* Professor of Communication Studies and Rhetorical Studies
* Marxist
* Member of the International Socialist Organization
* Supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement
* Supporter of the Anti-Israel BDS movement
* Accuses Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians
* Claimed that America provoked the 9/11 attacks
* Advocates the elimination of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Born in approximately 1964, Dana L. Cloud earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English and Telecommunications from Pennsylvania State University in 1986; a Master of Arts Degree in Rhetorical Studies from the University of Iowa in 1989; and a Ph.D. in Rhetorical Studies from the University of Iowa in 1992.
After completing her formal education, Cloud taught in the University of Texas-Austin’s Department of Communication Studies from January 1993 to August 2015.
She then took a position at Syracuse University, where she served as Professor of Communication Studies, Professor of Rhetorical Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies from August 2015 to August 2019.
Cloud then worked as a Senior Lecturer at California State University Long Beach from 2019-2020, and a Lecturer at California State University Fullerton from 2019-2024.
In August 2024, the University of Cincinnati hired Cloud as both a Professor and Director in its School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies.
Cloud’s University of Cincinnati biography describes her as a “critical scholar of communication, culture, and social movements, working from critical Marxist, feminist, and intersectional perspectives.”
Cloud herself is a Marxist, and since 2007 she has been a member of the International Socialist Organization, a Leninist vanguard that considers itself part of the Fourth Communist International.
Cloud’s academic specialties and research interests lie in the areas of critical theory; rhetorical criticism; media criticism; public sphere theory; Marxist theory; feminist theory; social movements; critique of representations of race and gender in the mass media; and the defense of historical materialist theory and method in communication studies.
In the wake of al Qaeda‘s September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, Cloud was quick to blame American foreign policies for having provoked the 9/11 atrocities. On September 12, 2001, she wrote:
“The devastating attacks on the World Trade Center were examples of the worst kind of disregard for human life and should be condemned. Yet I also feel outrage at the hypocrisy of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and all of the politicians and pundits who last night rushed to declare war on the still-unidentified perpetrators of this tragedy. Targeting civilians is despicable. But it is worth pointing out that the United States military has, in recent years, been the most effective and constant killer of civilians around the world. The 1991 Persian Gulf War left more than two hundred thousand civilians dead as a direct consequence of the war. Ongoing economic sanctions in Iraq have killed more than 1.5 million more, including hundreds of thousands of children. […]
“Furthermore, many Americans don’t stop to think about why Palestinians and others in the Middle East have cause to be extremely angry with the United States for its support of Israel in its decades-long campaign of terror against Palestinian civilians. Few people I have spoken with have thought about the role that the U.S.’s refusal to participate in the [U.N. World Conference Against Racism] in Durban, South Africa (where questions of Iraeli racism against Palestinians arose) may have played in intensifying Arab anger at the United States.[1]
“Of course, legitimate anger is no justification for terrorism against civilians. My heart goes out to the attack’s survivors, victims, and their families. However, the scapegoating of Arabs and the hasty and predictable attempt to blame the attacks on Osama bin Laden and his supporters will not ease their suffering. The scapegoating of Arabs can only result in an upsurge in irrational anti-Arab sentiment and violence.
“Likewise, I fear the curtailing of our civil liberties in the wake of this crisis. Already we are hearing about tightening airport security. Those of us who are regular participants in progressive political debate and activism also worry that there will be a crackdown on those kinds of activities and organizations in the name of protecting American lives. […]
“We need to look beyond the emotional calls to war and ask ourselves, is quick and violent retaliation the proper response? Why would someone target the U.S.? Why would people feel so desperate that they would want to kill themselves and innocent civilians in these kinds of attacks? We need to address these questions if we are to prevent the kind of devastation that happened yesterday from happening ever again.”
Professor Cloud’s antipathy for the United States is further reflected in her disdain for the Pledge of Allegiance. “It seems very strange,” she said in July 2002, “to pledge loyalty to a scrap of cloth representing a corrupt nation.” Thus, Cloud decided to write a new Pledge—not to America, but in honor of people worldwide who allegedly have been victimized by American greed, exploitation, and aggression:
“I pledge allegiance to all the ordinary people around the world,
to the laid off Enron workers and the WorldCom workers
the maquiladora workers
and the sweatshop workers from New York to Indonesia,
who labor not under God but under the heel of multinational corporations; I pledge allegiance to the people of Iraq,
Palestine and Afghanistan,
and to their struggles to survive and resist
slavery to corporate greed,
brutal wars against their families,
and the economic and environmental ruin wrought by global capitalism; I pledge allegiance
to building a better world
where human needs are met
and with real liberty, equality and justice for all.”
