Professor Mark Crispin has been teaching propaganda classes at NYU for more than 20 years, a very popular subject that always has more student participation than the designated maximum typically allows.
Crispin had always identified himself as being on the left, not as a communist but as part of the campus left, the counter-cultural left of the 60s which was heavily influenced by the anti-war and civil rights movement.
The left back then was targeted by certain agencies with concealed intentions, he believes, and was subsequently divided, further noting that the left he was part of was completely different than the one today.
“When I look back on what we then believed in, I can’t help but be shocked—repelled by what the so-called left has become today. The two lefts have nothing in common,” Crispin told The Epoch Times, “today’s left is the far-right.”
“When I was a kid, the far-right really kind of distrusted and feared the working class. They wanted them to stay away from politics, they didn’t like labor unions. Well, who are the deplorables? That’s the working class. The constant demonization of Trump’s base is essentially an attack—an elite attack–on the working class and its refusal to follow the script dictated to them by the liberal media.
“So they’re constantly dismissed and attacked as Nazis, as far-right, white supremacists.”
According to the professor—who was canceled by some of his colleagues and a few students and then exonerated—this procedure doesn’t apply to black people.
“The left fetishizes black people. The left thinks that black people are automatically on their side, especially if those black people subscribe to the same political views that the Democrats hold.
“The fact is that, putting aside the weird attitude of the so-called left toward black people, they have no use for the working class, they have nothing for contempt for them, and that strikes me as another symptom of their being on the far-right.”
Crispin doesn’t idealize the campus left of the 60s, acknowledging that there was a lot wrong with it. However, he asserts that they were the subject of a concerted and highly sophisticated attack from big liberal foundations, “Ford and Rockefeller especially,” who started favoring research projects focused on race and gender.
“I believe that’s a key reason why the academic left became a tribalist mob,” he continued, “because it suited [their] professional interests to [have you] become a devotee of identity politics. What those liberal foundations did not want you to study was class or political economy. They did not want the left to do that anymore.”
‘Black Lives Matter Is a Brand’
According to the professor, these foundations artificially directed the civil rights movement into an operation completely obsessed with race and identity.
“That’s what we have now. That’s what Black Lives Matter is, Black Lives Matter is basically a brand. I don’t see them doing anything, for example, about the health impact on black people of lockdowns,” Crispin said. “Why haven’t Black Lives Matter said anything about what Dr. Fauci did to all those black orphans during the AIDS years?
“They’ll get all exercised about Confederate generals—the statues that commemorate them on campuses and in city halls, and they’ll scream and yell and demand that Thomas Jefferson’s statue be taken out of the New York City Hall. Seriously? That ancient history gets them all worked up. What about what Dr. Fauci did, to black orphans, children, a few decades ago, and he’s still around, he’s still our health czar, right? Why isn’t Black Lives Matter screaming about him?
“The point is the Black Lives Matter and the whole critical race theory movement, comprise a gigantic step backward. Because we now have on college campuses all over the country, segregated dining facilities and segregated graduation ceremonies. To someone like me, who comes out of the 60s, who remembers the civil rights struggle and was deeply sympathetic to it—and a believer in it—this is stunning, just mind-boggling. All of a sudden now, there’s just a new reassertion of racism, which also entails this notion that all white people are white supremacists, which is a profoundly racist idea.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Black Lives Matter for comment.
