I’ve written several reports about a very specific case making its way through the US court system – Missouri v. Biden, et al, and the facts that are being uncovered that the government, legacy media, and social media platforms don’t want you to know.
See Government Censorship & Fauci Lies Documented in Latest Missouri et al. vs. Biden et al. Filing.
As reported by Tracy Beanz in an article titled The Lead Up to the Hearing: Missouri v. Biden, [t]he complaint alleged that the US Government was not only threatening and coercing social media companies to censor Americans on social media, but they were also working WITH social media companies to accomplish that goal.
Read more of Tracy Beanz stellar reporting here: Bombshell Court Order Outlines Proven Government/Big Tech Censorship.
Without fear of overstating the importance of the case, this is one of the most important civil liberties cases in American history.
READ / DOWNLOAD THE ORIGINAL FILING:
CISA and the FBI worked together to censor the Biden laptop story. NIAID and NIH conspired to censor the lab leak theory and the Great Barrington Declaration. NIAID is embedded in White House censorship activities. CISA and GEC coordinate with each other and with NGOs like the Election Integrity Project-
This isn’t a guess. They have the evidence. This happened.
And if you thought it stopped with just agencies, you would be wrong—high-level congressional staffers coordinated with the FBI and social media in secret meetings. The partnership between the White House and Congress gives coercive force to the censorship activities, and there are texts to prove it.
Tracy Beanz – Uncover DC
Read it all HERE
Yes, the government is coming for our guns. They want us disarmed, so they don’t have to worry about getting shot at when they go into “full Communist” mode. They hate that.
Yesterday, Joseph Robinette Biden used his yearly allotment of carbon credits by taking Air Force One to Monterey Park, California, to apparently exploit the victims of a January shooting. The Dick-Tater-in-Chief, believing he has the ability to not only govern by executive fiat, amend the US Constitution with the stroke of a pen, and use the US Office of the Attorney General as his own private, weaponized army (oops, already happened), stated the following:
“My executive order directs my Attorney General to take every lawful action possible to move us… to universal background checks without legislation.”
Joey “six-shooter” Biden
According to the White House:
“Specifically, the President is directing the Attorney General to move the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation by clarifying, as appropriate, the statutory definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms, as updated by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.“
White House Fact Sheet
Of course, Hunter Biden documented himself allegedly violating the rules and has yet for his (alleged) crimes that he recorded to his own laptop.
Under the executive order, Biden is also directing Attorney General Merrick Garland to develop and implement a plan to prevent former federally licensed firearms dealers, whose licenses have been revoked or surrendered, from continuing to engage in the business of dealing in firearms.
By Peter Barry Chowka
EXCLUSIVE.
“These are the times that try men’s souls .” At the time of the American Revolution (1776), English-born American patriot, revolutionary activist, and pamphleteer Thomas Paine wrote those words in his influential broadside, Common Sense.
His words seem applicable to these current times. His writings back then helped to inspire action and ultimately a revolution. Now, effective action on the part of traditionalists-conservatives-patriots to restore the nation seems like it may not be possible.
On Monday, July 2, I went looking for new updates about the Occupy Portland ICE situation which I was following so closely last week and wrote three major articles about. Please read them here (Part 1), here (Part 2), and here (Part 3). It has taken a lot of work to get the story straight. Basically, as of today (July 3, 2018) the left wing status quo prevails. The encampment of hundreds of radical leftists outside Portland ICE HQ is still in place. It looks like it is going to be allowed to stay there indefinitely. The occupiers pledge that they are not going home until they and their “comrades” (yes, comrades) achieve total victory in shutting down ICE along with their other objectives. Read on.
