A probing investigation into the history of the planned Communist takeover of the USA that is now well underway.
© By Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.
In a video from last December that has only recently gained attention, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff – Saikat Chakrabarti – wears a t-shirt with the face of Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist who was allied with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War II. Bose actually met with monstrous Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler at the height of the war.
The picture gives us an indication of part of the lineage of the ideas of AOC and Chakrabarti – including her advocacy of what she calls a Green New Deal. Another hint of their agenda is contained in the Washington Post’s fawning profile of Chakrabarti.
The WaPo article reports:
Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. . . Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” [emphasis added]
So, according to its key author Chakrabarti (AOC’s “brain”), the Green New Deal is not about climate change “at all.” The real agenda behind it is a socialist-Marxist-transformation of the United States, starting with a complete government takeover and regulation of the entire economy – essentially pounding the last nail in the coffin of what remains of free market capitalism.
At last count, the House resolution on the Green New Deal has been co-sponsored by six of the major 2020 presidential candidates: Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar.
This news got me to thinking about some of the major, if less widely-recognized, origins of the Green New Deal. The combination of “Green” with “New Deal” is significant. It was the revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the first socialist president, who promised a “New Deal” for America when he was running for the office in 1932 in the throes of the Great Depression. That’s what won the presidency for FDR in 1932 – much like Barack Obama rode a bad economy, or the perception of one, and the promises of “Hope” and “Change” to victory 76 years later.
As Diana West and other historians and authors have documented, the communists in our midst began their dirty work a century ago. The long march of Marxist ideas imported from Europe, that took root particularly in the labor movement and dark corners of academia in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, was interrupted during WW II and the prosperity and expansion of the post-war period when the U.S. became the leader of the Free World. Some Republican and Democrat politicians perceived the dangers that domestic communists were posing in the late 1940s, however, and tried to do something about the problem – personified by Sens. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) and Richard Nixon (R-Calif.), Rep. John E. Rankin (D-Miss.), and others.
After these efforts were stigmatized and dispatched as “witch hunts” and “blacklisting” by the Establishment, American communists regrouped and went forward. Their efforts were buttressed by a new generation of children born right before and during WW II (“Red diaper-doper babies”) and followed – significantly – by tens of millions of spoiled, impressionable Baby Boomers.
In the 1960s, the decade when the oldest Baby Boomers were coming of age, everything started to change. It was the decade that socialism of the Marxist-communist kind became turbo-charged – and like a stealth jet fighter was launched screaming into the future.
Not every leftist Baby Boomer, of course, was or became a card carrying communist. They were more like useful idiots. All that was required was an adjustment of many young people’s thinking to make them susceptible to feeling guilty about things like slavery, income inequality, and harming the planet. Post-adjustment, their brains became fertile ground for left wing manipulators. An appalling number would carry this sense of guilt – for being white, middle class, and/or successful – far into adulthood.
In 1962, a group of dedicated young Reds met at Port Huron, Michigan to plot the socialist-Communist takeover of the United States. Their vehicle was the radical group Students for A Democratic Society or SDS. This band of radical agitators, formed in 1960, was the U.S. equivalent of the small group of Bolshevik radicals that took over Russia a half a century earlier.
The SDS had learned a lot from the failures of the earlier generation of commies in the U.S. who had dabbled with attempts at violent revolution – all of them unsuccessful. The U.S. in the 1920’s and ‘30s – despite the Depression – still had a viable patriotic middle class, a strong Judeo-Christian foundation, and traditional family values. These qualities and an overwhelming sense of national unity essentially inoculated most Americans against communist influence.
The SDS meeting in 1962 in Michigan, which few took note of at the time except the participants and a handful of campus radicals, issued the Port Huron Statement. It was a manifesto calling for a revolution that would begin on college and university campuses and spread from there throughout American society.
The SDS had been founded in 1960 at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. According to Wikipedia:
SDS developed from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the youth branch of a socialist educational organization known as the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). LID descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, started in 1905.
The organizers of the SDS immediately distinguished themselves from the moribund and doctrinaire Old Left and saw their new campus-based model as the vanguard of a New Left. These modern communists derived inspiration from Fidel Castro’s triumph in taking over Cuba in 1959, the emerging Cultural Revolution in Mao Tse-Tung’s China, and the communists in North and South Vietnam fighting the U.S. and holding their own in the rapidly expanding Vietnam War.
