The Avakian cult invades UCLA

As if America’s colleges – especially those in the University of California system – weren’t already in the grip of far-left political ideas, members of the Revolutionary Communist Party of America targeted UCLA earlier this month with an aggressive recruiting campaign. As Arik Schneider reported at Campus Reform, they descended upon the campus dorms, where they “set up signs, handed out flyers, and wrote out chalk markings.” They ignored orders to cease and desist, staying at the dorms for hours spreading their call for “an actual overthrow of the system” through an armed “proletarian revolution” and replacement of the current government a “New Socialist Republic of North America.”

Of course if you’re a regular reader of this site you know who would be in charge of that “socialist republic”: Bob Avakian, who, as we’ve seen, started his career as a Stalin- and Mao-loving community organizer in northern California, where he tried to win workers over to Communism. In 1968, he and some pals founded the Revolutionary Union, which a few years later, under his sole leadership, became the RCP. Avakian is the real deal: visiting China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, when millions were being executed by the state for the crime of ideological impurity, he pronounced it “wondrous”; in the decades since Mao’s death, Avakian and his party have persistently proclaimed Mao’s – and Stalin’s – greatness and, bemoaning the collapse of the Soviet Union and the watering-down of Chinese Communism, have declared that they, the RCP, are Communism’s true torch-bearers, and that Bob himself is Stalin’s and Mao’s natural heir.

If it sounds like a creepy personality cult, that’s because it is. RCP members are typically worshipers at Bob’s throne, proclaiming the urgency of armed insurrection one minute and the greatness of Avakian the next. Yet Bob isn’t just some marginal clown who has given a bunch of losers somebody to look up to and persuaded them to spend their time barging onto college campuses and handing out his flyers. He has friends and admirers whose names you know. A couple of years ago, when he placed an ad in major newspapers protesting Trump’s “Fascist America,” the signatories included actors Ed Asner and Debra Messing, comic Margaret Cho, playwright Eve Ensler, director John Landis, and novelist Alice Walker. Cornel West is a buddy of Bob’s, and Michael Eric Dyson is a fan.

How did the recruiting effort at UCLA go? The good news is that even many left-leaning students at UCLA, including some for whom Marxism is an attractive concept, recognize RCP for what it is and want nothing to do with it. “I’m a Democrat and I absolutely cannot stand the Trump/Pence administration but these people are out of their minds!” a sophomore biochem major, Jenai Blazina, told Schneider. But she added, rather unsettlingly: “I want to think they’re harmless fools but they keep recruiting more and more people.” One wonders how many new members the RCP found at UCLA. Never underestimate the degree to which ideas that seem to you insane and extreme can gain the allegiance of people whom you think of as intelligent and sensible. Today’s laughable crackpot can be tomorrow’s dictator.

Posted on May 23, 2019May 15, 2019 by usefulstooges 3

Felarca redux: justice at last?

We first reported on Yvette Felarca on April 17. She’s a leader of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), a gang of Trotskyite thugs – and associates of the Revolutionary Communist Party – who keep themselves busy by rallying, rioting, brawling, making noise, setting fires, breaking stuff, and, on occasion, engaging in activities that both the FBI and Defense Department have labeled acts of terrorism. She’s also a teacher at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School in the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in Berkeley, California.

In June 2016, when white supremacists held a rally outside the California State Capitol in Sacramento, Felarca took part in a mass counter-protest that sent ten people to the hospital with stab wounds and led to over 200 arrests. According to media reports, Felarca herself “shoved a man to the ground,” punched a man in the stomach, and yelled “Get the fuck off our streets.” She was arrested, and outraged parents of kids at her school called for her dismissal, but of course the school kept her on, with a BUSD spokesman explaining, “We don’t have any authority or business to judge what an employee does in her off time.”

Milo Yiannopoulos: genocidal lynch-mob racist?

So Felarca kept her Berkeley job. If anyone hoped she had learned a lesson from the parental complaints, that hope was dashed in February of last year when she and other BAMN members rioted and rampaged in Berkeley itself. Their goal was to shut down a planned speech by conservative Milo Yiannopoulos, whom they accused of trying “to shut up and put in our places women or Muslims or minorities” and “trying to assert their power, threaten us, intimidate us, rape us, kill us.”

