For the past year, Barack Obama and his cheerleaders in the media have been trying to smother the story of Obama’s longtime close association with Ayers and Dohrn, who are now “education reformers” in Chicago.
Much of the major media coverage of the Obama-Ayers connection follows the pattern of reportage we saw in the case of Barack Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s race-baiting, America-cursing pastor. The pro-Obama media have ignored the Ayers issue as much as possible, but when forced to deal with it have put as benign a face on it as possible. Ayers is usually referred to as a “former radical,” not a “terrorist” or “former terrorist.” Thus, for instance, the New York Times, which has been head-over-heels for Obama, in a recent article (“Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths,” October 4, 2008) noted that “Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen.” The Times could not bring itself to use “terrorist” or terrorism” in connection with Ayers in the entire article, except to rehabilitate Ayers with his own self-serving statement that his memoir, Fugitive Days, “is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism.”
Not so; Ayer’s “memoir” is his justification for the violent path that he and his Weather Underground comrades chose. There is no genuine mea culpa, only a grudging admission that the violent path may have turned out to have been tactically and strategically — not morally — wrong, or ill-timed. He sees himself during his Weatherman years not as a terrorist but as an “educator,” which should give pause to those who are singing his praises now as an “educational reformer.” “Terrorists destroy randomly,” he rationalizes, “while our actions bore … the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.”
“I can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility” of bombing again, he wrote in Fugitive Days. Nor has he admitted his role in the Weather Underground’s deadly spree of bombings, shootings, jailbreaks, and robberies. Ayers, Dohrn, and company may be responsible for several thousand bombings. After a decade as fugitives, Ayers and Dohrn gave themselves up. In an incredible travesty of justice, charges against them were dropped because of an “improper surveillance” technicality. With the help of their former SDS comrades, who are now tenured professors, Ayers and Dohrn quickly ensconced themselves in academia, where they enjoy all the perks lavished on our radical professoriate.
Ayers would later remark, in a sympathetic New York Times interview (inauspiciously published, by the way, on September 11, 2001): “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” He also claimed, in the same interview, that the Weathermen had “showed remarkable restraint.”
Remarkable restraint? Hundreds of bombings (possibly thousands — there were over 5,000 bombings that may have been their work, but the perpetrators have not been identified), dozens killed, and millions terrorized by their tens of thousands of bombing threats. And Ayers and Dohrn refuse to answer questions about their participation in those terror attacks. Regarding those matters, Ayers defiantly states in his memoir, “Some details cannot be told.”
It is important to note, for those who may have foggy memories or are too young to have experienced the era, that Ayers, Dohrn, and their fellow Weathermen were not “student idealists.” In fact, they weren’t even students, having been out of school for years. They were professional revolutionaries, deadly terrorists, and agents of foreign powers.
Virtually none of the reportage in the “mainstream” news has mentioned that there is overwhelming ironclad evidence showing that Ayers and the Weather Underground received funds, training, weapons, false identification documents, passports, safe houses, and other assistance from our enemies: the communist governments of China and the Soviet Union, as well as their minions — Cuba, East Germany, North Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, and North Korea. We know this from the many admissions of Weathermen in their own writings and interviews, as well as from defectors and the numerous documents released by the FBI of intercepted communications, surveillance photos, testimony of undercover operatives, and captured records.
The trial of FBI officials W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller showed that Cuban intelligence, the DGI, met regularly with Bernardine Dohrn. According to FBI undercover operative Larry Grathwohl, Ayers gave him instructions on how to contact other Weatherman by going through the Cuban embassy in Canada, using the code name “Delgado.” FBI documents also confirm that Dohrn and other Weathermen regularly communicated with the KGB in East Berlin, and that Weatherman Lincoln Bergman and his father, Leibel Bergman, were working under the direct supervision of Communist China’s intelligence agencies. Larry Grathwohl, who worked his way near to the top of the Weather Underground, also says it was Ayers and Dohrn who set the bomb that killed San Francisco Police Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, permanently crippled Officer Robert Fogerty, and wounded others.
Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman is one of the few “mainstream” journalists who doesn’t whitewash the issue. “I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations on terrorist bombings,” Chapman said in an interview, referring not to the legal technicalities but to the moral implications of Ayers’ and Dohrn’s acts. “If you’re in public life, you ought to say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this guy,'” Chapman said. “If John McCain had a long association with a guy who’d bombed abortion clinics, I don’t think people would say, ‘That’s ancient history.'” Chapman is, indubitably, correct.