At Port Huron in June 1962, among the participants was Tom Hayden (1939-2016). He was the principal author of the Port Huron Statement/SDS manifesto. A few years later, Hayden was one of the Chicago 8/7 radicals arrested and tried for fomenting the mob riots at the Democrat National Convention in August 1968 and for other crimes. In the next decade Hayden would go on to marry Hanoi Jane Fonda and get elected to multiple terms in the California State Assembly and Senate – serving a total of 18 years. During Jerry Brown’s first two terms as California Governor (1975-’83), Hayden was one of Brown’s key advisors on a variety of policy issues.
The photograph above speaks volumes. It vividly depicts the power and influence of two of the most prominent leftists (in the case of Tom Hayden, a communist agitator) at the highest levels of government. The setting is a speech by California Gov. Jerry Brown (at the microphone on the right) speaking to the California delegation at the 1976 Democratic National Convention in NYC. On the stage with Brown (L-R) are labor activist Cesar Chavez, U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston (bald head and eyes visible), SDS honcho and Chicago 7 trial defendant Tom Hayden, Mrs. Hayden a.k.a. Jane Fonda, and U.S. Sen. John Tunney (clapping his hands). Two of the most famous leftists-communists (Hanoi Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden) invited on the stage with the three most powerful politicians in the state of California – two sitting United States Senators and the Governor who himself had been a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination that year, coming in second to the victor Jimmy Carter. Photo above taken and © by Peter Barry Chowka.
Photo below: Three years after the photo above that was taken in 1976, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda had become two of Gov. Jerry Brown’s closest advisors. Here, on May 6, 1979, (L-R) Brown, Fonda, and Hayden are seen together standing on the Western portico of the United States Capitol building observing a massive No Nukes demonstration taking place below. All three of them addressed the radical gathering. Photo taken and © by Peter Barry Chowka.
In 1962 in its Port Huron Statement, the SDS targeted racism and established the meme of “participatory democracy” (i.e., putting an end to a Constitutional representative republic that is the basis of the United States). The organization also had its eye on the Democratic Party. Quoting the Port Huron Statement:
An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests.
Approximately 55 years later, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest socialist organization in the country, voted at its annual convention to support Democratic Party candidates for election as the best way to establish Socialism-Marxism in the United States. As I wrote in an article at The Epoch Times on August 8, 2018:
The DSA’s national convention in 2017 adopted three goals. The first two, endorsing Medicare for All and supporting organized labor, were pro-forma. The third one, however, outlined a bold new proposal to elect open socialists by running them as Democrats. [emphasis added.]
The 1962 SDS Port Huron statement prominently highlighted the need for “university reform.” Wikipedia:
The Port Huron Statement argued that because “the civil rights and peace and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent,” it should rally support and strengthen itself by looking to universities, which benefit from their “permanent position of social influence” and being “the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint.” [emphasis added.]
A large part of the success of propagandizing the masses – especially young people – to embrace socialism and then communism was facilitated by the Cultural Revolution – including sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll – that came to prominence in the 1960s. This axis of evil influences hypnotized and brainwashed young people, especially college students. It tore them away from their long-established moorings including their families, and also began the downfall of traditional Judeo-Christian religious faith that had been the cornerstone of the nation since its founding including the first English-speaking settlements here in the early 1600s.
Moving past the rest of the 1960s and ahead to 1970 – and something called Earth Day. . .
The first “Earth Day” took place on April 22, 1970. It was the brainchild of liberal Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.), a hero to the left who embraced a wide variety of far left positions. Nelson was an early environmentalist and a staunch opponent of the Vietnam War. In the fall of 1969, the so-called Moratoriums organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a.k.a. “The Mobe,” represented the high water mark of the massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Also in the fall of 1969, Sen. Nelson came up with the idea for Earth Day. He foresaw it as promoting local demonstrations and teach-ins advocating environmental awareness and action at high schools, colleges, and universities around the country. It was inspired by and modeled after the 1960s anti-war teach-ins on American campuses that successfully laid the groundwork for the ensuing anti-Vietnam War peace movement.
As the new decade of the 1970s dawned, America’s campuses had been primed for action, and the first Earth Day was a success. It continues annually to this day and has expanded worldwide. These early fledgling environmental activist actions on campuses, including Earth Day, planted the seeds for academia to gradually but inexorably take the lead in instilling and then spreading far left ideology and ideas throughout the mainstream of society – by corrupting the minds of the youth and influencing them in their subsequent careers. Riding the wave of feel-good environmentalism, they were among the first steps in the successful mainstreaming of radical left wing radicalism.
