisons awarded Mr. Bayly a $10,500 contract in February 2014 to provide “religious services, leadership and guidance” to inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md. Ten months later he received another federal contract, worth $2,400, to provide “Muslim classes for inmates” at the same prison.

This isn’t a story about one problematic imam, or about the misguided administration of a solitary prison. Several U.S. prison chaplains have been exposed in recent years as sympathetic to radical Islam, including Warith Deen Umar, who helped run the New York State Department of Correctional Services’ Islamic prison program for two decades, until 2000, and who praised the 9/11 hijackers in a 2003 interview with this newspaper.

That same year, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism held hearings on radical Islamic clerics in U.S. prisons. Committee members voiced serious concerns over the vetting of Muslim prison chaplains and the extent of radical Islamist influences. Harley Lappin, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the time, said that “inmates are particularly vulnerable to recruitment by terrorists,” and that “we must guard against the spread of terrorism and extremist ideologies.”

Yet it is not clear what measures—if any—were taken in response to those concerns.

Testifying in 2011 before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Michael P. Downing, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Counterterrorism and Special Operations Bureau, said that in 2003 it was estimated that 17%-20% of the U.S. prison population, some 350,000 inmates, were Muslims, and that “80% of the prisoners who convert while in prison, convert to Islam.” He estimated that “35,000 inmates convert to Islam annually.”

Patrick Dunleavy, retired deputy inspector of the Criminal Intelligence Division at the New York State Department of Corrections, said in testimony that prison authorities often rely on groups such as the Islamic Leadership Council or the Islamic Society of North America for advice about Islamic chaplains. Yet those groups can and have referred individuals not suited to positions of influence over prisoners. As Mr. Dunleavy pointedly testified: “There is certainly no vetting of volunteers who provide religious instruction, and who, although not paid, wield considerable influence in the prison Muslim communities.”

The problem isn’t limited to radical clerics infiltrating prisons. Radical inmates proselytize and do their utmost to recruit others to their cause. Once released, they may seek to take their radicalization to the next level...

More.

Crossing Paths? Barack Obama and Williams Ayers

The conservative blogosphere's going to be saying, "give me a break"!

The New York Times has a big front-page story on the the intersecting lives of Barack Obama and William Ayers, the former Weatherman bomber who's now a radical professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.

Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.

Their relationship has become a touchstone for opponents of Mr. Obama, the Democratic senator, in his bid for the presidency. Video clips on YouTube, including a new advertisement that was broadcast on Friday, juxtapose Mr. Obama’s face with the young Mr. Ayers or grainy shots of the bombings.

In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, asked, “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”

More recently, conservative critics who accuse Mr. Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Mr. Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”

Of course, everyone knows the Times is in the tank for Obama. But you've got to hand it to Bill Keller for his innovative in-text ad placement for the Illinios Democrat.

The piece is a joke.

Crossed paths? It's more like comrades-in-arms. Here's Captain Ed:

How close does Obama have to be to make this connection a valid point? The two men worked together on political projects in Chicago. The issue has nothing to do with the quality of their friendship, if one exists (and there seems to be some evidence of one), but with the kind of work the two men did together. Ayers still agitates for the overthrow of the capitalist system, and his educational project was designed to create little charter schools for churning out radicals.

The American public ought to be ashamed at the distrastrous journalism it's getting from the country's "unofficial newspaper of record."

See also, "Dead Cops, Dead Marines... and Their Killers":

Barack Obama is a radical leftist whose career was launched at the home of radical leftists and who has affiliated himself with terrorists, radicals and unapologetic haters of America.

Photo Credit: New York Times

Paris Hilton Apologizes for Slamming Homosexual Men as Disgusting Pervs Probably Infected With AIDS

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Obama Dogged by 1960s Radical Ties

The American Issues Project has released a rebuttal to Barack Obama's Chicago-style campaign of intimidation against those speaking out against the Illinois Senator's associations with 1960s-era radical terrorists.

