Raleigh right-wing group unearths commie plot at UNC
It’s been interesting (and a little frightening) to watch the responses that next week’s election seems to be provoking on the far right. Though paranoia and a general desire to foment fear of “the other” has always been a prominent part of the right’s playbook, the possibility that voters may actually usher in some real change next week seems to have given rise to a new and powerful wave of fear mongering that would have warmed the heart of old Tail Gunner Joe and his faithful sidekick, Roy “Redbaiter” Cohn. See for instance, Elizabeth Dole’s pathetic attacks on a moderate-to-conservative, one-time Sunday school teacher named Kay Hagan.
Of course, most of the really nasty stuff is reserved for the world of far right blogs – the chosen venue for disaffected, between-jobs political hacks and would be journalists to rant about “liberals” and “socialists” who want to seize their property and guns and manhood. Earlier this week, a blog run by the Raleigh-based J.W. Pope Civitas Institute included a post that featured a bizarre drawing of Barack Obama with an extra dark face and the words: “LAY DOWN YOUR GUNS, LAY DOWN YOUR BIBLES, CLING TO ME”). The post went on to state:
“There must be a whole lot of frustrated people around the country right now. They are clinging to to (sic) their guns as fast as they can get them. Firearm sales are up through the roof all over the country despite economic hard times….While most of these reports do come from the heartland, please take note of the so-called "blue" states on the list, Michigan, Connecticut, New Mexico and Ohio. The marketplace has been discussed as having predictive value in the past. What future events does this market activity foretell?”
It doesn’t take long to find even scarier and more ridiculous statements if one just pokes around on the internet sites of the anti-immigrant and gun activist crowds or ventures into certain ultra-conservative enclaves. At last week’s NASCAR race in Atlanta, a front-row parking lot camper proudly displayed a “NObama” sign next to a large banner that said “They call it the Whitehouse.”
And then, of course, there are the “Obama- is-a-Muslim” nuts. These folks have actually convinced a quarter of the voters in Texas of their absurd fantasy. Heck, even supposedly serious analysts like the director of the John Locke Foundation refuse to give up on the “Obama-is-a-socialist” line of attack . What’s next? Obama is a Muslim-socialist?
A monstrous communist plot
Ah, but for sheer paranoid, pre-election fun, there’s nothing like some good, old-fashioned McCarthyite red-baiting. A classic case in point: a recent two-part “series” of essays from the John William Pope Center for Higher Education. Notwithstanding the almost complete disappearance of Communists from the modern world, the group still manages to find a way to link William Ayers (and thus Barack Obama, of course) to a supposed “evil agenda” of “Marxist subversion” in the UNC Chapel Hill School of Education. (Note: this would be the same UNC Chapel Hill that’s overseen by that radical member of innumerable corporate boards of directors, Erskine Bowles and leftist corporate entrepreneur, Holden Thorp, and that features close ties to subversive elements like the board of the investment firm Franklin Street Partners and of the revolutionary big money donors at Citizens for Higher Education.)
According to the Pope Center, the UNC School of Education is rife with devotees of “Social Justice” theory, which it describes as follows:
“‘Social justice,’ in its broadest definition, is the extension of the principles of ‘justice’ into every aspect of human existence. Depending on its implementation, such an idea could possibly have merit. But in all of its various American implementations and offshoots in America today, it is nothing more than a justification for Marxist and radical-left designs.
When it is applied to American education, social justice pedagogy (the method of teaching social justice) has come to mean a way of thinking and teaching intended to undermine both authority and objective reasoning and bring about an underclass-inspired political upheaval. The movement’s philosophical foundations are derived from the writings of the Brazilian Marxist educator Paolo Freire. Its American version was influenced greatly by Columbia University education professor Maxine Greene. The pedagogy’s best known popularizer is William Ayers, Greene’s protégé and former member of the violent 1960s Weatherman radical group, who is now a University of Illinois professor and an associate of presidential candidate Barack Obama.”
And this:
“That is what teaching for social justice is about—it is not intended to provide useful skills, or open young eyes to appreciate culture or the mysteries of the physical universe. It is to convert and to prepare a new generation for the coming takeover, violent or otherwise, by the radical left….It is remarked that tyrants often state their plans simply and directly long before they assume power, as Hitler did in Mein Kampf. So it is with the theorists and practitioners of social justice. The large majority of Americans who support the United States (and the nation itself) can be defined as “oppressors” under its precepts—even their charity and good will is condemned as a means to maintain tyranny. According to Freire, such oppressors are inhuman, and can only have their humanity restored by the cleansing retribution of the oppressed. Coming soon, to a public school near you."
And this:
"There is no question about the direction that the proponents of “social justice” in higher education are leading us—they openly and proudly write it down for all to see, in their scholarly articles, in their course syllabi, and in their official university biographies. We also know what Marxism produces: tyranny, poverty, waste, and corruption.
And yet the entire state establishment refuses to see the naked emperors in our education schools—the leadership of those schools, the individual university administrators, the university system’s general administration, the system’s Board of Governors, the media, the legislature and the governor all utter not a peep of condemnation. Have we truly become a people who will not defend our own culture or our government from those who will destroy us? Unless somebody in authority grows a backbone quickly, we are doomed as a nation."
Reality Check
Good grief! Who knew? This obviously explains the torrent of commie teachers that have been flooding the state’s public schools for decades. Just wait till the NCAE recruiters find out! And you thought that business in your kid’s second grade class about “character education traits” like “respect” and “courage” was the real deal. Now we know it was actually a diabolical plot to brainwash your child into becoming a loyal Party member and to rat out his parents.
Seriously, this is absurd paranoia of the highest order. There is no doubt that some faculty members of the University of North Carolina (hopefully all universities!) have read and even assigned books by authors that the far right would find objectionable. Some may have even challenged traditional ways of thinking about education (and literature and government and the role of women and hundreds of other subjects). That’s part of what a university is there to do – to promote out-of-the box thinking and to unleash the human mind to explore new possibilities for the species.
But come on guys! Marxist revolution?! What’s next? Does the author “have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the [President of the University] as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the [University]”?
Going forward
The far right’s recent mad rants about the supposedly ominous threats that await our country after next Tuesday seem likely to continue for some time. Let’s hope that, as was the case after the subsidence of the McCarthy-era insanity, reality intervenes and quickly consigns the fear mongers to the outer fringes of public debate where they belong.
