What I have frequently referred to as the Academic-Industrial-Complex (AIC) really is an organ of sorts of what I call the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC).<\/p>\n
One of the more recent illustrations of this point is Albert Ponce, a professor of political science at Diablo Valley College.\u00a0 One of Ponce\u2019s lectures was recently video recorded by one of his students.\u00a0 The student released it to The Red Elephants<\/em><\/a>\u2014an on-line organization that has launched a campaign encouraging students to record their \u201cMarxist professors\u2014who in turn shared it with the campus watchdog publication, Campus Reform<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Ponce is captured on video assuring his students that since America\u2019s is a system of \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d the flag \u201cis not really representative of everybody [.]\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are taught to get up and to pledge allegiance to the flag every single day.\u201d\u00a0 However, the \u201cflag is not really representative of everybody who is standing up in that room.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s the way it should be taught.\u00a0 All those who this flag represents stand up, and maybe 50 percent of this room, you remain seated because this is not for you<\/em>\u201d (emphasis added).<\/p>\n To be fair, the Albert Ponces of the contemporary academic world are a dime-a-dozen.\u00a0 While the drivel that he espouses is obnoxious, and while it can\u2019t fail to jolt the sensibilities of many to see and hear a professor at a taxpayer-subsidized institution engage in educational malpractice by substituting anti-American preaching <\/em>for teaching <\/em>in the liberal arts, <\/em>the tragic truth of the matter is that Ponce, in these respects, is indistinguishable from the vast majority of his colleagues in academia in these respects.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, it is good and just that this video is going viral, there has been a backlash, and that parents of current and prospective DVC students can discover for themselves the depths of the cesspool to which radical leftist academics have reduced our institutions of higher learning.<\/p>\n The United States Constitution, Ponce says, \u201cshould be called a white man\u2019s constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n So, the \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d that is America is in the proverbial DNA of the country. On this score, Ponce is unequivocal:<\/p>\n \u201cAnd there were people here, the indigenous people, who were part\u2014who paid a price, a very heavy price, for this project that is unfolding of white supremacy.\u201d<\/p>\n Ponce also labels the American system \u201cwhite democracy.\u201d While supplying a slide presentation with this title, Ponce expresses his disdain toward President Trump and Attorney General Session:\u00a0 \u201cSo it is fitting that a white supremacist of old with a white supremacist of today exists and sit\u2014they are smiling in the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet the Ponce video is especially valuable insofar as it reveals the logic of his ideology, the inescapable implication of his conviction\u2014to repeat, a conviction shared by the overwhelming majority of his colleagues\u2014that America is a thoroughly oppressive place.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t just that America is a \u201csystem\u201d of \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d though it is, of course, this.\u00a0 Ponce insists that in addition to being \u201cwhite supremacist,\u201d the American system is also \u201cpatriarchal, heteronormative, [and] capitalist [.]\u201d<\/p>\n Thus, with a system so oppressive to women, gays, the transgendered, and nonwhites, there can be no negotiation.\u00a0 There can be no \u201creform.\u201d<\/p>\n There can only be \u201cabolition<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat does abolition mean? Abolition means we must destroy it, not reform it.\u00a0 No voting is going to help.\u00a0 No writing your congressperson.\u201d<\/p>\n Ponce declares: \u201cWe need to smash <\/em>white supremacy\u201d (emphasis mine).<\/p>\n And how<\/em> exactly does Ponce propose \u201cthe oppressed\u201d go about \u201csmashing\u201d \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d?\u00a0 His answer is blunt:<\/p>\n Laws must be violated.<\/p>\n Those who \u201cwrite\u201d the law\u2014the \u201coppressors\u201d\u2014have \u201cconvince[d] all of us to follow it,\u201d Ponce asserts.\u00a0 Yet \u201cyou shouldn\u2019t,\u201d he continues, for \u201cthe laws existing,\u201d at least \u201cmany\u201d of them, \u201cwe should be violating [.]\u201d<\/p>\n This is activism, radical leftist activism.\u00a0 This is not teaching.\u00a0 To put it another way, Ponce represents as clearly as anyone the prevailing impulse among academics to forego the education <\/em>of their students in favor of training <\/em>them in the ideology of their instructors, an ideology that entails relentless activism against the very civilization that both birthed the institutions of higher learning of which these students and their professors avail themselves as well as bestowed upon them every other privilege and blessing.<\/p>\n Why would any parent who is remotely concerned with the intellectual and moral well-being of his or her children pay big bucks to place them at the mercies of academics, like Professor Ponce, who despise the institutions, traditions, and, by implication, most of the people of the West and America?<\/p>\n How can taxpayers sit idly by why their hard-earned dollars are siphoned off by bureaucrats and channeled to subsidize the rantings of the Albert Ponces?<\/p>\n To be sure, the ideal of a liberal arts education remains a beautiful one. And there remain talented, capable, and dedicated academics\u2014some of whom are on the liberal-left\u2014who labor diligently to realize that ideal for themselves and, importantly, their students.\u00a0 Regrettably, though, they are in the minority, outflanked on all sides by folks like Albert Ponce.<\/p>\n Besides the fact that Ponce deprived students of the education to which they are entitled, there is another tragedy in all of this.<\/p>\n Ponce and his far-left, activist colleagues are, in a very real sense, the victims of their own ideology. Blinded, they fail to recognize that the conceptual resources that they draw upon to condemn \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d and all of the rest are<\/em> the self-same<\/em> moral ideas that distinguish from all others the civilization that they condemn as \u201cwhite supremacist,\u201d \u201csexist,\u201d \u201chomophobic,\u201d etc.\u00a0 Most saliently, these anti-American, anti-Western professors presuppose the truth of the distinctively\u2014no, the uniquely\u2014<\/em>Western, Christian concept of the Individual, for only if the person<\/em> assumes moral importance over considerations of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and so forth can it be immoral to regard people in terms of these ostensibly morally irrelevant categories.<\/p>\n Notably, these anti-American, anti-Western professors organize their worldview around their readings of Karl Marx, who Ponce refers to as \u201cone of the most profound thinkers in the history of Western philosophy.\u201d Yet Marx was a 19th<\/sup> century German white man who was every bit as much a product of the \u201cwhite supremacist\u201d civilization against which 21st<\/sup> century \u201coppressed\u201d professor rails.<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t only the students of these activist professors who are in need of a genuine education. The professors themselves need it just as badly.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What I have frequently referred to as the Academic-Industrial-Complex (AIC) really is an organ of sorts of what I call the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC). One of the more recent illustrations of this point is Albert Ponce, a professor of political science at Diablo Valley College.\u00a0 One of Ponce\u2019s lectures was recently video recorded by one of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n