By Victor Thorn —
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pennsylvania—On March 19, former Weather Underground Organization (WUO) co-founder William Charles “Bill” Ayers appeared at The Dickinson School of Law of The Pennsylvania State University – Penn State Law to discuss the subject of “school discipline.” The highly controversial figure, who was an intellectual guru to a young Barack Hussein Obama, delivered his talk amid the presence of three campus police officers, reporters from a local television station, state senators voicing their disapproval, a week-long series of “letters to the editor” to local newspapers and a standing-room-only crowd.
Outside the auditorium prior to Ayers’s arrival, this reporter overheard one student whispering to another, “I read online that Ayers used to be a domestic terrorist.”
Indeed, within the span of two years, Ayers’s WUO bombed New York City police headquarters, the United States Capitol Building and the Pentagon. In fact, WUO claimed responsibility for at least 25 separate bombing incidents. Their most sickening plot involved the targeting of a dance hall at New Jersey’s Fort Dix Army base. Intent on murdering unsuspecting young men and women gathered at this facility, instead the nail bomb these saboteurs concocted in a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded before being delivered, killing three WUO members.
Once seated inside the lecture hall, this reporter spoke with Penn State student Jeffrey Masko about the controversy surrounding Ayers.
Masko replied: “I don’t find him very controversial at all, but then my politics are pretty far left as a member of the Progressive Student Coalition.” He also addressed free speech.
“Eleven students from the law school tried to prevent Ayers from speaking,” he said, “but dialogue is good. Shutting down conversations is ridiculous.”
The American Civil Liberties Union’s Mathieu Brener agreed. He told AMERICAN FREE PRESS: “I’m a huge proponent of the First Amendment. Even if someone from the far right was speaking tonight, we would welcome an open debate rather than totally exclude discussion.”
Student leader Rafael Alvaredo said to this reporter, “I’m happy about the publicity because it’s drawn an audience to this event that may otherwise not have known about it.”
Following his introduction, Ayers hypocritically informed the crowd, “We can’t filter everything we do through ideology or dogma.” Apparently not grasping the profound sense of irony in this statement, every violent act that either maimed or killed people committed by Ayers’s WUO in the 1970s was filtered through the prism of their radical ideology.
Ayers next complained that slavery was alive and well in America today via our prison systems. However, he conveniently failed to follow up with statistics, which undeniably prove that blacks commit a vastly disproportionate percentage of all murders, rapes and assaults in this country.
To the contrary, Ayers declared, “I’m a prison abolitionist.” But it’s highly doubtful, though, that he’d retain this viewpoint if violent black gangs stormed his gated community and raped his wife.
Opposed to the increased policing inside our schools, Ayers again refused to cite the rise of aggravated assaults perpetrated by urban students against teachers. In many of these classrooms, the situation more closely resembles armed combat than education.
Other than bleeding heart liberals like Ayers, who act as apologists for criminal behavior, most parents welcome a safe environment, if for no other reason than to protect their innocent sons and daughters from being brutalized at the hands of gangsters.
Next Ayers suggested, “We need to see the humanity of students that walk through school doors.” Could he possibly be referring to the “humanity” of someone like 18-year-old Michael Brown? Only days after graduating from high school, Brown attempted to murder police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri.
Ayers also recommended the need for more art and poetry in schools, especially those in inner cities. Yet instead of pushing the responsibility of civilizing these hooligans onto parents and black communities, Ayers neglected to offer any solutions to the problem. The truth is, little humanity exists in today’s ghettos where black kids are already destroyed by broken families, poverty, violence and drugs before they ever reach school.
In this setting, black youths are poisoned by violent hip-hop lyrics, crime, drugs and the so-called “thug life,” which is presented as preferable to hard work that is viewed as selling-out to whitey.
Today, schools serve as the only environment in which urban black teens can receive any discipline. Orderliness acts as a benefit to their lives, not a detriment, as Ayers claims. Sadly, once the recess bell rings, these kids return to an urban jungle of Ebonics, drive-by shootings, sexual assaults, welfare dependency and homes where no father is present.
Ayers’s hometown of Chicago stands as America’s murder capital. As an alternative to blaming racism, prejudice and social injustice, as he did at Penn State Law, Ayers should focus on cleaning up his own festering backyard in Chicago.
Short of taking these meaningful steps, Ayers represents nothing more than typical Frankfurt School-style, cultural-communist propaganda where the majority of law-abiding citizens and students are endangered by those like Ayers who perpetually side with villains.
It should also be noted that a then-unknown Barack Obama staged his first political fundraiser in Ayers’s living room. As a member of the socialist-oriented New Party, Ayers described his relationship with Obama: “[W]e were friendly; that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine [Ayers’s wife] were at a law firm together, that was true.”
Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and author of over 50 books.
