In 2017, political science professor Dr. Albert Ponce was targeted by right-wing media because of a lecture he gave at Diablo Valley College regarding white supremacy in America. Lydia walks us through what actually happened before, during, and after the motivating incident. The people responsible for this panic were totally cool and not at all white supremacist monsters. You can watch Dr. Ponce's lecture in full here! Be sure to tune in for our next installment of this mini-series. Feel free to email us at lydia@seriouspod.com or thomas@seriouspod.com! Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
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Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas.
That's co-host Lydia.
How are you doing?
I'm Lydia.
I'm good.
What?
I don't know.
I was trying to introduce myself a little bit.
Yeah.
Take your job maybe.
Wow.
All right.
Fine.
I'll just sit here.
Do nothing.
No!
This is the one bit of value I added was being able to say your name.
Now what do I contribute?
I know.
I don't even get to look at you.
How are you doing?
The only other thing I had was a face for radio.
No.
How are you doing?
Oh, pretty well.
How are you?
Good.
I'm excited for the usual end of the month flurry of stuff.
Yeah.
Bear with us, folks.
It's how we do it.
And it gives people, you know, a month to listen to a bunch of stuff.
Nothing wrong with that.
Yeah.
Well, what are we talking about today?
Well, kind of going on the flip side of some of the things that we've explored with One professor, Mr. Kilbourne, there are instances in which campus reform, for example, reports on professors that are doing pretty normal things in the classroom and kind of like targets them to some degree.
So if Professor Kilbourne did kind of a stupid thing and was barely targeted and then flipped out like he's being crucified, We're doing the mirror image of that, which is sometimes there is such a thing as cancel culture.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Let's find out.
Yeah, we're good.
Hey, we'll call it like we see it when there is something like cancel culture and, and all that, we'll call it out and we'll see how that comports with our worldview.
Right.
So Campus Reform is a website that reports on, according to them, you know, liberal bias on college campuses.
And they have student reporters that speak on liberal bias on their college campuses from their perspective.
And this is an example of an instance in which not just Campus Reform, but also another entity called College Fix, which is very similar.
Also reported on this.
These are two websites I've been on a lot.
Yeah.
And this is Dr. Albert Ponce from Diablo Valley Community College, actually out here in California.
And he is a political science professor.
He's also the co-director of the social justice studies at Diablo Valley College and mentors students in a variety of different on-campus associations and clubs.
He's also a member of the Diablo Valley Dreamers Alliance to support and build solidarity for undocumented students.
He got his PhD in political science specializing in race, ethnicity, and politics and political theory from UCLA.
And he has his bachelor's in Chicano studies as well as political science from UC Berkeley and was a McNair Scholar.
In other words, woke studies!
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Identity studies.
Victimology is what his major was in.
Yeah.
And so his focus is very specific to this, and there was a lecture that he was giving that ended up getting picked up not first by Campus Reform or College Fix, but actually the Red Elephant.
Do you know the Red Elephant?
Dear God, no.
Okay.
Well, I'll take you on a journey.
I imagine it's like a 10th rate anti-woke thing.
It's worse.
So the Red Elephant is a company that no longer exists because it was founded by Vincent James Fox, who is a major white supremacist.
BFFs with Nick Fuentes.
And the red elephant at the time that this happened, this was October 26, 2017, when the lecture occurred, just a couple months after Charlottesville and Unite the Right rally.
And this guy, Vincent James Fox, super alt-right, super white supremacist, when you search for his name in Google, the first thing that pops up is A ProPublica investigation from October 2017 about the Rise Above movement.
Again, focusing on the Unite the Right rally and the groups behind it and... Rise Above as in focusing on as in that's one of the racist groups or that's somebody looking at... A major white supremacist group.
Okay.
And Fox is implicated in this article because, quote, Fox wasn't just documenting the violence at the rally, he was inciting it.
On video, Fox posted to YouTube, he can be heard repeatedly encouraging RAM members and others to assault people.
So we're a little dated here.
He screamed when a Ram member and four or five other men grabbed a counter protester and began beating him.
Charge, Fox yelled as a mob of right wingers went on the offensive.
Yeah, he's a bad person.
So we're a little dated here.
We're talking about back 2017.
Yeah, but he was like pretty.
Pretty prominent.
So he followed around these groups and essentially was like the propaganda arm for them.
Filmed everything.
He had a YouTube channel, Twitter.
Obviously, he got banned from all of those things.
Oh, good.
Did he get unbanned by fucking Elon Musk?
He has a new account, but I think he primarily operates on the alt-right sort of social media ecosystem they've been building.
Oh yeah, the true social blahblahblah.
Yeah, like Parler and a bunch of other things.
And, you know, this But just these things are crazy.
He has been popping up again recently.
