Hat tip Campus Reform
That was the crux of SEIU union guy Eyon Biddle's guest lecture at UW Whitewater as he explained to the class about "white rage" in supporting Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. A student taped Biddle's words.
http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=5458
This, Dear Reader, is part and parcel of what is going on in our university humanities departments. It is a conscious effort to divide students by race; "people of color" (and gays) aligned against "privileged whites". It's all there; whites, the Republicans, the Koch Brothers, you name it. Imagine indoctrinating college students into that mindset and seeing them graduate and take this type of attitude into society.
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4 comments:
Yet another of Siarlys' union heroes?? And from Milwaukee at that. Just curious.
Eyon Biddle was MY county supervisor. I've talked to him a few times. He's very good on transit issues and taking transit off the property tax levy. This is a real disappointment.
The two people most responsible for Walker winning the recall are Mike Tate, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, who should have fallen on his own sword the day after, and Tom Barrett, who had the hubris to think the wave of initial revulsion against Walker meant voters were turning back to him.
"White rage" it was not. Voters were looking for a fresh new face, call it "change we can believe in" if you will. Walker had run a bland campaign as a fresh face committed to nothing specific, and running against a tired old pol, he squeaked through.
You must have seen the signs among the protests "I voted for Walker and he spit on me." That wasn't hard to explain. Union members tend to have enough income to afford to be homeowners, and therefore, are susceptible to the message, property taxes must come down. However, they didn't mean, at the expense of their own pay, benefits, and union contracts.
(Life is funny like that... I read that in Kentucky, which has a well-run, well-tested state exchange for the Affordable Care Act, people are saying "This is great, not like that Obamacare").
So what the Democrats needed to do was show that they had even fresher, newer faces than Walker, and a more coherent program of "change we can believe in." They failed miserably to deliver it. They took over the recall movement when it had a 55 percent popularity rating, and plunged it down to 47 percent. Idiots.
Anyway, this was definitely not Eyon Biddle's best day. Even if all he said was true, that was a really poor qualify off-the-cuff opinionated rant for a college classroom. I'm not in the district where he's running for alderman. If I was, I'd have some hard questions for him. I did think he was behaving oddly when he left the county board during his first term to jump at a city council seat against a well entrenched incumbent.
How about dividing people by color? Great tactic.
Well, TACTICALLY its a stupid move, all questions of ethics and principle aside. Wisconsin is something like 90 percent "white," so defeating Walker requires a lot of votes from that demographic. There's no reason those votes can't be gotten with the right campaign, but its stupid to talk about "white rage."
I must note though, that when Biddle ran for supervisor, he did a very good job of knocking on doors and speaking to all kinds of people quite sensibly. He must have thought, hey, this is a college campus, I can talk like I'm in a cross between a sandbox and a tavern.
I also note that when our certifiably black assembly woman retired, for genuine reasons of health, a young man of notably "white" complexion won the race to succeed her, after knocking on all kinds of doors himself. Its that kind of district. No matter what you are, you have to talk to a lot of people who do look like you and a lot who don't. It helps to speak a little Hmong also.
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