OPINION:
Until relatively recently, “Death to America” was a slogan Americans expected to hear from fanatical North Korean communists, along with acolytes of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and other people who have been brainwashed by authoritarian political movements and governments — not from their fellow citizens.
But lately this chant has sprouted in our own country, including on the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, and at Columbia University in New York and other colleges across the nation.
While public concern about anti-American extremism fostered by dons at America’s elite educational institutions has unfortunately made these college-based occurrences somewhat unsurprising, the “Death to America” chant was also heard, again and again, at an event in April at the Teamsters union bosses’ Chicago headquarters. A subsidiary of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters hosted the event in the basement of the building.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and other honchos at the union have control over the employment contracts of well over 1 million workers, the vast majority of whom want no part of this hateful extremism. Yet Mr. O’Brien and company made no attempt to denounce the event.
Mr. O’Brien is even slated to appear at the Republican National Convention in July — meaning he’s been given an opportunity to “make inroads” with his union’s numerous conservative members without any expression of remorse or explanation for how his union became a platform for virulent anti-Americanism.
So how did Teamsters leaders come to host in April a conference of roughly 300 radical activists who openly regard the United States as their “enemy”? These activists met to forge a plan to disrupt the Democratic National Convention this summer.
In a report for her publication and in a video posted on X, Olivia Reingold of The Free Press made national news of the Chicago radicals’ eruption into applause after hearing an announcement that missiles and drones just launched by Iran were headed straight toward Israel.
Ms. Reingold also made national news with her written account and video of Chicago organizer Shabbir Rizvi teaching conference participants to chant “Death to America” in Farsi, aka Persian.
Even after the “Death to America” chant had echoed through a room in the Windy City Teamsters headquarters and this fact was widely reported, neither Mr. O’Brien nor his lieutenants made any effort to distance themselves from the disturbing news account and video footage supplied by Ms. Reingold.
Teamsters bosses’ manifest willingness to associate themselves with extremist views would make no sense at all if they were truly focused on higher compensation, better benefits and safer jobs for workers, as Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and the relatively few other members of the Republican Party who actively court Teamsters support like to pretend.
But the willingness of Teamsters bosses to supply a platform for the likes of Shabbir Rizvi makes perfect sense if you understand, as Michael Watson of the Capital Research Center explained in a recent analysis of how private sector union bosses spend their compulsory dues money and other revenue, that the real program of U.S. union officials, “regardless of the sector represented or the social class of the members,” is “Everything Leftism.”
“Everything Leftism” means union bosses, even those with a politically conservative rank and file, believe that, in exchange for their fellow leftists’ support for the destruction of the right to work and other core union objectives, they must support “esoteric gender theories being taught to schoolchildren,” “de facto open borders,” etc., even though “those issues … have no obvious link to any economic dimension relevant to ordinary workers.”
That’s why, in 2023 alone, the putatively “moderate” Teamsters hierarchy paid nearly $1.2 million in workers’ mostly forced-dues money to Berlin Rosen, a public relations firm created, as Mr. Watson noted, by allies of far-left former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.
As Mr. O’Brien takes the stage at the Republican National Convention in July, all workers — and GOP politicians — should remember his and his cronies’ penchant to ally themselves with the most divisive parts of the American left — including “Death to America” radicals.
• Stan Greer is a senior research associate for the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.
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