Sunsara Taylor’s perpetual revolution

Sunsara Taylor, whom we’ve been discussing this week, is currently telling anyone who will listen that Donald Trump is a fascist, worse than Hitler, who will gradually introduce a cruel dictatorship and maybe even destroy the entire planet in a nuclear Armageddon. You might induce from this that Taylor cherishes American freedom and sees Trump as a disastrously departure from the previous occupants of the Oval Office. Um, no. Last year, long before the election of Trump as president seemed even a remote possibility, Taylor was on the warpath against the American system. Along with her Revolutionary Communist Party comrade Carl Dix, as we saw yesterday, she set out on a national tour of college campuses with a goal of recruiting revolutionaries and overthrowing the government. The press release announcing the tour read, in part:

This world cries out for radical change….

A radically different and far better world is possible—getting rid of this madness and horror, and getting beyond a world of oppression, exploitation, and domination. This will take an Actual Revolution.

“Revolution” and “socialism” are in the air…But a real revolution—one that aims to change the world—is radically different and, yes, more demanding. A real revolution requires a scientific understanding of society and how to radically change it. That science has been qualitatively developed by the revolutionary leader, Bob Avakian. We’re coming to your campus to get into this with you.

The tour appears to have been something less than a spectacular success. Witness a report by Columbia University student journalist Micah Fleck. “Though flyers spangled the hallways and scaffolding of Columbia’s campus promoting Carl Dix and Sunsara Taylor for Months,” wrote Fleck, “fewer than two dozen students attended their April 13 talk in a room that can seat more than 200.”

But Taylor didn’t let the pathetically low turnout defeat her. Referring to the cause, quite simply, as “The Revolution,” she and Dix presented a “new constitution,” which the RCP had helpfully published in book form in 2010. (It can be read in its entirely – 104 pages – here.) Taylor told her cozy audience that her movement sought to bring about “a world without America and everything America stands for.”

As we’ve noted, no matter what the name of the group or the specific cause du jour, Taylor has always been nothing more or less than an operative for the RCP. And her specific groups and movements and campaigns have never been anything other than efforts to enhance the RCP’s influence and power. And, above all, to raise the profile of Bob Avakian. Even a relatively sympathetic student, Pier Harrison, who attended one of her events at New York University in February 2010, was taken aback by the fact that she spoke “with cult-like reverence for party Chairman Bob Avakian.”

Harrison reported that “[b]etween Taylor’s speech and the Q&A[,] staff sent around collection baskets, just like in Church, for donations to support her tour, and the goals of the RCP.” Harrison asked moderator Annie Day, also an RCP member, whether she, Taylor, and their comrades “intended to stage a violent or non-violent revolution. Her response: violent.

So, would there be bloodshed? Day replied: “Revolution is a serious business. This is not just the frustrations of individuals. We are not pacifists. So to answer your question, yes.” Harrison wrote: “The most mind-blowing part of this whole event was realizing that by ‘revolution’ they mean that they are willing to kill people.” He also suggested that “the RCP has hijacked the feminist agenda to further its own will to power, which, again, they do not hide.” He was certainly correct about that. Whether the issue is war or women’s rights or the Trump presidency, the business of the RCP – with Sunsara Taylor as its public face and voice – is hijacking, pure and simple.

Posted on March 31, 2017March 26, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Sunsara Taylor’s war on “the war on women”

We’re spending this week in the constantly agitating company of tireless activist Sunsara Taylor, a longtime member of Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party. Over the years, she’s been the public face of a number of different groups purportedly dedicated to fighting different injustices. These days, as we’ve seen, she’s a spokeswoman for Refuse Fascism, which seeks to unseat President Trump (who, she argues, is worse than Hitler) and replace him with (who else?) Bob Avakian. Years ago, as we saw yesterday, she was involved in End Pornography and Patriarchy, a bold campaign to end America’s “war on women,” which, again, only Avakian could put a stop to.

