Stu Smith On the Fourth of July, These Radicals Made Plans to Topple America At the Socialism 2025 conference in Chicago, mainstream academics called for revolution.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/socialism-2025-conference-chicago
While the rest of the United States celebrated American independence on July 4, a rogues’ gallery met in Chicago to discuss how to dismantle our constitutional republic. The event, Socialism 2025, was billed as “a four-day conference bringing together thousands of socialists and radical activists from around the country” to discuss “social movements, abolition, Marxism, decolonization, working-class history, and the debates and strategies for organizing today.” Held every Fourth of July weekend, this conference, which meets in person and livestreams to YouTube, is “a place where activists share lessons from their struggles—from Palestine solidarity campaigns to the fight for gender liberation, from striking workers to the struggle to stop the destruction of the planet, the fight against racism, migrant justice, and more.”
As video from the event reveals, this wasn’t just a fringe gathering. The speakers’ roster included dozens of influential figures—Ivy League professors, faculty from top public universities, current and former leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers, and UAW president Shawn Fain. Attendees praised mass rioting, called for dismantling higher education, advocated abolishing the family, and openly called for ending America as we know it.
Multiple professors endorsed using the university as a power base to destabilize the status quo and carry out their political designs. University of Chicago professor Eman Abdelhadi noted that, while the university is “evil” and a “colonial landlord,” she teaches at one because it’s “one of the biggest employers in the city of Chicago . . . a place where I have access to thousands of people that I could potentially organize. . . . This is where I need to build power.” Similarly, Princeton University’s Lorgia García-Peña said scholars should “get the university’s money to do the work you want to do to dismantle the university within”—quickly adding, “hopefully, I won’t end up in court for saying this on the mic.”
David McNally, the Cullen Distinguished Professor of History and Business at the University of Houston, described how an insurgent mass movement might operate—for example, by making the university a sanctuary campus, abolishing campus police, eliminating tuition and grades, or even renaming the school George Floyd University.
Mohamed Abdou, the controversial professor whom former Columbia University president Minouche Shafik allegedly lied about firing, co-led a workshop called “A War Where All Fits,” which reframed the war in Gaza as an international revolutionary struggle. Abdou is a committed anarchist, who, four days after October 7, declared on Facebook, “Yes, I’m with the muqawamah (the resistance) be it Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad but up to a point.” He has also suggested that activists could learn from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the far-left militant group that controls much of the Mexican state of Chiapas.
Academic participants had their sights set on the world beyond the university. On the closing panel of the program, McNally outlined his plan to replace America’s constitutional republic with so-called “Democratic Councils,” a phrasing that invokes the Soviet system of government. Other panelists echoed this view. They included Geo Maher, a radical theorist who has taught at prominent universities, including the University of Pennsylvania; UCLA’s Robin D. G. Kelley; activist lawyer Andrea J. Ritchie; and community organizer Paula X. Rojas, who said on camera that she “was part of . . . a revolutionary movement in Chile.”
Numerous sessions at Socialism 2025 were not live-streamed. These included “Deny, Defend, Depose: Health Struggle After Luigi,” “Hope at the Edge of the Abyss: The Case for Revolution,” “Prison Made Us Militants,” “DIY Abortion,” and “Becoming Working Class Revolutionaries.”
The event also hosted four panels featuring Ayers, former leader of the Weather Underground terrorist group. The final one, titled “The Blunt-Force Assault on Education: Resistance to Fascism,” included several prominent left-wing academics: Wayne Au of the University of Washington, Davarian Baldwin of Trinity College, and Barbara Ransby and David Stovall, both of the University of Illinois Chicago. Panelist Jesse Hagopian, an ethnic studies teacher at Seattle’s Garfield High School and a leading advocate for expanding ethnic studies in K–12 classrooms, emphasized that the ideological campaign should extend across every level of public education.
University leaders, from presidents to trustees, should take the extremists on their campuses seriously. These are not marginal voices—they are deeply embedded in higher education and openly hostile to its civic purpose.
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