“Our Revolution” and “People for Bernie,” two key elements of the Bernie Sanders for President movement, have developed a close relationship with a militant Norwegian communist party.
The party in question, Rodt (Red Party), was formerly known as the Arbeidernes Kommunistparti (AKP or Workers’ Communist Party) and was notorious in Norway for its open support of Cambodian communist leader and mass murderer Pol Pot.
The Sanders movement’s ties to one of the most extreme communist parties of Europe gives lie to Sanders’ often-repeated claim that his “democratic socialism” has nothing to do with communism.
The AKP was founded in 1973 as a Maoist competitor to the pro-Soviet Norwegian Communist Party. The AKP, in common with many other Maoist parties of the era, openly supported mass-murderers Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.
According to the “Black Book of Communism,” Pol Pot’s Beijing-backed Communist Party of Kampuchea, or “Khmer Rouge,” was responsible for the deaths of approximately 2 million of Cambodia’s 6 million people in its bloody three-year reign. Approximately 1.3 million of these victims were deliberately executed by the regime and buried in about 23,000 mass graves.
The AKP openly endorsed the Khmer Rouge. When Pol Pot’s Maoist forces conquered Cambodian capital Phnom Penh in April 1975, AKP’s newspaper Klassekampen (Class Struggle) emblazoned “Long live the free Cambodia” as their front-page headline. The AKP dismissed reports of massacres under Khmer Rouge rule as anti-communist propaganda and continued to send delegations to Cambodia until Vietnamese troops expelled the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh in January 1979.
The AKP openly called for armed revolution before 1990 and kept the possibility of having to “defend the revolution with arms” open for some time after.
In 2007, the AKP re-branded itself as “Rodt” and turned its focus more toward electoral politics. The party claims to no longer support violence but does state that its goal is still a “classless society” or “what Karl Marx called communism.”
The AKP maintained close ties to foreign Maoist parties including the New Zealand Workers Communist League and especially the United States’ Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). In recent years, Rodt has broadened its Maoist base to admit Trotskyists and “democratic socialists.”
This has been mirrored in the United States by the backbone of the Sanders movement, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which includes in its rank Trotskyists from “Solidarity” and Maoists from Liberation Road, the new name for FRSO.
Rodt’s broadened base has given it a little more traction in Norwegian politics. Rodt now has 20 county council representatives and 190 municipal and city council representatives. The party made a small breakthrough in the 2017 election, winning 2.4 percent of the vote and its first seat in the Norwegian Parliament.
Sanders Movement
After developing deep ties with FRSO over several years, Rodt began to build links with the wider Sanders movement during the 2016 election cycle. In October 2016, the New York City branch of FRSO sponsored a small get-together of “local labor activists, Sandernistas and other lefties” to meet Reidar Strisland—former youth leader of the Oslo section of Rodt. Strisland was in the United States for two months gathering material for a book on the Sanders movement.
Strisland visited comrades in Detroit and Lansing, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio, as well as in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in South Dakota. Strisland was back during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, scoring photo-ops with several DSA-supported candidates, including Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke in Texas and congressional candidate James Thompson in Kansas.
A delegation of Norwegian activists, including Strisland, attended the Sanders movement’s People’s Summit in Chicago in June 2017. A few days later, three American activists, Winnie Wong, Claire Sandberg, and Moumita Ahmed, accepted Strisland’s invitation to travel Oslo to see “Nordic social democracy” firsthand.
Wong was a leader of People for Bernie and a newly minted DSA member at the time. Sandberg was an organizing director for Bernie 2016 and a founder of the FRSO-linked electoral organization We Will Replace You. Ahmed was a leader of People for Bernie and Millennials for Revolution and a member of the DSA.
In Oslo, the three Americans socialists addressed a Rodt-run political and cultural festival “Popvenstre,” met with Rodt leaders, and even trained grassroots comrades in U.S. election campaigning techniques in the party’s downtown Oslo office.
According to Wong and Sandberg: “We spent hours in trainings and breakout strategy sessions with Rodt party organizers digging into the nuts and bolts of digital and social media best practices, barnstorms, peer-to-peer text messaging, dank memes, and more.”
The training seems to have worked. In the 2017 elections, Rodt leader Bjornar Moxnes was elected as the sole representative of the party in the Norwegian Parliament.
In a play on the Sanders slogan “Feel the Bern,” Rodt campaigners wore “Feel the Bjorn” T-shirts as they campaigned in Oslo.
Is it legal for American Marxists to involve themselves in Norwegian elections?
In February 2018, Larry Cohen, chairman of the Sanders support network Our Revolution, traveled to Oslo to address a special Rodt strategy conference.
The leader of a Sanders support organization claiming more than 200,000 members and 600 groups across the United States gave a keynote speech at a high-level planning conference with one of Europe’s most militant communist parties—with zero media scrutiny.
Key operatives in the movement to elect Sanders to the U.S. presidency are working with a European communist party that once openly supported Pol Pot. Senior American Sanders supporters seem to have played a role in electing a revolutionary Marxist to the Norwegian parliament.
Does the Sanders movement really support Scandinavian “social democracy,” or does it really favor flat-out Norwegian communism?