He used to live in California, actually, and then moved to Idaho, of course.
He's talking about running for office out there.
He is a speaker sometimes, and they like tried to, I think it was, Oh, shoot.
I can't remember the exact details because this is a whole other rabbit hole, of course, and I'm trying to, you know, get us back on track.
But he was speaking at something like a city council event or something like that, and they purposefully left their calendar blank on that day on their website because he's so controversial.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, yeah.
He's a bad person.
And he has a new, you know, these new companies when he moved to Idaho.
He has three kids, too, which kills me.
I'm like, oh, God.
Please escape.
A new racist is born every minute.
Yeah.
He has a new website called Daily Veracity, and so now he just does video content on there.
He actually just posted very recently Elon Musk going after Anti-Defamation League, and he's like, hey, this is all the stuff I've been saying forever.
And I got banned from Twitter for saying it.
I mean, he makes a good point.
Yeah, like you did get to ban from Twitter back when Twitter wasn't run by the head fucking Nazi in charge.
Yep.
Anyway, this is someone who was responsible for this video getting out in the way that it did.
And what I sent you to play... This is the Elephant Man.
This is the Elephant Man.
What was his name?
Fox the Elephant.
Vincent James Fox.
He has a YouTube now, also under a different name.
But most of his old content's been, you know, taken down because the account was suspended.
So he was the one to break this story wide open.
He was.
He was.
According to him, a student sent this to him.
And what he posted was to his Red Elephant website and his YouTube before they were taken down.
But we do have a copy of this, the clip version that he put together, from his Facebook page that he's in charge of.
That's Film Your Marxist Professors.
That's the name of the page.
Does it still exist?
Yeah, it still exists.
Yeah.
I guess that's not like directly white supremacy, so it hasn't gotten banned.
Right.
And so we'll go ahead and play that and see what we're looking at here.
What I would love is if there's somebody who like innocently is like, Oh, I'm taking Marxism.
I'm supposed to film.
Okay.
I'll film my Marxist.
It's kind of weird, but yeah, sure.
I'll post all the lectures online in case you want to learn about Marxism.
Sounds good.
Yeah, Eastern European philosophy, Western European philosophy.
All right, let's see what this fox, elephant, whatever nonsense is.
And there were people here, indigenous people, who were part, who paid the price, the very heavy price for this project that is unfolding of white supremacy.
So we begin with the fact that we exist in a white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative capitalist system.
Thomas Jefferson.
All men are created equal.
Yet I hold 200 slaves and I break many of them.
And that's the beauty of the law.
If you can write it, you can convince all others to follow it.
Just like all of us do today.
When we shouldn't.
Many of the laws existing, we should be violating those laws.
We're taught to get up and pledge allegiance to the flag every single day.
A flag that's not really representative of everybody who's standing up in that room.
Maybe that's the way it should be taught.
All those who this flag represents stand up.
And all, and maybe 50% of this room, you stay sitting down because this is not for you.
We do it through the Constitution.
Which should- We should note it's, it's not just going in order.
Like there's, it's clearly- Yes, it's all cut.
Stitched together.
So I know it sounds a little bit crazy, but we're going to play this whole thing?
Yes.
Okay.
We call a white man's constitution.
And we still get up before every ball game and we're supposed to, These folks here are supposed to respect that flag.
When Colin Kaepernick stands up and literally takes a knee, but stands up for justice, for what is right, what happens then?
He's vilified.
Karl Marx, one of the most profound thinkers in the history of Western philosophy.
So it is fitting that a white supremacist of old with white supremacists of today exist and sit there smiling in the White House.
Abolition.
What does abolition mean?
Abolition means we must destroy it, not reform it.
No voting is going to help.
No right of your congressperson.
We need to smash white supremacy.
And we try to use legal means, but are legal means enough?
In fact, we'll have to, when we do abolish this white democracy, that it will have to be in conflict, that it would have to be something where we have to bear arms, where we'd have to go against and do what is illegal.
Well, what is illegal in the eyes of the state?
Okay, so as you mentioned, this is clipped together from what was an hour and 16 minutes.
Okay.
But I gotta say, like, what the hell was this?
Cause like, I don't, I just reacting to it.
I don't know.
You're the debunker.
I'm the, I'm just the person.
I don't know what the hell class that is.
I mean, it seems a little weird, but.
It's not a class.
That's the first piece of this.
It is not a class.
That seems like important information to have.
Yep.
Well, shoot, what is it then?
So this was a lecture series through the Community Education Department at Diablo Valley College, and they had speakers over the course of a period of time that came and visited and spoke about these different things, again, two months after Unite the Right Rally.
And this was the second speaker that they had.
Students did get extra credit from attending these lectures, but they weren't mandatory.
They weren't necessarily being taught by anyone who was speaking at these events.