The colleges and universities of the ‘60s and ‘70s provided the perfect environment – a sociological petri dish – to successfully grow the new communist-inspired ideas including social justice; the division of Americans into hyphenated, racial, ethnic, and sexual special interest groups; and environmental activism.
The college I attended during that time was pretty conservative – more than most – at least when I arrived there. Most of the professors were conservative. But a new generation of profs, younger and more liberal and radical than the tenured professors, was moving in. Even though they were in the minority, the new leftists quickly became the most popular teachers. They were the ones who started dressing like the students. They listened to rock music, smoked dope, had parties for students at their off-campus apartments, and taught from the new left wing canon (think Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, Che Guevara, and Carlos Castaneda). They actively participated in the Cultural Revolution that was sweeping America, inspiring students by their example.
The first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970. It was an ad hoc, local, feel-good Age of Aquarius-type party on a nice day in early spring. I remember students at my campus sunning themselves on the lawns, listening to some speeches, throwing Frisbees, and sending off balloons into the blue sky. Environmental apocalypse seemed far away.
A significant coincidence, if not a profound subliminal connection, is that on April 29, 1970 – exactly seven days after the first Earth Day – the Nixon Administration launched the invasion of Cambodia, widely viewed as an expansion of the Vietnam War that President Nixon had promised to end. The Pentagon’s intent was to cut the supply lines of the enemy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, who were invading our ally, South Vietnam, using the adjacent neutral country of Cambodia.
As the news of the Cambodia incursion spread, all hell broke loose. The anger on campuses was palpable and violence ensued on many of them. The fierce opposition on the campuses led to a student strike that shut down hundreds of colleges and universities. Many of them cancelled classes and final exams for the rest of the spring semester. The situation escalated into barely controlled chaos from coast to coast. It may have been the closest the country had moved towards mass insurrection since the Civil War. The killing of four students by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4, 1970 during a demonstration against the Cambodia incursion further inflamed the opposition to Nixon’s actions.
Student radicals organized massive demonstrations and the largest one took place ten days after the invasion began – on Saturday, May 9, 1970 on the Ellipse near the White House. I was there and it was one of the largest demonstrations in memory, with around a half a million people.
Although the era of massive anti-Vietnam War demonstrations was coming to an end in 1970, many of the radicals who honed their organizing skills in the 1960s took the advice of the Port Huron Statement and set their sights on academia (SDS functionary and Weather Underground domestic terrorist Bill Ayers is a prime example). Other radicals went into politics (Hillary and Bill Clinton, Tom Hayden, Bobby Rush). And last but not least, a new generation of leaders – taking power later or moving into positions of prominence today – including Barack Obama, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the other three members of the “Squad,” and too many others to mention – are carrying the torch for what started in the 1960s. Much of it, based on environmental radicalism, took root in the 1960s, expanded over the years, and has now morphed into the Green New Deal – one of the greatest Trojan Horse threats to the future of the United States.
Peter Barry Chowka writes about politics, media, popular culture, and health care for American Thinker and other publications. Peter’s website is http://peter.media. Follow him on Twitter at @pchowka.
By Peter Barry Chowka
UPDATED: On July 25th (online) and 26th (in print), The Epoch Times published my fourth feature article in two weeks. The title, “The Democratic Party in 2018: At War With Itself?,” indicates the content.
The article is a detailed examination of how the Democratic Party has recently taken a sharp and shocking turn towards the socialist (Marxist) hard left.
Which is not to suggest that the Democratic Party has in recent decades, not been a party of the left. But there is a qualitative difference between the party of John F. Kennedy, Henry (Scoop) Jackson, Walter Mondale – and even Bill Clinton – and its standard bearers today. All four of these well-known and powerful politicians from the 1960s through the 1990s were considered to be among the leading liberals and moderates of their times. But they were more traditional classical liberals who governed or legislated from the center-left of the political spectrum.
Since the ascent to total power of Barack Hussein Obama and his thousands of acolytes in 2008, a long decade ago now, the inexorable march towards socialism (which is a mask for Marxism and communism) has picked up considerable speed.
In 2018, a critical mass has finally been achieved as the Democratic Party is now embracing candidates who openly proclaim that they are socialists first and Democrats second.
The latest figure to grab the golden ring of the Party’s approval is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her surprising victory over ten-term incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley in a June Democratic primary election for Congress in New York, with the aid of the mainstream media, instantly catapulted this 28-year-old newbie politician wannabe into the national spotlight.
