I need to find a left-wing Michelle Malkin for my class

[adigal]

I am teaching rhetoric to my class, I have shown them a Michelle Malkin editorial, and I am trying to find someone far out on the left, with the same kind of almost-violent rhetoric, but I am having trouble. Any suggestions??? Thanks,
Adigal

[itsrobert]

1. Does not exist.

Your editorial would be better if you did not try and pull a "they do it too" main stream media argument.

[adigal]

38. I know...but I already got questioned for being "biased"

So I want to show them what a "left-wing" rant looks like compared to the loony right wing rants.

[ClassWarrior]

2. Nope. None.

:shrug:

NGU.

[Journeyman]

3. I believe your best hope, adigal, is to start penning violent ravings yourself. . .

otherwise, I don't believe you'll find anyone on the left with that flavor of kookiness. . .

[NMDemDist2]

4. you won't find 'violent' rhetoric but your class may be enlightened by

Noam Chomsky or Amy Goodman

edit to add link http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20100124.htm http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20100408.htm

[w8liftinglady]

5. The problem is.. ours have facts to back up their rhetoric..

you won't find anyone since 2002-2005,honestly,with over-the-top .. and even then,the writings were fact based.

[Johonny]

6. Ted Rall

He does call for open revolution against the government:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucru/20110112/cm_ucru/someweaselsaremoreequalthanothers


I think Ted's not as insane as Michelle but no one that insane would get onto the op ed page as a regular contributor on the left. Ted's about as wacky as you get for the left.

[H2O Man]

7. Don't.

Why waste your students' time to push a false idea?

[Hello_Kitty]

8. Thank you! Why perpetuate the "both sides are equally guilty" falsehood?

[leveymg]

18. As I said below, this exercise does point out a seemingly essential difference between the Right

and Left in contemporary America. They do have Michelle Malkin. We don't.

Viva la difference!

[DBoon]

9. Bob Avakian?

of course you need to point out that Michelle Malkin is considered a mainstream pundit with a regular show on a major network, while the Revolutionary Communist Party is a bunch of marginalized freaks consigned to handing out newspapers on street corners

[leveymg]

17. OMG, is he still around?

I recall him as one of fringiest of the fringe even in the 1970s. Can't imagine how he might have kept his little circle together all this time.

[Hello_Kitty]

10. I'm sure you could find a liberal equivalent but no one with her following

It's misleading to your students to present "both sides" without the important context of one side having a WAY bigger megaphone.

[yodermon]

11. Have your studends search for the left-wing violent rhetoric.

When they can't find any either... <insert learning-moment here>

[catabryna]

22. Best idea so far... n/t

[JuniperLea]

32. Awesome catch!

I like that... a lot!

[adigal]

39. I actually assigned my AP students this, but my regular

class may give up before they find anything!!

[bluestateguy]

12. Ted Rall is pretty bad

nt

[BumRushDaShow]

13. Randi Rhodes?

*ducks*

[leveymg]

14. Google "spokeswoman violent leftist rhetoric" turns up no one. Next thought, Rosa Luxemburg,

but you have to go back nearly a century to post-WWI Germany to find her. The 1919 Spartacist uprising in Germany, in which she became a reluctant but effective aggitator for the Communist revolutionaries, ended very badly for those involved, including Ms. Luxemburg.

I think you've pointed out an essential difference between the contemporary American Right and Left: the embrace of violent rhetoric by the former, and the near absence of it by the latter. I would point to decades of McCarthyism and repression of the Left as one reason.

[TexasProgresive]

15. You might have to look outside the USA and in history

Mao, Stalin and perhaps you could look to some of the more radical American leftists of the 30s 40s and perhaps the 60s. ie for the latter Weather Underground, Black Panthers, the Yippies to name a few and some names-Huey P. Newton, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, Kwame Toure and Dave Dellinger.

I don't think there are many today on the left who use the kind of rhetoric of the right wing pundits but I could be wrong. Good luck with your class.

BTW it might be a good project for them to find some on the left that are as vitriolic as the right. If they can't find any that would be a great post for the greatest page here.

[leveymg]

16. Weather Underground fixture Bernadette Dorn,

but she and Bill Ayres may have been agents provocateur.

[EFerrari]

23. Bernadette Dorn is a brilliant woman who has worked in prisoner rights

and with the Innocence Project for years. If she's a provocateur, she's a pretty lousy one. :)

[leveymg]

27. The evidence is circumstantial. But, there's a lot of it.

I'm not talking about the couple today. They're seemingly responsible and well respected members of the Chicago progressive community. I'm making reference here to their central role in splitting SDS and directing the Weather Underground faction and its bomb-making splinter groups. That the couple were able to evade capture for so long while on the FBI Most Wanted list is extraordinary. As later FBI records show, these groups were massively manipulated from within by COINTELPRO operations.

Here's an interesting short summary: http://salon.glenrose.net/default.asp?view=plink&id=8935

In April 1971, The "Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI" broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.<30> The group stole files with several hundred pages, 98% of the files targeted left wing individuals and groups.