They were, you know, sitting in on—you and I have done that before where we've gone to a college to attend a speaking engagement, right?
But is this a professor at that college?
It is a professor at the college.
Yes.
Yep.
And it was available to the public.
And so you have members of the community that are there, too, essentially saying, we're going to have this.
The title of this talk is this, led by Dr. Albert Ponce.
Please attend.
You know, if you're a student or faculty or whatever, it's free to you.
If you're a member of the community, it's open to you.
But it was like, you know, $10 or something.
Is this a community college?
It is a community college.
It's state-funded.
And so the premise here, what you are missing from these clips is nuance.
Always, always, always nuance.
For example, there's one clip in there where it just says the brilliant philosopher Karl Marx.
And what he's actually getting at, if you watch the entire hour and 60 minutes like I did, which I'll provide to everybody, because honestly, it was a really good lecture.
It was well done.
It was interesting.
What was the name of the fucking lecture?
White supremacy in the United States.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
And with the Karl Marx bit, what he's actually saying there is that when the United States was making moves to bring in Mexicans as part of the country and, you know, kind of like defeat them through all the wars and everything, Karl Marx was like, oh, that's good, right?
So he was kind of talking about like this person who we understand to be a great thinker, a great philosopher.
And, you know, you might agree or disagree with his ideas, but even he Yeah, because it was the pervasive Western, that's the West.
And so you see it even in those places where people who are very far left and love Marx, it's part of our minds already.
It's been ingrained in us.
And he plots through the history of how we got there.
There's some really interesting things about, he talks about in Spain, how they had a class system That basically indicated based off of how purebred you were essentially, a Spanish person.
But the royalty issued things that were like certificates so you could buy more whiteness and move up in your class.
Can I buy less whiteness?
I'm kind of full of whiteness.
Can I sell some?
Maybe.
What's the going rate?
Maybe that's the 21st century.
One thing to remember is kind of history trumps everything, you know, like even if somebody seemed really cool as a historical figure, possibly, you know, whoever it is.
And then I'm sure you can find an issue where they're like, well, yeah, but women shouldn't fucking vote or something.
You know, there's got to be something.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
And, you know, being reasonable there.
But it's really trying to demonstrate his point through this entire thing.
And, like, as you track through it, he's talking about how white supremacy as a system, and he's very clear about that multiple times in this.
I am not talking about that you are a white supremacist or you're a white supremacist.
What do we do about white supremacy as a system?
Because the system that we have is innately white supremacist, because It values Western thought historically for hundreds and hundreds of years as the right thought, and not being open to learning from Mexico and the people who lived there, right?
It was the idea of manifest destiny.
He talks about that a lot, and he has like a quip in there that I was really surprised none of the right-wing sources picked up on this, because he talks about affirmative action.
And he was like, well, what was manifest destiny if not affirmative action for white men?
And kind of goes on to talk about that, that it's only a problem when other people are like, hey, what about us, you know, 300 years later?
Yeah.
So he talks about all of these different things.
And towards the end, he has a picture of Trump with Sessions.
And in between is Andrew Jackson.
And so that's what he's getting at with, you know, a white supremacist of old.
We know that Andrew Jackson was a terrible person who thought less of indigenous folks and carried out some really awful things.
And so what he's trying to demonstrate there, again, historically, you know, you have this system that existed then, continues to exist now.
And we, by not reflecting on this, and that's what he gets into a lot of in the Q&A, reflection is a privilege if you have the time to do it.
And so when you have people who don't have the time, they're working for the man, they're working two jobs already.
Disfavors folks that are marginalized because they don't have the luxury of time.
They don't have that leisure to sit and philosophize and reflect on, like, how we can make these changes that are hard and sweeping.
And so if you can't reflect on it, then what ends up happening is you just kind of keep perpetuating it, a lot of times unknowingly.
And his flag example is something that I know you and I have talked about, where, you know, in kindergarten, you stand up and you start saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
But when anyone tries to say, well, hang on a minute, let's talk about this.
What does this flag actually represent?
Does it represent me?
Does it represent my community and my culture?
Am I equal in the eyes of, you know, a flag, I guess, if it had eyes, but symbolically, right?
It's also, do I endorse everything this country is doing and has done throughout history, and why am I pledging to a fucking flag?
Yeah.
Who cares?
But it starts when you're five.
Yeah.
And we've run into this with Phoebe.
Talking about indoctrination.
Yeah, exactly.
Film my fucking nationalist kindergarten teacher.
It should be the page.
I know.
And it's one of those things that as a child, you are not questioning those things.
It just kind of becomes part of your routine.
And by the time you get to an age where you can question it, a lot of times people don't.
I know for myself, I would stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance and I would just always leave out under God because I didn't believe in that.
