by Trevor | Jan 2, 2020 | #EnemiesWithin, Blog, Commentary, CPUSA, Democratic Party, Electoral Politics, Enemies Within, Featured, Freedom Road, International, Liberation Road, North America, Red Reps, Social Movements, Socialism/Communism
By Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | December 31, 2019, Updated: December 31, 2019
Commentary
A shadowy new alliance led by pro-China communists plans to mobilize 40 million new Democratic voters for the 2020 election.
This group, firstly known as the State-based Power Caucus and now simply the State Power Caucus, has the ability to mobilize thousands of volunteers and paid staff in New York, California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and Texas.
The State Power Caucus has already had a major political impact in Virginia, Florida, Kentucky, Texas, California, and several other states. This alliance could decide the 2020 election—yet it’s operating almost completely “under the radar.”
In July 2017, 20 state-based organizations from 13 states united to form the State-Based Power Caucus. The organization has no website and has generated very little publicity. We don’t even know its full roster of member organizations or the identities of most of its leaders.
What we do know is that most of its identified leaders come from “orbit” of Liberation Road—the United States’ main pro-China communist party. We also know that at least 22 major organizations in at least 15 states have now joined the caucus.
Leaders
Most known leaders of the State Power Caucus have some connection to Liberation Road. Known until recently as the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Liberation Road is descended from radical Maoist groups from the 1960s and ‘70s. While no longer exclusively Maoist in outlook, Liberation Road maintains ties to China, Cuba, and other communist nations and movements.
Identified leaders of the State Power Caucus include:
Jon Liss—co-chair of the New Virginia Majority, national chair of State Power Caucus. Long-time member of Liberation Road.
Andrea Mercado—co-chair of The New Florida Majority, leadership team State Power Caucus.
Bob Wing—organizing committee State Power Caucus. Former member of Maoist grouping Line of March. A long time Liberation Road affiliate.
Anthony Thigpenn—founder and president of California Calls and leadership team member of the State Power Caucus.
Claire Tran—State Power Caucus staff. Long time Liberation Road member.
Member Organizations
Most of the State Power Caucus affiliates are led by Liberation Road cadre or supporters. Some of the organizations are former affiliates of ACORN, the discredited “community organizing” organization exposed by Project Veritas, Glenn Beck, and others.
Confirmed organizations affiliated to the State Power Caucus include:
California Calls is a California-wide alliance with includes the renamed ACORN affiliate Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, several Liberation Road influenced organizations including Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Community Coalition, Strategic Concepts in Organizing Policy Education, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, Oakland Rising, San Francisco Rising Alliance plus California Federation of Teachers, Congregations Organized for Prophetic Engagement, Dolores Huerta Foundation, and several others. These groups have signed up hundreds of thousands of mainly “minority” voters to turn California into one the most heavily Democratic states in the country.
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth claims 7,500 members across the state and played a role in the recent defeat of Republican Gov. Matt Bevin. One of Democratic Governor-elect Andy Beshear’s first actions was to restore voting rights to 100,000 Kentucky felons—a move lobbied for by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. One of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth’s key leaders, Meta Mendel-Reyes, was involved with the pro-China League of Revolutionary Struggle in the 1980s and has served on the board of the Liberation Road-led Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee.
New Virginia Majority can claim credit more than any other organization for turning reliably Republican Virginia into a Democratic state. In 10 years of solid organizing New Virginia Majority claims to have signed up more than 200,000 Democratic-leaning “minority” voters. The group also worked closely with former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe to re-instate voting rights to more than 200,000 disenfranchised felons.
The New Florida Majority, like its Virginia cousin, is a front for Liberation Road. The New Florida Majority has signed up tens of thousands of “minority” voters for the Democratic Party and has helped elect several state-level politicians in Southern Florida. In 2018, the organization also worked with Organize Florida (formerly Florida ACORN) to pass a referendum re-enfranchising 1.4 million felons for the 2020 election. The New Florida Majority almost succeeded in electing the leftist Mayor of Tallahassee to the Florida Governor’s Mansion in 2018.
