A guest lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater, a public school, began class Tuesday with a racist, anti-Republican rant that went on for more than ten minutes.
The guest lecturer, Eyon Biddle, is the political and organizing director for Service Employees International Union Local 150. Biddle was speaking in the freshman general education course “Education 130: Individual and Society,” which allegedly “examines how people influence and are affected by their social worlds from the perspectives of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and women’s studies.”
In a video taken by a student in the class, obtained by Campus Reform, Biddle blames “white rage” for the failure of the Badger State’s 2010 recall attempt against Republican Governor Scott Walker. The union organizer goes on to say that American values are those of “division, racism, sexism, and classism.”
An excerpt of the video is below, and the full video can be found here.
“You’re looking at me like, ‘Dude you’re f*cking absurd, you’re crazy,’” Biddle said near the beginning of his lecture. “But every day you are living in a system that is telling you how to think, what to think, and when to do it.”
The SEIU official declared that blue-collar, white workers would not have voted for Scott Walker in 2010 — a vote that was “against their own interest” — if not for “white rage” and distaste over having to “pay for health care [for] blacks, browns, and gays.” He also said “racism with the first black president” was the cause of support for a governor who is trying to rein in government employee unions’ political power and head off a looming budget meltdown as public employee benefits spiral out of control.
Biddle went on to explain that Walker was not funded by normal Wisconsinites, but rather the “Koch brothers, corporations, [and] rich people” who were “confusing people, scaring people, [and] scaring the elderly about Medicare, Medicaid changes due to the Affordable Care Act.”
All of this was just “nonsense” Biddle informed his young adult audience.
Stating that his opinions “are just fact, the reality of what we live in,” Biddle said that now America focuses on “gay rights, women’s rights, things that polarize people, things that feed into the sense of those deep, like I said, American values of division, racism, sexism, classism.”
Freshman Kyle Brooks, secretary for the college Republicans, who filmed the video, told Campus Reform, “I’m very disappointed. What could have been a productive dialogue turned into a divisive rant smearing the conservative movement.”
— Alec Torres is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.