If John Eastman Taints Chapman, What About Communist Angela Davis at UC?

Author/activist Angela Davis speaks onstage during the Independent Lens Examines Black History Month panel during the 2012 Winter TCA Tour at The Langham Huntington Hotel and Spa in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 5, 2012. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

Commentary

The Los Angeles Times is upset because Chapman University supposedly is tainted by John Eastman. It reported, “Try as it might, Chapman University just can’t seem to get past John Eastman.”

The problems he allegedly caused include, “supporting California’s Proposition 8, which would have banned same-sex marriage.” Actually, it did ban same-sex marriage in California until the 2015 Obergefell decision overturned all such laws. And as we have been hearing, today’s Supreme Court could reverse Obergefell, throwing the issue back to the states. Meaning Prop. 8 would go back into effect. As a constitutional amendment, it only could be reversed if another initiative revoking it were passed by voters.

Don’t Times reporters do any research?

But Eastman’s main offense, of course, was giving President Trump advice about challenging the 2020 election results. I covered that in The Epoch Times back in March.

But how about a professor who’s a real embarrassment to her institution, Angela Davis, retired in 2008 from UC Santa Cruz with a taxpayer-backed pension? Last year she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

But she’s a communist—and I’m not Red-baiting her. In 1980 and 1984, she ran for vice president on the Communist Party-USA ticket with perennial Stalinist Gus Hall. That was just after the Soviet Union’s bloody invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which enslaved the country and murdered hundreds of thousands of people.

The CP-USA was always a front for the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, the Soviet archives briefly were opened widely. A 1998 article in the Atlantic by James T. Patterson summarized the findings:

“According to these documents, CPUSA leaders’ subservience to Moscow was total. American Communist officials all but invited the Comintern [Communist International, which among other things backed Mao’s Chinese Communist Party] to choose their leaders, and they acquiesced in sharp turns of Soviet policy—for example, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939—that appalled many Party members in the United States. Klehr et al. argue that top officials of the CPUSA offered no protests against the brutal purges and killings orchestrated by Stalin against his enemies (including some wayward American Communists in the Soviet Union) in the 1930s. The documents also reveal that the CPUSA often depended heavily on funding (‘Moscow gold’) from the Soviet Union. As late as 1988 the Soviet Union contributed $3 million to the Party in the United States.”

During the 1980s, both the Soviet Union and the United States pointed more than 40,000 nuclear weapons at one another. The threat of nuclear annihilation was real. Today, it’s about 6,000 each for the U.S. and Russia.

In 1975, just five years before Davis’ first VP run, the United States also suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, as South Vietnam was overrun and enslaved by North Vietnam’s Soviet-supplied tanks. The image of the U.S. helicopters making one final flight off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon still haunts us.

Davis, curiously, is a connection between the old-style economic, class warfare, historical-materialism Marxists and the current Cultural Marxists. The CultMarxists have abandoned the workers for whom Hall, Stalin, and the others said they were striving to create the Radiant Future, in favor of now deconstructing the moral, sexual, and political order. The CultMarxists’ main guru is Herbert Marcuse, under whom Davis studied. She merges Stalin/Gus Hall with Marcuse.

Her 1981 book, “Women, Race and Class,” as its title suggests, ties together the old class-based Marxism-Lennism with the new race- and gender-based Cultural Marxism. The Wikipedia review summarized it, “Bernice McNair Barnett of the journal ‘Race, Gender & Class’ wrote that, in ‘Women, Race and Class,’ Davis was one of the first scholars to make an intersectional analysis of race, gender and class. She and other women of color writers around the same period led to the development of such analyses and research in academia.”

It’s worth remembering who was the Soviet dictator in 1980: Leonid Brezhnev. He survived Stalin’s massive purges by being one of the top purgers, responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. In 1968, he ordered the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress its freedom movement. Along with Mao, he supplied the North Vietnamese communists with whom Davis was allied. That’s the monster from whom Davis took her marching orders.

The Black Book of Communism

In 1997 Harvard University Press published “The Black Book of Communism.” It tallied the following mass deaths from what it called the “Crimes of Communism,” totaling 94 million:

• 65 million in the People’s Republic of China
• 20 million in the Soviet Union
• 2 million in Cambodia
• 2 million in North Korea
• 1.7 million in Ethiopia
• 1.5 million in Afghanistan
• 1 million in the Eastern Bloc
• 1 million in Vietnam
• 150,000 in Latin America
• 10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power.”

Angela Davis supported the system of government that caused those 94 million deaths, and indeed ran for office under its bloody red banner. Yet she is celebrated by the University of California.

Meanwhile, poor John Eastman is persecuted and the fine Chapman University besmirched because he came up with a controversial legal theory.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.