Campus Progress: Agendas and Activities By Lowell Ponte March 2005
Campus Progressdescribes itself as "a brand-new effort to strengthen progressive voices on college and university campuses; counter the growing influence of right-wing groups on campus; and empower new generations of progressive leaders."
"In its first 3 months," said its May 25, 2005 press release, "Campus progress has held more than 50 campus speaking events; funded and supported student newspapers on 14 campuses; published hundreds of articles and multimedia pieces by students, journalists, officeholders, activists, and artists at the CampusProgress.org website; and promoted student advocacy on issues from Social Security to academic freedom, national security to judicial nominations."
Campus progress has ample money to wage such pro-left, anti-right propaganda warfare on America's campuses because it is a "project" of the Center for American Progress (CAP),whichis heavily bankrolled by billionaire George Soros and other wealthy left activists and entities. Created in summer 2003 as a "progressive" left-liberal "think tank," CAP reported 2003 revenues of $11,738,685. CAP's tiny board of directors includes Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during Democratic President Bill Clinton's Administration, as well as left-funding billionaire Peter B. Lewis and Aryeh Neier, the President of Soros' Open Society Institute and the Soros foundation network.
The President of the Center for American Progress is John Podesta, who served as President Clinton's White House Chief of Staff (October 1998-January 2001). Podesta was chosen to head CAP by George Soros and notorious Morton Halperin, who has had close ties to the leftwing Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and in February 2002 became Director of Soros' OpenSocietyPolicyCenter. Halperin was a high-ranking White House advisor to President Clinton, but was so controversial that a Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate refused to consent to his appointment to a higher position in the government.
Since CAP's founding Halperin has been its Senior Vice President and, in concert with board member Neier, has been its main bridge to Soros money.
Although Campus progress displays a few recent college graduates among its leaders, its fortyish Director and main boss is Morton Halperin's son David Halperin, a former speechwriter in the Clinton White House. David Halperin is accustomed to repackaging the same old stale, historically-discredited left propaganda that most of today's bright young college students are no longer easily persuaded to swallow. Such repackaging and propagandizing of the young is why Campus progress was created.
(Another Morton Halperin son is ABC's Political Director Mark Halperin, David's brother, who violated journalistic ethics in 1992 by secretly giving a confidential ABC document to the Clinton campaign. In 1992 ABC assigned Mark Halperin as one of its reporters covering the Clinton White House, despite knowing that he had betrayed ABC to help Clinton win and that both Halperin's father and brother worked there in political positions for President Clinton. During the closing weeks of the 2004 election campaign, Mark Halperin wrote a memo ordering ABC reporters and producers to slant their coverage against President George W. Bush and in favor of Democratic presidential candidate Senator John F. Kerry. ABC did not fire Halperin for this blatant example of bias.
Political pundits generally regard CAP and its arms such as Campus progress as designed to support the left in general and Hillary Clinton's expected 2008 presidential candidacy in particular. Podesta, Browner, the Halperins and others employed by CAP have been Clinton operatives. Former President Clinton was scheduled as the keynote speaker at Campus progress's first National Student Conference in Washington, D.C. on July 13, 2005. CAP and the Clintons share many of the same financial supporters.
This National Student Conference's immediate aim is to identify, recruit, radicalize and advance the careers of young leftwing journalists and activists. Scheduled conference speakers included Democratic Party operatives such as Paul Begala and Donna Brazile as well as Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation and John Passacantando, Executive Director of the leftwing environmental group Greenpeace US. A major aim of Campus progress, according to the Washington Post, is "putting young journalists in touch with staffers for The Nation, a socialist magazine which supported the Communist adversaries of the United States during the Cold War and now opposes the War on Terror, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly and American Prospect." The Soros agenda is to integrate the hard left with the Democratic Party.
"We're not winning the battle of ideas on campus," David Halperin in February 2005 toldWashinton Post staff writer Howard Kurtz, adding that conservatives "have this insurgency mentality, even though they run the world." Both ends of this statement are Halperin fantasies.
Working under David Halperin's direction, the Campus Outreach Coordinator for Campus progress is Emily Hawkins, a 2001 graduate of WesleyanUniversity.
In 2004 according to her CAP biography, Hawkins "served as a researcher and production assistant for [Michael Moore's company] Dog Eat Dog films where she provided political research and assisted with production and post-production of Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising Tour." The Slacker Uprising Tour was a campus political campaign in battleground states to get students to vote for John Kerry during the 2004 election.
The Campus Programs Director for Campus progress is Ben Hubbard, who prior to finding this job at CAP "worked in the personal office of Senator Patrick Leahy (D.-VT) and was an editorial assistant for the public interest journal TomPaine.com." TomPaine.com has been heavily funded by, among others, the Schumann Center run by Democratic partisan and retired Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) star Bill Moyers, whose son John Moyers has run TomPaine.com. Hubbard's writings have also been published in the left magazine American Prospect Online.
