RezkoWatch FactChecker: Pundita: The William Ayers plan to turn America's schoolchildren into Maoists and how Barack Obama helped him

The following was masterfully researched and written by Pundita. Sadly, it is not another faerie tale.

Characterizing the Weatherman as "an American Red Army," Ayers summed up the organization's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents." (1)

[In 2006 Ayers] continued to rail against his exclusion from the conference in an interview with the house organ of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, an interview printed right alongside some of the memorable sayings of the party’s Chairman for Life, Bob Avakian. Ayers complained to the RCP interviewer that the conference organizers were “taking the teeth out of the [progressive education] critique” and trying instead to “present progressive education as something nice and familiar.” (2)

In April 2008 Sol Stern, one of those tiresome ex-Leftists who do penance by ratting out former fellow travelers, dropped a bombshell on New York City's intellectual establishment:

[William] Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.(3)

It gets even more interesting—but here I pause to recount the intellectual establishment's immediate reaction, which to quote Mark Steyn in a somewhat different context, was sprayed coffee, steaming pants and scalded crotches.

Yes, all over Manhattan's Upper West Side cheerful Starbucks assistants ran around mopping latte sprays from laptop screens and handing out wads of paper napkins to customers howling in pain.

It's not as if the intelligentsia didn't already know that William Ayers was bent on transforming American schoolchildren into Manchurian Candidates. That was old news because in 2006 Sol Stern had publicized Ayers's education work.(4) The stunner was that Stern was not going to keep his mouth shut about Ayers during Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Now we'll return to Sol hurling thunderbolts:

Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”

Here I pause to clarify a smoggy term. Just what is "social justice?"

For the tourists, social justice means finding ways to make society more just for all. For William Ayers and other American pedagogical versions of the Weather Underground, social justice 'education' means using every subject taught in public school, including math and science, as a means to teach children that capitalism is evil and that anyone who supports the American way of life is going straight to hell.

Yet as Steve Diamond points out, Ayers and his fellow "authoritarian" Leftists in the teaching profession hide behind the generally understood concept of social justice. "... a meaningless [term] because the minute you challenge advocates of this approach they sound like Mom and Apple Pie liberals."(5)

What exactly is an "authoritarian" Leftist? I plan to write Professor Diamond to ask him that very question. But as near as I can figure, it seems to be his polite term for communists working toward the day when the last capitalist will be strangled to death with the guts of the last lily-livered socialist.

For those of us who've paid no attention to what American education experts have been up to in recent years:

Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.

Here I'll pause Sol's narrative, so readers who have seen Barack Obama's most ardent followers can wipe coffee spray from their computer screen.

Yes, it's entirely possible that some of the youngest Obamatons were stuffed full of social justice teachings based on textbooks written by an unrepentant Maoist terrorist.

Better set your coffee away from the computer because we're about to follow Sol Stern into the Twilight Zone:

Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated. Would that Ayers were just another radical English professor. In that case, his poisonous anti-American teaching would be limited to a few hundred college students in the liberal arts. But through his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms.

Here, readers who recall my May 6 The truth about Barack Obama's association with William Ayers... may wonder whether Sol is being coy with regard to what Barack Obama knows about William Ayers.

I wish I could say yes because the alternative explanation -- that Sol did not know the truth about the relationship at the time of the April writing -- is unsettling to the point of eerie.

Yet given Sol Stern's concern about William Ayers's education theories, and also that there is nothing in his 2006 writings about Ayers to suggest Sol knew about the Annenberg Challenge, I think we have to settle for the eerie explanation.

Sol's piece was published on April 23 by the City Journal, a quarterly magazine of the Manhattan Institute. Only the day before Steve Diamond had blown the lid off the Obama-Ayers relationship with Who "sent" Obama?

[...] in late 1994 or early 1995, Obama made what I think was probably the key move in his early career. He was named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million grant program to funnel money into reform efforts at Chicago schools. It turns out that the architect of the Annenberg Challenge was Bill Ayers, who designed the grant proposal and shepherded it to success.

In two sentences, Diamond makes a mockery of the claim that Obama and Ayers had only a casual relationship. But again, City Journal is a quarterly publication; Stern's article was surely submitted days or even weeks before the Spring 2008 volume was published online.

My guess is that prior to Diamond's investigative report, Obama's work for the Annenberg Challenge and Ayers's connection to the grant program were not well known outside a small circle of grant-making organizations/corporations and Chicago public education professionals -- although I think one would have to be naive to assume it wasn't known to the Democratic National Committee by the time Obama was promoted as a candidate for the presidency.

In any case Obama knew Ayers so well, was so familiar with Ayers's professional work, that terming him an "English" teacher was not a mistake; it was an attempt to suggest to the public that his relationship with Ayers was casual.

Diamond's report makes it clear that the relationship was close and work-related over a period of years. And it's clear from Obama's willingness to work for Ayers's pet project that he was in general agreement with Ayers's political philosophy and approach to public education.

To send you on your way with a spring in your step I'll quote a few more passages from Stern's April 2008 article, although I hope you'll go to City Journal and read the whole thing:

Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for.

In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

Recently on Fox News, Democratic strategist Bob Beckel tried to brush off concerns about Obama's relationship with a "terrorist" by retorting, "Ayers is a couple years away from an assisted living facility."

Either Beckel didn't know or didn't care that it's not Ayers's past but his present that should be of immediate urgent concern when asking about Obama's political views. America's parents need to know about Ayers's education ideas and true relationship with a man in sight of the White House. Ditto for American captains of industry and capitalist financiers who are throwing money at Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Endnotes

1. A Guide to the Political Left.

2. The Ghosts of Bill Ayers; Sol Stern, FrontPageMagazine, October 17, 2006

3. Obama's Real Bill Ayers Problem; Sol Stern, City Journal, April 23, 2008

4. "Social Justice" and Other High School Indoctrinations; Sol Stern, FrontPageMagazine, April 13, 2006; The Ed Schools’ Latest -- and Worst -- Humbug; Sol Stern, City Journal, Summer 2006 edition. See also #2 above.

5. Eduwonkette: Sol Stern and Bill Ayers Debate on "Social Justice" Teaching; Dr. Stephen F. Diamond, Global Labor blog, April 22, 2008:

Diamond's discussion is a portal to a world that for all its grave importance to Americans exists outside the general public's eye. The post links to Sol Stern's piece for City Journal, Ayers's reply, and a discussion of social justice by people in the education sphere.