The efforts of the left wing Communist Occupy zealots to close down ICE, is accompanied by their demands to close down the prisons and open the borders. It proceeds unimpeded. Portland, Oregon a.k.a. The People’s Republic of Portland is Ground Zero in this crazy pro-Communist effort that has now spread to many cities nationwide. Incredibly, many prominent mainstream Democrat politicians across the country are increasingly supporting these insane radical positions. Member in good standing of the Democratic Socialists of America Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in a Congressional primary election in New York last week is the tip of the spear in that regard. She openly supports no Ice, no borders, free health care, free college education, allowing illegal aliens invaders to stay here and import their large families with full benefits, and the impeachment of President Trump.
The shocking and obscene radical banner above about an ongoing occupy action in New York City is featured on the Portland Abolish I.C.E. PDX Twitter page. It calls for “no prisons no ICE no borders” and adds “chinga la migra” which translates as “f—k migra.” The word migra is a derogatory Spanish language slur for U.S. immigration officers often used by illegal aliens.
What accounts for these insane Communist positions becoming mainstream in the United States? One could cite many factors. An influential but often overlooked one is the profound demographic shift that has taken place in the United States of America.
Starting in the 1960s, at the hands of Democrat politicians when they controlled the Congress with veto proofmajorities, changes in immigration law kicked off that demographic shift. Slowly at first but later turbocharged by subsequent globalist administrations over the course of four or five decades, the country went from a majority of residents who traced their ancestry to Great Britain and European countries to a near majority of individuals from Mexico, Latin America, Africa, and other s—thole countries. That is an honest if politically incorrect description of the demographic shift. It is confirmed by accounts like the following published in the mainstream media with little notice.
According to Newsweek June 22, 2017, in an article titled “Will America Remain White? More Non-Hispanic Whites Died Than Were Born in U.S. Last Year:”
The non-Hispanic white population was the only race or ethnic group to experience more deaths than births between July 2015 and July 2016, according to data released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Over the same time period, the Asian and Hispanic populations saw the largest increases, as the United States continues to become more diverse.
From the Baltimore Sun August 8, 2017, “Whites Will Soon Be the Minority in Number:”
The U.S. population has been predominantly white since the founding of Jamestown in 1607. As late as 1950, whites accounted for about 90 percent of the nation’s population, according to U.S. Census figures. But in the past six decades, whites’ share of the overall population has dropped to 61 percent. . . In certain places this [population shift to minority-majority] is already underway. Hawaii and the District of Columbia became majority-minority in 1980, California and New Mexico in 2000, Texas in 2004, and Nevada last year. The white share of Nevada’s population plunged from 83.2 percent in 1980 to 49.9 percent in 2016. Nonwhites are drivers of the demography of the national and state populations. For example, nonwhites accounted for nearly 96 percent of the 14.4 million people added to the U.S. population between 2010 and 2016. Latinos were responsible for close to half of the national growth. The white population rose by just over 650,000 during the six-year period, making up only about 4 percent of the increase. [Emphasis added]
These statistics, published in mainstream publications, are based on official U.S. Census statistics. They deserve serious consideration.
If the trends continue – and they surely will – the United States will be a totally different country soon. In fact, it already is. It is no longer the country whose people cheered when Democrat President John F. Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, on January 20, 1961, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
Today, Democrats demand free health care, free college tuition, and, increasingly, free guaranteed annual income for everyone in the country including illegal aliens! And they want to impeach the duly elected 45thPresident of the United States, Donald J. Trump. The political platform of the Communist Party USA is close to being totally implemented in the country without a shot being fired.
As 2018 reaches its halfway point and we are on the eve of what should be a solemn and meaningful holiday, the 4th of July, Independence Day, a declining audience of mostly aging white people of European origin, with a very few independent-minded people of color thrown in, even pays attention to the meaning of the holiday. They are the ones who read the articles in publications like American Thinker, the Hagmann Report, and similar outlets, but little can be done to change the country’s direction. Too many people approve of that transformation, as President Barack Hussein Obama described it – the inexorable slide downward into Third World status that seems to be picking up speed. The power of the state is simply too great to resist. It is orders of magnitude greater than the power of the British occupiers during the Revolutionary War. And these days, despite President Trump being in the White House, most individual state power is aligned with the increasingly radical left – because the Shadow Government and the Deep State remain in power positions in many cases behind the scenes and in a lot of cases now, also quite openly feel comfortable in carrying out their dirty seditious deeds.