Nothing to see here, folks.
Photo credit: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks at the Frank LaMere Native American Presidential Forum in Sioux City, Iowa, on Aug. 20, 2019. (Stephen Maturen/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 Loudon | The Epoch Times* | November 12, 2019, Updated: November 13, 2019
Commentary
Radical Maoists from Liberation Road and their small “c” communist allies from Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) elected one of their own to Philadelphia City Council on Nov. 5.
Kendra Brooks, who won a city council at-large seat, will join fellow radical Helen Gym on the 17-member body.
Heavily Democratic Philadelphia follows an unusual system for electing city councilors. Ten councilors are elected by district, while seven are elected “at-large” from the whole city voting base. Two of those seats are traditionally reserved for “minor parties,” which has for decades guaranteed two Republican seats on the council. Brooks took one of these minority seats, cutting Republican representation down to one.
Brooks ran on the Working Families Party ticket. The party, which has recently expanded from its New York base to several new states, spent more than $400,000 on Brooks and her running mate Nicolas O’Rourke, and knocked on 150,000 doors and sent 300,000 text messages.
In reality, the Philadelphia Working Families Party is just a ballot-line, a shell with little real structure. The backbone of Brooks’s campaign were activists from the DSA, the 215 People’s Alliance (a Liberation Road front—the 215 signifies Philadelphia’s area code) and Reclaim Philadelphia (a DSA-led organization).
Liberation Road (known from 1985 to April as Freedom Road Socialist Organization or FRSO) is a pro-China communist organization that has in the last few years turned heavily toward electoral politics. Liberation Road works both inside and outside the Democratic Party depending on the local circumstances.
The DSA is the nation’s largest Marxist group with a claimed 56,000 members. The DSA is aligned to several European and Latin American communist parties.
Together with the Communist Party USA, Liberation Road and the DSA combine their forces to infiltrate mainstream politics, including the Democratic Party, in an alliance dubbed the Left Inside/Outside Project.
Brooks’s victory should be viewed in this context.
As the Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
“Without the infrastructure of a major party, Brooks and her campaign manager, Arielle Klagsbrun, largely built their operation from scratch. But they could not have won without the efforts of a preexisting network of groups whose members knocked on thousands of doors, held fund-raisers, and posted constantly on social media for Brooks and her fellow Working Families Party candidate Nicolas O’Rourke, who came up short in his Council bid. …
“The activist groups that carried the Working Families Party banner this year didn’t just aid Brooks’ campaign. In many ways, they were the campaign.”
Philadelphia DSA has at least 600 members in its main branch and can draw on many more from Delaware, Bucks, and Montgomery counties. Reclaim Philadelphia can mobilize hundreds of people across South Philadelphia and the river wards. Reclaim Philadelphia’s lead organizer Amanda McIllmurray is a well-known DSA member.
Liberation Road also has deep roots in Philadelphia, stretching right back to the Maoist student movement of the 1970s. It’s much more secretive than the DSA, however, and publicly acknowledges very few of its members. However, it does maintain several front groups in the city, and it’s fairly easy to track the same people appearing in various Liberation Road-aligned organizations.
The 215 People’s Alliance, which is centered in Southwest Philadelphia, is riddled with Liberation Road-aligned people. Confusingly, many of them are also DSA members as Liberation Road has some cross-membership with the DSA all over the country.
Some examples include:
Ron Whitehorne, a 215 supporter, was active in the 1980s Maoist group Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee and has since been active with several Liberation Road-aligned groups, including Philadelphia Public School Notebook, Media Mobilizing Project, and Youth United for Change—as well as the DSA.
Bryan Mercer, a 215 activist, has been involved with Liberation Road-affiliated groups Media Mobilizing Project, Asian Americans United, and LeftRoots.
Nancy Dung Nguyen, a 215 canvasser, has been involved in Liberation Road-friendly groups, including Asian Americans United, Memphis Solidarity Brigade, Campaign for Nonviolent Schools, and Progressive Philly Rising.
Teresa Engst, a 215 endorser and canvasser, comes from a well-known Philly communist family. Many of her relatives grew up in China after immigrating to support Mao’s revolution. She is active with Asian Americans United.
Kendra Brooks herself serves on the steering committee of 215 People’s Alliance and has a history of left activism. Her campaign manger Arielle Klagsbrun comes by way of the Midwest where she was an organizer with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (formerly known as ACORN), which was also closely aligned with the local Liberation Road.
Sitting Philadelphia City Council member Helen Gym, a Democrat, ruffled a lot of Democrat feathers when she endorsed Brooks rather than a fellow Democrat.
According to local radio station WHYY Philadelphia, Democratic Party chairman Bob Brady was “dismayed”:
“I don’t know why that’s happening. We have a slate of five, she’s a part of it, and now she’s asking someone to vote against herself or one of the other four candidates who won the nomination — that doesn’t make any sense to me.”
It makes perfect sense if you examine Gym’s background.
The high-polling Gym was first elected to the Philadelphia Council in 2015 by many of the same Maoists who elected Brooks. She has a history with Philadelphia’s FRSO/Liberation Road element going back more than 20 years.
