H/T to Gateway Pundit for informing us about Mike Klonsky blog posting on Obama’s site.
Mike Klonsky is one of the founders of Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (USA) and the Students for a Democratic Society a fervent Obama supporter, friend and former member of the terrorist group the Weatherman.
As Gateway Pundit notes: “Between 1979 and 1981, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML) chairman and Obama supporter Mike Klonsky was repeatedly feted with state-dinner-level visits to Beijing.”
Between 1979 and 1981, the CPML, which had become internationally recognized as China’s favorite American party (CPML chairman Mike Klonsky was repeatedly feted with state-dinner-level visits to Beijing), dissolved in a rapid series of factional splits and departures. Elbaum sadly relates the human and emotional toll exacted by the movement’s implosion, as “many veterans experienced something resembling post-traumatic stress syndrome.” For many, their bitterness was so profound that they “simply abandoned political work altogether.”
Elbaum notes that for many Maoists, once their political organizations crumbled, they successfully re-entered “the better-off strata from which they had once defected.” Some, like onetime CPML chairman Klonsky, now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, have undeniably retained more than a modicum of progressive politics. However, other former top CPML ideologues nowadays include a millionaire venture capitalist who worked for many years at the Blackstone Group and a management executive for a prominent Florida-based restaurant chain.
The following is from Global Labor
However, it must be pointed out that a notorious ally of Bill Ayers for many years, Mike Klonsky, is an open member of the Obama campaign. Klonsky runs a blog on the official Obama website Here where he claims to be a “professor of education” (the website of the Small Schools Workshop that he directs says only that he teaches some graduate courses, though it appears he was a visiting professor for one year at Nova Southeastern University in Florida in 2006-07) and says he blogs for Obama on “education politics and teaching for social justice.”
Who is Mike Klonsky? Well, on one level, he might just appear to be a protege of Bill Ayers in the education world. He received, as I detail below, a $175,000 grant from the Ayers/Obama-led Annenberg Challenge to run the Small Schools Workshop that he and Ayers started in Chicago to push their school reform agenda.
But that is only half the story. Klonsky was one of the most destructive hardline maoists in the SDS in the late 60’s who emerged from SDS to form a pro-Chinese sect called the October League that later became the Beijing-recognized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). As chairman of the party, Klonsky travelled to Beijing itself in 1977 and, literally, toasted the Chinese stalinist leadership who, in turn, “hailed the formation of the CP(ML) as ‘reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people,’ effectively recognizing the group as the all-but-official US Maoist party.” (Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 228).
I know of no indications that Klonsky has ever expressed any regrets about that activity. Perhaps like his SDS comrade, Ayers, he, too, thinks he did not do enough back then. In my view they did more than enough.
An excellent profile of that maoist milieu is available in a book called Revolution in the Air by Max Elbaum, a first hand participant whose sympathy for the maoism of the period does not get in the way of an excellent account of these idiot savants of the left.
How is it possible that someone of Klonsky’s ilk would now be playing a visible role in the Obama campaign itself on such an important issue as education policy - apparently with free reign to push his authoritarian “social justice” agenda?
These associations that Obama has with Klonsky, Ayers and other radical Communists/Socialists have got to be brought to light. These are the people who’ve shaped his world view and those views are 180° opposed to that of the majority of Americans and diametrically opposed to where this country needs to be.
At a time when most European countries are realizing their earlier shift towards socialism is, in fact, not working and are beginning to shift back to a stronger Capitalists system and electing more conservative leaning leaders… it’s surprising that our would be leaders and CongressCritters™ on the left are just now trying to follow the old European type system? Why are they so behind the curve? We must not make the same mistake and go backwards falling back on a completely failed philosophy!
I believe the post of Klonsky's is gone from the Obama site.
You must have struck a nerve!