“OK, OK,” say the liberal-left media apologists, “maybe Ayers and Dohrn got a little extreme, but that was so lonnnnnggggg ago. Isn’t it time to let bye-gones be bye-gones and move on? They’ve changed and are now respected members of the Chicago community.”
But did they change? Did they change anything other than their modus operandi? Or did they just get tired of running? Did the romance of being outlaws wear off? Did they merely decide to carry on the revolution by other means?
Any reasonable survey of Ayers’ and Dohrn’s actions, associations, writings, speeches, policy advocacy, and political activism since resurfacing would indicate that they have not changed their anti-American, pro-communist philosophy and political objectives one iota. Ayers, Dohrn, and their SDS-Weathermen comrades considered “Amerikkka” to be the enemy and considered the genocidal communist regimes in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana to be the leading forces of “liberation.” They have not changed. Ayers still insists that the United States is a “white supremacist,” “racist,” “imperialist,” “oppressive” country. He still calls himself a “small ‘c’ communist” and continues his infatuation with Fidel Castro, Che Guevarra, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, et al. To this sacred pantheon he has added Venezuela’s communist satrap, Hugo Chavez.
Consider Bill Ayers’ November 2006 address in Caracas, Venezuela, to dictator Chavez and the assembled comrades at the World Education Forum, which can be accessed at Ayers’ own website. Here, in part, is his address:
President Hugo Chavez … invited guests, comrades. I’m honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout Northamerica. Welcome to the World Education Forum! Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana! [“We love the Bolivarian revolution,” a reference to the name Chavez has given his particular communist revolution.]
Ayers then goes on to say:
This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle.
Who is this dear comrade Bonilla? He is one of Chavez’ top propagandists and president of Venezuela’s new Miranda International Center, which Bonilla describes as “a physical, institutional space to coordinate international support for the Bolivarian process, thus allowing thinkers and activists from all over the world who are committed to emancipation to help the Bolivarian Republic on many levels.” By which he means, of course, “small ‘c’ communists” like Ayers, as well as “big ‘C’ Communists” who are openly members of official Communist Parties. Two of the goals Bonilla has targeted are establishing a “critical pedagogy” and building “Twenty-first Century socialism.”
Ayers is enthusiastically in sync on both counts. “Capitalism promotes racism and militarism,” he declared. But Bonilla and comrades, he cooed, “continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education” as they “seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.”
Carried away on his own rhetoric, Ayers fervently proclaimed that “we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!” (“Education is revolution!”)
Summing up, Ayers told the assembled revolutionaries:
We, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education — a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation. This World Education Forum provides us a unique opportunity to develop and share the lessons and challenges of this profound educational project that is the Bolivarian Revolution.
Ayers then culminated his peroration in typical Marxist fashion:
Viva Mission Sucre! [Long Live Mission Sucre, (center of the Bolivian war for independence, 1809)]
Viva Presidente Chavez!
Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!
Hasta La Victoria Siempre! [Toward Victory Forever!]
If a video of the event turns up, one can be reasonably sure it will show Ayers pumping his arm in the air in the traditional communist clenched-fist salute to emphasize his final exhortations. This is not a gratuitous conjecture; it goes to the heart of Ayers’ continuing romance with communism. Like Mao, Castro, and communists the world over, he continues to wear a red star revolutionary pin, the most revered Marxist-Leninist symbol, save for the hammer and sickle. The red star also appears prominently on his web page, along with images of Che Guevarra, Hugo Chavez, and a card emblazoned with “Abu-Zayd,” Arabic for “Father of Zayd,” Ayers’ adopted Arabic title since naming his second son (now 31 years old) Zayd after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther who was killed in a gunfight that took the life of a police officer.
Of course, it is also worth mentioning that Ayers and Dohrn are now central figures in the reincarnation of their old SDS vehicle into two distinct revolutionary organizations: Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) for the old SDSers of the 1960s, and New Students for a Democratic Society (NSDS), to raise up a new generation of Mao-spouting, Che-loving socialistas. NSDS claims to have organized over 200 chapters on high school and college campuses. You can see Ayers, the aging Weatherman, on the MDS website wearing a red T-shirt with “Cuba” emblazoned across the chest.
The importance of the foregoing should be obvious in helping put Ayers’ education “reformer” image into perspective. But in the avalanche of 24/7 election campaign coverage, the “prestige” press has not deigned this worthy of the attention of the American voters. “Professor” Ayers, like small “c” and large “C” communists the world over, recognizes that “Education is revolution,” and that if he and his ilk can gain control over the education system, the future is theirs.