But now, to this day, I don't really want to participate in the flag at all.
Anyway, that's- The other day I was like, hey hun, do you want a flag?
And you were like, I'm not participating in the flag.
I was like, damn it.
I need someone to flag with.
Not me.
Yeah, I, from a very early age, somehow, just due to my personality, possibly, was just anti-group-fucking-anything ever.
My brain was like, why do we all need to do this?
Like, even as a first grader, I'd be like, well, everyone's saying it.
I don't know.
What does my voice add to this cacophony of 37-year-olds saying this dumbass thing?
Who cares?
That's so funny, because my reaction is, it will be very obvious if I don't lend my voice to this.
Is that?
I would just watch, like, kind of the teacher, and I would just be like, I don't care, this is worth it.
And then if they were looking at me, I'd be like...
Yeah.
But I mean, to this day, when we go to, like, Sharks games and stuff, like, you don't stand up for the national anthem, right?
I might stand up sometimes.
You stand up for Canada.
I don't want to have some sort of conflict with the people immediately around me, but I'm not gonna fucking, like, sing and cry.
But we have to do this shit before every single game!
All the time.
Every game!
We don't tend to notice those things.
Those things don't count.
When Colin Kaepernick kneels, that counts.
That's politics.
That's bringing politics into a thing, and that's a blah blah blah.
But when, like, the fucking military funds all this, like, flag jack-off bullshit before It's not just before like, oh, the championship game.
It's every goddamn hockey game.
There are 80 of them and it's every other day.
We have to be like, oh, I've heard it.
Yeah, community events.
It's constant.
When you take a step back, it's really creepy.
Disturbing.
It really is.
Yeah, it feels like North Korea.
We've been literally indoctrinated into it.
Yep.
So most people are like, yeah, no, that's just normal.
Of course, you have to worship a cloth before you play a sports game.
That's how that works.
So ultimately, like what I got from this lecture is, first of all, a lot of really interesting history.
But then second of all, this idea that he had the opportunity of reflection.
And so now he's sharing that reflection and his studies with the broader community.
So then you can ask yourself and be like, oh, yeah, that does seem weird.
Let me look more into that.
Oh, I never thought about it that way.
And what ended up happening here is after this was posted to the Facebook, Bill, my Marxist professor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it got picked up in Campus Reform with the headline, Professor Urges Abolition of White Democracy During Lecture.
And what you see here is it's things that are reflective of that two-minute, 24-second clip.
Yeah.
Well, but it also really fucking matters what it is.
Like, honestly, if you told me, like, yeah, this was just like a math class, I'd be like, well, yeah, that's kind of fucking... Kind of random.
Yeah, that's dumb.
Why is he pulling up these slides?
Yeah, and if it was... Honestly, if it was any class, I'd probably be a little... Because you don't really... Even as, you know, lefty as could be, you don't really want the class to be, here's my teacher's political views.
Like, we actually don't want that, you know?
Like, that's not what the left It does.
I don't even think that's what any college professor really wants to do.
They don't often teach a class that's called My Political Views.
I think the right thinks they do because when they teach facts, often the facts are denied by the right.
So that's looked at as some leftist agenda if you just teach like certain real things.
But if the class was just, I'm going to give a lecture on my political views and what we should do, that would be a little weird.
But hey, you know what?
Some key information is this wasn't a fucking class.
Like you said, I mean, that's very important.
And so I know that all the boomers who are sharing this shit and raging about it, I guarantee you that this was deliberately shared as though like, yeah, this is probably just like, you know, algebra.
And then he just, this professor who has a last name that is a scary to me, a white boomer.
Yeah.
He's just talking about how we should abolish all this stuff in a class.
But I will push back because even if this were in a class, he's a political scientist professor, and so what he's presenting here is not his personal political beliefs necessarily.
It's like an argument, right?
This is based off of X, Y, and Z. This is what I see through my knowledge and understanding of history and how this works within America now and the Constitution, right?
Like, it's a well-developed Thesis, and not necessarily like, I don't like Donald Trump.
Well, yeah, but I mean, some of the language, like it is, you can tell it's not a class, because I don't think you would talk that way.
You would probably speak a little bit more, you know, a little bit more carefully, probably, to represent, there's nothing wrong with representing those views, but you can just tell in the language, like it, you know, it stood out to me not knowing what it was like that, you know, that's a little more, I'm not saying it like, I don't know if that's, I don't know all the rules of college.
But I just don't, having attended college, that would have stuck out to me if it were some class.
Okay.
But, like, I don't mean that that means it's, like, illegal or something.
But, yeah, no, you can tell that it's not.
Like, I think it's very, you know, most college professors, 90-something percent of them, are responsible enough to know the difference between when you're teaching a class and when you can, giving, like, an optional lecture that's not tied to, like, the curriculum necessarily.
