12/1/15

Chicago’s Communists Lead Anti-Cop Protests Over McDonald Shooting

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

Guess who’s behind the protests in Chicago? Old, white communists from the ’60s – again. These agitators helped organize and coordinate last week’s protests in Chicago over the shooting death of Laquan McDonald. He was a 17 year-old black thug. A dashcam video shows him being shot 16 times by a white police officer. Cue the riots led by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

These communists belong to the Revolutionary Communist Party. They are a far-left Maoist group who is all for violent revolution.

The festivities began at about 4 pm last Wednesday, downtown on the corner of Jackson and State Streets. The night before, these same communists enthusiastically handed out fliers stating their intention to be the driving force in the protest movement there. Retirement is so boring.

It didn’t start out as much of a protest evidently, but that changed as they made their way to downtown Chicago. Hundreds gathered to follow the radicals. The communists worked diligently together carrying a bullhorn, a connected loud speaker and a carefully crafted sign from an October protest in New York City. The primary agitator at the protest screaming nonstop into the bullhorn with a barrage of chants was longtime communist Chicago activist Grant Newburger.

Newburger claimed to be the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade when he was in his 40’s. Now he’s 57 and still at it. During Wednesday’s protest, he kept shouting to the crowd political stances pushing his communist agenda. Newburger and other communists urged people to show up for the protest on Black Friday, so they could shut down the “Magnificent Mile.” Newburger led moronic chants like, “16 shots!” Another shout-back recital was: “CPD. KKK. How many kids did you kill today?”

Here is Newburger in 2007 at his apartment in the now-demolished Cabrini–Green public housing project. (Note the prominent poster of Chairman Mao on the wall.)

Enter another commie, Lou Downey. He’s also a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. “Send the killer cops to jail,” Downey urged protesters to chant. He was followed by yet another middle-aged white communist woman yelling into the bullhorn.

The meandering crowd was halted by police around 6 pm on Wednesday before they could get to Lake Shore Drive, which is a bustling thoroughfare. So, they turned around and headed south. They eventually made their way to the Trump International Hotel & Tower blocking traffic as they went. “We are the people! The mighty mighty, mighty people,” was a communist agitator-led chant. Also: “Whose streets? OUR STREETS!” These people need to get some seriously new chants going. It’s trite. In front of Trump’s place, protesters yelled “hands up, don’t shoot” at an assembled throng of police officers. What an insult and a lie to boot.

“How many bullets in the clip?” an enraged white protester shouted at the cops while marching. “Fuck y’all.” “We are not products! We cannot be bought or sold!” was another Mensa moment. Next in line were the offices of ESPN radio and the local ABC affiliate.

By 9 pm, the white-communist-led protesters had made their way to the south Loop chanting “fuck the police.” Also: “We’re black. We’re strong. We’re marchin’ all night long.” If they weren’t so violent and dangerous, I’d compare them to four year-olds who are colorblind. For kicks, when they got to Millennium Park, they ripped the lights from the City of Chicago Christmas tree. If there’s one thing commies hate more than cops, it’s Christians.

From the beginning of the protests across the nation, including the Occupy movement and now Black Lives Matter, I have said that you would find communists behind the radicals. The Revolutionary Communist Party is a big player in all this, with their aging hippie Marxists who feel this is their last chance to cause upheaval in the nation. They have always hated the police and now they have a vehicle to work on that hatred. Charlie Manson would be proud.

You saw these same people in Ferguson, Missouri. They paid protesters and were behind the movements there. Now they are in Chicago. But trust me, wherever you see racial division and violent chaos in the streets, the communists are not far behind. And not all of them are old… there are a lot of young ones joining the ranks these days.

“We are revolutionaries,” Downey, the well-traveled communist agitator, told The Kansas City Star in August 2014. “We’re working to do this in a way that puts an end to the system that for generations has criminalized youth, especially black youth.”

