(This article is part of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Defund Universities series. Previous articles include David Horowitz’s De-Fund the Universities and America’s Crisis is the Universities. )
We think of crime as emanating from the poor and the underprivileged, but the country’s crime wave actually has its roots in the work of academics who taught at prestigious universities.
The pro-crime movement that originated in the 1960s and has since swept America began in part with an article by Communist leader and agitator Angela Davis: ‘Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition’. Davis, a UCLA academic, was catapulted to national prominence during her trial for supplying firearms to terrorist Jonathan Jackson, who used them to murder a California judge presiding over the homicide trial of his criminal brother George, who later died after slitting the throats of three guards while attempting to escape from San Quentin. There are shrines devoted to Davis at prominent schools like University of California – Santa Cruz.
Angela Davis began her seminal incitement by quoting Michel Foucault: a French academic with the Collège de France. Foucault’s ‘Discipline and Punish’, which Davis described as “arguably the most influential text in contemporary studies of the prison system” remains widely studied on college campuses along with Davis’ racist perspective that incorporated the Black Panther’s threat to “Off the Pigs” (Police) that has long since entered politics and the wider culture in the form of police assassinations, demonizations and defunding, and other allied efforts to eliminate prisons, prosecutions and the justice system.
The two activist academics were not really interested in crime and the penal system as a field of research. They were bent on fomenting a civil war that would put the Left in power.
Foucault, a Marxist-trained philosopher, had been a co-founder of the Prison Information Group to support the Maoists imprisoned over the radical violence in France in 1968. Foucault had credited the riots with stimulating his interest in “the direction of penal theory”.
Angela Davis had bought guns to facilitate a murderous terrorist attack on a Marin County courthouse by the Black Panthers. The attack roughly coincided with Foucault’s visit to the United States during which he “investigated” the American prison system and the subsequent death of George Jackson: the Panther leader whom the Marin County attackers hoped to free.
Police defunding and the pro-crime movement came directly out of the Marxist and Panther playbook and the universities who embraced their call to revolution. (Huey Newton, the leader of the Panthers, and a violent killer and rapist received a PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz, in a program headed by Angela Davis. Newton was in the program to arm himself intellectually for the violent reckoning with American capitalism he had dedicated himself to.)
The French Maoists and Black Panthers bonded by their shared experiences of being locked up for their crimes came to see prisons as “not only Marxist universities, but training camps” for revolution, and criminals like themselves as its vanguard. Academic radicals developed Marxist ideas into an ideology before launching their violent nihilism into the popular mainstream.
The violence of the Black Lives Matter riots, founded by “trained Marxists” who viewed Davis as a revolutionary icon, and the even more catastrophic wave of death spurred on by following their lead — defunding police, ending prosecutions and freeing criminals — cost thousands of lives. Those deaths, like the movement that inflicted them, were massively supported by the college students who had been indoctrinated by the Marxist left in the classrooms of American universities.
In her Communist dogmas and support for domestic terrorism, Davis is not alone. Other former leftist terrorists have occupied influential academic positions including Bill Ayers and Susan Rosenberg: two Weather Underground bombers. Ayers taught at Columbia Teachers’ College, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, he has boasted that he set bombs in the Pentagon, and has promoted defunding the police. Susan Rosenberg, who was released after Bill Clinton commuted her sentence, was offered a position at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and co-chaired the fiscal sponsor of Black Lives Matter and its Marxist leaders.
Eric Adams, and whose students go on to serve in the FBI, the NYPD, and the Secret Service, John Jay College, a formerly prestigious institution whose alumni include New York City Mayor Eric Adams, and whose students go on to serve in the FBI, the NYPD, and the Secret Service, provided a place for a domestic terrorist who was arrested in possession of 740 pounds of TNT and a list of military and government buildings she was intending to bomb.
Rosenberg describes herself as an “anti-prison activist” and John Jay College has endorsed its own version of police defunding. The public college partners on fellowships with the Vera Justice Institute which is committed to “ending mass incarceration”. Students have been asked to envision the university in terms of Foucault’s critiques of the prison system.
Within the span of two generations, future law enforcement personnel were being indoctrinated with the teachings of Marxist domestic terrorists and their political allies. The situation at John Jay is emblematic of what has happened to criminology departments across the country.