(snip)

By the end of April, the FBI offices were to terminate all files dealing with leftist groups.<31> The files were a part of an FBI program called COINTELPRO.<32> However, after COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971 by J. Edgar Hoover,<33> the FBI continued its counterintelligence on groups like the Weather Underground. In 1973, the FBI established the 'Special Target Information Development' program, where agents were sent undercover to penetrate the Weather Underground. Due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents involved with the program, government attorneys requested all weapons- and bomb-related charges be dropped against the Weather Underground. The Weather Underground was no longer a fugitive organization and could turn themselves in with minimal charges against them.<34>

Let's be a little more specific about what exactly the FBI was doing that was illegal.

In Los Angeles, the FBI worked with the police department to support Ron Karenga, the leader of a black nationalist organization that was feuding with the Panthers. Two Panther activists were killed in a shootout at UCLA in 1969, for which five Karenga supporters were subsequently indicted, and three convicted. Louis Tackwood, an LAPD agent-provocateur who went public in 1971, says that the LAPD gave Karenga money, guns, narcotics, and encouragement.<8>

In Seattle, FBI agent Louis Harris recruited David Sannes in 1970, a patriotic veteran who was willing to help them catch some bombers. Sannes worked with explosives expert Jeffrey Paul Desmond and FBI agent Bert Carter. Their instructions were to find people interested in bombing. "For a few of the members it was a matter of many weeks of persuasion to actually have them carry through with the bombing projects," said Sannes. When Carter made it clear that he planned to have one bomber die in a booby-trapped explosion, Sannes dropped his FBI work and went public. "My own knowledge is that the FBI along with other Federal law enforcement agencies has been involved in a campaign of bombing, arson and terrorism in order to create in the mass public mind a connection between political dissidence of whatever stripe and revolutionaries of whatever violent tendencies," Sannes reported in an interview on WBAI radio.<9>

(snip)

The situation in Seattle is merely one of many examples of the FBI's campaign against the New Left. Two agents, W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller, admitted to a grand jury that they had authorized illegal break-ins and burglaries against friends and relatives of Weather Underground fugitives.

If you know something exculpatory about Dorn and Ayles activities during that period, or that may dispel the cloud of suspicions about them, I would love to hear about it.

[Jackpine Radical]

30. Wow, thanks for that info.

Ya lurnt me sumfin taday.

[leveymg]

31. I am not certain that Dorn and Ayles were double-agents, but I'm not the first to suggest it, either

They do seem to fit a profile of leading figures with violent movements who are later shown to be agents provocateur. That pattern goes back to the use of double-agents and false-flag terrorism by secret police working for European and Czarist Russian regimes in the 19th Century. Here's something with more depth that I wrote several years ago on the subject:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0612/S00032.htm

[Jackpine Radical]

33. Thanks for that too, Mark. (nt)

[EFerrari]

36. Well, you know I don't think much of the FBI.

I don't see their ability to evade capture during the really underground years as very remarkable. The documentary The Weather Underground has this information in it, iirc, about the break in that resulted in the COINTELPRO material.

I'd be willing to buy that Dorn and Ayers were manipulated but not that they were themselves provocateurs. They're pretty much the same people they were, with edges sanded smooth by years. Maybe better people but not different people.

[leveymg]

46. I think much of what the Bureau does is political.

They know how to find someone when they want to, and how not to - as Abby Hoffman, Tim Leary, and others who stayed on the lamb for a long time have perhaps demonstrated.

You may be right that Dorn and Ayers were largely unwitting about how they were being manipulated by the very political enemies they avowedly hated. But, they were smart and sane enough to know they were being lured into a sticky web and strings were being pulled in. That is the usual way that political police have operated for several centuries. I urge you to read the longer article I wrote about the origins of political policing and false-flag terrorism in the Czarist Okhrana: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0612/S00032.htm

[Erose999]

19. Just find a RW wacko and frame your arguments so that they look like a Lefty. It works for them...

Loughner was a "lefty"

Giffords was "really a conservative"

etc.

[monmouth]

20. Call the Actors Studio, many students would love this opportunity

otherwise I think you'll have a problem.../

[caraher]

21. Ask the students to find one

They have the Google, too, right? I think the inevitable arguments about whether the editorials they find use the same kind of rhetoric should serve your pedagogical ends better than just spoon-feeding them one (assuming you can find one, of course!).

[Doremus]

24. Taking a chance with this assignment aren't you?

Aren't you concerned one or more of your students who have rightwing parents might go home and complain about that "mean liberal teacher who's imposing her socialist beliefs on impressionable young minds"?

[adigal]

40. I have already been accused of that, so I want to show them

the difference between the rhetoric of the far right and our most liberal writers. :)

[ClassWarrior]

25. Hmmmm... no response from the OP. And no profile posted.

NGU.

[leveymg]

29. Noticed that, too. But, it was a constructive discussion by the rest of us.

We all agree, we are different from Michelle Malkin. Thank G-d.