Gym got her activist start with local FRSO leader Ellen Somekawa and her influential Asian Americans United activist group. She also helped Somekawa and Somekawa’s FRSO comrade and husband Eric Joselyn found the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School.
Gym played a key role in the creation and early publishing days of another FRSO-linked group, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, a nonprofit news outlet covering the city’s public schools. She worked alongside Whitehorne, Joselyn, and several other FRSO supporters on this project.
Gym would later work with the Media Mobilizing Project, Progressive Philly Rising, and the Minneapolis-based FRSO-linked education journal Rethinking Schools.
In recent years, Gym, who is of Korean extraction, has served on the board of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium (NAKASEC), which aims to “organize Korean and Asian Americans to achieve social, economic, and racial justice.”
NAKASEC grew out of Young Koreans United, a 1990s activist group well-known for its pro-North Korean views.
Gym may officially be a Democrat, but to all intents and purposes she follows the Liberation Road “line.” No doubt she will look forward to having an ally in Brooks to help advance her far-left agenda.
Photo: The City Hall building with the statue of William Penn on top is seen in the city center of Philadelphia on Dec. 3, 2017. Philadelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania and the sixth-most populous city in the United States. (ERIC BARADAT/AFP via 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 Loudon | The Epoch Times* | October 11, 2019 Updated: October 11, 2019
Commentary
Judith LeBlanc, a leading member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), is organizing Native American communities in several states to turn out in high numbers for the Democratic Party in 2020.
At just over 2 percent of the population, the Native American vote could be enough to swing several key U.S. Senate races and even the presidency. LeBlanc also organized the nation’s first Native American Presidential Forum in Sioux City, Iowa—specially to lift Native American voter interest and drive turnout.
A member of the Caddo Tribe of Oklahoma, LeBlanc joined the CPUSA in 1974 and has served at the highest levels of party leadership. LeBlanc has served as a vice-chair of the party and formerly chaired its Peace and Solidarity Commission. She has traveled to Japan, Australia, Israel, Lebanon, and “Palestine” on party business, which included a 2002 meeting with the late Palestinian terrorist leader Yasser Arafat.
On Nov. 29, 2010, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, LeBlanc “had the honor of speaking on behalf of civil society organizations to a special meeting at the United Nations,” according to the Peace Action blog.
In recent years, LeBlanc has been assigned to work on Native American business through her role as national coordinator of the Native Organizers Alliance—the country’s leading Native American activist group. This work included a training role in the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. In mid-September 2016, LeBlanc led a “four-day training at Standing Rock with tribal officials, native-led non-profits, and local community and political leaders on power mapping, strategic campaign planning, and direct action,” according to Inequality.org.
Now, LeBlanc’s role is to build on the energy and unity generated at Standing Rock. Her job is to ensure that millions of traditionally low turnout, yet Democratic-leaning Native American voters go to the polls in 2020.
Presidential Forum
Working in partnership with the South Dakota-based, Rosebud Sioux-affiliated voter registration organization Four Directions, Inc., LeBlanc’s Native Organizers Alliance hosted the Frank LaMere Native American Presidential Forum on Aug. 19 and 20 in Sioux City, Iowa.
Named after a recently deceased Winnebago leader, the forum featured interviews with 11 Democratic candidates, including front-runners Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).
The forum was partially underwritten by the leftist funding group The Praxis Project, which is closely linked to the pro-China communist group Liberation Road. The Praxis Project was founded and led until recently by former Communist Workers Party militant Makani Themba-Nixon.
In her opening remarks to the forum, LeBlanc referenced the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s action to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.
“ We are moving on a continuum from protest to power. … Standing Rock interrupted the narrative, and when we left Standing Rock, we went back to our cities and our reservations to organize,” she said, according to Religion News Service.
“Our goal for this first-ever Native presidential forum was twofold. The first was to energize the Indian electorate. We reached hundreds of thousands through the live stream of the event and the vast array of media coverage, including both the Indian and mainstream media. The second goal was to educate the presidential candidates about our strategies for overcoming the challenges in Indian Country.
“It was powerful. For example, Secretary Julian Castro spent quite a bit of time prior to the forum collecting input from various leaders in Indian Country. He issued a very excellent Indian platform prior to the forum. The week of the forum, Elizabeth Warren did the same. … The debate that happened during the forum, the back and forth with tribal and community leaders over the course of two days, will influence how whoever gets elected governs. For example, most of the candidates said they would have (or would consider) a cabinet-level representative of Indian Country.”
So promises of power have been made. But the only way to collect is to win the 2020 election.
The organized hard left—especially CPUSA and Liberation Road—want to win the next election on a Rainbow Coalition strategy. They intend to update Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign strategy from the 1980s—unite all the racial and ethnic minorities with the base of white “progressives” to achieve a winning majority. Don’t fight a losing battle on policy—make it all about race.
When Jackson last ran for president in 1988, minorities were about 12 percent of the pollution. Now, they are 38 percent. It only makes sense to focus resources on Native Americans to increase the chances of victory in what could be a very tight race in 2020.
