We Don't Need No (Leftist) Education
By Robin of Berkeley
American Thinker
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave those kids alone. . .
All in all, you're just a
Nother brick in the wall
- Pink Floyd, "We Don't Need No Education"
David Horowitz is one of those rare people who change lives. I know, because he changed mine.
When I started snapping out of my Leftist trance three years ago, I had nowhere to turn. I didn't have the foggiest idea why thugs were surrounding Obama. Weren't the progressives the good guys?
I turned to my local Borders bookstore for some answers. There I found the writings of David Horowitz, to which I could immediately relate. Like me, Horowitz was a Jew from New York who was hoodwinked by radicalism.
But that's where the similarities stopped. My parents were JFK-type liberals who loved this country. Horowitz was a red diaper baby.
Horowitz is also many years my senior. While he was a fiery radical during the '60s, I was (blessedly) too young to participate in those violent and misogynistic times. I came of age during the comparatively mellow feminist revolution.
A leader in the civil rights movement, Horowitz plotted revolution with such notorious characters as the Black Panthers' Huey P. Newton. Horowitz implored college students at rallies to burn down buildings. My only illicit action was plastering This Degrades Women stickers onto billboards in Manhattan subway stations.
Horowitz also woke up and got a clue decades before me. Since then, he has made it his life's mission to expose the Left's extreme agenda. Like a modern-day prophet, Horowitz forecast that a Shadow Party, masterminded by George Soros, would seize control over the Democratic Party. Tragically, Horowitz's predictions have come true with the (s)election of Obama.
One of Horowitz's burning passions is restoring sanity to our schools. For years, he's launched a a virtual one-man campaign to expose the extreme left-wing bias among university professors. Horowitz figured out early on what the radicals were doing: earning their Ph.D.s, infiltrating the universities, and brainwashing students into radical ideology. With tenure-for-life academic positions, the radicals then brought like-minded professors into the fold and shut out conservatives.
The militants wanted to start the indoctrination as early as possible. Professors of education began training new public school teachers to produce the littlest of foot soldiers. It's no coincidence that FOB (Friend of Barack) Bill Ayers is a retired professor of education.
In Reforming Our Universities, his newest book, Horowitz details his lone-wolf struggle to restore intellectual freedom to our universities. In Reforming, Horowitz offers an Academic Bill of Rights to protect students and faculty who hold divergent points of view.
Intrepid and resolute, Horowitz has given innumerable talks over the years at colleges across the country. In the process, he's been screamed at, threatened, shouted over, drowned out, and even mooned.
And it's not just conservative guest speakers such as Horowitz who are censured on college campuses, according to Reforming. In a particularly damning illustration, Horowitz recounts how liberal luminary Alan Dershowitz has to tape his Harvard lectures on date rape lest he face accusations from the feminist Thought Police. Another professor, a national expert on date rape, refuses to even teach the topic anymore. Ironically, political correctness deprives young law students of vital information to prosecute rape.
Of course, college students face swift retribution should they deviate from the progressive party line. Conservative students may be shunned, publicly humiliated, and punished with low grades. The radical professors, while holding themselves up as holier than thou, have no qualms about throwing their weight around and abusing their power.
It's no wonder that the radicals try to suppress free speech and intimidate dissidents. Progressivism is a house of cards. Remove one card, and the whole charade comes tumbling down.
If professors, for instance, exposed radical Islam's enslavement of women, young people would reject the Left, with its ties to Islam (a topic Horowitz covered in his book, Unholy Alliance). Our youth may not embrace socialism if they learn that millions were snuffed out under Communist regimes. If students figured out that the progressives were destroying their American dreams, the Left would lose an entire generation.
So the progressives maintain their choke-hold over the young by gagging speech and intimidating the truth-tellers such as Horowitz. And yet, through it all, amidst the insults and the slander, the anti-Semitism and the invective, Horowitz just keeps on going, like a modern-day Paul Revere. Just as I was writing this article, I learned that Horowitz was appearing in my neck of the woods.
Horowitz gave a speech on academic freedom at the Law School at the University of California, at Berkeley. Talk about penetrating the belly of the beast! Yet David Horowitz doesn't appear the least bit deterred by the cruelty lobbed his way.
Horowitz is a warrior, a real man, not the feminized kind that our universities spawn. He sticks his neck out for women treated as subhuman under radical Islam, and for college students, who are pressured and bullied. He's an unwavering, tenacious voice of sanity in the academic asylum.
A frequent American Thinker contributor, Robin is a recovering liberal and a licensed psychotherapist in Berkeley. You can reach her through her blog: www.robinofberkeley.com.
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