Another group on Taylor’s résumé was “The World Can’t Wait,” which was active around 2007 and which was one of many organizations protesting America’s war in Iraq. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel that the real point of “The World Can’t Wait” was to bring in members who were motivated by antiwar sentiments as a first step toward recruiting them into the RCP. Taylor “spoke at over 50 campuses” in an effort to “Drive Out the Bush Regime” and thus bring an end to the war. In connection with this antiwar effort, she and her colleagues also made a practice of shouting down politicians who were trying to deliver speeches. “The World Can’t Wait” made a good deal of noise during George W. Bush’s presidency but seems to have disappeared into the ether by the time Barack Obama took office.

But Taylor didn’t go away. After putting in a good few months trying to stop America’s wars in the Middle East, she shifted gears and threw herself, heart and soul, into an effort to rid the planet of religion. This movement was tied in with the publication of Avakian’s 2008 book Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. Just as “The World Can’t Wait” seemed to be a transparent attempt to exploit the antiwar movement to gain RCP converts, so Away With All Gods and the attendant activism comes off as a painfully obvious effort to swell RCP ranks by piggybacking onto the then-hot atheism movement spearheaded by Christopher Hitchens, whose bestseller God Is Not Great had come out in 2007, and Richard Dawkins, whose The God Delusion appeared in 2008.

Last year found Taylor involved in yet another crusade. In the months prior to the election that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Taylor was busy helping to run the RCP’s “Get into the Revolution Organizing Tour.” Along with her RCP comrade Carl Dix, she traveled from campus to campus around the U.S., trying to convince students “to become communists and kill off America.” On to that triumph tomorrow.

Posted on March 30, 2017March 30, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Fighting for Communism: Sunsara Taylor

As we saw yesterday, Sunsara Taylor is very worked up about the election of Donald Trump. She and her colleagues in a group called Refuse Fascism warn that he’s as bad as Hitler – no, worse! – and call on the entire country to take to the streets and force him out of power. Rarely has any guest on a political interview show seemed as close to outright hysteria as Taylor did on Tucker Carlson Tonight one night in mid February.

SONY DSC — Taylor and friends on the warpath

It’s a shame, because before Trump entered the White House, Taylor was just a quiet housewife who – no, just kidding. In fact, Taylor has spent at least the last decade being splenetic over something or other. Before Refuse Fascism, there were other groups with other names. The complaint varied from group to group. But the rage was always there. The prescription for change was always the same: to bring people out into the streets, screaming and protesting and committing acts of vandalism. And the ultimate goal was always identical – a society living under Communism, Bob Avakian style, with Bob’s Revolutionary Communist Party calling the shots and Bob himself installed as Beloved Leader.

“I’m fighting for Communism,” Taylor said, quite straightforwardly, in a 2010 public appearance. She was quick to acknowledge that historic Communism had erred a bit once or twice, but she assured her audience that Avakian’s supposedly new and improved version of Communism would work out terrifically.

Anyway, on to Refuse Fascism’s forerunners. One of them was End Pornography and Patriarchy, a movement to eliminate what Taylor described as “The Enslavement and Degradation of Women.” While Trump was still busy making real-estate deals and videotaping episodes of his NBC series The Apprentice, Taylor was getting apoplectic over what she called America’s “war on women.” Of course, according to her there was only one way to stop this “war on women”: to take to the streets, bring down the government, and replace constitutional democracy with “the new synthesis on [sic] revolution and communism developed by Bob Avakian.”

In one of her harangues about “the war on women,” Taylor issued an “urgent call” to all and sundry, young people especially, “who are uncompromising and defiant in their refusal to accept and their determination to defeat the current war on women.” Inviting the members of her audience to join her in “a new movement…that aims to affect all of society” and “change people’s thinking” and “seize back the moral high ground…throughout every corner of society,” Taylor urged them “to go out into the streets…to unmask the horrors that people have grown accustomed to” and “go forward from there until we win.” As part of her campaign, Taylor defended late-term abortion, implying in one video that a fetus doesn’t look like a human baby until after it’s born.