Washington Community Action Network is the state chapter of USAction. The group claims that in May 2019, Gov. Jay Inslee signed “their” Eviction Reform Bill into law. Washington Community Action Network executive director Mary Le Nguyen was a 2017 alumna of the Liberation Road-affiliated Rockwood Leadership Institute, an Oakland, California-based school for “community organizers.”
The Plan
It’s no secret that the communist rulers of China would love to see President Donald Trump defeated in 2020.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that Beijing’s American franchise has a plan to do just that.
According to State Power Caucus leader Jon Liss writing in Organizing Upgrade:
“Inspired by the disaster of Trump and Trumpism two years out most organizers are engaged in barroom or coffee shop speculation about the 2020 election. …
“All of it is idle speculation unless ‘we’ collectively organize tens of millions of the 108 million eligible voters who didn’t vote in 2016. That’s right, one hundred and eight million eligible voters chose not to register or to vote in 2016. The non-voting block is disproportionately young, poor and people of color.”
So how does Liberation Road plan to harvest these millions of potential Democrat votes? They claim credit for nearly 4 million new voters in 2016—but the target is way higher for 2020.
“Over the last twenty-five years, state power organizations have grown to fill the political space created by the decline of Democratic Party local organization, the breakup and collapse of ACORN, and low levels of voter turnout. …
“These organizations have deep strategic knowledge and practice in their particular states. Starting in the summer of 2017 many leading state-power organizations have come together as a caucus to support peer-to-peer learning and incubate innovate organizing practices. …
“The State Power Caucus has worked to first analyze the collective reach of the national networks who engage in electoral and civic engagement work. …
“We’ve also begun to assess the collective impact of state-based organizations. Looking at 2016, our rough estimate is that at most 4 million people were contacted and encouraged to vote. This is our high-water estimate. The actual number who actually voted is probably much lower still.
“Now, recall the 108 million people who were eligible but not voting? They are largely our ‘core’ constituency, or in other terms, they are our unorganized social base. This 108 million when compared to the voting electorate is more Black, more immigrant, more working class and poor.
“If we initially target just half of the 108 million, and we acknowledge that some in that half are going to disagree with our values and politics, some aren’t going to vote no matter what, and some are in geographies that we just can’t reach, we believe our real voter mobilization target number is 40 million, and we’ve agreed as a caucus to that number as our target. That’s our natural consistency.
“These are the voters or potential voters who put AOC and Ilhan Omar into Congress. They are our friends and family, and they are the everyday members and supporters of our organizations that fight for racial justice at the state and local level.”
The State Power Caucus believes that 40 million new anti-Trump voters is both realistic and achievable.
“The State Power Caucus is committed to working more effectively, efficiently and collaboratively with national social justice networks. Together, we look to take a big leap forward and move from mobilizing 4 million and organizing many less to mobilizing and organizing many times more.
“The long game to defeat white nationalism and move past neo-liberal corporatism is by building a bottom up movement of 40 million people.
“At a minimum that is a movement where people vote consistently and consciously. Where people share our values for racial, gender and social justice and where people believe they have the capacity to rule.”
Does the Republican Party even understand what’s coming? While President Trump is confronting China on trade and challenging China’s military in the Pacific, his voter base is being undermined by pro-China communists in Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona. If Liberation Road can flip only two or three states in the South, a China-appeasing Democrat takes the White House in 2020.
Permanent Socialism
The United States stands one election away from permanent socialism—otherwise known as “communism.” If the Democrats win in 2020 they will use the organs of the state to destroy their enemies. They will flood the country with immigrants, legal and illegal, and they will swamp the conservative voting base. They will consolidate their power just like they did in Cuba and Venezuela, and a free America will be over forever.
And all this could happen because a few hundred pro-China communists, with mountains of money from the Democracy Alliance, unions, and tax-free foundations are allowed to out-organize Trump and the Republicans in the South.
It’s perfectly legal to sign up “minority” voters for the Democratic Party. It’s not legal to do that to the advantage of a hostile foreign power.
The State Power Caucus and their constituent groups should become the number one priority for federal and state investigative bodies.