The country’s top criminology departments, like those at the University of Maryland, UC-Irvine and Rutgers, begin with the premise that the criminal justice system is racially biased.
The University of Maryland’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice has its Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network Small Grants Program, UC-Irvine’s Criminology program has a graduate emphasis on “Race and Justice Studies”, while Rutgers’ School of Criminal Justice takes part in the university’s Fellows in Racial Justice program. One of those fellows brags that being a “convicted felon” who spent time in maximum security prison allows him to “empathize with the downtrodden” and led to his “fervent commitment to activism”.
That’s the state of criminology at universities, but the general state of universities is even worse. Black studies programs offer a prison abolition syllabus (which predictably includes both Foucault and Davis) tying together faculty from Harvard and Wesleyan among others. Rutgers, Notre Dame, the University of Texas, the University of Colorado, among many others, offer Black Lives Matter courses, whose villains are invariably white people and cops.
BLM protests were widely backed by 8 out of 10 college students. Many of the protests were organized on campuses and involved faculty like Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of BLM’s Los Angeles chapter, who has made a bid to take over the group. Abdullah, the granddaughter of a prominent German Marxist, is a black studies professor at California State University.
The fundamental message of Foucault and Davis, refracted through BLM, was broadcast through academia. The policies, police defunding, prison releases and decriminalization, and the violent riots, helped unleash an unprecedented crime wave which brought to an end the lives of thousands of people, as it happens mainly black and poor. The ideas originally promoted by radicals in the 70s have led to a generation of progressive pro-crime DAs, many backed by George Soros’s millions. They include Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg, former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin – whose parents are convicted Marxist terrorists, Los Angeles’ George Gascon and Philly’s Larry Krasner, and Biden’s US Attorney in D.C., Michael Graves, who declined to prosecute in 67% of cases brought to him. Collectively, and with the backing of the Democrat Party, they have collectively dismantled the criminal justice system from within.
As a result of BLM and pro-crime policies, around 5,000 more people were murdered in 2020. And the rate of black people being murdered increased more than any other group. The CDC’s research showed that, “in 2020, one out of every 1,000 young Black males (15–34) was shot and killed.” Murder is the leading cause of death for black men from 20 to 44 years old.
All of this can be traced back to academia which promoted the idea that white people are racist oppressors and that the best way to fix that is to replace the police and the criminal justice system with social workers and apologies.
Restorative Justice, which proposes to replace crime and punishment with forgiveness for the perpetrator, originated in part from Goshen College in Indiana which now offers both a major and a minor in letting criminals go unpunished. Mariame Kaba, the contemporary godmother of police defunding, teaches at Barnard University. Kaba made her views plain in an op-ed titled, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.” The world that Kaba would make is laid out on her site, ‘Transform Harm’, which is funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. It features a sociologist proposing that rapists write apology letters and a professor of gender studies claiming that sending Larry Nassar, who had sexually abused some 250 girls, to prison embodies “political whiteness”.
Even in the face of growing crime and violence, academia continues to double down on a pro-crime program initially conceived in support of Marxist terrorists, but which has become a general program of supporting and enabling criminals across society.
To fight crime, we must lock up criminals, but we must also end the taxpayer funding of pro-crime universities, departments and programs. While most criminals eventually face consequences for the robberies, rapes and murders that they commit, the academics who enable them never do.
Leftists who support criminals have the right to their views, but taxpayers should not be forced to fund them, and universities which make them central to their curriculum should be put out of business. Victims of crime are being taxed to fund the pro-crime academics whose ideas led to them being assaulted. To break the cycle of pro-crime policies, we have to defund universities.
Thanks Daniel, excellent article.
Yes, he’s right. This promotion of criminality is just one more out of countless others to defund colleges and universities.
We have a hundred-year-old blueprint for what is happening in the U.S. today. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn outlined the Soviet exaltation of the common, nonpolitical, criminal in his historical opus The Gulag Archipelago. Russian communists believed they could educate thieves and murders to comform to their earthly utopia. Political prisoners were the scum of the camps who could not be trusted by the enlightened. These innocents feared the tattooed and pierced degenerates who lorded the limitted power available to inmates in the GULAG. Sound familiar? Traditionalist Americans are the political prisoners of 21st-century America, along with Jan. 6th-style protestors rotting in prisons across the Democratic archipelago. It doesn’t matter whether Stalin or American professors canonized the brutish George Floyd a new saint; he’s just one of the many of America’s latest inside-out Jesus figures, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi so sacrilegiously elucidated in 2021. The Bible is an even older foreshadowing of what’s to come: the mob chose to release the murderer Barabbas rather than let an innocent Nazarene go free under Pontius Pilate’s watch.
