Clarice's Pieces: She Wouldn't Harm a Fly

The American Thinker ^ | January 30, 2011 | Clarice Feldman

[Scanian]

Frances Fox Piven is a sociology professor who for four decades has advocated violent social upheaval as a means of effecting the radical change she believes in. Her notion of appropriate change is quite obviously the displacement of the productive class and elected public leaders in favor of people like -- ahem -- herself.

This week, Glenn Beck called Piven out on her advocacy of violence. In response, the New York Times, a group that has amusingly chosen to call itself the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the American Sociological Association have attacked Beck for daring to take her at her word. Now, with Piven exposed to a broader audience than usual as a firebrand who holds views dangerous to democratic life, her friends have dolled her up in widow's weeds (her equally radical husband, Richard Cloward, died in 2001) and noted her age (78) to distract us from her work.

They want us to think, as did Psycho's Norman Bates channeling his long-dead mother, that "[t]hey'll see and they'll know and they'll say, 'Why she wouldn't even harm a fly.'"

Stanley Kurtz at NRO; Ann Althouse, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin who has her own blog site; and the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto have taken the lead in this fight to expose Piven and her defenders.

In my opinion, they clearly have the better of it.

[Fred Hayek]

Somehow I just got the image of Madame LaFarge from A Tale of Two Cities.

[driftless2]

For those interested in the thoughts of Chairwoman Piven, NROnline has a tape of a debate made at least twenty years ago between Piven and Peter Jay on one side and Milton Friedman and Tom Sowell on the other. Piven’s views are pretty self-incriminating.

[BelegStrongbow]

I usually visualize Madame DeFarge when I hear Piven mentioned. Right down to the cackle.

[upchuck]

I have often wondered why we don't prosecute the obvious examples of sedition from people like Soros, Piven, Ayers, etc.

With Holderjoke leading the DOJ? Silly robot :)

[okie01]

We think “intellectuals”...the revolutionists think “complainers and troublemakers-—who needs them?”

And the revolutionary leaders think "useful idiots", soon followed by "dead meat".

[DuncanWaring]

I have often wondered why we don't prosecute the obvious examples of sedition...

The failure to prosecute Hanoi Jane for treason for her trip to the NVA anti-aircraft gun was an indication that we had crossed a line that should never be crossed by any society that wishes to survive.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

You are correct. We have too nice for our own good for many years. Those we have been too nice to will not return the favor.