“Nonsense,” say the Obamaniacs. First of all, insist his media defenders, Obama and Ayers barely knew each other. How do we know? Because Obama says so. As the aforementioned October 4 Times piece put it, their “paths have crossed sporadically,” that’s all.
The Chicago Sun Times did it one better, in a deceptive and blatantly dishonest op-ed by Linda Lenz who found concerns over Ayers and Obama to be “silly.” Lenz wrote:
Horrors, Obama had attended meetings and retreats with the author [Ayers] of The Good Preschool Teacher and To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. He had actually rubbed shoulders — can you believe it? — with a distinguished professor of education [Ayers] who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in early childhood education and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction. He had probably even shared a cup of coffee, as only a co-conspirator would, with this professor, whose writings describe good schools as places that are “organized around and powered by a set of core values” and “effectively meet students where they are and find ways to nurture and challenge them to learn.”
Yes, and mass-murderer Hitler painted landscapes, drew cartoons, and had an affection for dogs; mass-murderer Ho chi Minh wrote poetry; mob boss Al Capone supposedly enjoyed the opera. Employing Linda Lenz’s transparently disingenuous technique, associating with any of these miscreants could be made to appear harmless, and concern over it “silly.” (In the interests of full disclosure, Linda Lenz and the Sun Times might have told their readers that Lenz, who is the founder and publisher of Catalyst Chicago, an education newsmagazine, has worked closely with Obama and Ayers for many years, and Catalyst Chicago has received considerable funding from the Ayers-Obama team at Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Woods Fund. John Ayers, Bill’s brother, sat on her Catalyst Chicago editorial board, as did other Obama-Ayers comrades, such as Mike Klonsky, Maoist SDS leader and founder of the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist, and the now self-discredited Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Thus, Lenz isn’t exactly an independent, objective reporter with no axe to grind. So it is with much of the deceptive media spin on Obama-Ayers.)
Lenz and many of her media colleagues are eager to believe (or are eager for us to believe) Obama’s claim that Bill Ayers is just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” But the record shows otherwise, as the research by Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center; liberal-left Chicago attorney/law professor Steve Diamond of Global Labor and Politics; Sol Stern at City Journal; and others clearly prove. Like many leftists and activist hucksters — such as Tom Hayden, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton — Bill Ayers can raise money. In 1995, he obtained a $49.2 million dollar grant from Walter Annenberg for school reform in Chicago. He obtained another $60 million in matching funds from private and public sources to launch the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) and hired a young Harvard lawyer and Chicago “community organizer” by the name of Barack Obama to be the first chairman of the CAC Board. Obama stayed on as chairman from 1995-1999 and then remained on the Board until 2001, while the CAC reinvented itself as the Chicago Public Education Fund. During all that time, Ayers remained chairman of the CAC’s School Reform Collaborative, the CAC’s parallel arm. In 1999, both Ayers and Obama also became board members of the Woods Fund. Together, Obama and Ayers doled out millions of dollars to their favored projects and used the Chicago schools as a revolutionary incubator. One of their main projects, Chicago’s Local School Councils, seem to be patterned after the Bolshevik education councils started by Lenin in Russia, or the Leninist equivalents in Cuba and Venezuela.
At any rate, Kurtz, Diamond, and other researchers show that Obama and Ayers worked closely for several years. Diamond believes that their relationship goes back to the 1988 Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABCs) campaign, which would make their association over two decades old. It was his chairmanship at Ayers’ CAC that gave Obama stature in Chicago’s business, education, and political circles. And when Obama decided to run for political office, Ayers and Dohrn opened their home to hold one of the first “meet and greet” fundraisers for him.
“But,” say the Obamaniacs, “even if all the foregoing Obama-Ayers ties are true, there’s no way that a President Obama would appoint Ayers to any education post or openly associate with him now that he’s become a lightning rod. So relax, what’s the worry?”
The problem is that the Ayers influence and the radical “small ‘c’ communism” espoused by the Ayers and his former SDS-Weather Underground (who now run under the MDS-NSDS banner) runs far deeper into the Obama camp than is generally realized.