And the rest, as they say, is now history – which is being made right before our eyes.
Due to copyright restrictions, my entire article for The Epoch Times cannot be republished here. However, following the introductory paragraphs of the article, below, there is a link to the complete article, which can be read online for free.
The Democratic Party in 2018: At War With Itself?
By Peter Barry Chowka © 2000-2018 by The Epoch Times
The current rise of an active socialist base in the Democratic Party has led some observers to describe what’s taking place as an intraparty civil war.
The Democrats began to move decidedly to the left a decade ago with Barack Obama’s election to the presidency. Between 2009 and 2017, President Obama governed further to the left than any previous president since Franklin Roosevelt.
There was little opposition from fellow Democrats.
The strong showing in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was another indication that a substantial part of the party—generally referred to as the base—had turned hard left.
More recently, the move to political center stage of Congressional candidate socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and her embrace by many leaders of the party including Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez, appear to presage an even more important role for socialism in the party’s future. . .
The complete article at The Epoch Times may be read by accessing this link.
By Peter Barry Chowka
EXCLUSIVE. Never before in the history of the United States has open socialism/Marxism been on the march to this degree and poised to amass such significant electoral power.
The recent victory of hardcore socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the New York Democrat Congressional Primary, the sudden ascendancy of scores of openly socialist candidates running for office (and increasingly being elected with more of their comrades being given favorable odds to win in the fall), and the accelerating drift of the Democrat Party towards full bore socialism and Marxism is a cause for deep concern. It must be taken seriously.
A previous example of an authoritarian fascist regime getting its start due to the results of democratic elections is the rise of dictator Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany in the early 1930s. By 1932 the Nazis were the largest political party in Germany’s Reichstag (Parliament) which gave them the power to compel the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor in January 1933. That opened the door to his amassing complete control not only of Germany but of much of Western Europe and governing for over a decade as a ruthless psychopathic dictator. The results over the next 12 ½ years – World War II in Europe and the Holocaust – are well-known. (Actually, maybe not as well-known as one might think. Recent surveys have shown that a significant number of Millennials are as dumb as rocks and don’t know anything about the Holocaust, World War II, or many other important milestone in history.)
The situation in the United States of America almost 90 years after the rise of Nazism in Germany is obviously unique. It is a totally different world now. Nevertheless, some potential parallels might be observed. The Nazis (National Socialists) began their rise as a thuggish group of outliers, criminals, and losers in the wake of Germany’s catastrophic loss of World War I in 1918. With economic and political conditions deteriorating during the 15 years that followed that war, the Nazis gradually enlarged their base of support and managed to elect a significant number of Nazi Party members to office by promising pie-in-the-sky government relief for the German people. They matched these Utopian appeals with street violence, dividing the country, and targeting certain groups, like Jews, for undeserved blame, marginalization, physical attacks, and, ultimately, extermination in death camps.
Does some of that sound at all similar to what’s going on today? In these times, Trump supporters, Christians, and anyone wearing a MAGA hat has been made an open target for shaming or worse – as violence especially in urban areas continues to tick upwards.
Right now, in dozens of major cities around the country, mobs of losers – masked Antifa thugs, Communists, Marxists, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and other riffraff – have taken over by force of numbers whole areas of central cities and declared them “Temporarily Autonomous Zones” that will be “occupied” by the camping mobs until their demands are met. The first demand of these “Occupy” groups, which is now supported by at least 36% of Democrats (and 45% of “liberals”) nationwide, is the end of ICE – the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency that tracks down, arrests, and deports criminal illegal aliens as well as investigates and enforces federal laws against drug smuggling, money laundering, and child trafficking.
In most of the affected cities, under the control of far left wing Democrat (aka Socialist) mayors, the illegal Occupy ICE tent encampments are being left undisturbed as the Democrats in charge express their support for the Occupy movement and facilitate its continuance. The occupants, meanwhile, are claiming that they are staying permanently in their encampments until their insane demands are fully met.
The Occupy ICE movement’s demands are not stopping with shutting down ICE. Other demands being openly advocated now include No Prisons, No Borders, No Trump, and presumably No Police. “We do not negotiate with fascists [police],” screams a militant tweet on July 11 from OccupyICEpdx [Portland]. Every communiqué put out by the Occupy groups ends with ¡Chinga la migra! – Spanish for “F-ck the migra.” Migra is the insulting word that illegal aliens and their dumb ass supporters use to describe U.S. customs and border enforcement officials. A statement from Occupy ICE Portland on July 7 posted on social media announced that the Occupy ICE movement is no longer eschewing violence as a method of achieving its goals.