LeBlanc also told Organizing Upgrade:
“Four Directions, our sister organization, did research and found there are seven states where the Indian vote would be decisive in determining the outcome of 77 electoral votes. These 7 states include critical Senate races. From that scientific basis, Native Organizers Alliance and Four Directions began to organize traditionally, to reach out to the community groups that we have relationships within those seven states.”
It’s all about “transformational change”—LeBlanc’s euphemism for socialist revolution.
“ We’re also turning our attention to working in those seven states where the Native vote will be decisive. Native Organizers Alliance is working with groups in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, and Nevada. We’ll be doing the kind of voter registration, education, and mobilization that ensures that our grassroots groups and tribal entities expand their organized base. The day after the elections, we will be ready with a stronger organized, politically empowered grassroots base. …
“ In order to protect and deepen democracy in the long run, we need strong, vibrant social movements who understand that voting is one of the tools of social change along with protest, advocacy, governing and popular political education. That holistic strategy is needed for us to make a transformational change which deals with the systemic nature of the problems that our communities face. …
“We need science and people power.”
In 2016, President Donald Trump won 18 states by less than 250,000 votes. By targeting knife-edge states like Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, and Nevada, LeBlanc and her Native Organizers Alliance could well have a major influence on the 2020 election. If Trump loses Wisconsin, Arizona, and Michigan and is denied possible victories in Minnesota and Nevada by the Native American vote, LeBlanc will deserve much of the credit.
Most Americans (including most of the Republican leadership) seem to think that the Communist Party has no influence on U.S. politics. They might be shocked to find that just one comrade may be able to determine the outcome of the 2020 election.
Photo: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks at the Frank LaMere Native American Presidential Forum on Aug. 20, 2019, in Sioux City, Iowa. (Stephen Maturen/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.
The new name is in line with a new strategy to place much more emphasis on electoral politics. The new strategy is bearing fruit as the pro-China communists have already helped to elect allies to public office in several states.
With the word “socialist” dropped from their name, the comrades probably reason that their communism will be less apparent to potential electoral allies and voters. This could lead to even more electoral victories in the near future.
There was also another reason for the change. In 1999, FRSO split into two organizations, both of which claimed to be the “true” FRSO.
The minority faction, based in Chicago and Minneapolis, wanted to concentrate on traditional communist methods—street demonstrations, picketing and agitation, solidarity with China, North Korea, and foreign terrorist organizations, and alliances with other groups on the hard left, such as the Workers World Party. This group, which produces the FightBack! newspaper, is now the only FRSO—which must be gratifying after fighting their former comrades for more than 20 years over naming rights.
The majority faction, which is now known as Liberation Road, wanted to work for Left Refoundation—to build a re-vitalized less doctrinaire left with broader appeal to the masses and the ability to work closely with the Communist Party USA, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and other left formations. Liberation Road is very well funded, and has a major presence in several tax-free non-profits and labor unions, and even some churches.
FRSO Liberation Road still maintains ties to communist China but is fairly discreet about it. While internally still committed to communism, the “Road” has been working hard to sanitize its radical Maoist image in order to be able to work more effectively with the Democrats and local electoral groupings.
Liberation Road has a major presence in the San Francisco area and enjoys close relations with many local politicians and social movements. It’s also strong in Oregon and Washington State, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, the Washington D.C. area, Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Southern Florida, and central Texas.
Goals and Strategy
Liberation Road’s goal in the South is to defeat what they call the “New Confederacy”—the conservative Christian/business/rural base that has kept the Republican Party dominant in the South and viable nationally for the last two decades. For example, FRSO was very active in the Tennessee U.S. senate race in 2018, backing Democrat Phil Bredesen. They did not prevail but did build strong networks for future races.
“Our organization began in 1985 with a merger of two organizations … that came out of the New Communist Movement of the late 1970s/early 1980s. …
“Today, at a critical juncture—not just for us in Freedom Road Socialist Organization, but for the whole socialist and movement Left—we are excited to announce that we are changing our name to Liberation Road.
“Over the past 34 years, our organization has maintained a consistent commitment to opposing racial capitalism and fighting for socialism and self-determination. At the same time, we have prided ourselves on remaining highly adaptable based on ever changing internal and external conditions. …
“Since 2016, our organization has formally consolidated around a national strategy that focuses on building the independent political power of the strategic alliance through the creation of and support for mass independent political organizations (IPOs) as a part of a broader front to defeat the New Confederacy.”
These IPOs are independent political groups that are able to work both inside and outside of the Democratic Party to maximize the strength and leverage of the local left.
“Central to this strategic orientation is using the electoral arena as a tool and terrain that helps left/progressive forces to build political power.”
FRSO/Liberation Road has built several IPOs in Boston and in Philadelphia and Lancaster County in Pennsylvania. Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley was elected with FRSO help, as were Philadelphia’s radical council member Helen Gym and District Attorney Larry Krasner.
But the South is the main target of Liberation Road’s electoral efforts. Liberation Road knows that if they can flip even two or three Southern states to the Democrats, the Republicans will soon become a permanent minority party.
