Michael John Parenti (born September 30, 1933) is an American political scientist, academic historian and cultural critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects.

[7] Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary Following completion of his doctorate, Parenti taught political and social science at various institutions of higher learning, including the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UI).

[14][15] In the 1980s, Parenti was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.[16] In 2003, the Caucus for a New Political Science gave him a Career Achievement Award.

[18][19] In his book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia,[20] Parenti denounced what he considered the demonization, by the U.S. and its allies, of Slobodan Milošević and the Serbian Socialist Party.

[22] The committee was formed to urge an end to the war crimes trial of Milošević that commenced in 2002 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

The one exception was Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (1986)[25] which was reviewed by multiple scholarly journals[26][27][28] and by Michael Pollan in The New York Times.

The book dissects numerous popular movies and TV programs which, in Parenti's view, "have propagated images and themes that support militarism, imperialism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and other undemocratic values.

"[31] He describes what he believes is a pattern of unflattering portrayals of working-class people and trade unions, and he disputes the notion that the major studios are "giving audiences what they want.

"[32] In his Foreword to Matthew Alford's 2010 book Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, Parenti reiterated several of the points from Make-Believe Media.

[36][37] Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power (1996) contains Parenti's most wide-ranging collection of writings.

[38] In two essays on the JFK assassination, he breaks ranks with fellow leftists such as Noam Chomsky by giving credence to skeptics of the official government narrative.

[41] He later argues that the Soviet Union's "well-publicized deficiencies and injustices" were exacerbated by the Russian Civil War, the Nazi-led multinational invasion, and by non-military modes of capitalist intervention against the Eastern Bloc.

[47][48] In July 2003, Parenti was invited on the C-SPAN Booknotes program to discuss his latest work, The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome.

[52][53] New York City-based punk rock band Choking Victim use a number of samples from Michael Parenti's lectures in their album No Gods, No Managers.