Who is Eric Holder?

Cabinet a roster of far leftists

Attorney General Eric Holder, as a Columbia University student and leader of the Student Afro-American Society (SAS), participated in the armed takeover of a vacant campus ROTC office. The takeover lasted five days in the spring of 1970.

Holder himself has acknowledged participating in a separate takeover of a college dean’s office until SAS demands were met — for starters, transformation of the ROTC office into the Malcolm X Lounge.

The Columbia Daily Spectator of April 23, 1970, published the reasons, including: “Columbia’s contempt toward the beliefs of Black students,” “Columbia’s lack of concern for the welfare of Black people,” “the general racist nature of the American society” and “the right of Black self-determination.”

This program of black separatism dovetailed with the revolutionary movements of the time. “You must become a cohesive union,” radical lawyer William Kunstler told an enthusiastic student audience at Columbia on April 8, 1970, “who will achieve by any means necessary the end, or at least the halt, of racism, private property and the domination of one sex over another.”

The SAS got its Malcolm X Lounge, which student Barack Obama would frequent a decade later. The introduction of politically conceived, takeover forced minority studies departments at Columbia and elsewhere followed, de facto segregating campuses to this day.

That same semester, Holder’s Afro-American student group also declared its “full support of the Black Panther Party as a vanguard organization for the liberation” of black people, the Columbia paper reported on March 12, 1970.

Suddenly, Holder’s “Black Panther blind spot,” as the Washington Times called the attorney general’s failures to prosecute black radicals, is no longer a mystery. Holder sympathized with the Panthers then; he seems to sympathize with them now.

Back in the spring of 1970, while Eric Holder (Columbia ‘73) was occupying buildings and supporting Black Panthers in New York City, Hillary Rodham (Yale Law School ‘73) was actively monitoring and supporting the defense of eight Black Panthers accused of murder and torture in New Haven. Quite a nexus of revolutionaries, the Obama Cabinet.

This epic blackout struck me anew with the release of unedited video of a racially demagogic speech then-Sen. Obama gave in 2007. Listening to the man who became president rationalize the LA riots was bad enough, but the narrative of racist federal neglect he presented to his black audience was disturbing. It sounded so much like themes his attorney general and secretary of state supported long ago as student radicals — nothing like Obama’s 2008 campaign slogans of “post-racial” and nonpartisan “change.”

A radical left message lives and beats at the heart of the Obama administration. It makes me wonder: Will these chickens ever come home to roost?