USA Today offers a background report, "Obama Dogged by Links to 1960s Radical":

Conservatives are stepping up efforts to turn 1960s radical Bill Ayers into a political liability for Barack Obama.

This spring, Obama's links to Ayers briefly became a campaign controversy. Now American Issues Project is spending $2.8 million to air a TV ad highlighting links between Obama and Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground Organization, which opposed the Vietnam War and was responsible for several bombings.

Obama released a rebuttal TV ad Monday. "With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the '60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers?" a narrator asks.

A movie, Hype: The Obama Effect, was first shown Sunday in Denver. It was made by Citizens United, another conservative group, and explores the Ayers-Obama connection and questions whether Obama can unite the country.

Documents released today by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) will be scrutinized for clues to the relationship.

Ayers was a founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school-reform group. Obama chaired its board from 1995-99. National Review reported last week that UIC said records detailing meetings and other business were public, then reversed itself. UIC said Friday there was a misunderstanding.

Obama and Ayers, now a professor and author, live a few blocks apart in this city's Hyde Park neighborhood. Conservative activists say their relationship is evidence that Ayers' radical politics helped mold Obama's views.

"Ayers is clearly a relevant issue as it relates to Obama's pattern of relationships," says David Bossie of Citizens United.

American Issues Project spokesman Christian Pinkston says Ayers' influence is an open question, but "it's hard to see how one actually could resolve having any sort of relationship with an admitted, remorseless domestic terrorist."

The ad notes that Weathermen bombed the Capitol and asks why Obama would "be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it?"

Ed Failor, a founder of American Issues Project, worked for John McCain's Iowa campaign.

The Obama campaign on Monday released a letter sent to the Justice Department last week asserting that the American Issues Project ad violates federal rules that bar tax-exempt political groups from advocating a candidate's election or defeat. Pinkston called it "a sad ploy to circumvent the First Amendment." The campaign also released a letter sent last week to TV stations disputing the ad's truthfulness.

Campaign officials say the 47-year-old candidate and the 63-year-old UIC education professor have only a casual relationship.

"The last time Obama saw Ayers was about a year ago when he crossed paths with him while biking in the neighborhood," says Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman. "The suggestion that Ayers was a political adviser to Obama or someone who shaped his political views is patently false."

Actually, the patent falshood is the lie that Obama's trying to perputate on the American people.

This story's received intense coverage from commentators in the right-wing press and blogosphere. It's high times for the mainstream media to pick up on this scandal and run with it.

See also: "Attack Ads Slam Obama Ahead of Democratic Convention!", and "Fighting Back Against Obama’s Thugs."

True Liberals Must Debunk the Left's Campus Bigots

From Professor Michael Curtis, at the American Thinker, "Liberals Must Refute the Leftist Bigots on Campus":

Tis the season of Commencement discontent. Let me count in alphabetical order the number of universities affected by the growing intolerance of bigots on campuses in North America.  Among them are Azusa Pacific, Brandeis, Brown, California, Concordia, Haverford, North Carolina, Rutgers, Smith, and Swarthmore.  Withdrawals by individuals to be honored or invited to speak, whether due to university action or voluntary, are now as familiar as leftist indoctrination of university students.

There is always an excuse, a feeble excuse, for the protests, whether the rationale is an action or a supposed action by the person to be honored, or some controversial words written or spoken. Among those absurd excuses are: the attempts by administrators to restore order when a protest was disrupting campus life, criticism of some features of Islam, International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies that predated the tenure of the recipient towards developing countries, police racial profiling in New York City, views on immigration policy, disapproval of abortion.