What’s happening in the numerous cities where anti-ICE actions are going forward is emblematic. Politicians and even police departments in those cities are now on the side of the lawbreakers, whether they are the occupiers or illegal aliens – or even criminal illegal aliens who are members of gangs like MS-13. Nancy Pelosi recently defended members of the savage murderous Latino MS-13 gang as children of God who should not be called names. The criminal illegal alien, previously convicted of 7 felonies and deported from the U.S. a half a dozen times, who killed Kate Steinle by shooting her dead on a pier in San Francisco was acquitted by an American jury on all charges relating to her death (which his defense lawyer admitted he was responsible for) in an act of jury nullification. Leftists supported and praised the jury’s verdict.
Last weekend, a small group of conservatives obtained a permit for a legal march in the city of Portland and a rally. There were only about 150 of them. A violent mob of Antifa goons showed up, wearing masks, black clothing, and helmets and carrying weapons, and descended on the legal march. What the police and media called a “riot” ensued and the coverage depicted the scene as “antifascist” demonstrators challenging an extreme right wing group as if the latter, peacefully and legally marching, were the cause. It was a text book example of Fake News reporting. This was the case both in mainstream print and Internet publications and Sunday evening on the CBS TV nationwide network news broadcast. It’s as if the Daily Worker (the house organ of the Communist Party USA) was ghost-writing the reporting.
An excerpt from Fortune, May 23, 2017:
Two years ago, two married Princeton professors, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, released an alarming study, showing that white middle-aged Americans were suddenly dying much more frequently than in the past. The results were surprisingly given that mortality rates for the U.S. population had in general been falling since 1900.
The authors partly blamed what they called “deaths of despair”—deaths from alcohol and drug poisoning, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis, which have risen dramatically for whites.
Happy Fourth of July, America. I hope that it’s not our last.
Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. He is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Peter is scheduled to make his next video Skype appearance on The Hagmann Report on Thursday, July 5, 2018 between 8-9 PM EDT. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.
By Peter Barry Chowka
“The idea that (Trump) was in cahoots with Moscow, ridiculous.” — Vladimir Bukovsky 2019
Vladimir Bukovsky, the most famous surviving anti-communist Soviet dissident, has passed away. The sad news broke almost simultaneously early Sunday evening EDT in a tweet from journalist Diana West at 6:07 PM and in a news release emailed by Elizabeth Childs of the Bukovsky Center at 6:34 PM. This reporter was also one of the first to report the news on Twitter at 7:11 PM EDT on Sunday October 27th.
In poor health in recent years, Bukovsky, age 76, according to Childs had died of cardiac arrest at Addenbrookes Hospital near his home in Cambridge, England on Sunday evening at 9:30 PM local time in the UK.
In the 24 hours following Bukovsky’s death, his passing was taken note of in feature articles and obituaries by most of the world’s major media, including the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian.
Bukovsky had lived in the West since he was traded for a Chilean communist in a swap in Zurich in 1976. Before his release to freedom, he had spent a dozen years locked up in the old Soviet Union in prisons, gulags, and mental institutions.
The announcement of Bukovsky’s death emailed by Childs, and posted as an obituary at the Bukovsky Center’s Web site, summarized his life as a dissident in the Soviet Union and his achievements since his departure from the USSR in 1976:
A leading Russian human rights writer and activist, Bukovsky spent a total of 12 years imprisoned by the USSR. After his release to the West in 1976, he spent his last four decades writing and campaigning against successive regimes in his homeland.
Bukovsky first gained notoriety as a student writer and organizer in Moscow. In 1963, he was arrested for possessing forbidden literature. Rather than put him on trial, Soviet authorities had him declared mentally ill and locked him in a psychiatric hospital — a common tactic used in the USSR to discredit dissenters and confine them without appearing to be holding political prisoners. He was arrested again in 1967 and sent to a labor camp for three years.
