U of Missouri Epic Fail: No Amount of Context Can Defend Judy Ancel

Why the left-wing blogs are wrong.

Several serious allegations are being leveled at Andrew Breitbart. Amusingly, these complaints are even taking shape as a verb: to be “Breitbarted” is to be maligned unfairly with “selectively-edited” video that is taken out of context. The left is so busy spinning memes to distract from Breitbart’s repeated and consistent revelations about institutions of the left that they retreat into messaging and marketing.

The union videos involving Judy Ancel and Don Giljum, teaching a course on labor studies at the University of Missouri Kansas City, are being aggressively rebutted by the bloggers who form the backbone of the mainstream media’s dying artifice, in order to quickly malign this story and suck out its life.

If they can focus on trivialities, if they can avoid focusing on the core issues at stake, they can win through both attrition and distraction. Relying on a divided and much less aggressive conservative blogosphere, and less coordinated, they pick off their media targets with ease.

Specifically, Crooks and Liars has claimed these videos lacked context. To make that charge they focus on one of about six videos released so far, perhaps the most salacious one that includes Judy Ancel explaining that violence is a tactic, to be used when appropriate.

The defense of Ancel is important because she’s a professor, a member of the vaulted class of priestly self-appointed elites with whom the left cannot criticize. Dissent is patriotic, but not when it’s in the classroom.

Here’s what Crooks and Liars is saying:

Here is the full unedited transcript version of Ancel’s remark with sections in bold which were omitted from the Breitbart version:

ANCEL: The one guy in the film, one of the guys who had been one of the young, um, SNCC types, said

[crosstalk]

— he represented the kind of thinking that went into this student on the coordinating committee and then later probably — well, coinciding with the Black Panthers. You know, he said violence is a tactic and it’s to be used when it’s appropriate, when it’s an appropriate tactic. Whether — they never come back to him to ask him what he thought of the window-smashing in that march or whether or not that was done by them or others or provocateurs. We don’t know that.

If those unedited remarks are read as they stand, even without surrounding context, it’s clear the Breitbart video was edited to make it appear that Giljum and Ancel said the exact opposite of what they actually did say.

Shorter Breitbart version: Giljum and Ancel are calling for violent responses as appropriate tactics.

True version: Giljum believes violent responses would do more harm than good in today’s society, and Ancel is not commenting on the tactic, but on someone else’s tactics in a historical context. [my emphasis]

This sounds bad. It sounds as if there’s a conspiracy afoot. Andrew Breitbart is apparently part of the vast right wing conspiracy to attack unions and malign a peaceful professor who just made an innocuous comment in class.

In the leftist mind, relying on basic archetypes and simple story lines: It’s Shirley Sherrod all over again!

What’s missing, of course, is any context. The quote out of context as presented by Crooks and Liars attempts to justify Judy Ancel by saying “hey, she was just quoting someone …”

But that lacks context.

It lacks the notice that but a few minutes before, it was made clear that the discussion was about tactics. It lacks the context to know that the statement was made “nothing is off the table.” These inflammatory and incendiary statements were made to set a certain tone: militancy in achieving union objectives. Campaigns of intimidation to pressure businesses to accept union demands.

The other videos further add to this, they add to that context, they show the classroom environment that Judy Ancel and Don Giljum presented. Instead of tempering violence and quelling militancy, they encouraged it.

The full context of the Ancel quote doesn’t start where Crooks and Liars claims, it starts earlier. They also render unintelligible what is audible, they omit the beginning while claiming they have access to the full tapes, so they’re purposefully taking this out of context.

This is no surprise, and no surprise that so many other lackluster outlets are repeating the same line. It’s the talking points carefully crafted by the media politburo at Media Matters.

They first tried to ignore it, now they’re trying to ridicule it by saying it’s all a matter of context. Next the attack dogs like Richard Trumpka will get offensive. Their playbook is predictable.

Ancel is responding to a student who is proposing that non-violent social change should be the agreed value. She approvingly cites the SNCC leader (leader of a group called “The Invaders”) as a rebuttal to the student’s claim that one should follow Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Instead of augmenting and validating those leaders, Ancel stands with radical unions and Communist organizers in appreciating the value of violent political and social change.

To see it in pictures, to witness such amazing claims, is no doubt difficult for the left to accept. To console themselves they have resorted to this jihad of memes, that this is “Breitbarting” and this is “Shirley Sherrod” and this is the ACORN pimp suit all over again, this is the minor immaterial issue on which they want to anchor their rebuttal.

All we have to do is go to the context to see what Ancel was responding to, what she offered her comments in reaction to, and it confirms what we already know: Judy Ancel seems to teach violence as an appropriate political tactic to students at UMKC:

STUDENT 1: I have a question for the class militants. Do you think that the contract would have been signed had the protests continued? In the smashing windows, breaking storefronts, looting, thing.

