Conservatives Tie Obama Speech to Bill Ayers, Hugo Chavez

If you want to understand where the truly unexpected “Obama will indoctrinate our kids” controversy came from, look no further than the latest column by Michelle Malkin. She begins by mocking “the sneering defenders of Barack Obama who can’t fathom the backlash” and cites, as WorldNetDaily cited, an August 28 assembly at Eagle Bay Elementary School in Farmington, Utah, in which celebrities pledged to “be of service to Barack Obama.”

Then she nails her culprit: Bill Ayers.

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky — a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

As investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz reported, Klonsky and Ayers teamed up on the so-called “small schools movement” to steer schoolchildren away from core academics to left-wing politicking on issues of “inequity, war and violence.”

A cadre of like-minded educators and national service administrators across the country share the same core commitment to transforming themselves from imparters of knowledge to transformers of society. The “change” agenda trains students to think only about what they should do for Obama — and rarely to contemplate how his powers and ambitions should be limited and restrained.

The smoking gun? A 2006 speech by Ayers in Caracas, a secret so deep that it’s, err, posted on Ayers’ Website. While the White House’s clumsy rollout of the speech (its original questions for students, about how they could “help the president”) sparked the controversy, this is what’s fueling it.