We’ve listed below just a few examples of these troubling connections, to which the pro-Obama press corp has remained willfully blind:
Michael Klonsky — Until recent exposure by Diamond, Kurst, and others forced his removal from Obama’s official campaign website, Mike Klonsky’s “education politics and teaching for social justice” blog was a regular feature at www.barackobama.com. Mike Klonsky, who refers to himself as a “red diaper baby,” is the son of Robert Klonsky, a member of the Communist Party, USA, who was convicted of advocating the overthrow of the United States in the 1950s. Mike Klonsky can be seen on a YouTube video reminiscing about “SDS and 1968” and discussing, among other things, his family’s veneration of Soviet dictator “Uncle Joe” Stalin, whose photo was kept on the mantle. Klonsky became national secretary of the SDS and was closely allied to Ayers, Dohrn, and the Weatherman faction. A hardcore devotee of Chairman Mao’s Chinese communism, he was one of the first Westerners allowed into China. Klonsky was founder and chairman of the Communist Party Marxist-Leninist (CP/M-L), which vied with other U.S. Maoist parties (Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolutionary Union, Progressive Labor Party) for Beijing’s approbation. Klonsky and his CP/M-L received Beijing’s blessing and became China’s premier agents in the United States.
But, like Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Angela Davis, Tom Hayden, and hundreds of his other 1960s’ communist comrades, Klonsky decided to carry on the revolution as a cosseted, privileged professor. Ayers and Obama funneled a couple million dollars from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund into Klonsky’s Chicago-based Small Schools Workshop. Now Klonsky is hailed as a “distinguished educator” like Ayers, and is busily campaigning for his old friend Obama.
Carl Davidson — One of the ultra-militant members of SDS, Davidson was a key founder of the Venceremos Brigades, which sent thousands of Americans to Cuba for training in propaganda, espionage, subversion, and terrorism. He was one of a select group of SDS/Venceremos leaders who met in a closed three-hour meeting with Fidel Castro. Like Ayers and Klonsky, he remains committed to the same revolutionary Marxist goals, and along with Ayers’ wife Bernadine Dohrn, was appointed a board member of Movement for as Democratic Society (MDS), the regrouping of aged SDSers. He also is active building the New SDS. He is webmaster and regular commentator for Progressives For Obama, which is heavily larded with SDS, MDS, NSDS cadres, along with well-known radicals from the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). On the Progressives for Obama website, as well as his own personal blogspot, Davidson posts crusading calls to elect Obama.
Mark Rudd — As leader of the Columbia University SDS chapter, Mark Rudd was the primary instigator of the infamous and destructive 1968 SDS occupation of the Columbia campus. Mimicking his hero, communist revolutionary Che Guevara, who called on fellow revolutionaries to create “One, Two, Three, Many Vietnams,” Mark Rudd said, “Thus we have our slogan: create one, two, three, many Columbias!” In 1969, Rudd helped found the Weather Underground and spent the next eight years as a fugitive. How many bombings, deaths, maimings is he responsible for? Like Ayers, he has never answered those questions or owned up to his complicity in the Weathermen terror binge. He resurfaced in 1977 and soon wrangled a position as a mathematics instructor at a community college in New Mexico. Now he is back to his old ’60s shtick, organizing today’s campus radicals into the New SDS. In an October 9, 2008 post on The Rag Blog entitled “Mark Rudd : Thoughts on 2012,” Rudd assumed mused on the potential of an Obama second term in the White House.
“I’m thinking a lot about the 2012 election, for Obama’s second term,” Rudd wrote. “All of his advisors are Clintonites, ie., Republican lite.” Yes, no matter that Obama, in just two short years in the U.S. Senate, established a voting record that makes him the “most liberal” member of the U.S. Senate (National Journal, January 21, 2008, “Obama: Most Liberal Senator in 2007”) – meaning further to the left than Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, or any other longtime liberal-lefties in the Senate – he’s still too conservative for Rudd. He and his advisers are “Republican lite.” Rudd goes on:
But meanwhile, a diverse group of people are working on a progressive agenda within the Demo Party that demands a second New Deal (with disarmament and international law). That’s our four year goal. It will take that long to set up an infrastructure for the Demo Party that will do what the right-wing think tanks did for the Republicans.
By “diverse group” Rudd obviously means far left, ultra-far left, and outré-ultra-far left. Rudd continues his Rag Blog rant:
For over a year, Tom Hayden’s been urging people to think about the movement necessary to push Obama to the left. That’s our goal. The Obama field campaign has been making good progress at building actual grass-root electoral organization. I haven’t seen the peace movement do anything comparable in the last five years, have you?
Tom Hayden? Of course. Only self-avowed communist Tom “We are all Vietcong” Hayden, Mark Rudd, and their ilk would find it “necessary to push Obama” further to the left.
