CUNY Professor Leading Socialist Paramilitary Group Caught Teaching Members How to Deceive Police

A taxpayer-funded CUNY professor is spearheading what amounts to a socialist paramilitary organization operating in American cities—and he’s openly instructing members on how to lie to law enforcement, evade detection, and skirt legal boundaries.

Walter Lucken IV pulls in $105,000 annually as an assistant professor of English at Queens College. But his after-hours activities reveal a far more disturbing agenda than grading papers.

This week, Lucken led a workshop for the Red Rabbits Security Commission—the Democratic Socialists of America’s nascent paramilitary wing—at the DSA’s headquarters on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The session amounted to a masterclass in subversion.

Teaching Deception as Doctrine

“In New York, you’re allowed to just not say anything if the police talk to you…you can look right at them,” Lucken told attendees, sharing tactics he claims differ from his experience in Detroit, where he says police “will beat you up” for remaining silent.

But Lucken didn’t stop at advising silence. He actively encouraged deception.

“Play to their love of hierarchy… act confident even when feeding misinformation…police will sometimes let you do things that are not technically legal,” the professor instructed.

This isn’t academic theory. This is operational planning.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Lucken lives comfortably in a $3,000-per-month two-bedroom Kensington apartment with his therapist wife. His specialty, according to his academic bio, focuses on “public rhetorics of state violence, incarceration and higher education.”

Translation: He gets paid six figures by New York taxpayers to undermine the very institutions that protect them.

The 35-year-old professor joined the DSA immediately after Hamas’s barbaric October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks on Israel—a detail that speaks volumes about his worldview.

A National Network of Radicalism

The Red Rabbits Security Commission emerged from last year’s national DSA convention with an explicit mission: preparing for a “national uprising against federal agents and police brutality.”

Let that sink in. An organized network is actively training for confrontation with American law enforcement.

Chapters in Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Philadelphia, Tucson, Austin, and Portland have conducted “self-defense” trainings teaching members to block intersections, combat “fascists” with umbrellas and pepper spray, employ martial arts techniques, and—disturbingly—participate in what one chapter promoted as “sick” firearm safety courses.

This isn’t protest preparation. This is insurgency training on American soil.

Operational Security for Radicals

Lucken’s workshop provided attendees with sophisticated operational security tactics that would make intelligence operatives nod in recognition:

• Use Signal chat with disappearing messages
• Disable fingerprint and facial recognition on phones
• Turn off location tracking
• Destroy documents
• Avoid applying for demonstration permits

He also downplayed arrest consequences, telling dozens of attendees that disorderly conduct charges wouldn’t appear on job background checks.

“The state relies on the mystique surrounding the arrest process to keep us in a state of fearful inaction,” Lucken declared. “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.'”

Another Red Rabbits leader added: “The state is not invincible.”

These aren’t idle words. They’re battle cries.

A Rogues’ Gallery of Extremism

The Red Rabbits Security Commission has faced internal controversy, including a failed attempt to remove Christopher Winston—a violence-praising Maoist organizer and leftist influencer who has declared that “burning a Waymo is not political violence” and threatened to “execute” rivals.

When your organization considers such figures too extreme, you’ve ventured into dangerous territory.

Lucken serves as a Queens College delegate to CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress, the professors’ union. He’s scheduled to teach “Writing about Writing” in the English Department next fall.

The irony is rich. On his CUNY faculty page, Lucken writes: “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.”

Apparently, when addressing police, he believes persuasive misinformation trumps truth.

CUNY’s Pattern of Extremism

Lucken joins an increasingly crowded roster of controversial professors on the CUNY payroll—some with actual criminal charges.

The list includes Corinna Mullin, recently reinstated despite her anti-Israel and anti-American activism, who professed her admiration for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps at a DSA meeting.

Then there’s Shellyne Rodriguez, the unhinged Hunter College arts professor who held a machete to a reporter’s neck and threatened to “chop” him.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They represent a pattern of radicalism that CUNY administrators either enable or ignore.

The Accountability Question

Both CUNY and Lucken declined to comment when contacted about these revelations.

Their silence speaks volumes.

American taxpayers deserve answers. Why is a public university employing someone who actively trains others to deceive law enforcement? Why does CUNY tolerate professors who collaborate with organizations explicitly preparing for “national uprising” against federal agents?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. They demand concrete responses and immediate action.

The Bigger Picture

The Red Rabbits Security Commission has set an ambitious goal: trained marshals in at least 40% of DSA chapters nationwide.

They’re building infrastructure for sustained confrontation with American law enforcement and federal authorities. They’re recruiting. They’re training. They’re organizing.

And they’re doing it with the tacit approval of institutions like CUNY, which continue employing and paying individuals like Lucken despite their extracurricular activities.

This represents a fundamental breakdown in institutional responsibility and civic duty.

What Comes Next

The question isn’t whether these activities constitute a threat—they clearly do. The question is what Americans will do about it.

Will CUNY continue paying six-figure salaries to professors who moonlight as paramilitary trainers? Will taxpayers tolerate their money funding individuals who actively undermine law and order?

The DSA and its Red Rabbits Security Commission operate openly because they believe they can. They face no meaningful consequences. No institutional pushback. No professional repercussions.

That calculus needs to change.

New Yorkers and Americans generally deserve universities that educate rather than radicalize, that build up society rather than prepare to tear it down, that respect law enforcement rather than train people to deceive it.

Walter Lucken and his Red Rabbits comrades represent everything wrong with publicly funded academia today—radical ideology masquerading as scholarship, activism disguised as education, and subversion paid for by the very society they seek to undermine.

The time for tolerance has passed. The time for accountability has arrived.