“Our analysis is that this realignment of left/progressive forces, the building of mass independent political organizations operating both inside and outside the Democratic Party and the electoral arena, is crucial at this juncture. In embarking on this path, we have found considerable, though admittedly modest success in the building of IPOs in the South, which has been a geographic and strategic focus of our organization from its inception because of its unique role in the development of US racial capitalism.”
So far Liberation Road has had its greatest successes in swing state North Carolina and more reliably Republican Tennessee.
Southern Success
With its control of Durham for All, Liberation Road (which is aiming to raise an army of 10,000 activists) has put several comrades and allies onto local school boards and city councils, including recent Mayor Pro Tempore of the city of Durham Jillian Johnson.
In Tennessee, Liberation Road works closely with the DSA in local races in Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis.
In Knoxville, Liberation Road is running their comrade David Hayes on the City Council Movement / Knoxville for All ticket alongside DSA member Amelia Parker and Charles Al-Bawi—hopefully to join DSA comrade Seema Perez, who was elected to the city council last cycle.
In Central Tennessee, Liberation Road backs the Nashville Justice League, which endorsed no fewer than 15 City Council candidates this election cycle. DSA member Sean Parker recently won a Nashville City Council seat.
In the west of the state, Liberation Road’s Memphis for All has worked with the local DSA to elect several candidates for public office and is effectively running the campaign of mayoral candidate Tami Sawyer.
Memphis for All is doing extensive voter registration work in the city’s huge Democratic-leaning black voting base. If they flip reliably Republican Tennessee to the Democrats, it would be a knockout blow to the “New Confederacy.”
Memphis for All activist April Freeman recently told Liberation Road’s Mary Jo Connelly:
“Personally, I want Memphis For All to have a great impact on the voting turnout. … We’re already getting known for taking Memphis and Shelby County beyond—raising their voting turnout so much that it’s nationally covered.
“The Memphis electorate is a sleeping giant. It can flip Tennessee and lead a movement for deep change. … Deep grassroots organizing, and community leadership development can shift the balance.”
A New Socialist Party
Ultimately, Liberation Road wants to destroy the Republican Party. Then the plan is to work with the Communist Party USA, DSA, and others to gather all their combined forces inside and outside the Democratic Party into a mass socialist party that can seriously contend for permanent power.
From the Liberation Road website:
“In this new period of our organization and under our new name, we are excited to continue with others the process of building a party for socialism, while equally engaging with the broader progressive movement—globally and domestically—in the struggles to save the planet from environmental catastrophe and defeat both neo-liberal globalization and right-wing populism. Together, we look forward to working with others to create a vision and reality of fundamental social transformation that will move us down the liberation road.”
Liberation Road’s plans should not be treated as socialist fantasizing. The organization is backed by China and has a well-funded network spanning both coasts and most of the South. Their plan to use the Democrat’s minorities voting base and shifting demographics to destroy the Republican Party in the South has already made good progress in Virginia, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Liberation Road works well-under the radar but is highly effective, disciplined, and relentless. If the good people of the U.S. South do not want to suffer “socialist liberation” in the next few election cycles they’d better wake up fast.
Some state-level hearings on Chinese/Liberation Road influence on local and state elections might be a good place to start. I would happily testify.
Photo: Freedom Road Socialist Organization supporters during an anti-Trump march in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017. slowking4/GFDL 1.2
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 Loudon | The Epoch Times* | August 1, 2019,Updated: August 8, 2019
Commentary
When the Southern Baptists, the largest Protestant denomination in the country, endorse “critical race theory” (CRT), you know American Christianity has a Marxism problem.
At the Southern Baptist national convention in Birmingham, Alabama, in June, a resolution on CRT and “intersectionality” gained passage with a strong majority.
The resolution affirmed the Bible as “the first, last, and sufficient authority” in guiding the church on dealing with social evils and said that “critical race theory and intersectionality should only be used in submission to Scripture,” according to a news article from the Baptist Press. The resolution described critical race theory as a “set of tools to explain how race functions in society and intersectionality as the study of how various characteristics overlap.”
Traditional Baptists who believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and contains the answers to all problems within its pages must have wondered why their church would need Marxism for any reason at all.
One brave Christian, Tom Ascol, a senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Cape Coral, Florida, unsuccessfully challenged the CRT resolution, correctly explaining that “critical race theory and intersectionality” are “rooted in ideologies that are incompatible with Christianity.”
What Is Critical Race Theory?
So what actually is CRT? What does intersectionality mean?
“CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”
In other words, racism is about power, it’s exclusively a white problem, and it’s intrinsic in the current social system. Therefore, to end racism, we must change the existing power structures—a polite way of saying revolution. Affirmative action, reparations, and hate speech legislation are all justified by CRT. All are revolutionary tools derived from Marxism.
Intersectionality is the concept that all oppressions are linked. Racial oppression is linked to gay oppression, which, in turn, is linked to the oppression of women and workers. This is a modern expansion of the Marxist idea that “capitalism” oppresses not only workers but racial and gender groups as well. All “oppressions” intersect. We can’t treat them as separate problems. The main problem is not just capitalism, but white racist sexist capitalism.