After his release, Bukovsky created an international uproar when he had psychiatric hospital records for six well-known dissidents smuggled to the West in 1971. International psychiatrists’ organizations studied the records and charged Soviet doctors and the government with creating false diagnoses as a way to indefinitely detain possibly thousands of political opponents who showed no medically recognized symptoms of mental illness.
A gifted writer, Bukovsky was revered for his ability to document both the daily insults and grand oppression of Soviet prison life, and to convey with detail the soul-crushing effects of torture on both prisoner and jailer.
In 2019, one of Bukovsky’s most substantive works, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity, was finally published in English in the United States for the first time by Ninth of November Press. It had been scheduled for publication in the U.S. in the 1990s, but never came out. Meanwhile, it was published in England and a number of European countries including, ironically, Russia. The book is based on internal Soviet era documents that Bukovsky got his hands on and managed to copy and smuggle out of Russia when he visited the former USSR under Boris Yelstsin’s post-communist regime in the early 1990s. The 2019 English language version of Judgment in Moscow brought renewed attention to Bukovsky, and he was interviewed at length earlier this year by several leading American journalists, including Celia Farber, who wrote two extensive articles for the Epoch Times, one of them a Q & A that she had on the phone with Bukovsky.
Farber’s articles (here and here), and three lengthy interviews with Bukovsky by Jay Nordlinger published in the National Review (here, here, and here), really need to be read in their entirety to get a full appreciation of the richness in experience and analysis of this man who never sold out his principles.
Asked about the left’s ongoing charges of collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump, Bukovsky told Farber:
Mind you, the idea that he was initially somehow in cahoots with Moscow, ridiculous. I mean he is doing his thing, with some limitations in his understanding of Russia. But calling him a Moscow agent is ridiculous. You might like or dislike him. He has strong character, not very critical of himself, and so forth, but to suggest that he is Moscow’s agent is absolutely ridiculous. . . The president is limited by legislation, by Congress, by whatever. It’s not in his power to change the course of the country as much as they suggest. The president is only an executive officer and that’s it.
Following the news of Bukovsky’s death, journalist Diana West immediately employed her prolific Twitter account to share her thoughts about Bukovsky in a series of incisive tweets and an appreciation of him posted at her Web site. West wrote:
How do we mark the consequence and courage of such an extraordinary man who chose to lead his life in outspoken opposition to evil, who chose to sacrifice years of his life in Soviet labor camps and psychiatric hospitals rather than submit to communist slavery?
In many ways, Diana West is a Western intellectual counterpart to Bukovsky. Her scholarship, especially in her 2013 book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character and more recently in The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, has shed considerable new light on the decades-long collusion between many influential political and cultural leaders of the United States and the old Soviet Union. As Farber concluded after speaking with Bukovsky:
Sen. Joseph McCarthy, it turns out, was correct, but was the wrong messenger, and wound up derailing the cause of anti-communist awareness for half a century.
For more information, the Bukovsky Center Web site, run by volunteers, has been updated with news of Bukovsky’s passing and will be an ongoing source of information.
A two-minute film clip of a clandestine 1970 video interview with Bukovsky in a park outside Moscow, with the caption “The man on camera [Bukovsky] risks his life by speaking,” has been posted as a memoriam to him at YouTube here. It is highly recommended viewing.
As I wrote in an email of condolence to my friend Elizabeth Childs of the Bukovsky Center:
The death of someone who I respect, even if I never met him, usually stops me in my tracks, occasions deep thoughts, and is ultimately rather depressing. . . When you think of what Bukovsky lived through, and survived, it really is astonishing. Re-reading his 2019 interviews Sunday, it was so clear that his perspective today was grounded in a life of truly amazing and unique experiences and was so valuable.
[An earlier version of this article was originally published at American Thinker on October 28, 2019.]
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.
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.