Author: “… Victims of crime are being taxed to fund the pro-crime academics whose ideas led to them being assaulted….”
As I’ve said, it’s called a self-funding extortion loop.
And the Marxists have institutionalized it throughout academia, the government and corporate America.
Give them credit, they know what to do with an institution once they seize control of it.
Yup, institutions are turned it into street-thug training camps for those “down for the struggle”,..
and re-education camps complete with Maoist “struggle sessions” for the average American.
Kathy Boudin was a shiftless loser who’s ONLY accomplishment was to trick two cops into lowering their guard so that her fellow robbers could kill them.
She was pampered like a celebrity while in prison. Hence, celebrity dumbass Danny Glover visited & read one of her lackluster poems. (She was given an award for her poem – not via merit, but more like Nobel Peace prizes are doled out.
Slick Willie gave her a pardon (other pardons were sold), and the uneducated fool teaches at a college. More proof that colleges are pure bullshit indoctrination training camps.
This demonstrates the rot that has infected all of our country’s institutions. Nice country while while it lasted. I’m sure it will much better when criminals aren’t punished, we have to rely on windmills and the sun for electricity, when meat consumption is severely restricted, speech disagreeing with the Left is completely suppressed, we have a social credit system, medical care is distributed on the basis of race, and all notions of merit have been erased. What a brave new world we’re rapidly heading toward.
The dark ages are back, but this time they’re progressive.
Yes, with the Marxist woke class system the analog for the Medieval. Both are based on ascribed status instead of achieved status.
Some aspects of the current situation resemble Feudalism, in my limited understanding of it. Rich elites living in well-protected places with private security. The rabble (the rest of us) living outside the walls, at the mercy of the predators roaming outside.
Rich travelers able to travel protected by their private security when they leave their castles.
Very good out line with receipts . Thank you David. Watched all of it grow. 60s and 70s the elite couldn’t get enough of the murdering filth. They were feted and in some cases given huge sums of money by the republican and democrat highbrow filth just for the chance to hobnob with them. Ira Einhorn while not in the same gutter Davis and her filth were never the less was a complete fraud and eco terrorist that was beloved by screwball republicans in Pa. Arlen Spector was his bff.
Another raw truth article by Daniel Greenfield, exposing the cancer that U.S. Colleges & Universities have become within American society. Not only do we whiplash from crisis-to-crisis spawned by the academic Marxists, but billions of taxpayer money is wasted every year supporting these obsolete “institutions”. We owe it to the dead victim’s of Academia Marxists to permanently wreck their financial ecosystem.
The sooner the system collapses, the less ‘life support’ the leftist pipeline falls apart.
“In 1779, in “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” Jefferson proposed a system of public education to be tax-funded for 3 years for “all the free children, male and female,” which was an unusual perspective for the time period.” – Wikipedia
The road to hell is paved with the “good” intentions of altruism. It all starts with the moral code of altruism, which encompasses the idea that NEED MAKES RIGHT. Your neighbor’s children NEED an education therefore it is right, moral, and noble for Thomas Jefferson to initiate force against a peaceful citizen who has violated no one’s rights to extract from him his altruist DUTY and obligation to fund the need of his neighbor’s children of an education.
Now, Thomas Jefferson may only have been thinking of a tax funded three years of education to teach basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. But what even his genius level mind seems not to have understood, or more likely EVADED, is that once you accept the altruist principle that need makes right in part, you have accepted it in full. The rest is only a matter of time. So here we are 250 years later and this is where Thomas Jefferson’s evasion has led us. It was only a matter of time.
“America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal….
From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” – Ayn Rand
No, America’s inner contradiction has been the existence of worthless people like you.
Thank God Rand is long gone. Thank God you will never amount to anything.