Two black scholars are most closely identified with modern CRT—the late Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and the recently deceased James Cone, a professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary.
It’s worth noting that a member of the Southern Baptist convention resolutions committee, Walter Strickland, avidly teaches Cone’s theories from his post at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina, according to a graduate of the seminary. Strickland seems to have no conflict teaching Cone’s version of race-based Marxism to the future Baptist pastors who stream through his classroom.
James Cone: Religious Revolutionary
There is zero doubt that James Cone was a Marxist.
In 1980, the Democratic Socialists of America published an essay by Cone titled “The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other?”
In June 1984, a delegation of Black American Church leaders visited Havana.
Granma, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, reported that the organizers included the communist-controlled Ecumenical Council of Cuba, the Baptist Worker-Student Coordination of Cuba, and the Caribbean Council of Churches. The Black Theology Project was listed as a U.S. sponsor, and the Soviet-controlled Christian Peace Conference was also represented.
Delegates included Rev. Jeremiah Wright of UCC Trinity Church in Chicago, the future pastor to Barack Obama; William Babley, director of the Racial Union Program of the Methodist Church; Howard Dodson, chairman of the Black Theology Project; Dwight Hopkins, vice chairman of the Black Theology Project and a future founder of the communist-led Black Radical Congress; and James Cone of Union Theological Seminary.
Cone was also a little un-Christian in his racial views.
In his 1969 book, “Black Theology and Black Power,” Cone wrote: “The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people. … All white men are responsible for white oppression. … Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’”
In a 2004 essay, Cone opined: “Black suffering is getting worse, not better. … White supremacy is so clever and evasive that we can hardly name it. It claims not to exist, even though black people are dying daily from its poison.”
Derrick Bell: Legal Revolutionary
Derrick Bell, who a young Barack Obama once praised at a Harvard protest rally as comparable to Rosa Parks, was also a man of considerable influence.
According to his 2011 New York Times obituary, Bell’s “1973 book, ‘Race, Racism and American Law,’ became a staple in law schools and is now in its sixth edition.”
Bell “set the agenda in many ways for scholarship on race in the academy, not just the legal academy,” Lani Guinier, told The New York Times. Guinier was the first black woman hired to join Harvard Law School’s tenured faculty and is the daughter of the late leading Communist Party USA member Ewart Guinier.
Bell was a contributor to the journal Freedomways, which has been described as “one of the most influential African-American literary and political journals of the 1960s and 1970s.” Freedomways was established and run by well-documented members and sympathizers of the Communist Party USA.
According to Accuracy in Media, documents declassified in 2011/2012 from Operation SOLO, an FBI program to infiltrate the Communist Party, revealed that Freedomways, which closed in 1986, was subsidized by both the Soviet and Chinese communist parties.
Bell was also a founding member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the self-proclaimed “legal arm of the Black Liberation Movement.”
According to an archived page of the organization’s website:
“In 1968, young people of African descent in America were growing impatient with the slow pace of social change. Despite modest advances brought on by two decades of non-violent resistance, from one end of the country to the other, the cry for Black Power was raised in the midst of a sea of clinched fists. At the same time, this new militant spirit had moved many to don black berets and carry rifles. On street corners in practically every Black community, passers-by heard demands for Nation Time and Power to the People!
“Inevitably, the powers-that-be responded to this activist renaissance with police brutality, frame-ups and a vicious counter-intelligence program that targeted scores of militants for harassment, prosecution or assassination. A small group of Black lawyers refused to sit idly by while the iron fist of government came down hard on the bravest and most intelligent of the Black community’s younger generation. This period forced the birth of the National Conference of Black Lawyers which, as an organization, began to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with rifle-toting revolutionaries.”
The National Conference of Black Lawyers was a U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, a still-existing international communist front originally founded by the Soviet Union.
Is CRT Compatible With Christianity?
Is CRT compatible with Christianity, or indeed any God-centered faith?
Christianity is based entirely around the individual and his or her relationship with God. It is the individual who may be saved through faith in Jesus Christ, not the collective.
How can a collectivist philosophy that emphasizes racial division above all else and despises all manifestations of individual liberty have anything to offer Christianity? The answer is simple: It doesn’t. CRT is a Marxist technique used to divide society into antagonistic racial groups that can be manipulated to create chaos and revolution.
Are those who bring CRT into the church Christian? Or are they Marxists posing as Christians? Is their true purpose salvation or revolution?
I was told recently of an episode that occurred in a church in North Carolina. The young pastor, all fired up with CRT, noticed that a black family and a white family in his congregation shared the same surname. He falsely concluded that the ancestors of the white family must have once owned the ancestors of the black family. From the pulpit, the pastor demanded that the white family apologize to the black family for the slave-owning sins of their forefathers. The white family bravely refused to apologize for the nonexistent transgression, which created a major split in the church. That church no longer exists.
CRT is not just a Southern Baptist problem. This false Marxist doctrine is taught in churches, seminaries, and universities all across the United States.
Some brave souls are standing against this corrupt doctrine, but hundreds of thousands of seminarians and churchgoers are going along with revolution posing as religion.