sunsaratexas — Taylor being placed under arrest in Texas

One anecdote from 2012 is illuminating. While pro-life activists were holding a street protest during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Taylor and some of her comrades showed up. “They were carrying signs and blowing whistles,” 11-year-old Zoe Griffin told a reporter. “They were jumping around and chanting things like ‘A baby’s not a baby ’til it comes out, that’s what birthdays are all about.’” They were also waving signs that read “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology.” “They were acting like five-year-old children,” Griffin said. When Taylor saw Griffin and other pro-lifers who themselves were praying while holding signs that read “I’m a person” and that featured images of fetuses, she began screaming at them, pointing to one after another while saying “You’re a person! You’re a person!” When she got to Griffin, she said, “Fetuses are not.” But that wasn’t enough. Taylor told Griffin “you’re a stupid kid.” When Griffin broke into tears, Taylor turned to the adult pro-lifers, including Griffin’s mother, and said: “Look what you’re doing to this little girl with all your bullshit. You’re making this little girl cry!”

More tomorrow.

Posted on March 29, 2017March 26, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

For her, Trump isn’t Hitler. He’s worse.

Recently we spent a few days recounting the curious careers of Bob Avakian, longtime head of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and his loyal sidekick Carl Dix.

As it happens, there’s a third figure who looms large in the RCP and who deserves her place in the sun on this website. Her name: Sunsara Taylor. She surfaced recently on the Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight, where she was identified as an “organizer” of a movement called Refuse Fascism. Its exclamation-point-heavy website explains its position:

Bob Avakian

In the Name of Humanity,

We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!

Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!

The Trump/Pence Regime is a Fascist Regime. Not insult or exaggeration, this is what it is. For the future of humanity and the planet, we, the people, must drive this regime out.

Donald Trump and Mike Pence have assembled a vicious cabal that has put forth positions and begun initiatives which demonstrate that they fully intend to shred political and social norms with catastrophic consequence. Because Trump has his finger on the nuclear trigger, the Trump/Pence regime is more dangerous to the world than even Hitler….

The Trump/Pence regime will repeatedly launch new highly repressive measures, eventually clamping down on all resistance and remaking the law…IF THEY ARE NOT DRIVEN FROM POWER.

During her six-minute appearance on Carlson’s show, Taylor may have set a world record for comparing Trump to Hitler. “We the people,” she insisted, “must drive this regime out!” Donald Trump and Mike Pence, she charged, “are operating out of Hitler’s playbook.” She referred to Trump’s “Nazi inauguration.” Her prescription for change: “We need to pour into the streets and say no….We must drive them out. We must stay in the streets.”

Quite a show. But as it turns out, Refuse Fascism is only the latest in a long list of groups with which Taylor has been involved. Or perhaps the proper term should be “pseudo-groups” or “front groups,” because in fact Taylor has, all along, been nothing more or less than an RCP operative and a devout disciple of Avakian.

These various groups or sub-movements (or whatever you want to call them) have come and gone over the years, rising up at a certain point – apparently in an effort to catch a wave of public feeling – and then disappearing when the wave breaks on the shore. They all involve a good deal of money-grubbing. Case in point: Refuse Fascism’s Facebook page urges supporters “to start out with a $5 donation” and be “part of crowdfunding this movement to stop this fascist, illegitimate regime from ruling.”

Tomorrow we’ll take a little stroll through Sunsara Taylor’s previous attempt to overthrow the U.S.A. – and rake in cash for the RCP.

Posted on March 28, 2017March 29, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Socialism’s triumph: Oil-rich Venezuela is out of gas

As the Venezuelan economy continues to circle the drain, perhaps the quintessential symbol of the extraordinary personal incompetence of President Nicolás Maduro and of the thoroughgoing failure of the socialist system he inherited from his predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez, has been the mind-boggling inability of this, one of the top oil-producing nations on earth, to meet its own people’s demand for gasoline. This shortfall has occurred despite the fact that Venezuela has actually been importing fuel – for most of which, according to reports, it has been unable to pay its bills.