[adigal]

41. Sorry, I was teaching. I have been here a LONG time!!

I am trying to show the difference between the rhetoric on the left and the right, since I was already accused of a left-wing bias. I told my students I couldn't think of "left-wing" people who use the rhetoric of the right, but I also told them I would go looking. And I assigned my AP kids to go looking on their own.

[SidDithers]

53. The OP is all over this thread...nt

Sid

[FSogol]

26. How about Leon Czolgosz?

:shrug:

[leveymg]

28. He was executed in 1901. eom

[FSogol]

34. He's Malkin's analogue. Only difference? He took action, she encourages other nuts to take action

:shrug:

[leveymg]

37. If you want to go with the metaphor, Emma Goldman was Malkin's analogue, but Leon's present-day

counterpart isn't really Jared Laughner, who appears to be certifiably psychotic as much as he was politically motivated.

By contrast, Leon Czolgosz seems to have been more serious in his cause, while he was also characterized as a loon. In addition, there were those in the radical and anarchist movements who suspected him before the assassination of McKinley of being a police agent. Nonetheless, Goldman continued to praise him as a principled revolutionary.

[adigal]

45. Sorry, I am looking for a present day violent writer n/t

[FSogol]

49. Yeah, doesn't exist. The parties and their followers are not the same. n/t

[rurallib]

35. Rude Pundit maybe?

if they can't tell sarcasm from reality he might pass.
besides it would be fun to read in class.

1/12/2011
Palin, Limbaugh, and O'Reilly Are Angry; Pie Still Yummy:
1. There she sits, our idiot queen, crowned by her Hollywood coif, needing two American flags in the frame of the video to tell us how really, most sincerely Americanly American she is. In a jacket and a lower-cut than usual blouse (which, truly, made the Rude Pundit think, "She needs to use more sunscreen on her upper chest"), Sarah Palin speaks to the tragedy that occurred in Arizona this past Saturday, in "our country," she says. Then, in a moment that can only be described as "Uh, is she having an orgasm?" Palin sighs, "Mmmm...our vibrant country."

To watch Palin's seven and a half minutes of self-aggrandizement and strained victimhood is to understand in a microcosmic moment how cynically Palin is manipulating her followers. Simply put, the faux absence of self-awareness isn't charmingly silly anymore. It's just dangerous and sad. Quoting Ronald Reagan, she says, "Each individual is accountable for his actions." Then she continues, "They begin and end with the criminals who commit them." If that was the case, the world would be a simpler place, no? The entire fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and, well, criminal justice could be banished from the courtroom. Crime doesn't happen in a vacuum. If it did, if society had no responsibility to prevent it, then someone should have told the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, back in 2001 not to worry too much about building a nice hockey rink to keep the kids out of trouble.

[adigal]

43. Thank you, I will go look. n/t

[adigal]

42. Addendum: I am trying to show students differences in communication

and that the left has no one with the accepted violence of the right. If I cannot find anyone, and my top students cannot find anyone, that proves my point. I need to show this to them, as I have already been accused of being biased.

[EFerrari]

51. Reasoning out a situation and coming to a conclusion is not bias, though.

it's critical thinking. :)

[DirkGently]

54. Tada. "Bias" and "reality" are often conflated by the right. Rightwing views are underrepresented

by teachers, college professors, and honest journalists, because the fact is that tax cuts don't pay for themselves, the Founding Fathers did not set out to create a "Christian Nation," abortion is not murder, illegal immigration is not destroying the country, and deregulation is not the best way to improve unemployment. Etc.

It's not that all views that might be called "conservative" are wrong. It's that the things American politics call conservative, which are essentially a) religious fundamentalism and b) economic kleptocracy, cannot be supported by reason or evidence.

This is part of the reason why the most visible "conservative" commentators rely on tactics like demonizing the opposing view and inventing or distorting facts.

You might want to take a look (or another look) at "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." I think it explains the dynamic we've seen from the American right for many years. Might be helpful for the class. You could present in an "unbiased" fashion by noting that it's something that various political groups have employed, but which is now primarily used by the right in America.

http://www.kenrahn.com/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html

[adigal]

56. Thank you, this is a great suggestion n/t

[11 Bravo]

44. No such animal. Perhaps you could teach a baboon to speak, then infect it with rabies.

That's as close as you're likely to get.

[Zephie]

48. Best response I've ever seen to anything anywhere.

You win an internet.

[RandomKoolzip]

47. Hunter S. Thompson...but, yeah, he's dead too.

I finally figured out who the violent rhetoric merchants on the right are "emulating" when they "humorously" threaten Democrats and liberals: Hunter Thompson, who famously suggested that Ed Meese get raped by an elk, etc. Of course, Thompson was so over-the-top you couldn't take him seriously when he said things like that.

[SidDithers]

50. David Michael Green...

his rhetoric isn't violent, but he's just as much an idiot as Malkin.

Sid

[diane in sf]

52. Ask your students to find an example--it will be a good learning process when they search

the web, various publications, etc. When they can't find the equivalent that will be a good learning experience as well.

[alittlelark]

55. Me after soloing a bottle of red wine

It's not pretty.... but at least the next day ppl say I made sense.

Malkin....