From the May 31 edition of Front Page Magazine:
When you’re a champion of so-called social justice, there is no end to the accolades you’re likely to receive regardless of your faults.
Falsely described by those on the Left as a compassionate humanitarian, radical labor leader Dolores Huerta has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. Huerta “has fought to give more people a seat at the table,” Obama said euphemistically.
The award is not all that surprising for an administration that kisses the ring of Al Sharpton.
In an acceptance statement Huerta pushed all the right politically correct buttons:
The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights.
Did Huerta leave any aggrieved interest group out? If she did, it must have been an innocent oversight because she’s far too wonderful and inspiring a leader to have deliberately slighted any gripe-laden, tax-eating constituency.
Huerta’s 501c3 community organizer-training nonprofit, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, receives funding from high-profile left-of-center philanthropies such as the (Bill and Hillary) Clinton Family Foundation ($100,000 in 2010), Women’s Foundation of California ($35,000 since 2009), and the (Norman) Lear Family Foundation ($10,000 since 2010).
Huerta will soon be portrayed by Rosario Dawson, a beautiful and glamorous movie star, in an upcoming film. And who knows what other tributes Hollywood will generate for the octogenarian socialist.
But despite all the hype, the oft-imprisoned Huerta is no angel. She is less the civil rights leader imagined by the mainstream media and more a champion of vulgar redistributionism. As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don’t teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors’ fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice.
“I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy,” according to Huerta. “Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.”
It doesn’t seem to matter to the Obama administration that Huerta is no role model. Like leftist radicals Karl Marx and Jean-Jacques Rousseau she virtually abandoned her children in order to foment unrest as a union organizer. Huerta was arguably to the left even of her United Farm Workers colleague Cesar Chavez. Unlike Huerta, Chavez campaigned against illegal immigration and made an effort to work with Republican lawmakers in the California state legislature. Despite being a socialist, Chavez managed to earn respect on both the left and the right.
Huerta, however, hasn’t received much if any praise from conservatives and an examination of her career makes her an unlikely recipient of the nation’s highest civilian honor which in the past has gone to heroes and luminaries like former British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, actors John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, writers T. S. Eliot and William F. Buckley Jr., and singer Ella Fitzgerald.
Huerta is an “honorary co-chair” of America’s largest Marxist group, Democratic Socialists of America. She shares this distinction with DSA members Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, former Berkeley, Calif., mayor Gus Newport, pseudo-academic Cornel West, and SEIU vice president Eliseo Medina, whom Huerta recruited years ago to become a union organizer for the United Farm Workers.
Huerta’s nonprofit follows the same playbook employed by ACORN and other Saul Alinsky-inspired groups. The foundation “hires organizers from low-income working class communities and trains them using a grassroots organizing model.” Natural leaders are “developed by their participation in community projects” and local residents “hold an assembly of house meeting participants and vote to establish their own organization.” Such groups “make a plan for direct action participation” –Alinsky-speak for in-your-face, often violent action— and by “participation in these community projects, natural leaders develop their leadership skills,” according to the group’s website.
Huerta says “Republicans hate Latinos,” and urges illegal immigrants to join with unions in agitating against their employers. An anti-Vietnam War activist, Huerta also opposes the post-9/11 Global War on Terror, which she has described as a war on immigrants. She reportedly coined the radical zinger, “We didn’t cross the [U.S.-Mexico] border; the border crossed us.”
Huerta praises Venezuela’s brutal Marxist strongman Hugo Chavez, asking “why can’t we do that here in the United States?” (A second Obama administration might be willing to accommodate Huerta.)
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis recently lauded Huerta, who has mobilized angry mobs of illegals against Americans, calling her “a trailblazer” and “a luchadora who endured arrests, death threats and beatings.”
As Mytheos Holt quipped at The Blaze, while “luchadora” is a Spanish word for a female Mexican wrestler, it might be more appropriate to compare Huerta to a bullfighter or matador. “After all, based on her record of public statements, Huerta certainly raises enough red flags.”
Like Hillary Clinton, whose presidential run she endorsed, Huerta looks down her nose at homemakers, viewing them as useless bourgeois artifacts. “Excluding women, protecting them, keeping women at home, that’s the middle-class way,” she said.
Huerta isn’t the only non-mainstream American to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Left-of-center presidents have been awarding the medal to radicals for some time now.
President Obama gave medals to Malcolm X collaborator and poet Maya Angelou, former AFL-CIO boss John J. Sweeney, and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) founding director John Hamilton Adams. President Clinton gave medals to Jesse Jackson Sr. and Huerta’s labor organizing colleague Cesar Chavez.
The U.S. Navy took things with Chavez a step further, deciding to name a cargo ship after him. Chavez reportedly came up with the Obama campaign slogan, “Yes, we can!” Chavez’s union, the United Farm Workers, used the saying he coined as its official motto. (In Spanish, “¡Sí se puede!”)
Will Huerta also one day get a ship named after her? If so it should be a destroyer.