The list of Obama’s SDS/Weather Underground/communist/terrorist cadres goes on and on: Tom Hayden, Marilyn Katz, Jeff Jones, Howard Machtinger, Steve Tappis, Bill Fletcher, Bert Garskoff, Donald Warden (aka Khalid al-Mansour), etc., ad nauseum. More keep popping up all the time.
However, these “former” terrorist types are not the only concern; Obama’s legions include numerous revolutionary leftists of the more quotidian type: left-wing college professors and professional Marxist activists who may have never thrown a bomb (literally) but are, nevertheless, daily striving to undermine America’s social, political, moral, and economic foundations and to transform our constitutional republic into a socialist dystopia. In an entomological metaphor, Obama’s SDS/Weathermen contingent would be the bombardier beetles, which make a big noise and emit an explosive stinky gas, while Obama’s more pedestrian radicals are analogous to termites. The bombardier beetle is more flashy and startling, but the termites cause way more damage, because they are more numerous by far and their destructive impact is not so immediately apparent. The Obama termites are especially prevalent in education — in academia and in the radical teachers unions. They are in charge of the most radical programs on most campuses: Women’s Studies, African-American Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Hispanic Studies, Environmental Studies. But they also dominate the less obviously radical college departments and programs, in particular the education departments, where the nation’s classroom teachers are formed.
The education departments, which were already tilting far to the left from decades of influence by John Dewey, George Counts, Harold Rugg, Edward Thorndike, William H. Kilpatrick, and similar “progressive” ilk, have been pushed even further leftward by the influx of 1960s radicals. Now, aspiring teachers are taught a Marxist “critical pedagogy” that trains them to see America as an evil place that is virulently infected by racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, inequality, capitalism, etc. The entire school curriculum must be hijacked to expose and correct these fatal societal flaws: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, biology, literature, history, psychology, etc. The left-wing advocates of this subversion call it “teaching social justice.”
And one of the big guns in this movement is – Bill Ayers. Sol Stern notes, in a very perceptive and well-researched article in City Journal:
In 1997, Ayers and his mentor Maxine Greene persuaded Teachers College Press to launch a series of books on social justice teaching, with Ayers as editor and Greene serving on the editorial board (along with Rashid Khalidi, loyal supporter of the Palestinian cause and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University). Twelve volumes have appeared so far, including one titled Teaching Science for Social Justice.
Teachers College Press, of course, is the publishing arm of Columbia University’s Teachers College, the most influential college of education in the country, and the former bastion of John Dewey himself.
Sol Stern darkly warns:
One by one, the education schools are lining up behind social justice teaching and enforcing it on their students-especially since they expect aspiring teachers to possess the approved liberal “dispositions,” or individual character traits, that will qualify them to teach in the public schools. The National Council on the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the main accreditor of education schools, now monitors how well the schools comply with their own social justice requirements.
Stern shows how this plays out in real life, recounting the recent case of Steve Head, a Silicon Valley software engineer who decided to become a math teacher, only to run into the “teaching social justice” meat grinder. Because he refused to regurgitate the Marxoid, anti-American “critical race theory” drivel that was dished out at San Jose State University, he was given an “F” in an essential class and blocked from obtaining a teaching certificate.
Ayers and company have particularly focused on racism as the defining indictment of the United States. And it is particularly noteworthy that Mr. “no regrets” Ayers has applied to this newer “educational” endeavor the same venomous, inflammatory rhetoric that he employed when he led the terrorist Weather Underground’s bomb-and-burn efforts (which he also insists were merely “educational”). As previously noted, during his SDS/Weather Underground years, Ayers perennially wrote and ranted against “white supremacy,” which he asserted was the dominant evil feature of American society. He wasn’t interested in better black-white-brown race relations; he wanted to polarize racial conflict even more. He wanted blacks to become more militant and to join in armed insurrection against the U.S. government and America’s “white supremacist” social structure. He and other white radicals would join them in this struggle, this race war.
Ayers and his “teaching social justice” comrades are pushing the same inflammatory, polarizing agenda, without the overt calls to armed revolution. This is obvious in Ayers’ latest book, authored with wife Bernadine Dohrn, Race Course Against White Supremacy. According to the description from the publisher, Third World Press, the Ayers-Dohrn book argues “that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days.” Ayers advocates, among other things, reparations — government-administered wealth transfers from all Americans to African-Americans — for the “education debt” allegedly owed to blacks. As with his SDS/WU agenda in his previous incarnation, this is aimed not at justice or engendering racial comity, but at greater racial polarization. Ayers also knows that any reparations program would likely be funneled through approved activist organizations and institutions, meaning Ayers and comrades would cash in as well.