The objects of the intolerance are not extreme political activists, but prominent and distinguished members of the professions and society. They should be named. Robert L. Birgeneau, a former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley who is in fact admired for liberal social views. Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, the first woman to hold this position and one of the most powerful women in the world. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born activist who has made critical and controversial remarks about the religion of Islam and the ideology of Islamism from which she has herself suffered. Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State and Provost at Stanford. Charles Murray, distinguished author known for controversial views on race class, and intelligence. Raymond Kelly, former New York City Police Commissioner. Robert Zoellick, former president of the World Bank.  These multiple incidents today are reminiscent of the event in 1983 when Jeanne Kirkpatrick, political scientist and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, was denied a platform at Berkeley.

Although these distinguished people would exemplify the diversity that universities claim to foster, their offence was that they did not agree, or were thought not to agree, with the protestors. They have offended the ideological conformity of the protesting intolerant bigots who would be numbed by hearing views other than their own. The arrogance and close-mindedness of the protestors prevents them from listening to alternative points of view.

The goal of inquiry and research at colleges is to search for truth and challenge accepted points of views. But the dominant mode of protests and of much teaching in the social sciences and humanities is a form of leftist fascism, preventing speech with which one disagrees. The politically correct norm at present is not conservative or status quo views, but rather the opposite, radical intolerant ones. Do those intolerant protests help the growth of social justice?  Both practical activity and highly perverse intellectual argument suggest an answer.

The impetus to leftist politicization occurred in 1964 when the radicals in the University of California Free Speech Movement occupied the administration building in Berkeley, the first such “conquest” in the country. It led to the reshaping of curriculum in an overtly radical direction, and hiring of faculty who leaned towards those changes. It has also led to incredible ignorance, stupidity, and bigotry.

The case at hand is that of the several hundred students at Smith today whose protests led to the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde from Commencement. Their absurd message was that the IMF “was a primary culprit in the failed developmental policies implanted in some of the world’s poorest countries. This led directly to the strengthening of imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” The young women at Smith were not informed about or thought it unimportant to mention the “oppression and abuse” of hundreds of women, not by the IMF, but by honor killings every year in Muslim countries.

The current protestors have taken to heart the answer, even if they cannot take time from their protests to read the actual text, given in 1965 by Herbert Marcuse, who taught for a number of years at Brandeis, in his essay Repressive Tolerance. Among his more engaging conclusions was that, “the objective of tolerance would call for injustice towards prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions.”  This logically meant rigid restrictions on teachings and practices with which he disagreed in educational institutions. Perhaps Marcuse did not specifically suggest the shouting down or forbidding of intellectual opponents, but his advocacy of repression or limitation of expression has been taken by the present day bigots to its logical conclusion.

Many objective studies have indicated the host of problems on campuses today: the highly disproportionate number, by very large margins, of far leftist members of university faculty, and sometimes administration; raucous and highly active leftist student groups; one sided teaching if not indoctrination in class and in texts used in many of the social sciences and in history courses; a preponderance of radical campus guest speakers; the incessant activity of radical Islamic campus organizations.

Sixty-five years ago Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote The Vital Center, a book aiming to support liberal democracy against the ideologies of communism and fascism. Though it is not directly relevant to today’s campus intolerance, the book is pertinent for its practical suggestion to “restore the balance between the individual and community.” There is an urgent need for a balance today in campus behavior and for a vigorous response to the changes in recent years in that behavior. Free speech and free thought are being limited by the actions of leftists, many of whom are aging radical revolutionaries left over from the 1960s, and the students they have indoctrinated. The desirable features of intellectual diversity, essential for any real university, are declining. It would be reasonable to argue that this issue of intellectual diversity is as important, and perhaps now more important, than the issues of racial and gender diversity.

A distinction must be drawn between the radical leftists on one hand and true liberals, a group that on the issue of intellectual freedom would include conservatives today. Liberals have to make their voices heard on campuses. They must proclaim themselves as supporters of real tolerance on campuses, the right of speakers who are not leftists to be heard, that ideological indoctrination by faculty and choice of textbooks should be criticized, that conservative faculty or speakers should not be confronted by a hostile environment, that speech codes that ban politically oriented speech be abolished, and even that administrators should question the self-perpetuation of their radical faculty and appoint real liberals and even conservatives...