In reality, Yiannopoulos is just a man with opinions who goes around giving speeches. He does not commit acts of violence. So far as we know, he has never threatened anyone or raised his hand against anyone, let alone tried to rape or kill. Felarca and her crew are the ones who act like savages. And that’s what they did in Berkeley that day – they destroyed property, threw stuff at cops, and, in fact, ultimately forced the cancellation of Yiannopoulos’s speech.

Jesse Arreguín, mayor of Berkeley and BAMN member

But Felarca still kept her job.

For anyone who knows Berkeley, the refusal of local officials to fire this dangerous Communist firebrand was not really all that surprising. As it turned out, indeed, the mayor of Berkeley himself, Jesse Arreguín, is a member of BAMN and a friend of Felarca’s.

Shortly after her big day in Berkeley, Felarca appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program. On the show, she charged Yiannopoulos, a gay man (who, as it happens, is now married to a black man), with telling “racist, misogynistic, and homophobic lies,” with organizing “a movement of genocide,” and with stirring up a “lynch mob mentality.”

Felarca herself routinely commits actual violence, but here she was raising the spectre of lynching and genocide in her attacks on a man whose only weapon is his voice. In an apparent call for the suspension of the First Amendment, she insisted that Yiannapoulos needed to be “shut down.”

Sunsara Taylor’s perpetual revolution

Sunsara Taylor, whom we’ve been discussing this week, is currently telling anyone who will listen that Donald Trump is a fascist, worse than Hitler, who will gradually introduce a cruel dictatorship and maybe even destroy the entire planet in a nuclear Armageddon. You might induce from this that Taylor cherishes American freedom and sees Trump as a disastrously departure from the previous occupants of the Oval Office. Um, no. Last year, long before the election of Trump as president seemed even a remote possibility, Taylor was on the warpath against the American system. Along with her Revolutionary Communist Party comrade Carl Dix, as we saw yesterday, she set out on a national tour of college campuses with a goal of recruiting revolutionaries and overthrowing the government. The press release announcing the tour read, in part:

This world cries out for radical change….

A radically different and far better world is possible—getting rid of this madness and horror, and getting beyond a world of oppression, exploitation, and domination. This will take an Actual Revolution.

“Revolution” and “socialism” are in the air…But a real revolution—one that aims to change the world—is radically different and, yes, more demanding. A real revolution requires a scientific understanding of society and how to radically change it. That science has been qualitatively developed by the revolutionary leader, Bob Avakian. We’re coming to your campus to get into this with you.

The tour appears to have been something less than a spectacular success. Witness a report by Columbia University student journalist Micah Fleck. “Though flyers spangled the hallways and scaffolding of Columbia’s campus promoting Carl Dix and Sunsara Taylor for Months,” wrote Fleck, “fewer than two dozen students attended their April 13 talk in a room that can seat more than 200.”

But Taylor didn’t let the pathetically low turnout defeat her. Referring to the cause, quite simply, as “The Revolution,” she and Dix presented a “new constitution,” which the RCP had helpfully published in book form in 2010. (It can be read in its entirely – 104 pages – here.) Taylor told her cozy audience that her movement sought to bring about “a world without America and everything America stands for.”

As we’ve noted, no matter what the name of the group or the specific cause du jour, Taylor has always been nothing more or less than an operative for the RCP. And her specific groups and movements and campaigns have never been anything other than efforts to enhance the RCP’s influence and power. And, above all, to raise the profile of Bob Avakian. Even a relatively sympathetic student, Pier Harrison, who attended one of her events at New York University in February 2010, was taken aback by the fact that she spoke “with cult-like reverence for party Chairman Bob Avakian.”

Harrison reported that “[b]etween Taylor’s speech and the Q&A[,] staff sent around collection baskets, just like in Church, for donations to support her tour, and the goals of the RCP.” Harrison asked moderator Annie Day, also an RCP member, whether she, Taylor, and their comrades “intended to stage a violent or non-violent revolution. Her response: violent.

