WARD CHURCHILL - THE FAR LEFT FRAUD AND CON ARTIST

By: Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

The left needs to back off its knee-jerk defense of the fake 1st Amendment claims and see "Professor" Ward Churchill for the lying, cheating, thieving, morally-corrupt academic and political fraud that he is. This scumball is completely undeserving of the support he's been getting of late from people who should know better.

Let's start with the fact that Ward Churchill is about as much of a "Native American" as I am. Which is: Not Any At All. Churchill has been denounced as an impostor for close to 30 years now for his claim of being "Native American." He began by saying he was a Creek, but when the Creek Nation said they'd never heard of him, he changed that claim to being Keetoowah Cherokee. The Tribal Council of the Keetoowah Cherokee say none of the Cherokee ancestors he lists ever existed. Carol Standing Elk, head of the American Indian Movement of Northern California has said, "We have told the University of Colorado he is not an Indian and he should not be out there indicting Indian people."

That last point is a reference to Churchill's campaign against the "racist" tribal membership rules that prevent his making up his ethnic background without question. Churchill also finds it "racist" that a "Native American artist" has to be able to prove actual membership in a tribe in order to sell their work as Native American art, since he made a good living before that selling his "art." Nowadays, he just commits art fraud by passing off copies of the original work of artists like the late Thomas Mails as his own.

All this leads to the first point of Ward Churchill's career of continuing Academic Fraud.

Churchill has promulgated in his "writing" the lie that the "1/16 Rule" of tribal membership was forced on Native Americans by the U.S. Government when they passed the law breaking up tribal reservations into 160-acre individual parcels in 1887. In fact, there is nothing in the law that defines how one is to be defined as a tribal member, this rule being left to the individual tribes. The rules are "racist" because they prevent Churchill living out his fantasies.

Beyond playing fast and loose with historical fact on this point, Churchill has also promulgated the fraudulent "history" of the U.S. Army's "genocide of the Mandans" in 1837, in which he claims the Army provided blankets infected with smallpox, which he then claims killed a quarter-million Mandans in a government-planned act of genocide. Churchill's "academic citation" of these "facts" is the work of UCLA professor Russell Thornton (who really is a for-real Native American historian). Thornton's own account is completely different from Churchill's ravings and makes no mention of the Army whatsoever. When he was asked about this, Professor Thornton said "If Ward Churchill is citing my work as supporting his, then he has no support at all for what he says."

In other words, folks, Ward Churchill just makes this shit up as he goes along.

The fact Churchill has the position he does at the University of Colorado is further proof of the complete corruption of "the Academy" in the past 30 years. When he applied to CU in 1978 for a position tutoring minority students, he checked off "Native American" on his employment application and Federal affirmative action forms - something that was never verified, but with which he then managed to create an entire career. In 1991, he beat out several actual Native American applicants for a position at the university, teaching Native American Studies despite the fact that two of his competitors held Doctorates in the subject while his academic background is a Master’s Degree in "Communications."

Later that year, the faculty of the CU Communications Department was informed by their incoming chairman Michael Pacanowsky that Ward Churchill had been offered a full professorship at California State University Northridge and that they had to decide whether Churchill should receive tenure in the Communications Department after he was turned down by the Sociology and Political Science Departments. Pacanowsky said that hiring Churchill would be "making a contribution to increasing the cultural diversity on campus." Despite his lack of academic credentials, Churchill was given tenure in the name of academic political correctness.

In fact, no such offer had been made. John Chandler, spokesman for California State University Northridge, has stated "We have full records from that time and we cannot find any evidence of a hiring offer ever being made to Ward Churchill."

So, this scumball's a liar as well as an academic fraud from beginning to end.

He's also a liar and a fraud in the rest of his so-called "resume." What particularly pisses me off is his bullshit claim to be a "Vietnam combat veteran." If all those who claim this status really were, we’d likely have won that war. The truth is - of 1,500,000 who served in Vietnam - maybe 175,000 actually were "Vietnam combat veterans." That's because in the American armed forces at that time, for every grunt in the boonies there were nine others in "support." According to the US Army's records, PFC Churchill did his year in-country as a "light vehicle driver." In other words, he drove a jeep. Back in the rear, with the gear. There was a term for those guys back then: REMF - which stands for "Rear Echelon Mother F---er."

To me, what completely demonstrates his total unreliability is his claim to have come home from the war, become an organizer for Students for a Democratic Society, and to have joined The Weatherman Faction, who he taught to make bombs. I was in SDS back in the days of the scumbag Weathermen, a bunch of upper class radical-leftist morons who should have all died unlamented in the Townhouse explosion in 1970. I personally still hope that "Professor" Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn "get theirs" one of these days for their crimes against the antiwar movement and the left back then.

These people like Ward Churchill made our work harder back then, and they still do so. They weren't worthy of support 35 years ago, and they still aren't today. Unless you think a lying, conniving, thief and third-rate fraudulent con artist is someone you want on your side.