Photo credit: Voting booths are set up at the Yuengling Center on the campus of the University of South Florida as workers prepare to open the doors to early voters in Tampa, Fla, on Oct. 22, 2018. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor presents his acclaimed movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Dec 30, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Blog, Commentary, CPUSA, Democratic Party, International, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
By Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | December 20, 2019, Updated: December 29, 2019
Commentary
Ohio Communist Party leader Maicol Lynch criticized President Donald Trump and pledged allegiance to the international communist movement at the recent 20th Conference of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) in Nicosia, Cyprus.
Lynch affirmed American communists’ place in the world revolutionary movement and outlined some of the recent activities of the Communist Party USA and the Young Communist League.
According to Lynch’s contribution to the Communist Party USA website:
“The Young Communists of the United States of America salute you in this time of revolutionary change and resistance! This particular gathering of the 20th general assembly of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Cyprus is taking place precisely at a time that the youth of the United States of America, like in many other parts of the capitalist world, are facing a crisis. American capitalism has been intensified over the past three years as a result of the neo-fascist, anti-immigrant, anti-labor, and anti-people policies of the Trump administration.
“For the past three years, our organization has stood firm against the policies of Trump and worked alongside young workers and students in the resistance who are growing more and more frustrated with the political situation and are looking for revolutionary alternatives.
“In the midst of this year’s strike wave led by teacher and autoworker unions, our organization joined the picket lines and offered solidarity and support. …
“Our organization rallied with the masses of young workers and students for the international Youth Climate Strike in which we condemned global capitalism’s neglect to put people and planet before corporate profits.”
According to Lynch, the Young Communist League is using Democrats’ impeachment hearings against Trump to further ramp up propaganda against the president:
“The U.S. has entered a new political moment. The fight against the Trump administration is now centered on the impeachment hearings. Young Communists are working for what we call a ‘workers’/people’s and youth impeachment.’ On campuses and in workplaces all over the country, young people are taking a stand against Trump by holding up banners at football games, stopping traffic, kneeling during the National Anthem, and so forth.”
Lynch, like most American communists, is a Democratic Party supporter. Speaking to his international comrades, he emphasized the importance of the Party’s seemingly permanent shift to the far left and its role in radicalizing more American youth—all with an admirable flexibility with the truth:
“Inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, our country’s youth flocked to the polls a year ago to back candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib: women of color who pose a threat to Trump’s racist, anti-labor domestic policies and his imperialistic foreign policy to the point where they themselves, progressive Democrats, were red-baited this past July by being called ‘communists’ and were later met with threats of deportation by Trump himself.
“Progressive candidacies like these have motivated U.S. youth to search for more revolutionary and socialist alternatives to capitalism on the Left, which often brings them to the ranks of our organization. It is estimated by recent polls that as much as 40% or more of the U.S. millennial population believe that some form of socialism is better than the system we have right now. This number grows each day as youth realize that we need more than a temporary bandage on our problems both domestically and internationally. The march to the ballot box began last year, which resulted in the biggest defeat of the GOP in recent U.S. history, and is continuing.”
Founded in 1945, WFDY was for many years run as the Soviet Union’s main international youth front organization. After several lean years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, WFDY is on the rebound.
Today, WFDY gathers young communists from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Vietnam, Japan, Nepal, India, Iran, Russia, North Korea, Greece, France, Great Britain, Angola, South Africa, Namibia, Australia, the Philippines, and many other countries to coordinate revolutionary activities worldwide.
Every three or four years, WFDY convenes a World Festival of Youth and Students. The last gathering was held in October 2017 in Sochi, Russia, and attracted more than 30,000 young communists from all over the world to mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Attendees included more than 50 Americans from the Young Socialists, Communist Party USA/Young Communist League, and Students and Youth for a New America. Russian President Vladimir Putin personally intervened to secure the Sochi venue and keynoted the event.
WFDY was one of the first organizations granted general consultative status with the U.N. Economic and Social Council, and also enjoys operational relations with UNESCO.