So, would there be bloodshed? Day replied: “Revolution is a serious business. This is not just the frustrations of individuals. We are not pacifists. So to answer your question, yes.” Harrison wrote: “The most mind-blowing part of this whole event was realizing that by ‘revolution’ they mean that they are willing to kill people.” He also suggested that “the RCP has hijacked the feminist agenda to further its own will to power, which, again, they do not hide.” He was certainly correct about that. Whether the issue is war or women’s rights or the Trump presidency, the business of the RCP – with Sunsara Taylor as its public face and voice – is hijacking, pure and simple.

Posted on March 31, 2017March 26, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Sunsara Taylor’s war on “the war on women”

We’re spending this week in the constantly agitating company of tireless activist Sunsara Taylor, a longtime member of Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party. Over the years, she’s been the public face of a number of different groups purportedly dedicated to fighting different injustices. These days, as we’ve seen, she’s a spokeswoman for Refuse Fascism, which seeks to unseat President Trump (who, she argues, is worse than Hitler) and replace him with (who else?) Bob Avakian. Years ago, as we saw yesterday, she was involved in End Pornography and Patriarchy, a bold campaign to end America’s “war on women,” which, again, only Avakian could put a stop to.

Another group on Taylor’s résumé was “The World Can’t Wait,” which was active around 2007 and which was one of many organizations protesting America’s war in Iraq. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel that the real point of “The World Can’t Wait” was to bring in members who were motivated by antiwar sentiments as a first step toward recruiting them into the RCP. Taylor “spoke at over 50 campuses” in an effort to “Drive Out the Bush Regime” and thus bring an end to the war. In connection with this antiwar effort, she and her colleagues also made a practice of shouting down politicians who were trying to deliver speeches. “The World Can’t Wait” made a good deal of noise during George W. Bush’s presidency but seems to have disappeared into the ether by the time Barack Obama took office.

But Taylor didn’t go away. After putting in a good few months trying to stop America’s wars in the Middle East, she shifted gears and threw herself, heart and soul, into an effort to rid the planet of religion. This movement was tied in with the publication of Avakian’s 2008 book Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World. Just as “The World Can’t Wait” seemed to be a transparent attempt to exploit the antiwar movement to gain RCP converts, so Away With All Gods and the attendant activism comes off as a painfully obvious effort to swell RCP ranks by piggybacking onto the then-hot atheism movement spearheaded by Christopher Hitchens, whose bestseller God Is Not Great had come out in 2007, and Richard Dawkins, whose The God Delusion appeared in 2008.

Last year found Taylor involved in yet another crusade. In the months prior to the election that put Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Taylor was busy helping to run the RCP’s “Get into the Revolution Organizing Tour.” Along with her RCP comrade Carl Dix, she traveled from campus to campus around the U.S., trying to convince students “to become communists and kill off America.” On to that triumph tomorrow.

Posted on March 30, 2017March 30, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

Fighting for Communism: Sunsara Taylor

As we saw yesterday, Sunsara Taylor is very worked up about the election of Donald Trump. She and her colleagues in a group called Refuse Fascism warn that he’s as bad as Hitler – no, worse! – and call on the entire country to take to the streets and force him out of power. Rarely has any guest on a political interview show seemed as close to outright hysteria as Taylor did on Tucker Carlson Tonight one night in mid February.

SONY DSC — Taylor and friends on the warpath

It’s a shame, because before Trump entered the White House, Taylor was just a quiet housewife who – no, just kidding. In fact, Taylor has spent at least the last decade being splenetic over something or other. Before Refuse Fascism, there were other groups with other names. The complaint varied from group to group. But the rage was always there. The prescription for change was always the same: to bring people out into the streets, screaming and protesting and committing acts of vandalism. And the ultimate goal was always identical – a society living under Communism, Bob Avakian style, with Bob’s Revolutionary Communist Party calling the shots and Bob himself installed as Beloved Leader.

