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 30, 2019, Updated: November 6, 2019
Commentary
I heard a love story recently that brought me to tears. It wasn’t a Shakespearean tragedy of star-crossed lovers. It wasn’t romantic at all. It wasn’t a tale of a mother’s self-sacrifice for her children—quite the opposite.
It was a simple tale of masculine love—something so rarely praised and so often devalued that Western culture is dying for the very lack of it.
A highly regarded U.S. military leader, a veteran of one of this country’s toughest military units, told me his story.
Many years ago, my friend’s son was about 16. He was smoking marijuana every day, and no matter what his parents told him, or how much they pleaded or tried to reason with him, he simply wouldn’t quit. The son’s drug habit became a big family issue.
The boy’s mother offered him unconditional love. She would be there for him, no matter how he behaved. When the boy’s father threatened to throw his son out of the house, his distraught mother would tearfully plead his case. Her love for her son was overwhelming and unquestionable—and completely ineffective.
Eventually, the father, a man who had led some of the world’s toughest troops into combat, made one of the bravest decisions of his life. He put his son in the back of the family car. He drove him down to the local shopping mall and made him get out. He told his son: “This is your new home. … You stay here until you learn to love this family more than you love marijuana.”
The father drove away, choking back tears and praying all the way home.
Five long, tearful, and fearful days later, the boy turned up on the family doorstep and said: “I’m never smoking that stuff again. Can I please come home?”
The boy was joyfully welcomed back to the family—and he kept his word.
The big lie of modern Western society is that masculinity is dangerous, destructive, even toxic. Masculinity is harsh and unforgiving. It’s warlike, aggressive, and intolerant. It needs to be suppressed. We need more love, and that’s essentially a feminine virtue. Feminine love (the only “real” love, we are led to believe) is kind and forgiving, accepting and tolerant, welcoming and unconditional.
The truth, known to virtually every civilization in world history but somehow largely forgotten in our own, is that there are two sides to love: the masculine and the feminine. Both are essential to any healthy family, church, or society. And in proper balance, they produce results far greater than the sum of the parts.
No family can truly prosper without feminine love. How sad it must be for some to grow up without memories of a mother’s unconditional love: having your grazed knee bandaged, eating a hot meal with mom on a cold rainy day, and snuggling on her lap while she reads you a story. Or seeing her beam with pride when you graduate high school, or watching the tears roll down her face when you ship out to a combat zone.
But what of the love of the father? Can any family reach its true potential without masculine love? This is the love that demands respect, that will lay down conditions. This is the dad who will kick your backside if you disrespect your mother. The father who will make you clean up your room, or who will bawl you out for a bad report card.
This is also the father who will teach his son to stand up for himself and will expect him to strive for goals. He’ll demand that the boy shows courtesy to his elders and be willing to protect his younger siblings and those weaker than himself.
This is the father who will be a rock for his daughter, protecting her from every threat and danger, especially from boys like he used to be. He will encourage her to be the best she can be in every aspect of life. He will teach her to respect herself and look for a husband who is at least as good as her dad.
How many millions of young Western men—most other cultures haven’t gotten as crazy as us yet—are rotting in jails, working endless dead-end jobs, smoking dope all day long on welfare, or living in mom’s basement at 35 because they never had a dad around to take them fishing or boot their backsides when needed?
How many millions of young women move from one hopeless relationship to another because they so lack self-respect they’ll latch on to any man who’ll have them? How many of them struggle to develop real meaningful relationships because they have no yardstick to recognize a good man, even if they happen to stumble across one? How many millions of their children are almost certain to repeat the same cycle?
Masculine love isn’t just desirable; it’s essential for our survival. A lack of the masculine qualities of leadership, decisiveness, discipline, and courage are destroying the Western family, churches, and culture.
Masculine Christianity
Christianity, the bedrock of Western culture, was once a very masculine religion. Jesus came with a sword, not a poem. He overturned the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple and didn’t attempt to mediate a peaceful resolution.
He said, “Go forth and sin no more,” not, “Don’t worry, do what you feel like, I’ll make it right with dad.”
