Frances Fox Piven has a history of flame-throwing. She’s better known as one-half of the infamous Cloward-Piven strategy, wherein she and her husband published a theory detailing how people could overwhelm the system, break the system, and then get higher, guaranteed income. From magic.
Now that Piven’s calls for violent revolution have landed her in the … spotlight (you thought I was going to say crosshairs, didn’t you! You vitriolic person!) and the media is circling the wagons.
The New York Times is concerned:
On his daily radio and television shows, Glenn Beck has elevated once-obscure conservative thinkers onto best-seller lists. Recently, he has elevated a 78-year-old liberal academic to celebrity of a different sort, in a way that some say is endangering her life.
It’s easy to say Glenn Beck elevates because it allows the mainstream media to ignore the massive conservative population in America as the factor which really gave attention to conservative thinkers and thus, elevated them.
In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.
“Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response,” the group wrote.
Fox News disagrees. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president, said Friday that Mr. Beck would not be ordered to stop talking about Ms. Piven on television. He said Mr. Beck had quoted her accurately and had never threatened her.
[…]
Ms. Piven said in an interview that she had informed local law enforcement authorities of the anonymous electronic threats.
Progressives who speak of Piven’s threats remain silent on the threats (worse ones) directed at Sarah Palin, whom progressives targeted online in death threats on Twitter and pages devoted to her death on Facebook.
Again, situational compassion. Death threats are unacceptable in any fashion against anyone, but you’d be hard pressed to find a single progressive blogger or MSM character who has, or ever will, condemn death threats against conservative women. That’s because progressives happily sanction (when they’re not issuing the threats themselves) such behavior against conservative women. But that’s a post for another day. It’s nice to know that they’ve evolved to the point where they will at least defend their own as opposed to eating them. To a point.
More on the press front: Steve Benen, of the horribly Photoshopped and pixelated column “Political Animal,” isn’t so much an “animal” as a clueless blogger who doesn’t realize that Piven isn’t an “obscure” political character.
WHEN BECK’S MINIONS GET THE MESSAGE…. Glenn Beck doesn’t just rail against perceived enemies, whom he considers dangerous villains who must be stopped; he also chooses obscure enemies he considers worthy of his rage.
[…]
If you’ve never heard of Frances Fox Piven, don’t feel bad. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I hadn’t either.
Which makes him perfectly qualified as a progressive pundit. His post sounds like the plot for “Despicable Me 2.”
(Why is Piven important and not “obscure?” Because her and Obama’s relationship with the New Party and her chaotic economic theories popping up in proposed policy can’t just be coincidental.)
Continuing this theme, the NYT would have you believe that Piven has done nothing for attention since she first opined about destroying the economy:
Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler.
Right, because Piven hasn’t been active at all in calling for a violent revolution, or regularly maligning conservatives with her “rhetoric.”
Piven recently dazzled us with her manner of ignoring the accomplishments – nay, the very existence – of black conservative tea partiers because, as she infers, black people don’t count unless they’re progressives. Piven actually goes further than the three-fifths compromise by not acknowledging black conservative Americans at all.
She also says something about the tea party being hard-up or hung up on gender roles.
Here is Piven advocating for violence as acceptable dissent in 2004:
“I have considerable respect for nonviolence but I don’t treat it as inevitably a necessary rule …
“It’s partly a problem almost strategy and propaganda, it’s a violent country, it’s a violent government, it’s killing people, and they’re going to call us violent if we break a window, but they will do that. Unless you have good reason for breaking the window, probably you shouldn’t do that, unless it’s,m you know, a big part of your strategy.”
Piven calls for violent revolution again in the most recent issue of The Nation:
So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?
[…]
Second, before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant.
[…]
Third, protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones capable of making some kind of response to angry demands.
Did Piven just say “targets?” Wait – shouldn’t the left be condemning this instead of defending it? How are we to take their calls for censorship civility seriously?
An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.
You remember what those looked like, yes?
That’s what Piven’s advocating. Still find it defensible?
Piven defends her remarks:
“That is not a call for violence,” Ms. Piven said Friday of the references to riots. “There is a kind of rhetorical trick that is always used to denounce movements of ordinary people, and that is to imply that the massing of people itself is violent.”
Come again? Nice semantics, but no dice. Piven specifically called for a violent uprising. Her verbatim quotes and quotes in her own voice are above. If she’s second-guessing her remarks, the thing to do is to apologize for them, say she was wrong, and move on. Sadly, progressives don’t operate in such a manner; as we saw after Arizona: when there was more evidence to tie Jared Loughner to the progressive-Communist movement, progressives double-downed on blaming the tea party. You have to give them credit: they are tenacious to a fault.
Instead, Piven insults the intelligence of conservatives, even her own ideology, by calling criticism of her remarks ungood and saying that she meant something else other than the very clear language which came from her mouth. How does she insult her own ideology? By dumbing down their discourse to mere rhetoric and making them defend falsehoods as truth.
When you become a slave to semantics over cause, you’ve lost your soul.
When you can’t see the cause for the argument, you’ve lost your purpose.
This is how liberalism is nearly extinct due to progressivism.
Instead of defending the merits of Piven’s arguments – there are none, which is why progressives won’t or can’t – the situational feminists of the progressive persuasion, both male and female, decided to reinvent Piven as a poor, elderly, widowed college prof, how dare anyone criticize her statements.
The Daily Mail couched a story on Piven between a story on Lada Gaga and a piece on bimbo Katie Price, a.k.a. the usual Daily Mail fare.
If Frances Fox Piven is correct, then stick up for her arguments. Where’s that grrrl power aesthetic from the progs? Women as old as Piven are cavorting around in Jimmy Choos in “Sex and the City” slamming silly pink cosmos like they’re PBRs. Sixty is the new 50 is the new 40 is the new 30. When someone is accurately quoting Piven and expresses alarm at her statements, that’s not an attack. Why is Piven suddenly too delicate to face her own words when someone else says them?
What about all elderly widows Piven bullies with her remarks?
Remember when the Obama administration sent storm troopers to intimidate little old ladies in Quincy, Illinois?
Where was the concern for the widows, the elderly then?
Again, situational compassion.
If Piven is too delicate to assume criticism for her insane remarks, then someone on her side should do the old lady a kindness and tell her that if she’s too delicate for criticism of her own remarks, she’s too delicate to make those remarks. The left and the media need consistency in order for this narrative to work.