Karl Marx is long gone. Jesus Christ is long gone. So is Mohammed. So is Moses. So is Thomas Jefferson. Men are mortal but their ideas live on.
The question is which ideas, because they are based on reality and reasoning about reality, lead to peace and prosperity on earth and which do not. Which ideas are rational and therefore true because they correspond to the facts of reality and which are irrational and false because they are mere fantasies that do not correspond to the facts of reality.
Judaism has the answer. Each individual is required to give 10% of his/her net income to help those who cannot help themselves. Government stays out of it. That way the help really goes to help- not to fund profitable “non-profits” or organizations with agendas designed to help themselves- not those in need. The Clinton Foundation, The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundations all are political lobbying organizations with agendas not really designed to help the poor. Bill Gates murdered many thousands in Africa with his experimental vaccines and the whole bunch mentioned above push population reduction by any means short of obvious Nazi type techniques. As wealth assembles men deteriorate- think they are like Gods. Actually, they are Godless and therefore EVIL.
lulz… there is no wisdom in the machinations and rationalizations of man… only wickedness, evil, and ignorance. Believing Jesus Christ was a mortal man and is long gone means there is no hope which exists for you as it is not given unto you and the end is a terror to which you would wish you were never born. And you know it, deep in your heart. All men do.
What is found in the Bible answers all the questions of why, what, who, and where about our existence and it’s worthy to be believed simply because it’s believable. To go down the route of placing value in the ridiculous concepts of man being able to produce anything worthwhile with his own inherent thoughts and wisdom is a most foolish and vain attempt with nothing good in the end. Good luck.
Abolitionism was a bottom-up movement of evangelical Christians which began in the late 18th century. It started with Quakers, then Methodists, and finally, after a half-century or so, the established church embraced it.
Those ideas were Christian ideas. They came from Jesus of Nazareth. He lives! He is risen! He will come again!
You never miss an opportunity to trash America, do you?
I’m not trashing America, I’m pointing out the philosophical and moral contradiction that has led to its destruction. I agree with Ayn Rand when she said,
“I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
Excellent article. Too bad victims of crime tend to be normal folks. The “intellectual” elite are insulated from the disastrous consequences of their “intellect.”
How has Soros not been assassinated? Or, brought in to be indicted?
Start defunding the Universities by 100% no more Tax Payers hard earned Cash into the Bank accounts of UCLA AND U.S. Berkeley totally cut them off no more allowance for you Collage know-nothings
Exactly. Thank you for publishing this.
Bill Ayers taught at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and not the University of Chicago. I don’t know if that matters but it is always better to be accurate about such details so as not to reflect negatively on the rest of the article.
Angela Davis always struck me as one of the most naive people the left ever produced. She is completely oblivious to the mayhem her pro-criminal advocacy has unleashed on the lives of low income working class black people.
You’re right. Thank you. Fixed.
A fulfillment of Socialist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “marching through the institutions” to institute radical change.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing for it tends to inebriate the brain into believing it knows all there is to know. Only more vast sums of knowledge will sober one up to illustrate that no one can know all there is to know. Davis and her ilk never sobered up.
The Silent Invasion and War at Home
By Jeffrey Folks
The most numerous victims of this invasion are blacks and Hispanics who are attacked by young men of their own race. These are the forgotten men and women in our society, and this is a topic that mainstream news won’t cover because the killers are mostly black and Hispanic. Just in 2020, the year of the “defund the police” protests, murders of blacks soared by 32%, and they’re only continuing.
Unfortunately, they are not forgotten. More accurately, they are best forgotten. Utter criminals with no empathy toward those whom they inflict suffering.
The lamestream media also covers the fact that most attacks on Orientals is by blacks
As a Rutgers alumni, I can vouch for the author’s statement that almost the entire Rutgers faculty is on the Left. The criminology program fits in perfectly here.
The Marxist grandfather of this BLM person Melina Abdullah is Günter Reimann – adopted name as communist/KPD activist and journalist at “Rote Fahne”. An interesting person: friend of Herbert Wehner. Book “The Vampire Economy” on the Third Reich economy, written in exile.
And the woke university- activism complex should be shut down.
Left unsaid is the high number of jews behind current events, starting with sugar daddy George Soros. Even Melina Abdullah, the blm co founder mentioned, is part Jewish through her father.