Modern Western Christianity is drowning in feminine love. Seldom will you hear an American or European priest or pastor ever get tough with his flock. You’ll hear very little about renouncing sin or denouncing evil in most Western churches.
Your modern Western church experience probably won’t include a military veteran priest or pastor who can preach a sermon that will chill your blood and cleanse your soul. You will likely not sing songs of praise such as “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
A caricature of today’s clergy would be a wispy-bearded, latte-drinking pastor, wearing skinny jeans and playing sappy “Christian” rock music, while he (or she) tells you that Jesus loves you no matter what you do, and as long as you put some money in the collection plate, you’re good with God—whoever she may be.
Western Christianity has all but abandoned masculine love, and our churches, families, and culture are dying because of it.
The fact that many people will be enraged by what I have just written only proves my point. We have so lost our bearings in the West that stating obvious truths about the virtues of masculinity and its role in family, church, and societal leadership could be enough to get you fired, banished, murdered, or even de-friended on Facebook.
To recover our culture, we must restore our respect for masculinity and the masculine virtues. We must recognize that masculine love is what drives young men to defy tyrants, fight just wars, explore space, create businesses, plant churches, and build strong families.
Life without feminine love is sterile, suppressive, harsh, and cold. Communist China, which so undervalues femininity that it has aborted tens of millions of baby girls under the “one-child policy,” is a case in point. Life without masculine love is, to borrow from Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutal, and short.” Go to any inner-city welfare slum, where fatherless families are the norm, to see proof of that.
Any family, church, or society that can properly honor and balance both feminine and masculine love is destined to grow and prosper. We need both aspects of love to make us whole—and holy.
*Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Photo credit: A father and son watch batting practice prior to a game between the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field in Phoenix, Ariz., on Aug. 20, 2019. (Norm Hall/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 16, 2019, Updated: October 22, 2019
Commentary
On Oct. 28, the two most powerful Democratic politicians in the United States, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), will headline the annual conference of J Street—a leftist (and, in reality, anti-Israel) lobbying organization.
Schumer’s presence at the conference is especially significant because he has been long regarded as a pro-Israel voice in the Senate. He regularly speaks at the annual conference of the pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—the nemesis of J Street.
Traditional bipartisan support for Israel has been waning for some time as the pro-Palestine left wing of the Democratic Party gains more and more influence. This “fraternizing” with J Street by party leaders will likely send a signal to Israel that Democratic support in the U.S. Congress can no longer be relied upon.
While AIPAC has long worked with both Democrats and Republicans, J Street is an almost exclusively Democratic-focused operation. Its affiliated political action committee, JStreetPAC, raised $5 million for more than 100 Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, according to The Jerusalem Post.
J Street was established in 2007 essentially as a counter to AIPAC. J Street describes itself as “the political home and voice for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans … who want Israel to be secure, democratic and the national home of the Jewish people … [advocating] for policies that advance shared US and Israeli interests as well as Jewish and democratic values, leading to a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.”
According to Media Director Jessica Rosenblum, cited in Brown University student newspaper The Brown Daily Herald, J Street “aims to ‘redefine what it means to be pro-Israel’ and marshal American support for a two-state solution.”
According to J Street, to be “pro-Israel” today is to support the “two-state solution”—the partitioning of Israel to create a new independent Palestinian nation within current Israeli borders.
The so-called two-state solution would in fact be tantamount to Israeli national suicide. Depending on the proposed borders (a major sticking point), a new Palestinian state would incorporate nearly a third of Israel’s territory and would include several major cities including Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus, Hebron, and Jenin. It would bring the borders of a potentially hostile foreign power to within a very few miles of Israel’s economic center Tel Aviv and within literal yards of the capital city Jerusalem. It would also bring dozens of Israeli towns and settlements within easy rocket or sniper range.
The “two-state solution” would make Israel almost impossible to defend—which is no doubt the reason it is being pushed so hard by the Jewish nation’s enemies. It is the strategic equivalent of giving Hawaii, Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington to China, or ceding the entire Eastern Seaboard up to the city limits of New York and Washington to Russia.