The late great Andrew Breitbart used to say that “politics is downstream from culture.” He could have added that “culture is downstream from religion.”
The Southern Baptists, the most conservative major Protestant denomination in the United States, have started down the Marxist road. Several other denominations are well ahead of them. If this isn’t reversed, how will this shift affect our culture and politics in years to come?
Photo: Parishioners sit inside the renovated Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga., on Jan. 19, 2002. (Erik S. Lesser/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 Loudon | The Epoch Times* | January 22, 2019,Updated: February 17, 2019
Commentary
The United States is a deeply religious country. Very early on, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) realized that if the United States was ever to be brought to socialism, religion would have to be harnessed to the task.
Enter the CPUSA’s Religion Commission, where socialist pastors, religious academics, and laypeople network to spread Marxist ideas through their churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques.
As the United States is primarily a Christian country, the communists began to infiltrate churches, seminaries, and theological colleges even before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
In congressional testimony in July 1953, former CPUSA Chairman Ben Gitlow described how the first communist front was established in the United States, by minister and later Party member Harry Ward:>
“The Methodist Federation for Social Action … was first organized by a group of Socialist, Marxist clergymen of the Methodist church headed by Dr. Harry F. Ward. … Its objective was to transform the Methodist Church and Christianity into an instrument for the achievement of socialism. It was established in 1907, 12 years before the organization of the Communist Party in the United States in 1919.”
In testimony a few days later, another high-ranking communist defector exposed Ward as a card-carrying communist and a powerful “agent of influence” for the communist cause:
“The Methodist Federation for Social Action, headed by the Rev. Harry F. Ward, whom I have already identified as a Party member, was invaluable to the Communist Party in its united-front organizations campaign. It was invaluable because, through it, the Party was able to get contacts with thousands of ministers all over the country.”
That defector, Manning Johnson, also went on to reveal how the CPUSA’s Soviet masters had shifted emphasis to co-opting religion from destroying it:
“Once the tactic of infiltrating religious organizations was set by the Kremlin, the actual mechanics of implementing the ‘new line’ was a question of following the general experiences of the living church movement in Russia, where the Communists discovered that the destruction of religion could proceed much faster through infiltration of the church by Communist agents operating within the church itself.
“The Communist leadership in the United States realized that the infiltration tactic in this country would have to adapt itself to American conditions and the religious make-up peculiar to this country. In the earliest stages, it was determined that with only small forces available it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries and divinity schools. The practical conclusion drawn by the Red leaders was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths most conducive to Communist purposes.”
According to Johnson, the CPUSA set about infiltrating American Christianity at every level:
“In the early 1930s, the Communists instructed thousands of their members to rejoin their ancestral religious groups and to operate in cells designed to take control of churches for Communist purposes. This method was not only propounded but was executed with great success among large elements of American church life. Communists operating a double-pronged infiltration, both through elements of Communist-controlled clergy and Communist-controlled laymen, managed to pervert and weaken entire strata of religious life in the United States.”
All over the United States, CPUSA members went back to their childhood churches. Over time, many gained positions of influence. This activity ramped up during the Vietnam era.
Some examples follow:
In Utah, Wayne Holley was a proud member of the Mormon Church and founder of the Joe Hill Club of the CPUSA. Holley worked for “all economic and social issues including universal health care, fair housing, jobs with justice, women’s issues, and all ‘movements for peace.’ He fought against nuclear testing at the Nevada test site, the Vietnam War, and the MX Missile Program,” according to CPUSA publication People’s World.
In Chicago, Bill Hogan, a CPUSA member and Catholic priest, joined in the national campaigns to end the U.S. war in Vietnam, was a leader in Chicago Clergy and Laity Concerned (an anti-war group), and “was one of the plaintiffs in a pair of federal lawsuits in 1974 and 1975 that sought to stop alleged Chicago Police Department harassment of political activists,” according to his obituary.
In New York, CPUSA member the Rev. Richard Morford was executive director of the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship and a leader of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
During the Vietnam war era, the American Communist movement split into Maoist, Trotskyist, and “democratic socialist” factions. The traditional CPUSA was dramatically reduced in numbers. However, far-left infiltration of seminaries and theological schools increased as thousands of young draft-dodgers opted to promote socialism in divinity school rather than fight communists in Vietnam.
Today, most of the leftist divinity professors and religious leaders come out of the 1960s Maoist and “democratic socialist” movements rather than the CPUSA.
However, the CPUSA did continue to make considerable progress in black-majority churches. Since the 1960s, when the CPUSA began to more deeply infiltrate the Democratic Party, a larger emphasis was put on recruiting black pastors. These pastors could be used to promote socialist policies within the Democratic Party, and to keep their congregations loyally voting for the left.
In April 2005, the CPUSA re-organized its Religious Commission with a conference in Des Moines, Iowa. The CPUSA’s People’s World newspaper quoted several participants to give a flavor of the event:
“‘The word of God and communism are hand in hand,’ said Diana Sowry, a school bus driver from Ashtabula County, Ohio. … Sowry is a union activist and also active in her church, where she sings in the choir. She feels communists and others who are working to defeat the ultra-right and advance peace, social and economic justice, and socialism are ‘doing the work of the Word.’