In the Revolutionary Communist Party’s flier, they describe the efforts of police officers as “a campaign of terror with genocidal implications.” “This is a situation where the burning anger and righteous refusal of the people to take this shit any more has erupted repeatedly into resistance since the uprising in Ferguson over Mike Brown’s murder,” the handout declares. “We need an end to the whole system of capitalism-imperialism.”

“We need a whole different system, one where the system of oppression of Black people and other oppressed nationalities is eliminated, along with all the other outrages this system perpetuates here and around the world. This requires an actual revolution. This revolution is real and possible.”

The Party’s website presents a glowing picture of their founder and leader, Bob Avakian. Reality is somewhat different.

Bob Avakian is the Chairman of the anti-capitalism, Maoist Communist party formed in 1975 within the United States called the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In “From Ike to Mao and Beyond” (2005), Avakian tells the story of a middle-class California boy who moved left during the ’60s, first in the Free Speech Movement and Students for a Democratic Society at Berkeley, then with the Black Panther Party, and finally into the far-left Maoism of the party he founded in 1975, the Revolutionary Union – later to become the Revolutionary Communist Party.

A little history… Students for a Democratic Society met in June 1969 in Chicago. By this time, S.D.S. had more than a hundred thousand members, making it the largest leftist organization in the United States. Its politics were anti-imperialist and somewhat Marxist, although anarchist currents existed in the organization, as well. During the convention, three ideological groupings became clear. One was led by the Progressive Labor Party faction and espoused a Maoist philosophy, another was the Weatherman faction, also Maoist, but also a follower of third-world revolutionary nationalism, and the third dominant grouping was Marxist-Leninist. This latter grouping was originally known as the Revolutionary Youth Movement 2 (RYM 2). As time progressed, RYM 2 splintered into smaller formations, with one of the largest organizations calling itself the Revolutionary Union (R.U.).

R.U. began in the San Francisco Bay Area under the leadership of Jane Franklin, Bruce Franklin and Bob Avakian. In 1979, Avakian was arrested at a demonstration against Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the White House; charged with assaulting a police officer, he fled the United States for France. It is unknown where Avakian, “Chairman Bob,” currently resides.

“He has advanced the science of communism and made decisive breakthroughs in the theory, method, and strategy of revolution and the final goal of communism throughout the world,” their website declares.

The Revolutionary Communist Party runs a handful of radical bookstore franchises around the country called Revolution Books.

The Chicago mess started when McDonald died on October 20th, 2014. Evidence was withheld and once video was leaked, everything blew up. The officer in question is Jason Van Dyke, who has now been indicted on a single charge of first-degree murder. In the now public video, McDonald has a knife and is walking away from the police officers. Van Dyke shot McDonald from 15 feet away. He kept shooting even after the teenager was on the ground unresponsive. Van Dyke has been denied bail and he is in protective custody. Van Dyke’s lawyer has said the officer opened fire because he feared for his life and the lives of other police officers when he saw McDonald had a knife. He is citing the “Fleeing Felon” rule. Under U.S. law, the “Fleeing Felon” rule was limited in 1985 to non-lethal force in most cases by Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1. The justices held that deadly force “may not be used unless necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious bodily harm to the officer or others.” If he is convicted, he will probably get 20 to life. The CPD has already settled with the McDonald family for $5 million reportedly.

Give the McDonald family its due… they asked people to refrain from violence this week. Then the commies came to gin people up just like they always do.

The Revolutionary Communist Party flier called for a Black Friday protest to begin at Chicago’s famous Old Water Tower at 11 am last Friday:

Black Friday saw thousands march in Chicago… they literally shut down the “Magnificent Mile.” This disrupted business on the busiest retail day of the year. It was the continuation of the protest over the shooting death of McDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke. The protest was also over the fact that the shooting has taken well over a year to even come up in court. They didn’t like the handling of the case and that was reflected this morning as the Police Superintendent was fired by the mayor there in Chicago. Mayor Rahm Emanuel never lets a crisis go to waste and he has found a sacrificial lamb to take the fall for all this.