STUDENT 2: I think there was an element of it that really shocked people. I’m sure it brought a lot of people’s attention to it. I don’t think it’s the answer. I don’t think it’s like, the, a solution to the problem. But, I’m not willing to put any tactics off the table and I think it played a part.

STUDENT 3: I think it came to the people saying we’re not gonna shop, we’re gonna stick together and we’re not buy your goods. It was like a deal like with Gandhi where he started with a lot of that, but I think they would have stayed true to their goal of not buying economic power.

STUDENT 4: When they’re willing to give up violence, then I will too.

—here’s where the left, i.e. Media Matters and Crooks and Liars, starts the transcript—

ANCEL: The one guy in the film, one of the guys who had been one of the young, um, SNCC types, said…What?

STUDENT: The Invaders [name of the militant group in the film]

[ANCEL:] — he represented the kind of thinking that went into this student on the coordinating committee and then later probably — well, coinciding with the Black Panthers. You know, he said violence is a tactic and it’s to be used when it’s appropriate, when it’s an appropriate tactic. Whether — they never come back to him to ask him what he thought of the window-smashing in that march or whether or not that was done by them or others or provocateurs. We don’t know that. [my emphasis]

—here’s where the left, i.e. Media Matters and Crooks and Liars, ends the transcript—

In the video, though, the discussion continues …

STUDENT 4: One more thing is that they’re trying to be a part of the larger society, we don’t, I don’t, necessarily want to be a part of of capitalist society. I want to take over the state with revolutionary movement which doesn’t exist.

STUDENT 2: For King too, he opened the doors and had a conversation with these guys [people using violence as a political tactic]. He didn’t denounce them, he didn’t lock them out.

STUDENT: I just think it’s interesting now, It’s mainstream to revere these figures like Martin Luther King and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and we forget how radical they were in their time and even today. Martin Luther King was all about social justice and like a radical vision for America that people today think they were only about civil rights and died with his work completed. FDR, I didn’t realize until I read a book about him, he wanted a second bill of rights that said everyone had a right to a job with a living wage, social security, health care, housing, that those things were rights. Today that would be, not even, he would be laughed out of Washington.

The quote and citation to Ancel is a true, accurate reflection of her beliefs. She approvingly cited to this SNCC leader to rebut a student who proposed adhering to non-violence. Her defense is to say this was a “pedagogical explanation” but it was, rather, a rebuttal to a claim for temperate tactics in politics.

Breitbart is correct, we’re correct, and the unions, left-wing blogs are wrong.

Let us predict that the chorus of voices on the left will equivocate, rationalize, nitpick, massage, message, spin, before they admit that this is wrong and immoral. They will never admit the obvious: that Judy Ancel’s class at the University of Missouri Kansas City advocated violence as a way to achieve political results – there was no speech against it.

Presented with the chance to embrace non-violence in class, Judy Ancel, a professor of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, pushed for more militancy and more radicalism instead of toning down the rhetoric. She taught her students that non-violent social change wasn’t enough. She cited to this former SNCC leader in order to push their minds further, to consider the use of violence for political change.

Let’s also not miss the chance to note the incredible, outlandish hypocrisy of these left-wing outlets that tried to pin the shooting of Cong. Giffords on the radical voices on talk radio and the extreme political rhetoric they claimed motivated the shooter. The mainstream media pointed to a small graphic on Sarah Palin’s website as encouraging violence. But here, where professors are explicitly endorsing violence, they find ways to say “oh, well that’s out of context!”

We don’t know who was hurt by the tactics that Ancel advocated, and we don’t know which companies were sabotaged by past students of Don Giljum, but we have them here explicitly explaining to students how to do it, why to do it and reinforcing the values and militant mindset to carry out such terror. There’s no place in politics for violent words nor violent actions, but too many in the left-wing blogosphere and at UMKC seem ready to rationalize, deflect and distract instead of admit their mistakes and fix the situation.

No amount of context will satisfy hardened political operatives and left-wing bloggers. They are intent on covering up through semantics, hiding in plain sight the radicalism that passed for normal at UMKC. That they see this as the latest battleground in the war to protect liberals from reality is no surprise, but our minds should be conditioned to question their deconstruction of plain language outrages on video. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, is a sham. It’s merely a mouthpiece for the AFL-CIO, and progressives, generally. Any POVs to the contrary are suppressed, and any story unfavorable to their buddies within the St. Louis Newspaper Guild – such as Communist Party USA for Missouri/Kansas leader, and fellow guild member Tony Pecinovsky, also featured in the footage recruiting students to the Communist Party and training students to destroy capitalism – which is to say, the American economy. Tony is also the local head of the Communications Workers of America – I suppose that plays into the Post-Dispatch’s thinking, too. Bullies protecting bullies. How can anyone take them seriously? Another reason why the Establishment Media is dying.

Judy Ancel is indefensible here. Her extreme comments were always in context.