Consider the speech Ellison gave in 2000 in defense of Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson who later pled guilty to conspiracy to bomb Los Angeles police officers, and then to murder. This “cause,” he claimed was a “later chapter” of the 60s and 70s, “a confluence of a time when people came together and DID beat back the things that America was always based on.” Some of his other “causes” have included defense of gang members http://powerlineblog.com/archives/015415.php. Most recently, he rushed to the defense of the six imams kicked off a U.S. Airways flight for suspicious behavior. Consider his ties to these imams through their mutual terrorist-linked organizations, CAIR and NAIF, at whose conferences he gave speeches just days before the removal of the six imams.
Consider the fact that he has a long association with black supremacist Louis Farrakhan and publicly echoed his anti-Semitism under pseudonyms, such as Keith Ellison-Muhammad. Consider the fact that this has been well-documented, but that he was elected anyway. DiscovertheNetworks.org
Consider the fact that he has downplayed this association for the benefit of the useful idiots, the left who celebrate his election as an example of “diversity” and “inclusiveness.”
This has been a decades-long project. In classrooms, the anti-American message was promoted through an attack on the notions of truth and reason, through sophisticated sounding theories of postmodernism.
I know from entering graduate school in the mid-nineties.
Reason itself, I was told, is the basis of oppression because it is the foundation of Western thought. (Yes, reason is bad.) A seminar on the modern novel devoted largely to a novel that celebrated Malcolm X and the anti-West values that he represented, Gravity’s Rainbow, like most graduate seminars, was a semester-long bashing of the West, “Amerika.” My professors and classmates treated me like a rube when I insisted that the U.S. was not at fault for the genocides of the Nazi regime.
Appeals to fact (truth) have no credence in the postmodern classroom. Nor do appeals to reason (obviously).
Reason, of course, is connected to a notion of truth and all the “cutting edge” critics in their various ways said that “truth” is a notion invented by a Western hegemony to oppress others. The text implicated in this far-out, but reigning academic conspiracy theory, is the Bible. Underneath all the attacks on the West, such as Pynchon’s novels, is the Bible.
As the immigrant daughter of a blue-collar father with a fourth-grade education in our native Slovenia, I had never dreamed of earning a Ph.D. But when I did finally enter graduate school in my mid-thirties in the 1993, I was shocked and dismayed to find the literature of the West being trashed by professors. Books had gotten me through childhood traumas, had given me another perspective, an insight into the good. They had given me hope. Here I was finally living out a dream, the first one in my family to graduate from college, the first one to earn a Ph.D. in my extended family.
When I enrolled in graduate school, I saw the true agenda behind the left—the wholesale assault on truth and beauty--and began my conversion from a liberal who voted for Clinton to a conservative. And as I saw that the book behind the attack on Shakespeare, Milton, and T.S. Eliot, was the Bible, I was led back to my faith. I read the Bible to see why the radicals, who spouted hate, insults, and ugliness in graduate seminars, despised it. Thus began the second part of my conversion.
In an article about the editing of the original Robinson Crusoe to remove all of Defoe’s references to “man’s discovery of himself, civilization, and God,” Philip Zaleski wrote, “Culture is the medium through which we hear the voice of God.” No teacher in a public school would be allowed to respectfully present Defoe’s Christian message through an unabridged version of Robinson Crusoe. But Malcolm X’s autobiography shows up regularly on high school syllabi.
In spite of decades of civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and special funding for minorities, professors are still repeating the same lectures about the terrible Western hegemony. I have been required to teach from anthologies that present such skewed views of West and had been instructed to put on my syllabi that an objective of each literature class is to learn about “gender, race, and class.”
There is a reason that after their own acts of murder, terrorism, and intimidation, the Nation of Islam radicals and their white supporters set out to destroy the curriculum. They were training the next generation. The multiculturalists presented reason and truth as notions of a Western imperialistic culture; as a result, now reigning in our educational institutions is the unquestioned dogma of multiculturalism that dismisses debate about the dangers of Keith Ellison as merely “intolerance.”