Father Pfleger helped organize the Black Friday protests in Chicago. Father Michael Pfleger was a spiritual adviser to Barack Obama. He’s also a stone cold Marxist and a devout radical. He protested with Obama against the payday loan industry demanding the State of Illinois regulate loan businesses in January of 2000. He’s just one more communist member who abhors capitalism.

Approximately 2,000 protesters marched in the cold and wet with signs that said “Stop Police Terror” and other nifty slogans. Organizers said the rally, led by activist-politician Rev. Jesse Jackson and several state elected officials, was a show of outrage over the October 2014 death of Laquan McDonald and what they see as racial bias in U.S. policing. It took the prosecutor 13 months to announce charges in the case and just hours later, a graphic video of the shooting was released to comply with a court order. Now, the protesters want the head of the prosecutor as well and they may just get it at this rate.

“It’s unconscionable that the police officer who killed Laquan McDonald was able to sit at a desk for over a year and draw a paycheck,” said James Hinton, 49, who joined the march holding a sign that read: “13 months, 16 shots.” The protesters chanted “Stop the cover up, 16 shots,” as they marched along Michigan Avenue.

This is another instance of communists, anarchists, racists, Islamists and radicals joining forces because they want to ‘change’ the face of America. They all have different goals, but they believe if they unite to defeat a common enemy, they can overthrow the U.S. from within. The death of the teenager was tragic and it remains to be seen whether the officer will be held accountable for doing what he saw as his job. What will come as no surprise is that these aging, white, hippie communists will be somewhere behind every protest and every hate-filled event you see in our streets. That’s where they put their money and efforts. It’s what they live for… they want revolution.

12/31/14

Obama’s Recognition of Cuba Renews Communist Subversion

Hat Tip: The Right Planet

12/20/14

Journalism Educator “Hates” Republicans and Loves Marxism

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

A feminist professor of communications at the University of Michigan has become a laughingstock for a poorly-sourced column in a socialist newspaper about the academic basis for hating Republicans. In the article, Susan J. Douglas began with the statement, “I hate Republicans” and declares that “marrying a Republican is unimaginable to me…”

A specialist on “Gender and the Media,” she is reportedly married with a daughter.

I’ve got something that beats that. Curtis J. MacDougall, the author of a journalism textbook that I used in college, was a Marxist with a 319-page FBI file, who wrote favorably about Fidel Castro and feared Joe McCarthy. MacDougall was an activist in the communist-dominated Progressive Party.

As a young journalism student, I studied from MacDougall’s textbook, Interpretative Reporting, which encouraged a form of advocacy journalism, and “learned” that Walter Duranty of The New York Times was one of the great figures in the media. I later discovered that Duranty was a stooge of Stalin and one of the greatest liars in the history of journalism. In fact, he helped Stalin cover up the deaths of 7- to 10-million Ukrainians in a forced famine.

A modern-day MacDougall, Professor Douglas tries to sound like an intellectual and apparently wants to be taken seriously. She insists in the article that a “series of studies has found that political conservatives tend toward certain psychological characteristics,” such as “Dogmatism, rigidity and intolerance of ambiguity; a need to avoid uncertainty; support for authoritarianism; a heightened sense of threat from others; and a personal need for structure.”

She cites unnamed “researchers” as proving that “the two core dimensions of conservative thought are resistance to change and support for inequality.”

Douglas, who graduated from Elmira College in New York and received a master’s degree and a doctorate from Brown University, is not only a professor but the head of the University of Michigan communications studies department.

Since MacDougall’s textbook, Interpretative Reporting, was instrumental in training a generation of journalists, perhaps he influenced Douglas.

Now, she is trying to influence her students. But her self-declared “hate” for Republicans has backfired. She has exposed the real purpose of her “educational” pursuits.

The Detroit News reports that Andrea Fischer Newman, a member of the UM Board of Regents, said she found Douglas’s column “extremely troubling and offensive,” and that it condoned “hatred toward an entire segment of individuals in our society based solely on their political views…”

Grant Strobl, head of Young Americans for Freedom at the school, called the Douglas piece “ugly and full of hatred.”