Cars lined up for gas at Maturin, Venezuela, on March 23

Over the last few months, despite continual reassurances by Maduro, the supply crisis has only gotten worse. On February 21, Maduro promised “good news soon” because he had installed a “new PDVSA board” that was dedicated to fighting “corruption and unnecessary costs.” On March 22, however, thanks to maintenance issues, production challenges, shipping difficulties, and a shortage of working trucks attributed to a lack of spare parts – in other words, significant problems at pretty much every stage of the oil extraction and distribution process – the situation had deteriorated to a point at which the entire nation was experiencing a critical shortage of petrol. At gas stations across the country, dozens of cars could be seen queued up, their owners hoping in vain to be able to fill their tanks.

Aside from the magnificently unmasterly Maduro himself, the personification of this embarrassing dilemma is Eulogio del Pino, president of the country’s colossal oil entity, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), which is the primary engine of the nation’s economic power, such as it is. Or was. In a touch that would seem insane in the policies of any country but that these days seems par for the course for the Bolivarian Republic, just a couple of days ago came the news that Venezuela, despite its domestic oil crunch and its emergency oil-import policy, had not only continued but stepped up fuel exports to Cuba, Nicaragua, and other allies.

On March 23, a man in Maturin pushes his car after running out of gas

But, as with much else about Venezuela’s current, many-faceted nightmare, the chief culprit here seems to be Maduro himself. Apparently more interested, even now, in shoring up and enhancing his own power than in trying to rescue his nation from catastrophe, he’s dismissed relatively skilled key officials in the PDVSA and replaced them with his political and military cronies, most of whom have little or no background in the oil business – or, for that matter, in the competent management of anything. Other PDVSA executives, recognizing that Maduro’s hirings and firings are only helping to drive the state-owned company even further into the ground, have jumped ship of their own accord, presumably recognizing that at this point, under present governance, the whole massive enterprise is, quite simply, doomed.

In the midst of all this drama, Del Pino, in what can only be read as a display of the remarkably tone-deaf insouciance that so often characterizes the mindless, mediocre agents of ineffectual and indifferent authoritarian states, visited a fuel distribution plant where, in response to a chorus of irate complaints by laborers about their working conditions and salaries, simply smiled inanely, loftily ignoring their concerns. Somehow, that distant and detached reaction seemed the perfect summing-up of the whole ridiculous tragedy.

Posted on March 27, 2017March 27, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Hooey from Hughey

So far this week we’ve met a couple of college professors who, not realizing they were being videotaped, browbeat their students after Donald Trump’s election victory – and ended up going viral. Today we’ll pay a quick visit to an academic who went public himself with his reaction to the election results.

His name: Matthew Hughey. An Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut (he’s also on the Adjunct Faculty of the Africana Studies Institute and American Studies Program), he’s written several books with titles like The White Savior Film; Race and Ethnicity in Secret and Exclusive Social Orders; White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race; The Obamas and a (Post) Racial America?; and 12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today.

Plainly, the red thread running through his work is race. According to him, all of his scholarship is guided by a single question: “What is the relationship between the heterogeneous interpretations of race and the long-term staying power of racism and racial inequality?” We’re not sure that we entirely understand this question, but let’s not allow that to distract us. In order to probe his guiding question, Hughey explains, he studies “race and ethnicity as a dynamic and ongoing practice with an emphasis on racism, meaning-making, and asymmetrical relations of power.” So race and ethnicity are practices? Or, rather, a practice? Welcome to academia. “A thorough scholastic comprehension of race,” Hughey maintains, “must move beyond views of static identities or ideologies. Rather, an understanding of the processes and contexts that produce race, how race is imbued with particular meanings, and how race constrains and enables pathways of human action and order, is necessary.”

Um, what? Hold on, his next paragraph is quite a bit clearer:

I situate my worldview against concepts of social life that are entirely individualistic and which analyze society only in terms of psychological make-up, skills, and atomistic behaviors. These assumptions gesture toward a belief that social structures will magically change via one’s hard work, good intentions, or education. History affords too many examples of participation by the “righteous,” “educated,” and “hard-working” in structures of oppression to allow any objective observer of social life to accept that notion that equitable or just social arrangements are based entirely on the redemption of the individual without direct attention to external social forces.