Increasingly, individuals (usually white people associated with the Trump administration) are being targeted for harassment and even violently attacked (the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise and other Republican members of the House during a baseball practice in June 2017 is an example). A tweet by the DSA in Louisville on July 8 commented favorably on the latest harassment of the #1 Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, and his wife when they were eating dinner in a Louisville restaurant: “We’re so proud of the people of our city. Mitch does not deserve a meal in peace, and it’s clear that a grassroots movement is building across Louisville to make that a reality.” This is the organization that soon-to-be Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is a proud member of.
To date, apparently none of the high-profile instances of harassment of Trump administration officials or Republican office holders (McConnell, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kirstjen Nielsen, et al) has resulted in any arrests. The harassers appear to have total immunity from arrest and from being held accountable for their threatening actions.
This is perfectly in sync with the agenda of the insurrectionists who are running wild – and exerting a greater influence on Democrat pols. The move to completely decriminalize entering the country illegally is being matched by serious campaigns to do the same with U.S. lawbreakers, by closing prisons, restoring full rights, like the right to vote, to violent felons, ordering police to no longer arrest people for “minor” crimes (in an effort to reduce the numbers of “people of color” caught up in the criminal justice system), and otherwise fostering a jungle-like law free descent into the equivalent of Marxist Venezuela 2.0.
The gradual escalation of political and ideological disagreements to physical violence is a troubling trend, but it seems to be flying under the radar of the media, who may report some incidents but then either ignore the societal implications or give wink-wink tacit approval to the anti-social Social Justice Warrior (SJW) “direct actions.” Meanwhile, Marxist socialists and their fellow travelers increasingly approve of such obnoxious and even violent tactics.
This growing rag tag “movement” of native born collectivist dirt bags, layabouts, and slobs, and illegal aliens, almost all of of them surviving on some form of government assistance, would not be so troubling if its sick agendas were not being adopted by a cadre of slightly more presentable socialist politician wannabes (members of the DSA) who have cleaned up their act and are running for office and winning. Ocasio-Cortez is a case in point. An article in The Hill on July 11thdepicted most Democrats in Congress as already enthusiastically slobbering over and sucking up to Ocasio-Cortez while they look forward to her imminent arrival in D.C. – the “New Democratic Star.” One of her soon-to-be House colleagues, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) commented: “She’s going to be a rock star and a huge progressive force the first day she arrives.” The picture of these Democrat-Socialists fawning over this piece of – fill in the blank here – is absolutely nauseating.
Meanwhile, a crowd of leading Democrats, many of them Presidential wannabes – including Senators Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren – are advocating No ICE. A Democrat member of the House of Representatives has introduced legislation to close down ICE. The proposed law is steadily gaining support among his colleagues.
With the almost universal approval of the mainstream media propping up their radical movements, the socialists/communists are fanning out like a bunch of plague infested rats and infecting the body politic nationwide with their toxic, highly communicable brain eating disease. The DSA Heart of Iowa, for example, in a tweet on July 9th, crowed that:
Socialism will win on the coasts.
Socialism will win in the Midwest.
Socialism will win in the south.
Socialism will win in cities.
Socialism will win in small towns.
Socialism will win in rural America.
SOCIALISM WILL WIN.
In fact, socialists have reasons to celebrate recent victories in local elections in Montgomery County, Maryland (right next door to Washington, D.C.), Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. The Nation magazine, which has been advocating socialism and going easy on communism for 153 years, recently bragged “Socialism is on a Winning Streak.” Many references and examples were cited.
The commies (that name should suffice to describe this disparate group of seditious Fifth Column anti-American Marxists who are multiplying like cockroaches), emboldened with a new bravado, are predicting more of the same.
On July 9, NBC News (not whacko MSNBC), prominently featured an article by an elected socialist in Chicago, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, titled “Democrats ignore the left at their peril. Midwesterners aren’t scared of socialism — they’re hungry for it. Some members of the Democratic establishment argue that bold, left-wing platforms can’t win elections. They’re wrong.”
NBC News — once the home of iconic mainstream news anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley — is now serving as a mouthpiece to promote socialism!
The questions for all of us include: Where do we go from here? A further and faster descent into the communist morass? On the verge of full-blown insurrection or Civil War 2.0? God only knows.
Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. During the past year, he has been a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Every Monday at 9 PM ET, Peter offers political and media analysis live on The Hagmann Report. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.
