Quick Takes: <i>News You May Have Missed</i>

Quick Takes: News You May Have Missed

By: Aaron Klein

Published: May 12th, 2010

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President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, has argued that certain forms of speech that promote “racial or gender inequality” should be illegal, this column has found.

In her 1993 article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V.,” for the University of Chicago Law Review, Kagan writes: “I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.”

In a 1996 paper, “Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine,” Kagan argues that it may be proper to suppress speech because it is offensive to society or to the government.

Kagan’s name was also on a brief, United States V. Stevens, dug up by the Washington Examiner, stating: “Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs.”

Meanwhile, in her undergraduate thesis at Princeton, Kagan laments the decline of socialism in the country as “sad” for those who still hope to “change America.”

Titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933,” the paper argues that infighting caused the decline of the early socialist movement. Kagan asks why the “greatness” of socialism was not reemerging as a major political force.

“In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States. Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness,” writes Kagan.

“Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?” she asks.

In the senior thesis, Kagan, who graduated from Princeton in 1981, addresses infighting in the socialist movement.

“Through its own internal feuding, then, the SP [Socialist Party] exhausted itself forever and further reduced labor radicalism in New York to the position of marginality and insignificance from which it has never recovered.

“The story is a sad but also a chastening one for those who, more than half a century after socialism’s decline, still wish to change America,” she writes. “Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one’s fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.”

Her thesis was dedicated to her brother “whose involvement in radical causes led me to explore the history of American radicalism in the hope of clarifying my own political ideas.”

Axelrod’s Communist Connection

Newly uncovered correspondence quotes a purported communist activist claiming to have served as political mentor to President Obama’s Senior Adviser David Axelrod.

The correspondence is highlighted in this reporter’s new book, The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and other Anti-American Extremists. The book exposes evidence of Axelrod working closely with a pair of communist activists who boasted of aiding Axelrod’s political career; it ties Obama to the same activists as well.

The book also documents how Don Rose, founder of the pro-communist Hyde Park Voices and member in the 1960s of a purported Communist Party front, the Alliance to End Repression, boasted of his relationship with Axelrod:

“Your dad and I ‘mentored’ and helped educate [Axelrod] politically,” Rose wrote to Marc Canter – the son of David S. Canter, who co-founded the Voices newspaper and was named as a communist in the late 1960′s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, “which is perhaps why you may recall seeing him hanging around the house.”

“I later wrote a reference letter for him [Axelrod] that helped him win an internship at the Tribune, which was the next step in his journalism career,” Rose admitted, referring to an internship Axelrod landed at the Chicago Tribune in 1977.

The newspaper later hired Axelrod full-time. At the age of 27, Axelrod became the youngest Tribune writer when he served as the City Hall Bureau Chief and a political columnist for the publication.

Axelrod worked again with Rose and Canter when Obama’s future top adviser was hired in 1987 to aid in the successful reelection campaign of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. Washington himself was supported by a coalition of communist and socialist groups.

Canter, a key Chicago political fixer, was reportedly instrumental in convincing Washington to first run for election in 1981.

Rose and Axelrod then worked together again, running the 1992 senatorial campaign of Carol Moseley Braun, whose election was notoriously aided by a massive voter registration drive led by Obama himself at Chicago’s Project Vote.

Rose was later an organizing member of Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq, the group that invited Obama to speak at its October 2, 2002, antiwar rally in Chicago – an address that propelled Obama to national attention.

The rally was organized by Marxist Carl Davidson and extremist activists Marilyn Katz and Bettylu Saltzman.

Davidson is a notorious far-left activist and former radical national leader in the anti-Vietnam movement. He served as national secretary for the infamous Students for a Democratic Society anti-war group, from which Ayers’ Weathermen later splintered.

Davidson is also a founder of the New Party, a controversial 1990s political party that sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far left.

The Manchurian President contains new evidence, including an exclusive interview with Davidson himself, indicating that Obama was a New Party member.

Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief and senior reporter for Internet giant WorldNetDaily.com. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York’s 770-WABC Radio, the largest talk radio station in the U.S., every Sunday between 2-4 p.m.

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About the Author: Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief and senior reporter for WorldNetDaily.com. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York's 770-WABC Radio, the largest talk radio station in the U.S., every Sunday between 2-4 p.m (CHANGE TO 7-9 p.m.). His website is KleinOnline.com

Quick Takes: News You May Have Missed

Axelrod’s Communist Connection

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