Israel’s traditional Middle Eastern enemies, such as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the openly Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, always owed their main loyalties to the former Soviet Union. Fatah, a faction of the PLO, now rules the Palestinian Authority, a semi-autonomous part of Eastern Israel. Terror group Hamas, which rules the Gaza strip in Southern Israel, is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, which has deep ties to Soviet-Russian intelligence. Hezbollah, which has often attacked Israel from its bases in neighboring Lebanon, is a front for the Iranian regime, which partially owes its existence to the former Soviet Union and is still closely allied with Moscow.
Therefore, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that J Street is heavily penetrated by the U.S. hard-left, most of which is now militantly opposed to the existence of Israel.
Connections
In 2009, late Minnesota Communist Party leader Erwin Marquit traveled to Washington for the first national conference of J Street. Marquit “attended the conference on 26–28 October and participated in lobbying members of the Congress on 29 October. … The guidelines for the lobby stressed Congressional support of Obama,” according to his memoirs. Marquit was also a political ally and financial supporter of hard-left Muslim former Congress member Keith Ellison. J Street endorsed and funded Ellison in his 2016 congressional race.
Members of the J Street advisory board have included:
Stanley Sheinbaum, a wealthy Los Angeles-based philanthropist and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member. Sheinbaum claimed PLO leader Yasser Arafat as a friend and denied that Arafat was a terrorist.
Alan Snitow, a filmmaker and former member of East Bay DSA.
Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at the School of Social Science of Princeton University and a member of the DSA.
Maria Echaveste, the former deputy White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton. At Stanford University in the 1970s, Echaveste was active in MEChA, a radical socialist group advocating for the return of the U.S. Southwest to Mexico. In May 1975, Echaveste of Students for Equity joined the Alliance for Radical Change, the far-left Iranian Students Association, and the Maoist-leaning Revolutionary Student Brigade to pressure Stanford University trustees to terminate a three-year, $1 million contract to develop a satellite system for National Iranian Radio Television. The communist campaign to economically isolate the regime of the pro-American Shah of Iran contributed to the Islamic revolution of 1978. There are clear parallels to today’s anti-Israel Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment Movement.
Rob Malley, the former special assistant to Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs and foreign policy adviser to President Barack Obama. Malley’s father, Simon Malley, was a founder of the Egyptian Communist Party and a close associate of PLO leader Yasser Arafat. According to Ed Lasky of the American Thinker: “Simon Malley loathed Israel and … spent countless hours with Yasser Arafat and became a close friend of Arafat.” In 1980, Simon Malley and his family were expelled from France for “political activities which do not correspond with, and even run contrary to, French interests in certain countries,” according to Discover the Networks. An Oct. 3, 1980, United Press International report stated, “[French] Interior Minister Christian Bonnet told the Assembly that some articles written by Malley were ‘genuine appeals to murder foreign chiefs of state.’”
J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami also has a radical bent. Ben-Ami was then-President Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser and later served as policy director for leftist Democrat Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Before becoming president of J Street, he was senior vice president at Fenton Communications, a Washington public relations firm notorious for representing communist movements and governments, including Daniel Ortega’s Marxist regime in Nicaragua, Prime Minister Maurice Bishop’s Marxist-Leninist regime in Grenada, El Salvador’s Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization the FMLN, and the pro-Soviet MPLA regime in Angola.
In 2009, Ben-Ami served on the board of J Street sister organization Americans for Peace Now alongside several radical leftists, including DSA members Jo-Ann Mort, Stanley Sheinbaum, and Michael Walzer.
J Street is unquestionably an enemy of Israel as it is constituted today. The fact that the two highest-ranking Democrats in Congress are scheduled to address the upcoming J Street conference will likely be noted with some concern in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Feature Photo: U.S. Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) arrive at a news briefing after they returned to the Capitol from a White House meeting with President Donald Trump May 22, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/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* | September 30, 2019,Updated: October 1, 2019
Commentary
Controversial Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is about to associate herself with one of the most subversive organizations in this country.
On Oct. 3, Omar will present the annual Letelier-Moffitt Awards at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). The IPS is a center of both far-left policy formation and support for the Palestinian socialist cause. The Letelier-Moffitt Award is named after the late Orlando Letelier, a paid Cuban intelligence agent.
With Omar’s strong ties to radical groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Palestinian socialist cause, she is a perfect fit for the IPS—whose columnists have been defending her regular outrageous statements since her election to Congress.
An IPS press release states:
“We’re excited to announce that Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota’s 5th District will present this year’s Letelier-Moffitt Awards!
“Rep. Omar has made herself a key figure in the progressive movement by working with a diverse group of legislators on the best ideas in politics today; bold, transformative policies like student loan forgiveness, Medicare for All, and a Green New Deal.
“We’re thrilled to work with her and delighted to welcome her into our community.”
Omar’s IPS connection should raise all sorts of alarm bells.
For many years, the IPS was the largest and most influential of the far-left think tanks in Washington. From its founding in 1963, it steadily pushed a pro-Soviet line on foreign policy, defense, and the economy.
In a 1978 article in National Review, Brian Crozier, then director of the London-based Institute for the Study of Conflict, described the IPS as the “perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.”
The Letelier-Moffitt Award has its roots in Chile’s bloody anti-communist counter-revolution of the early 1970s.
Assassination
In 1973, at the request of the Chilean parliament, Chile’s generals stepped in to remove pro-Castro socialist President Salvador Allende from office for alleged gross breaches of the country’s constitution. Allende committed suicide in the presidential palace rather than surrender to the military. For several years afterward, the military brutally cracked down on Chilean socialists, communists, and terrorists. Thousands were imprisoned, many were executed, and some simply “disappeared.”
One of the victims of the anti-communist purge was Allende’s former ambassador to the United States, Orlando Letelier. After a period of imprisonment, Letelier was allowed to leave Chile, settling first in Venezuela, then in Washington at the suggestion of IPS staffer Saul Landau, a personal friend of Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
In 1975, Letelier became a senior fellow of the IPS, where he soon became a leader of the leftist resistance to anti-communist Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. On Sept. 10, 1976, Pinochet officially deprived Letelier of his Chilean citizenship.
Undeterred, Letelier carried on his efforts to bring down the Pinochet government. He was reportedly responsible for the cancellation of several major European loans to Chile, which made him a major enemy of the government. He was described by one of his colleagues as being “the most respected and effective spokesman in the international campaign to condemn and isolate” Chile’s anti-communist government.
On Sept. 21, 1976, Letelier was traveling to work with an IPS colleague Ronni Moffitt and her husband. As they were driving down Washington’s Embassy Row at 9.35 a.m. a bomb exploded in their car. Within an hour, Moffitt and Letelier were pronounced dead. Moffitt’s husband survived.
It was later revealed that the bomb had been planted in the direction of Chile’s intelligence service, the DINA.
During the investigation into the assassination, the FBI leaked documents to The Washington Times columnist Jack Anderson, and others, which indicated that Letelier had been an Eastern Bloc intelligence operative. Letelier had also apparently been coordinating his activities with the Chilean government-in-exile, then based in communist East Berlin.
Letelier was reportedly working closely with Allende’s daughter, Beatriz Allende, who was married to a senior Cuban intelligence officer. While working for the IPS, Letelier was being paid $1,000 a month (no small sum in 1976) from Cuba’s communist regime.
So in giving out the Letelier-Moffitt Award, Omar is, in effect, honoring the memory of a paid Cuban agent-of-influence.
Marxist Ties
Today’s IPS maintains strong ties to the DSA and other domestic Marxist groups. The IPS has several DSA comrades on staff, including Ashik Siddique, a research analyst with IPS’s National Priorities Project, and John Feffer, co-director of IPS webzine Foreign Policy in Focus. The Metro DC DSA steering committee even holds its meetings in an IPS office.
Like Omar, the IPS is uncompromisingly pro-Palestine and anti-Israel.
Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the IPS. He researches “U.S. empire, borders, and migration.”
Until earlier this year, Petersen-Smith was a leading member of the now-disbanded International Socialist Organization. According to the Socialism 2016 conference website: “He has written about Black and Palestinian liberation and US empire for Socialist Worker and the International Socialist Review. He co-authored the ‘Black Statement of Solidarity with Palestine’ in 2015, which was signed by over 1,100 mainly communist Black activists, artists, and scholars.”
In April, Petersen-Smith, with his IPS colleague Noura Erakat. held an event with the Tufts University chapter of the far-left Students for Justice in Palestine, titled “Black Solidarity With Palestine.”
Veteran IPS staffer Phyllis Bennis runs the IPS’s New Internationalism Project. In 2001, she helped found the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. She advises several leading U.N. officials on Palestine and was twice in contention to be appointed the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory.
Bennis was also a leading member of Line of March, a Marxist-Leninist group that supported first communist China and then the Soviet Union.
The IPS still maintains strong ties to Cuba and played a role in President Barack Obama’s disastrous directive to ease sanctions on Havana, which probably saved the communist dictatorship from imminent collapse.
In July 2015, as the communist flag was raised over the newly reestablished Cuban Embassy on 16th Street NW in Washington, Bennis and her IPS and ex-Line of March comrade James Early “joined in the delirious shouts of ‘Viva Cuba!’,” according to The Washington Post.
“It’s an amazing moment,” Bennis told The Washington Post. “In the decades-long effort to normalize relations with Cuba, to stop the US attacks and hostility toward Cuba, we have not had so many victories. Suddenly we have a victory. The flag going up—that’s huge.”
“For those of us who were committed to the values and the aspirations of the Cuban revolution,” said Early, raising that flag again “is a recognition of Cuba’s right to sovereignty and self-determination.”
Right from the start, the IPS built networks of contacts among congressional legislators and their staff, academics, government officials, and the national media. The IPS’s main aim has always been to influence U.S. government policy in favor of the world socialist movement.
It’s no surprise to see the IPS welcome Omar into its radical bosom.
Feature Photo: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks at a press conference on the Capitol on July 15, 2019. (Holly Kellum/NTD)
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 | TheEpochTimes* | September 16, 2019, Updated: September 16, 2019
Commentary
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is working closely with Brazilian Trotskyists from the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) to coordinate attacks against U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
The U.S.–Brazil revolutionary alliance is conducted through revolutionaries in both countries aligned to an international Trotskyist revolutionary coordinating body—the Brussels-based United Secretariat for the Fourth International.
One of the key point men in the alliance is Pedro Fuentes, an Argentine-born revolutionary now living in the United States. Fuentes, along with São Paulo-based “militant and leader of the Socialist Left Movement” Bruno Magalhães (also known as Bruno Silviano), represented PSOL at the August DSA convention in Atlanta. During his speech, Magalhães declared, “We in Brazil are really, really excited with the Democratic Socialist movement here in the U.S.”
Also associated with PSOL are journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda, who is a federal congressman for Rio de Janeiro, and former PSOL member Adélio Bispo de Oliveira, who stabbed Bolsonaro in the stomach during a 2018 rally, almost killing him.
Pedro Fuentes
Pedro Fuentes is the “nom de guerre” of Argentine Trotskyist revolutionary Alberto Pujals. Born circa 1943, Fuentes “began his activism [in Argentina] as a teenager, when he and his brother joined a high-school student movement to reform the schools called Movimiento de Acción Reformista. In the 1960s, he joined Palabro Obrera, led by the Argentine Trotskyist revolutionary Nahuel Moreno,” according to a DSA Facebook event post. In 1971, Pedro’s older brother, Luis Pujals, a leader of the Proletarian Revolutionary Army, died in the “dirty war” against Argentina’s anti-communist government.
Fuentes was forced to flee Argentina, traveling across Latin America and Europe, where he continued working with Trotskyist groups in several countries.
Fuentes eventually settled in Brazil and, in 2000, began organizing with Movimento Esquerda Socialista (MES), a Trotskyist tendency inside the ruling leftist Workers’ Party. In 2003, the Workers’ Party split over pension reform issues, and several Trotskyist factions, including MES, subsequently founded PSOL—now Brazil’s fifth-largest political party.
Fuentes served for many years as PSOL’s secretary of international relations and still works to build ties between PSOL and other leftist parties. Though living in the United States, Fuentes still serves as a leader of the PSOL’s MES faction.
Fourth International and Mass Party of the Left
In the early 1990s, the Fourth International used its national affiliates in an attempt to rebuild the world revolutionary movement after the so-called “collapse of communism.” These efforts were modeled on the very successful Brazilian Workers’ Party—an amalgamation of leftist Christians, Greens, black radicals, ex pro-Soviet communists, former Maoists, and Fourth International Trotskyists.
In my home country of New Zealand, this concept materialized in the New Labour Party/Alliance Party, which ruled for a time in coalition with the “old” Labour Party. The Australian counterpart, Socialist Alliance, achieved little success, but in Germany, the former East German communists joined up with several Trotskyist factions to form the Party of Democratic Socialism (now Die Linke), Germany’s third-largest party on the left. Similar coalitions were formed with varying degrees of success in El Salvador, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippines, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and some Scandinavian countries.
Many of these groups also maintained close ties to old-line communists, including the Maoist-leaning Belgian Workers’ Party, the pro-Soviet South African Communist Party, and of course everyone’s friend on the left, the Cuban Communist Party.
In the United States, Trotskyists from a small “socialist feminist” group called “Solidarity” joined with former pro-Soviet communists, DSA activists, Maoists from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and ex-Maoists from the Frontline Political Organization, to form the Committees of Correspondence (CoC) in Chicago in July 1994.
According to the September/October 1994 issue of Chicago DSA’s New Ground publication, “Over 500 delegates and observers … attended the founding convention of the Committees of Correspondence (CoC) held here in Chicago in July.”
New Ground reported that the speakers included Charles Nqukula, general secretary of the South African Communist Party; Dulce Maria Pereira, a senatorial candidate of the Workers’ Party of Brazil; Angela Davis of CoC; Andre Brie of the Party of Democratic Socialism of Germany; and a representative of the Cuban government.
CoC was supposed to lay the foundation for a new mass party of socialism—one that could eventually replace the Democratic Party. However, rampant sectarianism and lack of visionary leadership eventually turned the project to dust. Today, the organization still exists as the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, but it’s down to fewer than 200 mainly elderly members nationwide—many of whom hold dual membership in the DSA or the Communist Party USA.
While the Fourth International’s dream of an international alliance of new mass parties of the left lived on in Brazil and Europe, it was dead in the United States—until Bernie Sanders came along.
Rebirth of the DSA
From the start, PSOL and the broader Trotskyist movement welcomed the Sanders socialist movement that took the U.S. left by storm in 2015 and 2016. The DSA went to nearly 30,000 members from 6,500 in two years, and is now approaching 60,000. This was very inspiring to many Trotskyist revolutionaries, including Pedro Fuentes.
Writing on the Spanish language website Aporrea in August 2015, Fuentes and his PSOL comrade Tiago Madeira urged Trotskyists to get behind the Sanders movement:
“In our opinion, we must support Sanders. For us, the debate in the US, with its specific characteristics, is similar to what we face in the rest of the world. Will Trotskyists, without losing sight of our strategy, intervene in events and real political movements—however contradictory they are—to contend for influence. … We are talking about building new organizations, new parties—and respecting their leaders, even if we disagree with them.”
And support Sanders they did. Solidarity, the U.S. affiliate of the Fourth International, joined the DSA en masse to help lead the Sanders movement.
Fuentes has worked closely with DSA members in the United States and attended several DSA events. As mentioned, he was a PSOL delegate to both the 2017 and 2019 DSA national conventions.
Fuentes and PSOL comrade Mariana Riscali wrote of their experience attending DSA’s breakout 2017 national convention in Chicago on the socialist website Left on the Move. The PSOL delegates were very welcome and were given equal standing to large Marxist parties from Europe.
“PSOL was known by a large share of delegates. … We are proud to say it was MES, a slate from PSOL, that has made the greatest effort to establish this contact so that we are proud of our country being recognized by the DSA at the same level as the Momentum from England, Mélenchon’s Party [France], Podemos [Spain] and Bloco de Esquerda [Portugal],” Fuentes and Riscali wrote.
The PSOL delegates look to the DSA as a breakthrough in world socialism—the start of a new international hybrid left that might build a mass revolutionary movement where older formations such as the CoC and the Brazilian Workers’ Party have failed.
“Surely, this privileged relationship with DSA will allow PSOL to look from a more internationalist point of view [at] the international situation and the emergence of new political processes independent from the old social democracy or false Latin American progressivism as PT [Workers’ Party]. DSA is the best expression of the ‘new cycle.’”
In November 2018, Fuentes attended a DSA meeting in New York, where he was photographed with two admiring members of the DSA International Committee, Carrington Morris and Ella Mahony.
In June 2017, Mahony represented the DSA at the PSOL organized “International Encampment of Youth in Struggle” in Rio de Janeiro. The event was both a congress for PSOL’s youth wing and “a convocation of international solidarity.”
Solidarity and the DSA International Commission
In 2018, the DSA revived its decades-old International Committee. After splitting with the “moderate” Socialist International in 2017, the DSA began looking for revolutionary friends overseas. The International Committee became the DSA’s diplomatic wing, charged with cementing ties to foreign socialist and communist movements.
At least two Solidarity members made it onto the newly formed committee: Boston-based David Grosser and New Yorker Dan La Botz.
Grosser is a longtime supporter of El Salvadorean revolutionary movements, whose personal goal is to “build the internationalism necessary to bring down the US Empire.”
La Botz is a seasoned revolutionary with direct ties to the Fourth International and to several Latin American revolutionary movements, including PSOL.
La Botz was meeting with PSOL activists in Brazil as far back as 2014, and also met with PSOL activists in New York in November 2016.
In April and May 2016, La Botz toured several countries in Europe and Brazil speaking about Bernie Sanders and the U.S. elections. All of his talks in Brazil were sponsored by either PSOL, or by Insurgencia, another Fourth International affiliated group also active in PSOL.
In a May 2016 article on the DSA website, La Botz explained how Fourth International Trotskyists were working with mainstream communists and other Marxists to create broad-based political parties that could compete electorally in Europe, Brazil, the UK, and the United States:
“In France, Spain, and Brazil, there have been and continue to be attempts to found new broad left, radical socialist parties as an alternative to the Social Democrats. In France we have seen both the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) and the Front de Gauche, in Spain Podemos, and in Brazil, PSOL. These efforts can be compared to those in the English-speaking nations where Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labor Party and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party clearly represent a similar popular reaction among youth and sections of the labor movement to the conservative policies of Labor and the Democrats.”
La Botz emphasized that the Fourth International had moved on from its notoriously violent and sectarian past to a strategy of bringing about socialist revolution through the electoral process. Forming broad-based electoral alliances with communists and socialists was to be the new path to the revolution:
“The New Anti-Capitalist Party came out of a merger of former members of the French Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) with environmentalists and other social activists. Anticapitalistas was formed by people out of the Spanish Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), also Trotskyist. Ensemble in France, which participates in the Front de Gauche, has members who come from the Socialist and Communist Party, as well as from NPA and the Trotskyist left. Similarly, solidaritéS Suisse [Switzerland], though it has Trotskyist roots, has also incorporated those from other traditions.
“These groups, if they were Trotskyist in origin, have by and large turned away from many of the characteristics once associated with Trotskyist organizations. At one time many of these groups held a dogmatic view of socialist ideology based almost exclusively on a very particular and narrow reading of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. …
“They worked to organize ‘vanguard parties’ based on a supposedly ‘democratic centralist’ model and often attempted to take control of and to dictate to labor unions and popular movements. … The Fourth International … has developed a more broad-minded view of revolutionary socialism, and so have most (but not all) of its affiliated organizations.”
Hating on Trump and Bolsonaro
According to an article by DSA comrade Ben Dalton:
“The official topic at the first Brooklyn Jacobin [DSA-aligned magazine] reading group held after the [2016] election was socialist politics in Brazil, but the conversation kept returning to Trump.
“’I think you should be in the first line against Trump,’ said Pedro Fuentes, a visiting speaker and official in Brazil’s Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). Around the room heads nodded. ‘Anti-Trump. This is the first task you have.’”
If PSOL and the DSA are united in their goal of building mass revolutionary parties in their home countries, they’re even more unified in the hatred of their respective presidents, Trump and his friend Bolsonaro.
In the United States, the DSA’s approximately 60,000 members are active in the anti-Trump movement in all 50 states. DSA comrades and their captive unions, non-profits, student unions, and even churches have organized thousands of anti-Trump rallies and meetings across the country. DSA comrades played a major role in taking back the House of Representatives for the Democrats in 2018.
Currently, the DSA is working with two pro-China organizations—Communist Party USA and Liberation Road (formerly Freedom Road Socialist Organization)—in the Left Inside/Outside Project to flip North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and even Texas to the Democratic column in 2020. If they succeed, Trump will be a one-term president, and the United States will almost certainly be lost. All the remaining free countries will then fall like dominoes.
PSOL has played a major role in almost every anti-Bolsonaro rally held before or since Brazil’s 2018 election. Their American DSA allies have tried to poison the waters for Bolsonaro in the United States as well.
At a meeting on May 26, the Collin County DSA (North Texas) Skyped in “three comrades from Brazil who are members of the PSOL … to talk with us about their organizing efforts against the current proto-fascist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Thanks to Mr. Pedro Fuentes of the PSOL, Ms. Alice Domingues, a student organizer, and Mr. Bruno Silviano, an organizer with the teacher’s union.”
“One of the most important things we learned from our comrades in Brazil was that opposition to Bolsonaro is huge in Brazil right now. At the most recent demonstrations against Bolsonaro before our conversation (which happened around the same time as DSA NTX and other area socialists, communists, anarchists, LGBTQ people, labor, and antifascists were protesting against Jair Bolsonaro’s visit to Dallas …)
“We asked our comrades in Brazil what we in the U.S. can do to help — the big ask right now was to boost awareness in the U.S. of the huge protests against Bolsonaro and show our solidarity. …
“Solidarity with the working class and oppressed of Brazil against fascism!”
The Trump–Bolsonaro Alliance Must Continue
Brazil was specifically mentioned in DSA’s Resolution #4, titled “Building the DSA International Committee,” passed during the convention, where the comrades resolved in part to “prioritize establishing relations with socialist and working-class organizations in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Latin America broadly.” The resolution claimed that “an effective and orderly International Committee is necessary for DSA to transition into an internationalist organization.”
The DSA and their PSOL comrades are fully committed to destroying the Trump–Bolsonaro alliance. From the revolutionary’s point of view, presidents Trump and Bolsonaro are huge impediments to world socialism.
They understand that this auspicious pairing could do more to counter world communism than anything we have seen since the Ronald Reagan–Margaret Thatcher–Pope John Paul partnership of the 1980s.
If Trump can turn around the United States and Bolsonaro can save Brazil, the positive consequences will be felt across the entire Western Hemisphere. And it will not end there.
If Trump and Bolsonaro destroy the Marxist movements in their respective countries, the world communist movement could be set back decades. This would be a fantastic boon for world freedom.
Trump and Bolsonaro should immediately direct their intelligence services to investigate the DSA and PSOL’s transnational interactions and their network of international allies. The DSA–PSOL–Fourth International alliance needs to be countered and dismantled. It poses a more urgent threat to our freedoms than does ISIS or al-Qaeda.
This alliance is nothing short of transnational treason. We need widespread media exposure, international governmental cooperation, and firm legal action to put an end to this threat.
Photo: U.S. President Donald Trump (R) and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (L) walk down the Colonnade before a press conference at the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC on March 19, 2019.
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.
