A professor, students and videotape.

What I have frequently referred to as the Academic-Industrial-Complex (AIC) really is an organ of sorts of what I call the Racism-Industrial-Complex (RIC).

One of the more recent illustrations of this point is Albert Ponce, a professor of political science at Diablo Valley College. One of Ponce’s lectures was recently video recorded by one of his students. The student released it to The Red Elephants—an on-line organization that has launched a campaign encouraging students to record their “Marxist professors—who in turn shared it with the campus watchdog publication, Campus Reform.

Ponce is captured on video assuring his students that since America’s is a system of “white supremacy,” the flag “is not really representative of everybody [.]”

“We are taught to get up and to pledge allegiance to the flag every single day.” However, the “flag is not really representative of everybody who is standing up in that room. Maybe that’s the way it should be taught. All those who this flag represents stand up, and maybe 50 percent of this room, _you remain seated because this is not for you_” (emphasis added).

To be fair, the Albert Ponces of the contemporary academic world are a dime-a-dozen. While the drivel that he espouses is obnoxious, and while it can’t fail to jolt the sensibilities of many to see and hear a professor at a taxpayer-subsidized institution engage in educational malpractice by substituting anti-American preaching for teaching in the liberal arts, the tragic truth of the matter is that Ponce, in these respects, is indistinguishable from the vast majority of his colleagues in academia in these respects.

Nevertheless, it is good and just that this video is going viral, there has been a backlash, and that parents of current and prospective DVC students can discover for themselves the depths of the cesspool to which radical leftist academics have reduced our institutions of higher learning.

The United States Constitution, Ponce says, “should be called a white man’s constitution.”

So, the “white supremacy” that is America is in the proverbial DNA of the country. On this score, Ponce is unequivocal:

“And there were people here, the indigenous people, who were part—who paid a price, a very heavy price, for this project that is unfolding of white supremacy.”

Ponce also labels the American system “white democracy.” While supplying a slide presentation with this title, Ponce expresses his disdain toward President Trump and Attorney General Session: “So it is fitting that a white supremacist of old with a white supremacist of today exists and sit—they are smiling in the White House.”

Yet the Ponce video is especially valuable insofar as it reveals the logic of his ideology, the inescapable implication of his conviction—to repeat, a conviction shared by the overwhelming majority of his colleagues—that America is a thoroughly oppressive place.

It isn’t just that America is a “system” of “white supremacy,” though it is, of course, this. Ponce insists that in addition to being “white supremacist,” the American system is also “patriarchal, heteronormative, [and] capitalist[.]”

Thus, with a system so oppressive to women, gays, the transgendered, and nonwhites, there can be no negotiation. There can be no “reform.”

There can only be “abolition.”

“What does abolition mean? Abolition means we must destroy it, not reform it. No voting is going to help. No writing your congressperson.”

Ponce declares: “We need to smash white supremacy” (emphasis mine).

And how exactly does Ponce propose “the oppressed” go about “smashing” “white supremacy”? His answer is blunt:

Laws must be violated.

Those who “write” the law—the “oppressors”—have “convince[d] all of us to follow it,” Ponce asserts. Yet “you shouldn’t,” he continues, for “the laws existing,” at least “many” of them, “we should be violating[.]”

This is activism, radical leftist activism. This is not teaching. To put it another way, Ponce represents as clearly as anyone the prevailing impulse among academics to forego the education of their students in favor of training them in the ideology of their instructors, an ideology that entails relentless activism against the very civilization that both birthed the institutions of higher learning of which these students and their professors avail themselves as well as bestowed upon them every other privilege and blessing.

Why would any parent who is remotely concerned with the intellectual and moral well-being of his or her children pay big bucks to place them at the mercies of academics, like Professor Ponce, who despise the institutions, traditions, and, by implication, most of the people of the West and America?

How can taxpayers sit idly by why their hard-earned dollars are siphoned off by bureaucrats and channeled to subsidize the rantings of the Albert Ponces?

To be sure, the ideal of a liberal arts education remains a beautiful one. And there remain talented, capable, and dedicated academics—some of whom are on the liberal-left—who labor diligently to realize that ideal for themselves and, importantly, their students. Regrettably, though, they are in the minority, outflanked on all sides by folks like Albert Ponce.

Besides the fact that Ponce deprived students of the education to which they are entitled, there is another tragedy in all of this.

Ponce and his far-left, activist colleagues are, in a very real sense, the victims of their own ideology. Blinded, they fail to recognize that the conceptual resources that they draw upon to condemn “white supremacy” and all of the rest are the self-same moral ideas that distinguish from all others the civilization that they condemn as “white supremacist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” etc. Most saliently, these anti-American, anti-Western professors presuppose the truth of the distinctively—no, the _uniquely—_Western, Christian concept of the Individual, for only if the person assumes moral importance over considerations of race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and so forth can it be immoral to regard people in terms of these ostensibly morally irrelevant categories.

Notably, these anti-American, anti-Western professors organize their worldview around their readings of Karl Marx, who Ponce refers to as “one of the most profound thinkers in the history of Western philosophy.” Yet Marx was a 19th century German white man who was every bit as much a product of the “white supremacist” civilization against which 21st century “oppressed” professor rails.

It isn’t only the students of these activist professors who are in need of a genuine education. The professors themselves need it just as badly.