"We're being outhustled," Hubbard told the Washington Post. "We want to cultivate the media stars, much like the right has done with Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza."
The Campus Speakers Bureau Coordinator for Campus progress is Keisha Senter, a FloridaA&MUniversity graduate in Food Science who earned her Masters Degree in International Relations from DublinCityUniversity in Ireland. Before joining CAP, she worked in New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer's Manhattan office and as a field organizer in his reelection campaign.
The Interim Editor of CampusProgress.org is Elana Berkowitz, a 2001 BrownUniversity graduate whose writing has been published by The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and The Nation and has been aired on National Public Radio (NPR).
The Associate Editor and Webmaster for CampusProgress.org is August J. Pollak, who prior to being hired by CAP "worked as a legislative aide with the New Jersey State Assembly."
The Center for American Progress describes itself as "a nonpartisan educational organization." What emanates from its project Campus progress, however, says nothing good about leaders of the Republican Party and conservatives and not a single word criticizing leaders of the Democratic Party or leftists. Of those paid by CAP to work on Campus progress, Halperin, Hubbard, Senter and Pollak come from explicitly partisan Democratic backgrounds, and all come from the left end of the ideological spectrum.
"While the media perceives U.S. campuses as bastions of liberalism," wroteCampus progress, "the right wing has spent 30 years organizing to gain the upper hand. Conservative groups spend over $35 million every year pushing their agenda on campuses through speaking programs, funding for student publications, and leadership training, plus tens of millions more for academic programs. It's time for progressive students to start winning the battle of ideas."
This picture painted by Campus progress is, of course, absurd. Most American campuses today are dominated by faculties that, when polled, typically acknowledge voting 85-99 percent Democratic….and those professors who do not usually say their reason is that the Democratic Party is not far enough to the left. The generation that demanded "free speech" at Berkeley in the 1960s now runs America's campuses and, in many cases, has imposed speech codes and other policies to stifle views contrary to their own. Diversity on many campuses now means that the faculty includes a black Marxist, a transsexual Marxist, and a Hispanic Marxist, but diversity of ideas has been eliminated by an intellectual apartheid that favors the hiring only of a one-sided monoculture of leftwing professors.
Moreover, the lion's share of campus funds - both students activities funds and departmental funds administered by leftwing professors goes to underwrite leftwing campus political activity already. Also virtually all official college newspapers are controlled by the political left. Campus progress is therefore much more an overt attempt to recruit the already well-funded campus left to become wedded to the Democratic Party.
Thanks to the funding of Soros and the backing of Clinton and other Democratic Paryt heavyweights, Campus progress is now by far the best funded national organization on campuses. Alarmed by the conservative student movement for intellectual diversity and academic freedom Campus progress has set itself the specific task of combating the minority political voices of conservatism wherever it can. Campus progress is using four lines of attack to prevent fresh ideas from penetrating America's campuses. One is its speaker bureau to counter any conservative voice and to flood speaking slots where a non-left voice might be invited for a hearing. Another is its online webzine that gives "students the opportunity to be published nationally," at least if what they say conforms to the left's ideological template. These publications also provide a simplistic catechism of cliches on current issues, in effect crib sheets and talking points to help fashionably-liberal students "win debates" with campus conservatives and impress their professors.
Campus progress, in other words, is using money to fund campus newspapers and speakers that spout its partisan left Democratic Party line. Those that conform may receive substantial money; those with the independence to criticize liberals will be denied funding or have it cut off the moment they deviate from the party line. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and the tune Campus progress will demand of campus publications for its pay includes lots of "Allemande Lefts."
As of February 2005 CAP had allocated $750,000 to help subsidize nine liberal campus publications and launch four others, reportedthe Washington Post.
The campus publications that Campus progresswrote it has "selected for support in the winter/spring semester 2005" include the following:
The above have effectively ceased to be student publications, although each will continue to have nominal student "editors." Just as MoveOn.org following the 2004 elections boasted that it now "owned" the Democratic Party, having bought and paid for it, CAP and Campus progress have bought and paid for these prostituted publications. During future elections such publications should be regarded as potentially-illegal campaign contributions to the Democratic Party and its candidates.
(CAP, incidentally, uses the same internet service provider as MoveOn.org - but this seems unsurprising in view of the fact that George Soros is one of the biggest funders of both of these sister"Shadow Government" organizations.)
The Campus progress propaganda which these publications carry comes in several flavors, including hate, hype and hi-jinks. It includes negative commentary about Republicans. It includes warm and cuddly features such as "Five Minutes With," quickie interviews with the likes of former Clinton Administration Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, whom it honored as a co-creator of and model for TV's lefty drama The West Wing.UCLA student columnist Ezra Klein has written sarcastically about "How to be a Conservative Pundit in Three Easy Traits" and, revealingly, about how one of the Democratic Party's most successful political campaign operatives uses her "impersonator syndrome."