Simply put: black people are still held back by racism, no matter how skilled they are and how hard they work. There’s a degree of truth in this, of course. Prejudice has held back all kinds of people in every society throughout human history. The main point, however, should be that America today is less racist than virtually any country at any time, ever. Four years ago, as it happens, the World Values Survey found that the U.S. is one of the least racist countries on earth. Check out this map, which suggests that a serious, scrupulous scholar who was genuinely interested in exploring racism would do far better to study India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia – in fact almost anywhere outside of the Americas, the Anglosphere, and Scandinavia – than to focus on the U.S.

But to the likes of Hughey, racism in the above-named countries – racism everywhere other than in the West – is invisible. Or irrelevant. Or, perhaps, attributable, via some contorted academic logic, to Western colonialism and/or American imperialism. For the whole point of the kind of “scholarship” that people like Hughey pursue is to prove, for the millionth time, that America is Ground Zero for all human iniquity. Again, yes, there is abundant iniquity in the U.S. But there’s more of it almost everywhere else on the planet. And to ignore that fact as systematically as Hughey and other academics in the social sciences do today is to give a pass to a great deal of outright evil.

Which brings us to Hughey’s take on Donald Trump’s election. He wasn’t happy with it, of course – and he blamed it on (what else?) white supremacism. When confronted on this assertion by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Hughey readily added that Trump’s ascendancy was also the fault of three other vices: sexism, heteronormativity, and capitalism. But the main cause of Trump’s win, he insisted, was race – because America is and has always been afflicted by white supremacy. There was, to be sure, one little detail Hughey didn’t explain: how had an electorate so thoroughly and permanently poisoned by a white supremacist mentality managed to elect a black man to the presidency twice in a row?

Posted on March 24, 2017March 27, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Orange Coast College: punishing the victim

Yesterday we met Olga Perez Stable Cox, who teaches courses in Human Sexuality at a California institution called Orange Coast College and who made national headlines in December after a videotape of one of her classroom rants about Donald Trump went viral. Members of the student Feminist Club, fearing Cox might face disciplinary action, held a rally in her support. The College Republicans held a counter-rally in support of the student who had taken the video, freshman Caleb O’Neil, who faced possible legal action by the teachers’ union and possible suspension by college officials.

Alejandro Vargas, deputy secretary of OCC College Republicans, post a quote from instructor Olga Perez Stable Cox as they counter-protest a rally where other students, including those in the Feminist Club, rally in support of instructor Olga Perez Stable Cox in Costa Mesa, California, December 12, 2016. A video clip of Cox telling her human sexuality class that electing Trump was an act of terrorism has gone viral. A student said the teacher asked all Trump supporters to stand up so she could, "Show the class who to watch out for" (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG) — The counter-protest: Alejandro Vargas of the College Republicans with a poster quoting from Cox’s rant

When they realized O’Neil was in danger, other students from Cox’s classes came forward to defend him and to amplify the case against Cox. One of them, Vincent Wetzel, said that Cox’s rant “has nothing to do with free speech.” Cox, he argued, was “overstepping her profession.” Wetzel, who is gay, told the Orange County Register: “Of all the people who are supposed to provide an inclusive environment, it’s her. Now, I don’t feel comfortable.”

Orange Coast College student Caleb O'Neil is being suspended for videotaping his teacher, Olga Perez Stable Cox as she was making strong anti-Trump comments a week after the election. in Costa Mesa on Wednesday, February 15, 2017. (Photo by Sam GangwerOrange County Register/SCNG) — Caleb O’Neil

Two students said that after O’Neil had stopped taping, she’d asked Trump voters in the class “to stand up and show the rest of the class who to watch out for and protect yourself from.” When no one in the class stood up, she accused them of being “too embarrassed” to admit to supporting Trump. One student, Tanner Webb, rejected the faculty union president’s claim that Cox had been inviting students to discuss the election results and that O’Neil had “chosen to not engage in a discussion.” Cox’s “anti-Trump rant,” said Webb, “was no open debate to engage students.” As it happens, Webb was enrolled in another class taught by Cox, and in that one, too, he said, she “continually bashed on Trump supporters, belittling them and making it seem like every person who voted for Trump was an LGBT community hating white supremacist.”