While the article has to be taken seriously, its dependence on clearly dubious “studies” and “research” make it practically ridiculous.

Douglas ought to be laughed out of academia.

In an earlier piece for In These Times, she also gave us a precious insight into her own ideology. She hailed Stuart Hall, the founding editor of New Left Review, as a “towering Marxist public intellectual” who had “influenced multiple generations of professors and their students…” It’s apparent she is one of them.

Indeed, she appears to thank Hall for helping establish “communication studies” as “one of the most popular majors in the United States…” She wrote, “We owe him a monumental debt.”

She notes that Hall was a follower of Antonio Gramsci, but doesn’t point out that Gramsci was an Italian communist whose writings were introduced to the United States in the mid-1950s by Carl Marzani, a publisher and Soviet KGB agent whose publishing house was subsidized by the KGB. (Interestingly, Curtis A. MacDougall’s history of the Progressive Party, Gideon’s Army, was published by Marzani as well.)

Gramsci popularized the idea of destroying Western society through infiltration rather than armed revolution. It helps explain why Weather Underground terrorists such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became college professors after giving up on a communist armed revolution inside the United States.

Robert Chandler, in his book Shadow World, noted that Gramsci’s Marxist theory of cultural revolution “stressed that dominance over the existing order in the West, including religion, was rooted in education, the media, law, and a mass culture of beliefs, values, and traditions.” In order to overturn the existing order and “Marxize the inner man,” Gramsci taught that “one must create a subversive program of ‘counter-hegemony’ against its supporting culture,” in order to “negate the established modes of thought and ways of doing things.”

That appears to be Susan Douglas’s mission in academia and journalism.

Douglas’ Curriculum Vitae identifies her participation in a “Rethinking Marxism” conference in 1992, delivering a talk on “Pop Culture, Kitsch and Social Change in the 1960s: Hegemony, Subjectivity and the Rise of Feminism.”

The editors of the journal, Rethinking Marxism, also sponsor “Marxism and the World Stage” conferences, described as “celebrations of the Marxian tradition.”

Douglas’s “academic credentials” include numerous articles for such publications as The Nation, The Progressive, and In These Times.

Her hate for Republicans is making news, but don’t think students in her classes haven’t been aware of the agenda she’s been pushing. Some of the comments from students who have taken her classes include:

She openly states that she hates certain members of the student body based on their political opinions. Avoid this closed minded intolerant person….
Boring and disorganized. Talks to students like they are children. I think she rates herself to get good scores.
Condones hatred and intolerance towards differing viewpoints.
Socialist feminist nut.

This controversy will serve a purpose if it renews a focus on the corruption in journalism education and why left-wing and even pro-Marxist bias in the media is getting worse.

Her book on decoding “enlightened sexism” was the subject of a talk she gave that was video recorded. An elitist who knows better than everyone else, she claims to be an expert on uncovering “subtle” forms of sexism in the media.

Her courses include:

Media, Culture, and Society
Media Theory and Criticism—introductory and advanced levels
Qualitative Methods in Media Studies
Gender and the Media
History of Broadcasting
Origins of Mass Culture: 1870-1930
Images of Women in Popular Culture: 1945-present
Analysis of Television News
Motherhood and the Mass Media
The Social History of Radio in America
History of Communications Technologies
Introduction to Mass Communications

In a University of Michigan profile of Douglas, she was asked, “What inspires you?,” and she replied, “My students inspire me. I love teaching undergraduates: their energy, their optimism, their openness to new ideas.”

But this “love” seems to have undergone a transformation into a closed mind of hate toward opposing views. She has made explicit what we know and understand to be their usually hidden biases.

Thank you Ms. Douglas for telling us openly what we always suspected to be the case. Thank you for alerting us to the Marxist revolutionaries in positions of power in journalism and academia.

Now, please tell us why you deserve to be in a position of trust and authority over students who desire a good education and want to make something of their lives.