Lynch rounded off his speech to the WFDY comrades with a rousing call to arms:
“Our organization will continue to seek the broadest unity possible to take down Trump, the extreme right, and all the other reactionary neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan—like forces that fuel their fires of hatred and division. We will continue to combat Trump’s imperialist policies against Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and others.
“We will fight within the belly of the beast and never abandon our international comrades in their struggles, which are our struggles as well. We have a long road ahead of us, but we shall overcome! Long live socialism, long live international solidarity, and long live WFDY!”
Is Lynch advocating giving “aid and comfort” to enemies of the United States? Surely not—that’s illegal. Shame on me.
Photo credit: A view of Nicosia, Cyprus, in February 2008. The city hosted the 20th Conference of the World Federation of Democratic Youth during the first week of December 2019. By TomasNY, via Wikimedia Commons
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor offers his acclaimed movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
by Trevor | Dec 17, 2019 | #EnemiesWithin, Asia-Pacific, Blog, China, Commentary, CPUSA, Democratic Party, Enemies Within, Socialism/Communism, Socialist Opinion Shapers
By Trevor Loudon | The Epoch Times | December 16, 2019, Updated: December 17, 2019
Commentary
Fresh off winning Virginia for the Democratic Party, helping to elect a Democratic governor in Kentucky, and winning a city council seat in Philadelphia, pro-China communists from the Liberation Road group are turning their attention to Arizona and Nevada.
Liberation Road is marshaling all its resources to defeat President Donald Trump. Turning Republican-leaning Arizona blue and holding swing state Nevada for the Democrats would go a long way to achieving that goal and permanently altering the “balance of power” in the United States.
Liberation Road is the main representative of the American Maoist movement. Formed as Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) in 1985, Liberation Road joined the remnants of several Maoist groups—the Proletarian Unity League, Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, Bay Area Revolutionary Union, Robeson-Cabral Collective, League of Revolutionary Struggle, Communist Workers Party, Line of March, and others—into one unified organization.
Confusingly, in 1999, more traditional Maoist FRSO comrades in Illinois and Minnesota broke away to form a new organization also called Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The majority FRSO faction oriented more to electoral work and racial politics—through movements like Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).
In April, the majority FRSO re-named itself Liberation Road—partly to differentiate themselves from their former comrades and partly to make it easier to work with the Democratic Party.
Arizona is a must-win state for Trump in 2020. Once reliably Republican, socialists have exploited Arizona’s growing Latino minorities to move the state toward the left. Communist Party-backed Democrat Kyrsten Sinema narrowly won her U.S. Senate race in 2018, and incumbent Republican Sen. Martha McSally faces a strong challenge from Democrat Mark Kelly—a former astronaut.
Nevada would be a solidly Republican state if wasn’t for Clark County—Las Vegas. With a huge population of Latino and Asian service workers, leftist groups such as the Maoist-rooted Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) have signed up thousands of new Democratic voters to dominate statewide politics.
Liberation Road has had a lock on San Francisco Bay politics for many years. Almost every leading San Francisco and Oakland politician owes something to Liberation Road or its affiliated groups such as Bay Resistance, Bay Rising, San Francisco Rising Alliance, Oakland Rising, or the Chinese Progressive Association.
Consequently, Liberation Road is able to devote resources and personnel to nearby states such as Arizona and Nevada.
Seed the Vote
Bay Area Liberation Road and its satellite organization LeftRoots have established a political action committee, or PAC, to carry out electoral work both in state and out of state.
Everyday People PAC is a “social justice organization committed to mobilizing our communities to elect candidates that share our values,” its website states.
A subsidiary group “Seed the Vote” is a “project of Everyday People PAC, and it is supported by Bay Resistance, Bay Rising Action, San Francisco Rising Action Fund, and other organizations and individuals throughout the Bay Area committed to building political power in our communities.”
According to the Seed the Vote website, Seed the Vote is supported by Liberation Road cadre Sarah Jarmon and Michelle Foy and LeftRoots members Emily Lee of San Francisco Rising Alliance and Adam Gold of the Center for Popular Democracy Action.
Other supporters include Kimi Lee of Bay Rising Action, Lara Kiswani of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Jill Shenker of San Francisco Rising Action Fund, Rose Mendelsohn of Bay Resistance, and ex-Line of March leader Max Elbaum.