Not hard.

Just let them speak. As soon as leftists utter a sound the bullshit sirens will be sounding in overtime. These people are nothing but hateful buffoons who wither at calm, cool and collected reason.

More.

Obama's Community Organization of Power

One of the most imporant and fundamentally radical elements of Barack Obama's political journey is his experience as a Chicago community organizer.

The nature of community organization is inherently leftist and anti-establisment. Rooted in progressive social activism, community action is an Americanized version of the proletarian class struggle of the Marxist-Leninist ideological program. As such its essential project is the overthrow of institutions of hierarchical dominance and the decimation of the oppressive classes. It is totalizing in its project to defeat the reigning patterns of alleged hegemony of class and race. It seeks to give power to "the people."

The contemporary progressive left is well aware of Obama's practice of radical community organization. Progressives see in Obama one of their own. He'll take his politics of agitation, practiced on the Chicago South Side, to the national level.

The political appeal and current application of this leftist Trojan Horse is explained by John Maki, in his essay, "Obama's "Community Organizer" Phase Was About Political Power, Not Soup Kitchens":

"Community organizer."

If you've heard the term, you likely learned about it through Barack Obama's memoir or one of his speeches where he talks about his time working in poor neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side in the 1980s. He refers to this time in his life a lot. Obama leans on it, hard, while stumping. But what does it mean?

"One of my fundamental beliefs from my days as a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up ... And there's no more powerful tool for grassroots organizing than the Internet."

-Barack Obama

What do community organizers actually do? How do they do it? And how has Obama's experience as a community organizer shaped his run for the presidency?

Well, as Maki indicates, community organizers practice a brutalizing politics of fear and power. Community progressives achieve their aims through a politics of implacable belligerency. It is the politics of abject thuggery. It is based in confrontation and scare-tactics. Those subjected to the community activist model will be offered a deal they can't refuse - there'll be hell to pay in going against the will of the people:

If you think these tactics resemble standard forms of political intimidation, you are right ... community organizing is old-fashioned, bare-knuckle politics for the little guy.

This is also what most coverage of Obama's days as a community organizer fails to appreciate. For whether you are an Alinksy-schooled community organizer or a Chicago politician, you are a student of power. If you have survived long enough to succeed in either position, like Obama has, you have learned not to worry so much about the power you have. What keeps you up at night is the power you do not have. In community organizing and politics, you know the only thing that can hurt you is what you cannot control.

Since Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, he has been accused of moving to the center and flip-flopping on positions he adopted during the primary. This criticism misses the point. In his recent moves, Obama, the community organizer, is simply trying to build new alliances as he neutralizes threats to his power. It is what any Chicago-trained community organizer worth his salt would do.

The fruits of Obama's community organization model can be seen in the latest revelations surrounding the presumptive nominee's ties to ACORN, the Chicago-based radical community action group. As Stanley Kurtz notes:

Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama.

Obama has been tremendously successful in keeping his oppositional community ties out of the national spotlight. There's been some attention to Obama's South Side radicalism, but for the most part the soft, respectable images of Barack Obama as a Harvard-trained lawyer and family man, with some sprinklings of benign multiculturalism, have prevailed as the dominant narrative.

The truth is otherwise.

Obama's steeped in the oppositional model of critical race studies. His theology's one of black liberation, social revolution, and hatred. He has known ties to ex-revolutionary fugitives William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, activists today who still denounce the United States and stomp on the American flag; and Obama's family ties have deep and troubling foundations in doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist activism and ideology.

The foundations of Obama's community organization of power are found in his radical ideological, political, and religious history.

This is the political program Obama will take to Washington if he's elected this November.

See also, Rick Moran, "Obama's Ties to ACORN More Substantial Than First Believed."