Right.
I think that's a major difference.
The students don't have to be there.
They don't have to go in there.
There'll probably be, guess what?
Uh, fucking Ben Shapiro is probably visiting later to do his speech.
Probably not a community college.
Cause you know, he's so big time, but like, yeah, that's kind of how that works.
And towards the end of this, one of the things that I think is miscommunicated a lot in the footage that was carried over and I'll, I'll get to that is just during the Q and a session, one student asked, what can I do as a student of color?
to help change this?
What can the community do to help change this?
And he was talking about, you know, you need to start demanding change of your professors, of your college.
Like when you are in a space and you see something that reflects on kind of this, this believed to be inherent, you know, the Western thought, push back.
And his point was, it's more than just the individual levels.
Like, you have a neo-Nazi.
His example is Richard Spencer.
Even if Richard Spencer is gone, the system will remain.
And so it's imperative that those conversations, that pushback, you're not going to change the system by yelling at somebody's face at a protest.
You need to have those conversations through your institution.
And then, you know, you work through the local government, the state government, then the federal government and sort of that grassroots effort there.
And what got picked up in that is this idea of, like, abolition, where he says, what does abolition mean?
Abolition means we must destroy it, not reform it.
And I think because what he's saying here, and, you know, no voting is going to help, no riding your congressperson, that it's so pervasive that this one drop in this one moment in time is not enough and that we need to not be like, OK, we have a system in our country that favors White men.
What can we do to change that system to, you know, tweak a few things so then it no longer favors white men?
And his position is it's steeped in that.
We have the system we have because it has always favored white men.
In order to get a system that doesn't, that is not rooted in that white supremacy, we kind of have to start over and talk about what we want that to look like.
And that's what he's talking about with the grassroots, you know, moving your way up from local up to state, up to federal.
Sure, but I mean, all this is a little bit neither here nor there.
I mean, it's interesting to talk about, but like, I don't really know if I entirely agree with that, but like, it doesn't matter.
Like, what white people need to do is realize that someone somewhere might have an opinion that you disagree with and not overreact to it.
Like, I don't know that I entirely agree with that.
I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
Like, he might be right, I might be wrong.
It doesn't fucking matter.
Like, if someone's giving a lecture, And their view, it's not mandatory, this is not a fourth grade classroom, this is not, you know, like, it's someone giving a lecture.
Don't they always say, they always say, oh, isn't college where you should hear the challenging ideas?
Right, right.
Isn't it where you should be challenged?
Until it's the ones they don't like and then they're like, well, this is a Marxist professor and we need to have him killed.
It doesn't matter, I know you did the time you want to talk about the lecture, that's fine, it's an interesting lecture, but like, I guess I don't want the message to be, Oh, no, actually, this is okay because the lecture content was a little bit more blah, blah, blah.
That doesn't matter.
Yeah.
If it's an optional thing, if it was advertised somewhat appropriately, and it's not the state mandating some re-education camp bullshit that they're trying to claim it is, it doesn't fucking matter.
Hey, go be challenged, everyone.
I thought that was what we cared about.
Yeah, they talked about that, you know, he's anti-white, anti-American teacher.
The comments on the Facebook video are talking about he needs to be fired.
He needs to be sent back to where he came from, you know, like what they normally do.
And then the College Fix reporting on it was a little more Fair because they called out that it was a lecture series, whereas a lot of other sites were not.
And again, they are just speaking to those key talking points and driving up this vitriol For people who then are reading these things and thinking that that is the story, which, I mean, is wrong anyway, the way that they reacted.
And it's pretty terrible.
So what ended up happening there, you know, Fox News picked it up, not on a show, but through their their website.
And so now this is just kind of growing and growing and growing this narrative.
We've seen this forever.
The shit just filters up.
And it's it's interesting.
There's almost like the farm system.
For conspiracy theory-esque bullshit, this happened a lot with Alex Jones, where it's like, stuff gets a trial run on Alex Jones, and like, sometimes it's like, eh, it's a little too crazy to make it to the big time, to make it to the show, you know?
And then other times it's like, hmm, that's just crazy enough.
Maybe if we modify it a little bit, make it slightly less crazy, it can make the big time.
It can be on fucking Tucker.
And there really is this weird, like I said, farm system, like it's the MLB or something, where it's like, the ideas get tried and tried, and They make it up to different stages depending on how batshit they are.
Yeah, and what ended up happening is like this just got so insane that NPR actually picked up the story but talked to him.
Oh, okay.
Because what happened with this right-wing media storm, people found, they doxed him.
Oh, God.
And he was getting, you know, obviously he was getting phone calls at the office because that was posted on the community college website, right?
He was getting emails when NPR was interviewing him.
