A CUNY professor is one of the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America’s emerging paramilitary wing — which held a rare training session in NYC this week.
Walter Lucken IV is an assistant professor of English at Queens College who made $105,000 on the taxpayer’s dime last year, but on Thursday night he was leading a workshop for the Red Rabbits Security Commission on ways to skirt the law and lie to police.
“I moved here from Detroit, where police will beat you up if you don’t say anything if they ask you a question,” said Lucken, 35, at the workshop at the NYC DSA’s dingy Lower East Side headquarters. “In New York, you’re allowed to just not say anything if the police talk to you…you can look right at them.”
“Play to their love of hierarchy… act confident even when feeding misinformation…police will sometimes let you do things that are not technically legal.”
Lucken, who lives in a $3,000 a month two-bedroom apartment in Kensington with his therapist wife specializes in “public rhetorics of state violence, incarceration and higher education,” according to his online bio for the Journal of Multimodal Rethorics.
The Red Rabbits Security Commission, launched at last year’s national DSA convention, has been preparing for a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality,” according to its authorizing resolution.
In other cities — Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Tucson, Austin and Portland — Red Rabbits “self-defense” trainings have taught members to block intersections and fight “fascists” with umbrellas, pepper spray and martial arts, along with what one chapter billed as “sick” firearm safety courses.
Lucken, who said he joined the DSA after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, downplayed getting arrested, telling the dozens of attendees a mere charge of disorderly conduct wouldn’t show up on a job background check.
“The state relies on the mystique surrounding the arrest process to keep us in a state of fearful inaction,” he said. “They want people to be like, ‘Oh if I get arrested at a protest that’s the worst thing that could ever happen in my life.’”
DSA members were also told to avoid detection by using Signal chat with disappearing messages, turning off fingerprint, facial recognition and location tracking on their cell phones, destroying documents — and were discouraged from applying for permits for demonstrations.
“The state is not invincible,” declared another Red Rabbit leader.
Since its inauguration, the Red Rabbits Security Commission has been a source of internal controversy — including an unsuccessful effort to remove a violence-praising Maoist organizer — leftist influencer Christopher Winston — who has claimed “burning a Waymo is not political violence” — and has threatened to “execute” rivals.
Lucken, who serves as a Queens College delegate to CUNY’s professors union, the Professional Staff Congress, is teaching “Writing about Writing” in the English Department next fall, according to CUNY’s online class schedule.
“I instruct students to imagine the act of argumentation as a search for the balance between that which is true or just on the one hand and that which is persuasive on the other,” he writes on his CUNY faculty page.
The socialist is among a rogues’ gallery of controversial professors — some with criminal charges — employed by the taxpayer-funded university over the years.
They include recently reinstated anti-Israel and anti-America Corinna Mullin, who recently professed her love for the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps at a DSA meeting, and Shellyne Rodriguez, an unhinged Hunter College arts professor who held a machete to a Post reporter’s neck and made wild threats that she was going to “chop” him.
CUNY and Lucken did not return The Post’s request for comment.