Seed the Vote education team member Calvin Cheung-Miaw is also a leader of the Left Inside Outside Project, a national alliance of Liberation Road, LeftRoots, Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America, and Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism established to further infiltrate the Democratic Party and defeat Trump in 2020.
Another Seed the Vote leader Jason Negrón-Gonzales was once a supporter of Bay Area Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), as was Adam Gold, also named above.
According to Negrón-Gonzales, writing on Liberation Road-affiliated website “Organizing Upgrade”:
“The Trump era has been all about the naked aggression of the far right, but cracks are appearing. Trump is battling impeachment, a result not only of his criminality but of the changes that the blue wave brought to Congress. Last month we saw further losses for the right in Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania — the result of sustained organizing by hundreds if not thousands. That work didn’t start this year; it’s the culmination of many years of work. None of this was spontaneous. When we organize, we can win. When we step up to fight, we can win.
“Those are the lessons of last year, and this week — lessons that we have to apply to 2020. Seed the Vote is a project in the Bay Area attempting to create a vehicle to do just that. We want to leverage the experience, capacity, and expertise of organizers and activists in California in support of long-term organizing in our neighboring states.
“Our goal is not just to push Trump out of office, but to help shift the balance of power in the states where we are working in favor of communities of color, social justice organizations, and labor. We want to be tactically and politically smart, and move our politics and organizations forward.”
To this end, according to Negrón-Gonzales, the decision was made to shift resources from local races in 2020 to focus on Arizona and Nevada—and to build a small army to do it.
“The possibility of Trump’s re-election in 2020 is a real one. And it’s one we are determined to stop. When we — a group of left activists rooted in community and labor organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area — gathered this spring, it was with the urgency that came from seeing our communities under relentless assault from a white nationalist, authoritarian administration.
“But we also knew that 2020 — with the size, energy, and leftward shift among the opposition to Trumpism — would give us an opportunity: if we plan carefully and think big, we can make a difference at the ballot box in 2020, the kind of difference the Left failed to make in 2016. And we thought we could do this while building a stronger and more cohesive Left.
“So we launched Seed the Vote. Our practical focus is centered on bolstering 2020 electoral efforts to defeat Trump and the GOP in two key states, Nevada and Arizona.
“We are already building infrastructure and recruiting to (1) deploy several hundred Bay area activists to work with partnering unions and community-based organizations in Nevada and Arizona for two-week periods in October 2020; and (2) connect volunteers with remote call-in and text efforts from the Bay Area to register voters, protect voting rights and increase turnout in key constituencies in November 2020.”
The plan is to not just win in 2020, but to permanently change U.S. politics in favor of the left:
“This effort is not only designed to impact the 2020 election outcome. We are including a training component to provide our volunteers with the skills and experience to lead electoral engagement work, ranging from advanced canvassers to team leaders who can train and supervise others, to campaign managers.
“And our program is crafted to increase the capacity and reach of partner organizations in Nevada and Arizona, as well as participating organizations in the Bay.
“Seed the Vote is an active investment in the long-haul work of building the independent electoral strength of social justice organizations rooted in communities of color and the working class.”
Several hundred dedicated Bay Area communists working with already established leftist voter registration and Get Out the Vote groups in two key swing states could very well decide the 2020 election.
Couple that with Liberation Road’s disciplined and focused work across the South in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, and we have a perfect Maoist storm brewing up.
China’s communist leaders could risk hundreds of billions of dollars trying to defeat Trump in a trade war. Or risk hundreds of millions of lives (including their own) in a shooting war of indeterminate outcome. Or they could defeat Trump by encouraging their U.S. communist “franchise” to spend a few million dollars flipping three or four Southern and Southwestern states to the Democrat column—all under the radar.
Which option would you choose if you led the Communist Party of China?
Featured photo: Arizona voters wait in line to cast their ballot at a polling place during the midterm elections in Phoenix, Ariz., on Nov. 6, 2018. Ralph Freso/Getty Images
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Trevor presents his acclaimed movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!