“The Rev. Scott Marks, from New Haven, Conn., said ‘people in the pews’ cannot simply stick to ‘feel-good issues,’ but must ‘be willing to go to the wall on the real issues.’ … [Marks] is a Pentecostal minister who leads the Connecticut Center for a New Economy. For him, this is doing ‘the real work’ of Jesus. ‘It’s not pie in the sky when we die,’ Marks told the World. ‘It’s how are we going to change things in the here and now.’ …
“In the session on work in local churches, the Rev. Gil Dawes, a retired volunteer pastor at Trinity Methodist Church here, emphasized that grassroots progressive religious activism has deep historical roots, and has to be re-energized today. ‘That’s where the right is way ahead of us,’ he said. …
“’People suffering will become leaders if they have a chance to put it together with other people,’ Dawes said. This kind of Bible study helped turn one congregation from fundamentalist to one of the most progressive, he said.
“In the session on Marx and religion, Paul Nelson, a Lutheran minister who teaches at a community college in Iowa, disputed the idea that Marx opposed all religion. What Marx denounced was an ‘illusory’ form of religion that served as ‘ideological cover for the exercise of aristocratic economic and political power.’”
Today’s Influence
Today’s CPUSA is still very active in the church. Here are some examples:
Edward Carson, chairman of the Boston Communist Party, was an editor for The Christian Century “Then and Now” blog.
Michael Adam Reale served on the CPUSA Religious Commission in 2004 and 2005. Reale told the CPUSA newspaper People’s Weekly World (later changed to People’s World) in 2004:
“I personally felt led to bring into the Communist Party three friends who are active in their faiths, one a Quaker, another who is the pastor of the United Church of Christ, and the third a Jehovah’s Witness—all three had expressed an interest in the party. We all need to confront the myth that communism is anti-religion. Communism is not anti-religion—it is anti-opulence. …
“I came to the Communist Party because of my deep Quaker faith. I have become convinced (a Quaker expression) of the ‘rightness’ of Marxism.”
In 2010, Pierre Williams was secretary of the Religion Commission of the CPUSA. He received his master’s in divinity from Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. He also completed pastoral residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and served as staff chaplain at Harbor Hospital in Baltimore. He is an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and has been a member of the Florida Interfaith Commission on Children and Youth.
Henry Millstein, a practicing Roman Catholic, is an activist in several faith-based social justice organizations. He serves on the National Committee and the Religion Commission of the CPUSA.
Millstein holds a doctorate in Jewish Studies from the University of California–Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union, with a focus on Jewish–Christian relations, and has taught humanities and history of religion at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and the Graduate Theological Union.
Millstein is currently programs manager at Islamic Networks Group in San Jose. His LinkedIn profile states:
“His background includes both academic and experiential acquaintance with a variety of cultures and religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Native American traditions. In his current position at ING-Islamic Networks Group, he brings together his experience in moving across boundaries of faith and culture with his passion for peace, nonviolence, and social justice.”
The Rev. James Caldwell is one of two black pastors in the Houston Communist Party branch. He is a graduate of Phyllis Wheatley High School and Texas Southern University’s School of Public Affairs. He also attended Dallas Theological Seminary and has been an ordained minister for over 30 years.
The Rev. Tim Yeager was, in 2010, chairperson of the Religion Commission of the CPUSA. He has served on the Standing Commission on Anglican and International Peace with Justice Concerns and the Advocacy Center of The Episcopal Church.
After a Christian upbringing in Iowa, Yeager went on to study Russian and History at the University of Iowa. The Vietnam War was raging then, and he became involved in the anti-war movement.
“That opened my eyes to a whole host of issues. I moved away from Christianity and became a Unitarian. As time went on, I became a leader in left-wing student activities … I had read Karl Marx on Ludwig Feuerbach [a German philosopher and anthropologist] and decided that I had to move away from religion altogether and became a Marxist,” Yeager said in a 2015 interview in British local magazine Westcombe News.
Yeager also became chief organizer of the Communist Party in Iowa but was drawn back to the church by communist pastor Gil Dawes.
“I never really lost my connection to my home church in Iowa. It was part of my family. And then, I met a wonderful man named Gil Dawes. He was a Methodist minister and liberation theologian who showed me what I had not really taken on board, that Christianity and socialism had much in common and so I joined his church … but I have to admit that I had not yet become a Christian again in my heart,” Yeager said in the same interview.
In 2011, Yeager was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church, and, in 2012, he took on responsibility for serving a small inner-city church on the West Side of Chicago.
He currently serves at a church in London and is a member of the Communist Party of Britain.
Communists want to be gods on Earth. Their main competition for the minds of men is revealed religion. Attempts to brutally suppress Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the early days of the Soviet Union proved counter-productive; infiltrating and twisting religion is far more effective. This tactic has been applied all over the world and has made huge inroads in the United States.
Much of what is preached today in U.S. churches have been influenced, if not dominated, by communist ideology posing as religion.
Feature photo: A priest walks to the sanctuary following a mass Photo by Jeff Swensen/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 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.