In the end, sure enough, O’Neil was suspended. At a press conference, he said that he’d taped Cox “because I was honestly scared that I would have repercussions with my grades because she knew I was a Trump supporter.” In a joint statement, college president Dennis Harkins joined faculty and union leaders in fully backing Cox, who, they said, had done nothing other than exercise her right to “express views that may challenge student opinions, world view, or ideology.” (In a rare example of good news from this front, it was reported on February 23 that O’Neil’s suspension, under national pressure, had been rescinded.)

Orange Coast College student Caleb O'Neil and his attorney William Becker, right, speak to the media about O'Neil being suspended for videotaping his teacher, Olga Perez Stable Cox as she was making strong anti-Trump comments a week after the election. in Costa Mesa on Wednesday, February 15, 2017. (Photo by Sam GangwerOrange County Register/SCNG) — O’Neil and his attorney William Becker hold a press conference

As for Cox, she told anyone who would listen that, far from being a bully, she was the one who’d been bullied. A month later, she was still unapologetic, telling the Register “I didn’t say anything wrong or do anything wrong. I didn’t say anything that thousands of Americans weren’t feeling or saying…I don’t regret it.” O’Neil, she insisted, was “part of a national campaign to intimidate liberal professors.” Meanwhile, it emerged that in addition to punishing O’Neil, OCC administrators were investigating the College Republican club – an act that club president Joshua Recalde Martinez described as “Gestapo-like.”

That’s an overstatement, we hope. But there’s no denying that Cox’s effort to “identify, humiliate, and shame” her pro-Trump students (as the College Republicans’ lawyer, Shawn Steele, aptly put it) was rooted in a disturbing authoritarian impulse of precisely the sort that Cox had accused Trump of personifying – and that an equally authoritarian impulse informed the decision by OCC and union officials to punish Caleb O’Neil and the College Republicans for bringing Cox’s petty classroom tyranny to light.

Posted on March 23, 2017March 22, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Another faculty bully

Yesterday we discussed David Parry, an obscure professor at an obscure Philadelphia university, who earned his 15 minutes of fame recently after one of his students posted on You Tube a covert video of him subjecting a class to an unhinged political rant.

Parry’s not alone. On the other side of the country, at Orange Coast College – a two-year institution in Costa Mesa, California – an instructor whom nobody has ever heard of made headlines for doing exactly the same thing. The only differences are that (a) her rant was even worse than his and (b) she’s perhaps even more obscure than he is. In fact, you could copy her “bio” page at the college’s website onto the back of your hand. “This is my 30th year at OCC! I love teaching!” it begins. (What is it about these mediocre community-college teachers and exclamation points?) “I was born in Habana Cuba and immigrated to the U.S. when I was 10 years old,” she writes. (Yes, she spells it “Habana” and doesn’t use commas around the word “Cuba.”) “I am the oldest of 4 children. I lived in Philadelphia, New York, and Idaho prior to moving to Southern California in 1967.” Her education: a 1973 B.A. in sociology from Cal State Fullerton and a 1975 M.A. in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling from Chapman College (now Chapman University).

Her name is Olga Perez Stable Cox, and here’s what happened: in December, she took time out of a Human Sexuality class to tell her students that the then President-elect, Donald Trump, is a “white supremacist,” and that Mike Pence, the Vice President-elect, is “one of the most antigay humans in this country.” Cox called their election “an act of terrorism” – thereby providing a perfect example of the radical left’s readiness to excuse actual acts of violence and terrorism while describing mere statements or policies or election results that they don’t like as acts of violence and terrorism. “We have been assaulted,” she maintained, and it was clear who the “we” were and who had done the assaulting. It’s “frightening,” she went on to say, that Trump voters “are among us” – that they include “people in our families and our circle of friends.”