He, like, had 20 new voicemails that he just got, and I'll read some of these to you.
Fucking race-baiting fucking piece of trash is one of them.
Albert Ponce, you are a piece of shit fucking gutter slug that needs his neck snapped, okay?
Call me if you need me, I'll do it for you.
And he started getting mail at his home.
At the time, he had a nine-year-old daughter.
And he said that he and his wife had to tell her she's not allowed to touch the mail anymore.
Like, she couldn't go out there anymore.
It ended up culminating in someone threatening to, like, beat him up in person.
And his colleagues called on the university president, Susan Lamb, to publicly say something, like, this is not OK.
And they wrote in a letter to her, whereas this morning a DVC faculty member had his life threatened once again on campus, campus, be it resolved that the social science and English divisions demand that Diablo Valley College issue an immediate public denunciation of this act and provide an adequate response now and in the future to any threats, including but not limited to death or any other physical harm to other forms of intimidation and harassment to DVC faculty, including but not limited to death or any other physical harm to other forms of intimidation and harassment
Well, yeah, I mean, this is kind of I don't know the situation.
And we've talked about this before of like the classification of professors, you know, employees, whatever.
Yeah.
But this is a work safety issue.
It is.
This is someone who was, he's getting threats related to an on-campus thing.
That's a safety issue.
So what was the response?
The response was, it is my belief, this is a portion of the email that's quoted in this Inside Higher Ed article.
It is my belief and the belief of police services.
Hold on, who is this?
The president, Susan Lamb.
It is my belief and the belief of police services that public denunciations, especially in our current political environment, tend to create more targeting and negativity.
Thus, I cannot in good conscience do something that could escalate the situation as requested in the resolution.
And there was mixed response.
I think some of the faculty kind of understood, I guess, that response.
You know, again, this is 2017, early 2018.
It's pretty intense during that time period.
And one of them said, you know, like, I'm not dissatisfied with the response, but was hoping at least for an indication that the college was doing everything that can be done, in quotes, to address the threats.
Not wanting to go as far as like criticizing the response because she might know more than the faculty know about the efforts that are being done and logically like could understand where she was coming from, but the assurance that something was being done to protect their colleague and his family.
That's what I was going to say, is like, even if I maybe grant, I don't know, I think that response, maybe there's more to it, maybe I don't have all the context, but I think that response is pretty weak and also kind of arrogant.
Like, yeah, the whole world is looking at this fucking community college president.
And the minute you say something, they're going to just blow up.
First off, the president saying anything, I don't, on one hand, I don't really think it would do anything anyway.
And that was her position, yeah.
But it's also, it goes both ways.
I don't think it's going to make things worse.
I don't think it's going to make it better.
And if it's 50-50, maybe do the thing that supports the faculty of color whose lives are being threatened.
But also, a lot of what I heard you read was asking about security or safety.
What was the response to that?
I mean, I didn't hear that addressed in the quote, at least, that you said.
Yeah, no, what they were looking for was just, yeah, a denunciation saying, like, that, you know, violence will not be tolerated at Diablo Valley College, yada, yada, yada.
That's all they were asking for.
But I thought they asked for, like, tangible safety.
Did they not?
Demand that they issue an immediate public denunciation of this act and provide an adequate response now and in the future to any threats.
Okay, so you interpreted that as, like, a verbal response.
I interpreted that as, You know, like a response as in some way of helping keep someone safe.
That's I guess I interpreted a little more.
Personnel kind of thing.
Yeah, something or like, let's at least notify authorities.
Let's get, you know, is there a campus police?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there is a campus police.
And from this article, President Lamb encouraged anyone who receives a threat or anything that makes them uncomfortable to report it to police services.
She just felt that a public denunciation wouldn't make faculty safer, and that's the most important thing to her.
After all of that happened, and the NPR article and everything came out, College Fix ran a second article titled, Professor Who Advocated Destroying White Democracy Whines About Backlash, and included a picture of just like a random stock photo, I guess, of man making like a ridiculous crying face, and he's like not wearing a shirt, and it's Weird.
It's so weird.
Just saying that he's complaining about being, in quotes, targeted by right wing attacks.
Oh, maybe that's because he was targeted by right wing attacks, though.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And so they're almost taunting him in this.
And some of the emails that he was receiving, again, he like was receiving emails for Months.
It was a long, long time.
This one was received April 2018.
So, you know, his lecture, October 2017, it says, Hello, saw a video of you just joining the prospective dog pile of hate and wrath that the web will spew up all over you.
It comes to mind that you may deserve all the slice you will suffer.
All I can hope is that it has some effect on you and at least alerted you to the way you have drifted into madness.
You've been publicly called out for your vile bullshit and worst of all you tech kids, I don't know, like what good did you think you were doing that you were so wise as to call for the whole system to be changed?
