Two Missouri labor professors have been vindicated after a right-wing smear campaign almost cost them their jobs. Last month, the website BigGovernment.com—run by right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart—posted footage of a labor relations class taught by University of Missouri professors Judy Ancel and Don Giljum. In the video, the professors appeared to make a number of statements backing the use of violence in the struggle for labor rights. But it turned out the video was edited in a way to distort their words—similar to recent video campaigns against ACORN, Planned Parenthood, NPR and former FDA official, Shirley Sherrod. “I was just appalled, because I knew it was me speaking, but it wasn’t saying what I had said in class,” said Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
that clip from the Big Government video has Ancel saying, quote, “Violence is a tactic, and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.” But what the video doesn’t show is that Professor Ancel was actually quoting a person interviewed in a film she had screened for the class. This is Professor Ancel’s actual statement, without the editing.
Professor Ancel and Professor Giljum, ultimately vindicated after the University of Missouri reviewed the full unedited tapes—but not before a vocal campaign from right-wing groups that called not just for the professors’ dismissal but the dissolution of the entire labor studies program itself.
The pressure was so intense that university officials accepted Giljum’s conditional offer to resign before reversing their position after reviewing the tapes. In a statement, the University of Missouri-St. Louis said, quote, “The excerpts that were made public…were definitely taken out of context, with their meaning highly distorted through splicing and editing from different times within a class period and across multiple class periods… We sincerely regret the distress to [Don Giljum] and others that has been caused by the unauthorized copying, editing and distribution of the course videos.”
The University of Missouri-Kansas City concurred, saying, quote, “It is clear that edited videos posted on the Internet depict statements from the instructors in an inaccurate and distorted manner by taking their statements out of context and reordering the sequence in which those statements were actually made so as to change their meaning.”
The episode marks the latest in a series of right-wing efforts to target opponents by using undercover videos. The head of BigGovernment.com, Andrew Breitbart, is currently facing a lawsuit from former Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod. Sherrod was forced out of her job last year after Breitbart posted a video clip that was deceptively edited to make it appear that she was racist toward a white farmer. Breitbart is a vocal supporter of right-wing activist James O’Keefe, known for his undercover videos targeting NPR and the community group ACORN, as well as Planned Parenthood.
Judy Ancel talking:
It started on April 25th, Amy. And I was informed that this video was up on Andrew Breitbart’s web page, Big Government. And I watched it, and I was just appalled, because I knew it was me speaking, but it wasn’t saying what I had said in class. I also knew that whoever took the videos, it was an inside job, because only students with a password had access to these videos. And so, I began to think, well, which one of my students would have done this and would have edited these tapes? We later did find that out.
It was a student named Philip Christofanelli, who is a full-time student at Washington University.
And as we came to find out later, he was a founder of an organization called Young Americans for Liberty and is affiliated with the Tea Party. And Philip, using his password, copied these videos and claimed on Breitbart’s web page that he just showed them to friends because he was so disturbed by what we were saying in class. Well, I think his friends include James O’Keefe, who is connected to Breitbart and insurgent
O’Keefe has been seen on campus at events that were sponsored by Philip’s organization. So he frequently—and it’s clear he’s been on Dana Loesch’s program, which is a talk show. Dana is a commentator on CNN and a rising star.
She does a radio talk show in St. Louis. And she had Philip on. She also had the Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, Peter Kinder, on, who misquoted the misquoted videos on her radio show and called for us to be fired.
a Tea Party activist, Dana Loesch, who played a key role in the campaign against the two professors
we never were teaching violence in our classroom, nor sabotage. We were talking about the violence in labor history, which is extreme in the U.S., and we were talking about the fact that, in many situations, there is violence, and it’s mostly directed at workers. Sometimes it comes from—it came from workers. We were very clear that we do not advocate violence. These folks were putting words in our mouth, and they have a political agenda, for sure.
The timing of these attacks is very important, because Peter Kinder was on her show because Peter Kinder was promoting an anti-labor agenda and an anti-public worker agenda. This coincided with the last two weeks of the Missouri state legislature, where they were considering right-to-work bills, a so-called “paycheck protection” bill, as well as cuts on the political voice of public employees in the state of Missouri. I don’t believe it was an accident that they timed these attacks to coincide with that.
We did talk about examples where workers were denied the right to strike and what happens. We talk about labor rights in the class. We talk about the importance of negotiating, of coming to the table and having a meeting of the minds. All of that was left out of the edited videos. They very selectively picked those things which could be interpreted as promoting violence.
We had a total of about 22 students, and they are all listening to the lectures and reacting. It was a class that had a tremendous amount of discussion, a lot of questions from the students, talking about all kinds of strategies, tactics, history, law, labor rights, those kinds of things. So, what Don was talking about was that violence, again, was something that is a very important part of our history, something we need to understand and we cannot omit. But again, he was talking about it historically, and that’s distorted. He’s paid a huge price for this.
two days after the story went up on Breitbart’s web page, Don’s international union president of the Operating Engineers called him and demanded his resignation as business manager. He’d been business manager for 27 years of a very important local in eastern Missouri, western Illinois. And he resigned. He had planned on retiring anyway on May 1st, but he resigned a few days earlier. And that really hurt. Luckily, his members have rallied to his side and opposed that action, but it’s done.
He was forced to resign, yeah. And that was reversed, and they have vindicated Don, as you said, and he was told that he will be rehired. He’s an adjunct. And this raises the whole question of the rights of contingent faculty, who teach now a majority of the courses in our universities. How can they have academic freedom when they’re subject to these kinds of attacks? They need to be supported by their universities.
we would have been toast. What changed is Shirley Sherrod and the attacks on NPR, the attacks on ACORN, and the fact that the media is now getting wise to Breitbart’s lies. And so, they held off, for the most part. There were some bad stories, one in the St. Louis Post that was not very favorable, and one in a Columbia, Missouri, paper.
But the fact is that most of the media waited for my response and then my university’s response, which took three days to come, and then we got the headlines, not Breitbart. That was a huge change, and I really appreciate that.
– from democracynow.org
Koch brothers funding Tea Party. Koch brothers dont like employees who knows their rights and unions. So they want to kill those ideas which empowers employees. They want slaves for their firms.
Anybody tries to educate people then they will make trouble. Actually they want dissolution of the entire labor studies program itself.
Knowledge is light. oh its bad. Let there be darkness. Shame on you idiots.