In 2007, Cloud proudly defended the free-speech rights of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who had recently come under fierce criticism because of an essay he had written suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were understandable Arab reprisals for American malefaction. Cloud depicted Churchill as a victim of “right-wing culture warriors who have set their sights on critical, progressive, and radical faculty on campuses across the United States.” “It is obvious,” she added, “that the charges against Professor Churchill did not originate with questions about his research, but about the political arguments he made after 9/11. We all have the right as citizens to speak our minds and hearts on matters of importance. We must defend this right every time it comes under attack. If Professor Churchill’s scholarship were really the issue, the [Bush] administration would have found fault during his tenure review or subsequent promotions—including promotion to Chair of his department. No, these attacks are politically timed and motivated and we must see them for what they are.”
In 2012 Cloud became involved with the Online University of the Left, a self-described “online center for Marxist and progressive learning.” It was founded by the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and headed by Carl Davidson.
In the aftermath of a November 2014 grand jury decision not to indict a white police officer who had recently shot and killed a black teeenaged criminal named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Cloud penned a lengthy essay depicting the U.S. as a nation where “there is a racism problem in policing”; where “historical and systemic” factors “have conditioned the possibilities of life for every Black person alive today”; where “there is an enormous wealth gap that can be attributed to race”; and where a state of “permanent discrimination” exists “against Black people.” In light of the fact that numerous violent riots had erupted in response to Brown’s killing, Cloud defended such actions by claiming that “riots … have historically been effective at prompting change” because of their ability to “focus mass public attention on social problems when more measured responses have not.” Additional excerpts from Cloud’s essay:
In 2017, while Cloud was employed at Syracuse University, a protest march in opposition to Sharia (Islamic Law) took place near campus. The event was hosted by the conservative organization ACT for America and was intended to highlight the medieval Islamic legal code’s incompatibility with America’s own legal and governmental system. While many attempted to frame the ACT organizers as hostile to Muslims, those organizers explained that they were merely raising awareness about the threat that Sharia Law posed to America because its precepts often “run contrary to basic human rights and are completely incompatible with our laws and our democratic values.”
When the far-left New York Antifa Alliance showed up to stage a counter-protest against the ACT event, Cloud tweeted: “We almost have the fascists in on [sic] the run. Syracuse people come down to the federal building to finish them off.”
These comments were interpreted by many as a call for violence and for university students and staffers to gun down the remaining anti-Sharia demonstrators. Responses to the tweet made it clear that many understood her words as an exhortation to violence. The conservative website, Campus Reform, labeled it a “veiled call to violence.”
It is quite arguable that Cloud’s tweet—coming as it did during the march and while the anti-Sharia activists were still in the streets—was not protected by the First Amendment. In Bradenburg v. Ohio (1969), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that political speech advocating violence is illegal “where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Consider the circumstances of Cloud’s tweet. The professor encouraged Syracuse students and faculty to act violently in both an immediate and specific capacity. She stated clearly whom she was targeting—the “fascists,” that is, the anti-Sharia demonstrators — and encouraged readers to come to the “federal building” to “finish them off.” As a “direct call to immediate lawless action,” Cloud’s tweet should not have been protected by the First Amendment.
In her 2018 book, Reality Bites: Rhetoric and the Circulation of Truth Claims in U.S. Political Culture, Cloud compared the revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to that of the 18th-century political philosopher Thomas Paine. BLM was a key player, she said, in the leftwing effort to delegitimize the dominant cultural narratives that allegedly oppressed America’s nonwhite minorities and poor people.
On July 31, 2018, Cloud and some of her fellow International Socialist Organization members convened outside the James M. Hanley Federal Building in Syracuse, New York and held a protest against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s role in separating illegal-alien adults from their illegal-alien children at America’s southern border. Additional protesters included members of the Green Party, the Workers’ Center of Central New York, the Immigrant and Refugee Defense Project, and the Democratic Socialists of America. “We think ICE should be abolished and we’re going to specifically demand that it be evicted from Syracuse today,” said Professor Cloud.
Cloud is a member of Tempest, which describes itself as “an organizing and educational project” animated by “a commitment to revolutionary socialism from below,” and “united by a vision of replacing capitalism with a society rooted in the interests of the majority.”
Cloud is a vocal and active supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement — a Hamas-inspired initiative that aims to use various forms of public protest, economic pressure, and court rulings to advance the Hamas agenda of permanently destroying Israel as a Jewish nation-state.
On May 30, 2024, Cloud pubished an article titled “The (not so) new red scare: Zionists weaponize ‘antisemitism’ to crack down on academic freedom.” Some noteworthy excerpts:
Cloud’s writings have appeared in numerous scholarly journals, including:
Cloud also has written at least two-dozen book chapters. Moreover, she has authored, co-authored, or edited 7 books: