COMMUNIST LEADER MOBILIZES NATIVE AMERICANS FOR DEMOCRATIC VICTORY

COMMUNIST LEADER MOBILIZES NATIVE AMERICANS FOR DEMOCRATIC VICTORY

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.

LeBlanc told the Liberation Road-linked website Organizing Upgrade:

“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)

Portrait of Trevor Loudon, author and creator of "The Enemies Within Movie" DVD.Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.

Trevor presents his acclaimed movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!

*Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO BE PRO-FREEDOM; WE MUST ALSO BE ACTIVELY ANTI-COMMUNIST

IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO BE PRO-FREEDOM; WE MUST ALSO BE ACTIVELY ANTI-COMMUNIST

Commentary

Trevor Loudon  |  The Epoch Times*  | August 27, 2019, Updated: August 28, 2019

 

A recent NBC report criticizing The Epoch Times repeatedly emphasized that the publication is anti-communism, with the clear implication that this stance is anachronistic, paranoid, or unwarranted. Unfortunately, such views are commonplace in today’s West, certainly on the left, but also on much of what is considered the “right.”

The NBC article included this amazing paragraph: “In 2005, The Epoch Times released its greatest salvo, publishing the ‘Nine Commentaries,’ a widely distributed book-length series of anonymous editorials that it claimed exposed the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘massive crimes’ and ‘attempts to eradicate all traditional morality and religious belief.’”

Multiple reputable sources, including the famous “Black Book on Communism,” written mainly by academic ex-communists, assert that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been responsible for at least 65 million deaths during its 70 years of bloody reign. This adds to the full death toll of communism, which the authors show was at least 100 million.

In the first chapter, titled “Introduction: The Crimes of Communism,” academic Stéphane Courtois states that “communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.” By comparison, Nazism, while its crimes were also reprehensible, was “distinctly less murderous than Communism,” with a death toll of 25 million innocents.

Currently, 100 million Chinese citizens identify as Christians, and there are many others who are Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, or Falun Gong practitioners. These groups are subjected to ongoing, intense persecution under the CCP.

To The Epoch Times’ credit, it is one of the very few publications in the United States that is not just “pro-freedom” but actively anti-communist, a very important distinction, which was brought home recently in a conversation I had with a senior Epoch Times staffer. He related to me how some Epoch Times journalists had attended a conservative gathering in Washington and were surprised to find they were not universally well-received.

There were some comments that the presence of the Epoch Times people, well-known for their opposition to the Communist Party of China, “might damage our trade relations with China.”

Bear in mind that many of these critics were veterans of the Reagan presidency. They had seen how Reagan’s tough anti-communist stance had forced the Soviet Union into a major retreat (not a “collapse,” but a strategic retreat)—something decades of appeasement and East-West trade under previous presidents had failed to achieve.

These “conservative” leaders were all about free trade between nations and liberty at home. However, the thought that they should be opposing “communism” in this day and age was completely foreign to many of them.

What Is Communism?

This view stems from a failure to understand that communism is not just another political system. Communism is a form of organized crime justified by the cult of Marxism–Leninism. It’s basically a combination of criminal inclination coupled with uncontrolled political power.

Like all crime, communism is parasitic. It produces nothing of value itself; it must rely on force, propaganda, torture, intimidation, threats, and espionage to survive. Like cancer, communism consumes its host. Except that in communism’s case, it will only die when the whole planet is consumed.

Must we let things get to that point?

It’s Not Enough to Advocate for Freedom

Most would agree that it’s not enough to merely advocate for a lawful society. A society must also actively work to suppress crime and punish criminals.

Most would agree that it’s not enough to advocate for a healthy population. When cancer appears, for example, it must be starved of nutrients and removed as quickly as possible from its host.

Similarly, it’s not enough to simply advocate for freedom. It is not enough to support free markets, the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, and private property. Liberty will not be assured unless men and women of goodwill fight against that which threatens it.

As long as we remain imperfect beings, some iteration of communism will always be with us. Communism is the politicized, malignant distillation of the evil that’s in all of us. Marx, Lenin, Mao, and other communist leaders saw this flaw in man and sought to organize and legitimize it, awarding their evil ideas with a scientific veneer.

Communism is the highest expression of organized evil this world has ever seen.

How is feeding this beast going to produce good results?

History

Before World War II, Nazi sympathizers in the United States and Britain worked to steer their governments away from confronting Hitler. Big business in many Western nations made fortunes feeding the Nazi war machine.

During the Cold War, leftists in the West were constantly pushing for accommodation of the Soviet Union, even as it swallowed up much of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Some Western big businesses were more than happy to line their pockets with blood-stained rubles.

Nazism was ended with a huge loss of life, after years of appeasement had failed.

In the 1980s, Reagan avoided war by pushing the Soviet Union into full retreat through massive economic pressure. Had that pressure been maintained until the KGB was completely removed from power, we might now be friends with a free Russia instead of facing the nuclear weapons of a superior neo-Soviet regime now confronting us.

The United States has a similar choice with China. We can make billions trading with China (while gutting our own industrial base), then spend trillions defending ourselves from the monster we created when the inevitable war comes—not to mention the millions of casualties and the very real possibility of defeat and communist occupation of the lower 48 and Hawaii.

Or we can isolate China economically until the Communist Party is destroyed by internal pressures, and a new government, or governments, arise. That is our only hope for both a free China and a free United States.

Recently, President Donald Trump said in a tweet that U.S. companies “are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”

There is no doubt that Trump has the authority to make such a call.

According to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), signed in 1977 by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, the president has the power to restrict trade once a “national emergency” is declared.

According to the Washington Examiner:

“‘The president can impose a virtual embargo on a nation under IEEPA,’ said John Yoo, director of the public law and policy program at the University of California at Berkeley and a former official in George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel.

“The law has been used in the past to enact sanctions on hostile regimes such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. The Trump administration is now suggesting using it as a trade negotiation tool. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said China was an ‘enemy’ of the United States on trade.”

China is the United States’ enemy on every front, Secretary Mnuchin, not just in trade.

Let’s hope Trump is prepared to use IEEPA not just as a “bargaining chip,” but as the first step in doing to communist China what Reagan did to the Soviet Union.

The only peaceful way to achieve any real change in China, and to curb the regime’s criminal behavior and foreign and military policies of expansion, is to use U.S. economic leverage.

President Richard Nixon and communist China’s “best friend in America,” former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, opened up U.S.–China trade in the 1970s in a grossly misguided attempt to play communist-ruled Beijing against communist-ruled Moscow. That is the moral and practical equivalent of the FBI allying with the Italian Mafia to defeat the Russian mob.

Had the United States and the West economically blockaded Soviet Russia and communist China from the very beginning, both criminal regimes would have collapsed in a relatively short time. Millions of lives would have been saved, and the West could have spent trillions less on defending itself from the monsters they were economically supporting.

The Current State of Affairs

Today, the heavily nuclear-armed and FSB (KGB)-run Russia is in a formal military alliance (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization) with communist-run China, which is now the world’s second-largest economy. Communism is closer to destroying this planet than it ever has been.

Communism is the plague of our times. After a setback in the Reagan era, communist and semi-communist parties now rule Russia, China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, Cuba, Nepal, South Africa, Namibia, Mozambique, the Congo, Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and, only half in jest, California.

Communist ideology has deeply penetrated every Western nation, and in the United States, it dominates the universities, organized labor, Hollywood, and the new Democratic Party. And still, most Western conservatives and libertarians refuse to become active anti-communists.

Any force for freedom that doesn’t actively oppose communism is doomed to eventual failure. It is as impotent as a saint who won’t oppose sin, a pastor who won’t condemn the devil, a policeman who won’t arrest criminals, or a doctor who won’t fight disease.

The Epoch Times is one of a handful of pro-freedom publications in the West that actively works to expose and oppose communism. We will never fully defeat communism, but if we refuse to oppose it, it will inevitably defeat us. If you aren’t fighting communism, you are in effect enabling its eventual terrifying victory.

The Epoch Times is proudly and actively anti-communist. All of us who love liberty, regardless of our spiritual beliefs, should support The Epoch Times in this noble endeavor.

Feature Image: Cover of the “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party,” a collection of editorials that catalyzed the Tuidang movement and outlines its philosophy. (Benjamin Chasteen/Epoch Times)

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the year in which President Jimmy Carter signed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The Epoch Times regrets the error.


Portrait of Trevor Loudon, author and creator of "The Enemies Within Movie" DVD.Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.

Trevor presents his movie, “ENEMIES WITHIN” DVD—BUY NOW!

 

*Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.