The unhinged cultural Marxist Left that now totally dominates nearly every university in America has been hard at work trying to stamp out the small remnant (1-2%? 5%?) of non-communist faculty in the humanities and social sciences. Their latest strategy is to organize a mob of low-I.Q. students to scream and yell, call names, and sometimes set buildings on fire and commit other acts of violence directed at a single non-communist campus speaker or professor.
Ever since I began my academic career of university teaching in 1979 I have observed the Leftist faculty on campus after campus corralling the lowest of the low-I.Q. students, indoctrinating them with Marxist slogans, and directing them to become “activists” rather than sticking to their studies. They are used as play toys, in other words, by people who are themselves too cowardly to come out in the open and publicly express their cherished communistic beliefs and ideologies in such a Bolshevik-inspired manner.
The latest spectacle organized by the campus Left, with the help of some outside agitators, is a hateful, libelous and slanderous attack on Professor Marshall DeRosa who has been a political science professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida since 1990.
A couple of weeks ago two students – a giddy-looking little girl named Allie Jacobs, a member of the Leftist student group “Student Power,” and an effeminate-looking young man named Jonathan Ray Jackson, a graduate student in “Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies,” were associated with others who placed posters all over the campus announcing the tired old Leftist sloganeering that Professor DeRosa is a “white supremacist.” “FAU Young Democratic Socialists” proudly takes “credit” for the libelous smears of Professor DeRosa.
What seems to have incited this attack on Professor DeRosa is that the Left got wind of the fact that he teaches FAU-affiliated classes in American civics (the Constitution, Declaration of Indepencence, and other founding documents, etc.) at a privately-owned maximum-security prison in Florida, funded by a grant from the Koch Foundation. Seventy percent of the inmates there are black. Therein lies his “Great Sin”: He associated himself with a Koch Foundation-funded charitable program, and participated in it at a private, not a socialist, government-run prison. A ragtag group of Leftists jerks (not at FAU) called “UnKochMyCampus” seems to be one of the organizers of this whole charade.
State Universities like FAU are lavishly funded by tax dollars from direct state government appropriations, federal and state government grants of all sorts, and millions from mostly left-wing foundations. As with all universities, whenever a single conservative or libertarian individual or foundation proposes a drop-in-the-ocean donation a campus “protest” erupts. Yale University was even forced to return a $100 million donation to the Bass family of Texas intended to be used to teach about Western Civilization at Yale, something the Yale faculty refused to consider.
Professor DeRosa knew that the smear was coming since “UnKochMyCampus” had filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the state university for ALL of his campus emails. They also did a little online research and discovered that on his personal blog he stated that, as a conservative Christian, he apparently does not think that Bruce Jenner is the ideal role model for his children and grandchildren. This seems to have really upset the campus Left at FAU, especially that “women, gender, and sexuality” student.
The “white supremacist” smear seems to have come from the fact that Professor DeRosa has written for the Abbeville Institute and once lectured on constitutionalism at a student summer school event organized by the League of the South Institute in the 1990s. At that time, Professor DeRosa and myself were invited by our friends, Professor Donald Livingston of Emory University and Professor Clyde Wilson of the University of South Carolina, to talk about some of our research and writings before a group of several dozen students at a week-long student seminar. And so we did: I spoke about the economics of the “Civil War” and my writings on Lincoln, and Professor DeRosa spoke mainly about his scholarship on the Confederate constitution, which had been published as a university press book.
Professors Livingston and Wilson disassociated with the League of the South Institute (different from the League of the South) for reasons I am unaware of, and Livingston founded the Abbeville Institute, an outstanding scholarly organization in the Jeffersonian, decentralist tradition. Anyway, the totalitarian campus Left zeroed in on one of Professor Derosa’s Abbeville Institute publications and did what is typical of the Southern Poverty Law Center type of smear: They took a few words from a very long essay completely out of context, using them to smear and slander. Their purpose is never to engage in any kind of civilized discourse, but to censor all non-communist viewpoints.
In this case they took one of Professor Derosa’s statements of plain, undisputed, historical facts and got all hysterical over it. In an Abbeville Institute essay entitled “Confederate Case Law: The Rule of Law, Not Men,” he pointed out that the slave trade, like all trades, had a buyers’ side and a sellers’ side. Understanding this, he said, means that “linking . . . slavery with white supremacy is a gross oversimplification. First, black supremacy is the origin of Southern slavery. It was blacks and Asiatic Muslims on the African continent that enslaved and sold other blacks to the slave traders.”
There is no disputing this. European slave traders did not go into the interior of Africa and risk dying of malaria or being eaten by wild animals; they did business with African kings on the west coast of Africa who sold their own people – or anyone else they could enslave — into slavery.
The FAU student libelers ignored what Professor DeRosa actually said here, only broadcasting the lie that he supposedly defended “white supremacy.” They also ignored the very next sentence in the essay where Professor DeRosa wrote that “although slavery is morally reprehensible, it was legal.” He said this because the purpose of the rest of the article is to use Confederate case law to discuss how the judicial system of the Confederacy dealt with slaves who committed crimes. It is a very interesting piece of scholarship, but of course these “students” have no interest at all in scholarship.
A group of FAU’s “Young Democratic Socialists” barged into a faculty meeting to interrupt it by calling Professor DeRosa names and demanding that he be fired. To their credit, the rest of the faculty seemed to pay little attention to them, and the university administration has defended Professor DeRosa against this scurrilous attack.
One of the Young Democratic Socialists videotaped the disruption of the faculty meeting and, after Professor DeRosa stated that his family can be at risk by all of this, the “student” videotaper is heard snickering on the video. Professor DeRosa was probably thinking of how a gay man barged into the Family Research Center in D.C. several years ago and shot several people after reading a similar unfounded, lying smear of that organization on the Web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which labeled the Family Research Center as a “hate group.”
Professor DeRosa lost his twenty-seven-year-old son Elijah in an automobile accident less than a year ago, a fact that the entire FAU community must be aware of. This is especially true of the Young Democratic Socialists who obviously did very extensive online research on anything and everything related to Professor DeRosa. In other words, the little creep who was videotaping Professor DeRosa’s remarks and giggled when he expressed concern for his remaining family had to know of this horrible tragedy. What a hateful little piece of human trash.
As I said earlier, there are always some cowardly far-Left faculty members behind these attacks on academic freedom and freedom of speech at universities. In this instance a Professor Christopher Robe, the faculty advisor to Young Democratic Socialists, needs to be questioned. A conservative student online publication did contact him, but he invoked the “Sargent Schultz” defense of “I know nussing, nussssinnnng!” (For the younger generations, go on YouTube and type in “Sargent Schultz Hogan’s Heroes”). Rumor has it that Professor Robe has the new nickname of “Professor Pinocchio.”
Professors like this who proudly label themselves as socialists are associating with an ideology that was responsible for the murder of over 100 million people during the twentieth century and countless other horrors. THEY are the ones who should be subjected to campus protests.