Insert basic metaphor of how such arrogance is the first shovel in a mass grave.
Very weird.
These fucking people.
I mean, I've had a little bit of this myself.
Yeah.
It does have a tendency to come up at random times, you know, something will get shared and it'll go, you know, a little bit viral again, you know, because a lot of stuff gets shared with no date, you know, kind of on purpose to where it seems like, oh, this is happening now.
Kind of thing.
And so, yeah, they just stir up from time to time.
I love the lack of self-awareness that's like, hi, I'm writing an email to someone about a thing a year ago that was fucking stupid.
And yeah, you're crazy, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, this is just something that has happened to a lot of professors.
Obviously, we're talking about one particular instance, but another person reflecting on her experience, she prepared a report.
Her name is Abby Ferber.
When she spoke with Professors that experienced these things and also reflecting on her own experience, she said that we all felt betrayed, violated, shocked, and vulnerable.
We had words and materials pulled out of context and shared with the world.
We all felt both mental and physical trauma.
One woman reflected that it took her two months to move away from the physical manifestations.
Some found it difficult to do anything for the first couple of days due to the shock, trauma, and flood of emails.
Some faculty felt their entire semester became a disaster and found it hard to focus on work.
One person explained that for weeks afterwards they were just trying to recover from having been laid out on the line.
Someone else described it as physically revolting.
Yeah.
I have a little bit of experience with this and it can be really traumatizing and horrible.
I don't know if it's the time to get too philosophical about it, but I think it might be worth talking about our values here.
I think that the number one purpose of the show is debunking the bullshit.
And that doesn't mean that I'm a super big fan of dogpiles online, even when people have done something wrong.
I actually am not.
I think that what's important, though, is taking a proper assessment of the thing, taking a factual and accurate assessment of the thing.
It's actually bad.
Even when someone does a bad racist thing.
I'm actually not a huge fan of a big dog pile online.
I don't like it.
I don't like doxxing.
I think there can be times when someone's actually a person in power and does something that actually, like perhaps a Supreme Court justice, for example, who does something that literally costs lives and takes away the autonomy of millions of people.
Then I don't mind if they are a little uncomfortable socially and outside and eating in restaurants.
I actually don't mind.
That's fine.
You are.
That's what comes with power to be making decisions that are life and death for people and doing a fucking terrible job at it.
Yeah.
When it's just some person, you know, when it's just like maybe it's somebody who does suck, but like it's a personal opinion.
But once someone's already getting it, you know, I don't I don't it's like the Pledge of Allegiance all over again.
Once someone's already getting shit, they're already getting shit.
I don't need to add to that.
And I would disagree.
And actually, it makes me kind of sad even when people find someone who deserves it, but they're really shitty and cruel to them.
I actually don't really like that.
It's unpleasant to me.
But what's important to note is That that is sort of a given no matter what, and what really matters is the facts of what happened.
And if we're talking about someone who did not at all deserve any sort of criticism, which he didn't really, like you could criticize the guy's ideas if you want.
Yeah, like you could engage in debate.
Yeah.
But he did nothing wrong.
Yeah.
At all.
Whereas somebody else like say Killborn or somebody did do something wrong.
Yeah.
And deserves some backlash.
That doesn't mean I would endorse anyone just being endlessly shitty to Killborn.
And it doesn't mean that if I'm not a fan of that, that means I'm like against This quote-unquote cancel culture and blah, blah, blah.
I think we've reached a moment in which social media and the way we are, it means that things are pretty shitty online no matter what.
Like that's the baseline.
The baseline is you're gonna have people mobbing and doing all this shit.
I don't like it, but you don't get to say that that's the left or something because it's not.
In fact, it's far more often the other way.
The sources that are going to engage people's anger and fear responses are more often going to be people like Campus Reform and all those people who engage a right-wing hate mob.
And so that's what really matters in my mind.
Because it sucks to go through this kind of public chastising, whether you deserve it in some measure or not, is honestly, in my opinion, it's already a punishment that's too severe for whatever the infraction is.
It's cruel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I 100% agree.
So, thankfully, this is not a situation in which the college responded by firing him or anything, right?
He has his job.
Is he still at the same place?
He's still at the same place.
His Rate My Professor was taken over, of course, but I was looking through that and a lot of previous ratings had been flagged and removed and some of them were flagged and deemed as, you know, Accurate reviews, like actually a student who took his class and not just random people.
But I wanted to close this out a little bit by just reading an article that was actually published in the local paper after his lecture, but before all of this fell apart, they did a profile on him because he's like a really just interesting So like before there was a backlash?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Because his lecture was in October.
It was posted on Facebook December.
And this article came out November 20th, 2017.
So like kind of right in the middle.
Yeah.