Campus progress finds a variety of ways to pump Democratic Party talking points on key issues into reader heads. Its propaganda, for example, includes funny contests that always have a tinge of hate and denigration, such as its winter 2005 "Name Ann Coulter's Next Book" contest. Runners-up among 150-odd entries included "Democracy: The Liberal Plot to Feed Your Children to the Poor" and "Pander: How Character Assassination and Name-Calling Will Make You Popular and Rich." The winning entry, whose author received as his prize "The official Ann Coulter talking action figure": "Roosevelt: Wheelchair-Riding, America-Hating Terrorist."
("Well, at least now they're trying to be funny," was Coulter's response, "a welcome change from all the vomiting and fainting after the election season." Coulter also offered her own titles regarding Campus progress: "Tuesdays with Morons," "The Dan Rather Code," and "He's Just Not Into Jews: The George Soros Story.")
Campus progress propaganda includes "Tools," including a series of hit pieces called"Know Your Right-Wing Speakers," biographies viciously slanted to smear, promote hatred for, and poison the well against conservatives such as Ann Coulter who occasionally are invited to speak on college campuses.
One such agitprop hit piece in this series, for example, preemptively attacked David Horowitz, a former Marxist intellectual-turned-conservative and best-selling author. This anonymous attack - posted without any author's byline - falsely accused Horowitz of having been a "Communist Maoist," when he was on the left. In fact, Horowitz was a New Left Marxist and a vocal anti-Stalinist and anti-Maoist who actually wrote well-known articles for the New Left magazine Ramparts Magazine condemning both Maoists and Stalinists. During the Vietnam War era he criticized both China and Russia.
The anti-Horowitz hit piece described this lifelong civil rights activist, who demonstrated in behalf of civil rights legislation as early as 1948, by using vague and loaded words such as "nasty," "ill-mannered," "ill-informed," "smarmy" and "seemingly bigoted." This last was a criticism leveled at articles published in the leftwing magazine Salon.com which could in no way be interpreted as such. Campus progress also made it clear to careful readers that this attack on David Horowitz was written as hot return fire for a cool, factual May 2005 Horowitz analytical article at FrontPageMagazine.com titled "The Multiple Lies of John Podesta and Friends."
It's reference to Horowitz academic freedom campaign was no more moderate or truthful. "Campus progress hopes that students, faculty, campus administrators, and legislators of all ideological and political stripes will stand up against these efforts by Horowitz to turn state government into Campus Thought Police." This is how it referred to Horowitz efforts to encourage free speech and diversity of views on campuses, in a classic example of the pot calling the kettle - white. (Yes, Campus progress even accused Horowitz of "defending that downtrodden demographic, white males," as if this group of students should have no equal rights.) It is, of course, Campus progress and not Horowitz that wishes to preserve today's monolithic rule by the left Campus Thought Police.
The hit piece on Horowitz, according to Campus progress , "in no way endorses" those who "to curb free speech" have attacked speakers with pies, as has happened to Horowitz, Ann Coulter and other conservatives on campuses. "Horowitz has as much of a right to speak his mind as the rest of us, no matter how weak his arguments or hazy his facts. And we don't like wasting pie…."
Campus progress mildly suggested that those who share its left ideology not throw pies at conservatives, but in the same piece it dishonestly slimed David Horowitz and painted him as an appropriate object of hatred for all decent - i.e., left-thinking -- people. In that same hit piece, Campus progress praised University of Hawaii students who "interrupted" a Horowitz speech "each time he told a lie. Instead of shouting him down…the students simply corrected Horowitz's misstatements." It didn't supply any Horowitz lies or misstatements and neglected to mention the signs held aloft by the Hawaiian radicals which said "No academic freedom for fascists."
The alternative to pie throwing and shouting a speaker down recommended by Campus progress is what logicians call "a distinction without a difference." Incessantly interrupting a speaker to call him a liar prevents his being heard and uses up the few minutes he has to address an audience at least as effectively as does shouting him down or throwing a pie in his face.
This is a tactic used to stifle a speaker by those so self-righteous that they deem themselves the arbiters of what is true and censors of what they regard as a lie. Who died and made them God, empowered to impose their notion of truth and morality on everybody else? These are the kind of zealots who gagged Galileo by declaring what he said a lie. Campus progress has explicitly encouraged the disruption of speeches by conservatives on campus. This denies a conservative's right to speak and violates the ideal of diversity, a fair hearing for alternative viewpoints, and the students' right of free choice. It is Campus progressthat is clearly vying to be a combination of campus commissar and thought police.