One of Cox’s students, freshman Caleb O’Neil, videotaped her rant, then took it to the College Republicans club, which posted it online. Cox’s rant made the local news. Joshua Recalde Martinez, the president of the club, told a reporter the obvious: this wasn’t education but indoctrination.

Did Cox apologize? No, she complained to her union – which called the video a “setup,” described O’Neil’s action as “unethical,” and threatened him with legal action. Shawn Steel, an attorney who volunteered to represent the College Republicans pro bono, told the local news that just as Cox had bullied her students, her union’s leaders, too, were “acting like bullies…like thugs.” So were the college administrators, who threatened O’Neil with suspension. The college president, Dennis Harkins, issued a feeble statement declaring that “the college encourages discourse” as long as it’s “in context.”

Did Cox get in trouble? Tune in tomorrow.

Posted on March 22, 2017March 22, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Propaganda in the classroom

We’re always puzzled to find someone who teaches “communications” at the college level but who seems to have had very little professional experience in the field. David Parry received a B.A. at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. at the University of Albany, taught at the University of Texas at Dallas from 2007 to 2013, and since then has been an Associate Professor at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where he is chair of the Communications Department. “His work,” according to the university’s website, “focuses on understanding the complex social and cultural transformations brought about by the development of the digital network. He is particularly interested in understanding how the internet transforms political power and democracy. He also researches and is an advocate for Open Access Research.”

David Parry with group of students, Faculty, School of Arts and humanities — David Parry with some of his students back at UT Dallas

It is interesting to know what Parry’s “work” focuses on. But we’ve searched up and down the Internet and found almost nothing that would fall under the category of Parry’s “work.” To be specific, we found exactly one item: a revealing article entitled “Organizing information for ease of retrieval.”

One thing it revealed is that Parry is weak on punctuation. (In particular, he seems to be allergic to commas – so much so that it can be hard to follow some of his sentences.) More important, however, it revealed that he is a world-class master of the obvious.

“I have been teaching ‘digital stuff’ for about eight years now,” he writes, “and in those eight years I have noted a rather significant shift. While it used to be the case that when we would discuss the internet, social media, and the digital network, students would approach it with a certain lack of familiarity — ‘What is this strange object before us?’ Now they simply take it in stride.” No kidding! “When Facebook has 350 million plus active users,” he writes, “it is no longer a cultural outlier, it is the norm.” Wow! And here’s his conclusion: “These ‘new media’ aren’t new; they are central and a fundamental part of our cultural, legal, and social institutions. It is time we started treating them as such.”

St. Joseph’s University, then, has quite a superstar on its hands. But until the other day, Parry was a total unknown. That changed when a rant he delivered in front of his class was recorded by one of his students and ended up being posted online and shared at several popular websites. “As somebody who fights for liberal values,” said Parry, “I am not sympathetic to the white voters who make over $50,000 a year and said that we are going to vote for Trump….If you are a person of color in this room, if you are a woman in this room, you do not have to open your heart to them. They told you you are not a person….It is okay to deal with it any way you want, because that normalization should not…” At this point his voice trails off; he is unable to complete his sentence. (Great communications skills!)

After expressing concern that he will “not be able to get it all together here,” Parry goes on to say that “there are two…two…two…two…two groups of people in this room. All right? There are white dudes like me who have power, and then there are other people in this room. So I’m going to divide what I’m saying here.” His message to the powerless: “I’m not gonna tell you how to feel and how to be. I’m just going to invite you to feel and be anyway you want and to hopefully communicate to me what we can do to make this situation better. Um, because let’s be clear. This is violence. People are going to die because of what happened.” He raises the spectre of people dying because of indirect “state violence” in the form of a rewrite of Obamacare, the spectre of “direct state violence” in the form of intervention in “non-white communities.” He claims to have seen swastikas and to have heard kids in York, Pennsylvania, where he lives, shouting “white power.” “That is not my democracy,” he states. The tape ends there.

