A City University of New York professor has emerged as a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America’s growing security operation, a group critics have characterized as a paramilitary-style wing, after it hosted an uncommon training session in New York City this week.
Walter Lucken IV, a Queens College assistant professor of English who earned $105,000 in taxpayer-funded salary last year, led a Thursday night workshop for the Red Rabbits Security Commission focused on navigating encounters with law enforcement, including advice on withholding information from police.
“I moved here from Detroit, where police will beat you up if you don’t say anything if they ask you a question,” Lucken, 35, told attendees at the session, held at the NYC DSA’s worn 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.”
He also urged participants to understand how officers respond to authority and presentation, saying, “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 with his therapist wife in a $3,000-a-month two-bedroom apartment in Kensington, specializes in “public rhetorics of state violence, incarceration and higher education,” according to his online biography for the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics.
The Red Rabbits Security Commission was created at last year’s national DSA convention and has been preparing for what its authorizing resolution described as a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality.”
Across the country — including in Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Tucson, Austin and Portland — Red Rabbits “self-defense” trainings have reportedly covered tactics such as blocking intersections and confronting “fascists” using umbrellas, pepper spray and martial arts. One chapter also advertised what it called “sick” firearm safety courses.
Lucken, who said he joined the DSA after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, sought to minimize concerns about arrest, telling several dozen attendees that a disorderly conduct charge would not appear 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.
