Fox News Guest: Socialism On Campus Could Lead To Soviet-Style Genocide

Fox News hosted a discussion about the rising popularity of socialism Monday morning. Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy spoke to retired professor, Dr. Michael Rectenwald, author of Springtime for Snowflakes. Rectenwald made some alarming claims that seemed to be too much for Doocy at times.

Doocy showed a clip of Home Depot’s co-founder claiming that 50% of college students now approve of socialism, though no source was provided to support this claim. He then turned to Rectenwald for comment, and viewers were treated to several more unverified numbers. Doocy started by saying that this issue had started in the 1920s.

“You had professors going over to the Soviet Union, you know, from America, going over to the Soviet Union, learning about the Soviet system of education and being convinced that they should bring it to the US and re-engineer the entire education system after it,” Rectenwald said. “And this was a professor, particularly George Counts, who came back, taught at Columbia teacher’s college and he’s teaching teachers who are going to then propagate the same ideology that he is teaching them. And this is how it spreads.”

The educator he referred to, George Counts, was an advocate of progressive education, head of the American Federation of Teachers and wrote in praise of Soviet education in 1931, long before the Cold War and widespread fear of socialism in the US.

Doocy said that the events Rectenwald was discussing were a long time ago, but went on to link them to Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential run and blamed colleges for young people talking favorably about socialism. Rectenwald agreed.

“Especially when the professoriate are 48% socialist. And that’s a large number. I mean, we have about 90% are leftist and 40% of the total are socialists.”

Doocy was taken aback by Rectenwald’s claim that so many professors were leftists or socialist, but Rectenwald said that this was true in the humanities and social sciences. He did not provide any evidence to support this claim, however.

“There’s a bubble and they don’t want to hire anyone. And I’ve seen people actually thrown out of degree programs, Ph.D programs, for being conservative,” Rectenwald claimed, again without evidence, while going on to say, “There is a huge indoctrination process going on. And it’s not just called socialism now. They’re calling it social justice as well.”

Doocy wanted to know where all this would lead, and Rectenwald had strong views on the matter.

“It leads to the kind of forced egalitarianism that you saw in the Soviet Union, where you have to squash people down, so that everyone’s quote-unquote equal. And it led to 94 million people being murdered combined in all the Communist regimes in the 20th century.”

Rectenwald’s final claim seemed to be a little much for Doocy, he quickly added: “That was a different time then,” and ended the interview.

Watch the video above, via Fox News.