After his rant went public, Jesse Watters of Fox News tried to get an interview with Parry. But the chair of the Department of Communications didn’t feel like communicating:

Needless to say, Parry is entitled to his political opinions. But to force those opinions on his students when he’s being paid to teach communications is a totally inappropriate move. To tell his students that some of them are powerful solely by virtue of their gender and sex and that some of them are powerless for the same reason is reprehensible. And to tell those students that it’s legitimate for them to respond to Trump’s election victory in “any way [they] want” is to condone the very violence that Parry claims to be so terrified of.

Parry claims to believe in liberal democracy, but this is not how teachers in a liberal democracy are supposed to speak to their students. By the way, what kind of an example does it set for his communications students that, when confronted by the nation’s most-watched news network about his classroom conduct, he was apparently incapable of doing so?

[UPDATE, March 23, 2017: The video of Parry’s rant, which earlier was available on You Tube and linked to here, has now disappeared down the memory hole.]

Posted on March 21, 2017March 23, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Deep in the heart of Texas: Jew-hatred

An outfit called Canary Mission, a watchdog group that “anonymously monitors anti-American, anti-Israel and antisemitic activity on US college campuses,” reported recently on a particular egregious finding.

college-park-center — UTA’s College Park Center

On both Facebook and Twitter, no fewer than 24 current and former students at the University of Texas-Arlington (UTA) have posted the vilest imaginable comments about Jews. They’ve advocated anti-Semitic violence, denied the Holocaust, celebrated the Holocaust, and written things like “Stuff Jews in the oven.”

sjputa — Some members of the UTA chapter of SJP

How can such extensive Jew-hatred have taken root in, of all places, a college in Arlington, Texas? Well, one clue to the answer is that most of the repulsive posts were made by members of the UTA chapters of two groups. One of them is Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has been described as a “front for Hamas and the Hamas intermediary American Muslims for Palestine.” The group, which has chapters on at least 200 campuses in the U.S., is viewed as playing a leading role in the spread of anti-Semitism among American college students. As a 2014 article observed,

Instead of promoting justice, SJP and/or its members spend almost all of their energy demonizing Israel, advocating for its eventual destruction, showing an unfortunate affinity for pro-terrorist figures, bullying and intimidating pro-Israel and Jewish students with vicious and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric, and even at times engaging in physical violence. While SJP may pay lip-service to peaceful aims, their rhetoric and actions make it hard to avoid the conclusion that a culture of hatred permeates nearly everything the group does—making the college experience increasingly uncomfortable, at times even dangerous, for Jewish or pro-Israel students.

Three years ago, Northeastern University banned SJU entirely, “after years of anti-Semitic vandalism, glorification of terrorist groups, calls for the destruction of Israel, and other actions.”

The other group behind the rash of anti-Semitism at UTA: the Muslim Student Association (MSA), a front for the Muslim Brotherhood that has chapters around the world and that has not only routinely voiced a virulent anti-Semitism but has also aligned itself with Communist and other radical-left groups.

Among the UTA students named in Canary Mission’s report is Mariam Ghanem, who belongs to both the SJP and MSA and who has “compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler, and tweeted a cartoon equating Nazi soldiers and IDF officers.” Ghanem, now a senior at George Mason University, has worked as an intern at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve; her profile at the Society of Egyptian American Professionals says that she hopes to “use her education and background to give back to the global community and to improve the lives of as many people as she can.”

Also mentioned in the report was SJP member Nancy Salem, who once “retweeted a riddle asking: ‘How many Jews died in the Holocaust?’ The answer: ‘Not enough, HAHAHAHA.’” When a friend left for a visit to the Holy Land, Salem tweeted: “Have a safe trip Lulu. I love you baby girl! See you in 3 weeks! Kiss the Palestine ground for me and kill some jews! <3 #IMissYouAlready.” Then there’s Ismail Said Aboukar, who “referred to the Nazi genocide of the Jews as ‘#LiesToldInSchool’” and wrote that the “world would be sooo much better without jews man.”

Attention UTA administrators: perhaps it’s time for you to learn a lesson from Northeastern University –and, in fact, do them one better by banning both of these hate-inculcating groups?

Posted on March 20, 2017March 20, 2017 by usefulstooges 0

Useful Stooges