In our yuppie, latte-liberal climate of corporate cash-in on social justice warriorism, even our most ardent radical anti-capitalists are feted siphons of the capitalist system.
Close observation of the description of former Black Panther and former-candidate of the American Communist Party, Angela Davis’s keynote, given at this year’s Ruby Jones Conference — as stated on its webpage — is corporately sponsored by State Farm.
From the outset, the hilarious hypocrisy of it: Miss Marxist is being financially backed by an insurance company. Could anything be more ridiculous and hollow? If our most notable anti-American leftist is no longer even avant-garde, but is now an in-demand, college-speaking-circuit toast of the liberal bourgeois, is anything sincere anymore from that ideology? Davis is here on the support of the corporate dollar with a history of telling us that capitalist corporations and their dollars are bad. Huh? Come again?
For a committed socialist, Davis seems to be laughing her way to the bank, picking our pockets blathering anti-capitalist drivel. It’s difficult to trace who gets what monetary benefit from the keynote. Thus, I’m calling for the Ruby Jones Conference to release publicly how much Davis requests for a speaker’s fee.
As Vladimir Lenin famously stated: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Someone ought to tell State Farm that when the leftists, heirs to the French Revolution, decide to roll in the guillotine again, they won’t be spared from their beheading because they sponsored the ‘woke’ Angela Y. Davis way back when.
To wit: Davis’s own historical and infamous political affiliations betray and contradict her now apocryphal personae of feminist heroine to a generation of mal-educated and uninformed college students. Since the professoriate won’t tell us, I will. Lest we forget:
1) In the early 1970s, a sawed-off barrel shotgun — linked and registered to Davis — was used in the murder of Judge Harold Haley in a Marin County courtroom shootout that was perpetrated by the Davis-affiliated Black Panthers. Judge Haley had three daughters.
2) Two years before the 1978 Jonestown massacre, Davis bellowed on a loudspeaker to the cult members that Jones’s cause was a worthy one. Jim Jones was a faithful Communist himself. More than 900 people committed suicide, including women and about 300 children that were forcibly given the poisonous cocktail. Those that attempted to flee the commune were shot on site by Jones’s guards.
3) In 1979, Davis traveled to Moscow to collect her awarded Lenin Peace Prize. (Isn’t Russia supposed to be the enemy now?) She praised the founder of the Soviet Union and his “great October Revolution” while carefully avoiding any mention or critique of the largest prison system in operation — the gulags — where the women in the camps were raped and abused by the guardsmen, beaten and murdered. Roughly 1.7 million, as a whole, perished in the gulags.
The only reason Davis should speak anywhere anymore is to atone for her past political advocacy. It stands to reason: at what point do our public intellectuals fail out of public pontification? How many strikes are they allotted, and how many of their reprehensible, immoral calls are enough? Apropos Davis’s feminist credentials, we could go simpler: just ask Judge Haley’s daughters about Davis’s Black Panthers.
Vincent Carcirieri is a second-year student majoring in English. vc837639@wcupa.edu
In talking about the atrocities of the soviet state one cannot forget to mention the eradication of the golchomag class (roughly 600k people) and the ensuing 1932-33 famine that resulted in another 6-7 million people dead. That said, and to quote Dianne Feinstein, “the dogma” of Marcuse’s repressive tolerance “lives loudly within [Davis]”—to the best of my knowledge Davis has never thoroughly addressed these problems (let alone the current one’s you’ve highlighted). Her silence speaks more to her character than her ostensible veneration for social “justice.”
Our public “intellectuals” such as Davis will be allotted an infinite quantity of strikes as long as they are able to prey on students’ sense of compassion and empathy in order to increase their own power and wealth and the advancement of their outdated philosophies. Good research mate.