Barack Obama’s educational program, then, is of some significance, since the federal government’s involvement in education has become one of the most extensive, expensive, and intrusive fedgov influences in American society today. The following individuals provide some hints at the alarming direction Obama’s education policies are likely to go:
Professor Linda Darling-Hammond — A professor of education at Stanford University, Darling-Hammond is education adviser to Barack Obama and widely touted as his top choice for Secretary of Education. Like Bill Ayers, she is a major advocate of reparations for black students for centuries of “education debt” due to slavery and the subsequent (and continuing) oppression of blacks by white society. She is a prominent active member of the American Education Research Association (AERA), a major fount of radical educational theory and policy. Ayers is a vice president of AERA, and he and many of his former SDS-Weathermen comrades and similarly minded “critical pedagogy” advocates have made the organization into a leading vanguard for the kind of revolution in education that Ayers praised at Hugo Chavez’s 2006 education summit. Like Ayers, she is a leading proponent of “teaching social justice,” a beneficent-sounding code phrase that masks an incredibly subversive program to deconstruct American society and reconstruct it along Marxist lines. She is the co-editor of Learning to Teach for Social Justice, one of the Teachers College Press series launched by Ayers. Like Obama, who tried to pass off his longtime working relationship with Ayers by saying he’s just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” Darling-Hammond now admits only to “knowing” Ayers. While she may not have the SDS/WU pedigree of some of the other Obama-Ayers activists, the federal government’s unconstitutional intrusion into education matters would undoubtedly escalate under her direction and speed up its leftward march.
Melody Barnes — Barnes left her position as executive vice president for policy at one of George Soros’ radical activist projects, the Center For American Progress (CAP), to be a top policy adviser to Obama. John Podesta, former White House chief of staff for Bill Clinton, also left his posts as president and CEO at CAP to head Obama’s transition team. CAP is the brainchild of notorious security risk Morton Halperin, who is a vice president at CAP while also running Soros’ Open Society Institute. Melody Barnes has represented Obama on education matters on PBS and other national media. A longtime adviser to Senator Ted Kennedy, she is also a former board member of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and EMILY’s List, which provides campaign contributions to pro-abortion candidates.
Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings — A professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Gloria Ladson-Billings is a past president of AERA (where Ayers is a vice president and a very active force) and along with Prof. Darling-Hammond, a leading advocate of reparations for the black “education debt.” Ladson-Billings appears to have adapted this educational theory from Randall Robinson’s radical TransAfrica proposal for reparations for slavery. Apparently, she also has been heavily influenced by Bill Ayers arguments for the same and by his viciously bitter denunciations of America as a “white supremacist” nation. She coauthored To Teach: Journey of a Teacher with Ayers and co-edited City Kids, City Schools with him. Ladson-Billings and Darling-Hammond are co-conveners of the Forum on Education and Democracy (FED), which issued a report this year declaring that the top priority for the federal government must be repaying this “educational debt.” This past September, when exposure of Bill Ayers’ terrorist record continued to build, some of Ayers’ comrades launched a petition drive to collect signatures, largely in the field of education, to support Ayers and denounce his detractors. To date, 4,090 “educators,” students, and activists have signed on. Ladson-Billings’ name heads the list, just a few names above Rashid Khalidi and radical Maoist H. Bruce Franklin, the founder of Revolutionary Union and the Venceremos Organization.
The major media’s continuing whitewash of the heavy influence of terrorists, communists, socialists, radical Islamists, and other radicals in Obama’s past, as well as those in his current campaign, is an enormous travesty. If a conservative candidate is found to have a friend whose great uncle once belonged to the KKK, or to have a lowly precinct worker who misspeaks on immigration or race, or to have received a campaign contribution from someone who can be identified as a neo-Nazi (even if the conservative candidate didn’t know the contributor and had no way of knowing the person’s ties or beliefs), you can be sure it will be splattered all over the news and the candidate will be smeared as one who is in cahoots with the forces of hatred, violence, and intolerance.
But when it comes to the real agents of hatred, violence, and intolerance in Obama’s camp, the same media “watchdogs” become lap dogs. Obama knows he doesn’t have to fear exposure from them. However, the Obama camp is undoubtedly having heartburn worrying over the fact that millions of Americans are discovering his alarming radical pedigree thanks to the alternate media of talk radio and the Internet.