And so they're talking about his upbringing.
He grew up in a poor immigrant community and he had limited opportunities, what he wanted to do after school.
He could join the military or he could work in the low-wage sector of the economy.
Those were kind of his options.
And instead, he decided to drop out of high school at 16 and start working full-time immediately because the environment to learn where he was growing up, it just wasn't conducive to learning.
And once he was out of school, then he ended up traveling to Mexico for a bit and spending time with the indigenous communities there and learning about their experience And, you know, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the clash there that was going on, and that sparked something in him.
And when he came back to the United States after that visit, he got his GED and then he started community college.
And I read his academic credits earlier at the beginning of the episode, but again, went to UC Berkeley and got two bachelor's degrees, graduated with distinction.
Political science and Chicano studies.
Then he went to UCLA and got his doctorate in political science.
And then he was teaching at UCLA while he was earning his Ph.D.
And then he decided, you know, that community college made such a difference in his life.
And the impact that his professors had on him when he was taking classes after getting his GED just was transformative.
And he wanted the opportunity to be that for somebody else.
That's really cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They interviewed some of his students and they said, you know, that he sets up his classes by putting chairs in a circle so everyone can learn from each other.
And one of the students says, facing one another can help you realize that you have a lot in common with the person who has an opposing view.
I think this is especially important in a political science class with the current political climate.
Yeah.
Ponce also allows his students to challenge themselves to be uncomfortable.
One of his students says, This course consists of studying many white male philosophers.
As a female of color, I was a little apprehensive about how engaged I would be with these philosophies.
Due to how Dr. Ponce has framed the course, I found myself nothing but fully engaged.
Yeah, he's just incredibly dedicated to not only political science and learning, but to his students and really is like being that professor for a lot of folks that he had to that made such a difference in his life.
Yeah, man, that's just so sad that these bullshit reactionaries collapse everything down to nothing.
Like, it's like, actually, you know, we've got a really interesting human story here.
Yeah.
And it just sucks, the state that we're in around this, you know?
And I don't know how to fix that.
I know.
I don't know either.
Abolish.
I guess is what Dr. Ponce would say.
Well, I think that's a different thing.
I think the key is actual human interaction.
It's like we did a few episodes with Joe on polarization on Serious Inquiries Only, and it really is human-to-human conversation is actually the best way.
It doesn't mean I'm saying that everyone has an obligation to go try to convince a MAGA idiot or something.
I'm not saying that, but it is actually an unfortunate truth that Really, that is kind of the best thing that we can do, is try to have these kind of more person-to-person, actual humanizing conversation.
Because what this anti-woke bullshit agenda relies on is demonizing and demonizing.
And demonization pretty much only works if you're cut off from the person you're demonizing, or if you're compartmentalizing it.
But if you have to actually interact with the person you're demonizing, You're instantly reminded like, oh yeah, okay, well that is just a human.
Forgot.
Well, that's why, like, yeah, that right-wing outrage machine, right?
It exists online.
It's social media and, you know, you're able to... Well, it can exist on TV, it can exist places, but as long as, like, you've flattened the humanity of the thing you're targeting.
Yeah, I don't know.
I was very moved by his story, and I'll include his lecture for folks to check out.
I thought it was really interesting.
I learned a lot, as you can tell.
I wanted to talk all your ears off about it.
You're radicalized over here.
Maybe I am.
And yeah, maybe I'll drive over to Diablo Valley Community College.
It's not far.
Nice.
And yeah, pay him a visit and shake his hand.
Yeah, this is, I think, the start of a little bit of a miniseries here.
Yeah.
So more to come on being targeted by these websites.
College Fix, Campus Reform.
And actually taking a look at how that goes and the effects on people.
So I'm glad that it seems as though this one is a little bit, you know, if not a happy ending, it's at least like not the worst case, it sounds like.
I mean, he went through not to minimize anything he went through, but like kept his job.
Sounds like he was able to stay in the same place because that's not always the case.
And we'll see in other examples, often people can't even continue in the organization they're in.
So there you have it.
That fantastic breakdown.
And what a cool guy.
Yeah.
That guy said, I mean, he was really teaching at UCLA and was like, nah, I'm going to, I'm going to do community college.
Cause it's more fulfilling.
I think it was like, while he was, while he was receiving his PhD, he was teaching all those classes and I think he had the opportunity to stay.
And then he was like, ah, I just want to do community college and did Lake Tahoe community college for a little bit.
And then went over to Diablo Valley.
Community college is fucking great by the way.
Yeah.
It's really great and it's something that I hope we continue to provide resources for.
I have no idea what the state of that is given the war against any sort of higher education, but community college is fantastic, you know, just giving more people the opportunity to learn from amazing professors like this.
Yep.
All right, well, that's the show.
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