“I’m fighting for Communism,” Taylor said, quite straightforwardly, in a 2010 public appearance. She was quick to acknowledge that historic Communism had erred a bit once or twice, but she assured her audience that Avakian’s supposedly new and improved version of Communism would work out terrifically.

Anyway, on to Refuse Fascism’s forerunners. One of them was End Pornography and Patriarchy, a movement to eliminate what Taylor described as “The Enslavement and Degradation of Women.” While Trump was still busy making real-estate deals and videotaping episodes of his NBC series The Apprentice, Taylor was getting apoplectic over what she called America’s “war on women.” Of course, according to her there was only one way to stop this “war on women”: to take to the streets, bring down the government, and replace constitutional democracy with “the new synthesis on [sic] revolution and communism developed by Bob Avakian.”

In one of her harangues about “the war on women,” Taylor issued an “urgent call” to all and sundry, young people especially, “who are uncompromising and defiant in their refusal to accept and their determination to defeat the current war on women.” Inviting the members of her audience to join her in “a new movement…that aims to affect all of society” and “change people’s thinking” and “seize back the moral high ground…throughout every corner of society,” Taylor urged them “to go out into the streets…to unmask the horrors that people have grown accustomed to” and “go forward from there until we win.” As part of her campaign, Taylor defended late-term abortion, implying in one video that a fetus doesn’t look like a human baby until after it’s born.

sunsaratexas — Taylor being placed under arrest in Texas

One anecdote from 2012 is illuminating. While pro-life activists were holding a street protest during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Taylor and some of her comrades showed up. “They were carrying signs and blowing whistles,” 11-year-old Zoe Griffin told a reporter. “They were jumping around and chanting things like ‘A baby’s not a baby ’til it comes out, that’s what birthdays are all about.’” They were also waving signs that read “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology.” “They were acting like five-year-old children,” Griffin said. When Taylor saw Griffin and other pro-lifers who themselves were praying while holding signs that read “I’m a person” and that featured images of fetuses, she began screaming at them, pointing to one after another while saying “You’re a person! You’re a person!” When she got to Griffin, she said, “Fetuses are not.” But that wasn’t enough. Taylor told Griffin “you’re a stupid kid.” When Griffin broke into tears, Taylor turned to the adult pro-lifers, including Griffin’s mother, and said: “Look what you’re doing to this little girl with all your bullshit. You’re making this little girl cry!”

More tomorrow.

Posted on March 29, 2017March 26, 2017 by usefulstooges 2

The Maoist behind decades of race riots

While Bob Avakian has worked hard to make himself the mystery man at the head of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), his co-founder, Carl Dix, who serves at party spokesman, has been the RCP’s public face. He’s led a career crowded with varied activities, though his ideological compass has remained constant: he’s always supported Maoist and Stalinist revolutions (in, for example, Nepal, Peru, and the Philippines), always expressed solidarity with convicted cop-killers (such as Mumia Abu Jamal and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, né H. Rap Brown), always been determined to stir up violence against the police. As his bio at the RCP website puts it, he “believes in world revolution” and “has actively opposed U.S. imperialism” throughout his career.

In 1981 he moderated an event called the “Mass Proletarian War Crimes Tribunal,” which pretended to prosecute the U.S. government for its purported imperialism and international atrocities. That same year, when some of the Americans who’d been held hostage in Tehran for over a year sued the governments of the U.S. and Iran for damages in a Los Angeles court, Dix and a group of his followers were outside the courthouse accusing the hostages of war crimes.

(FILE FOOTAGE) April 29, 2012 marks the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots, when a jury acquitted three white and one hispanic LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King following a high-speed pursuit. Thousands of people rioted in LA over the six days following the verdict. — An image from the 1992 L.A. riots

In 1992, Dix led a group of RCP agitators who played a key role in instigating the riots in Los Angeles that followed the verdict in the Rodney King case. Flyers distributed throughout the city carried a message signed by Dix calling on blacks to react to the verdict by waging “revolutionary war.” Not only did Dix and his comrades instigate the riots – they took part in them, looting stores and committing arson at several locations around L.A. Before the L.A. riots were over, more than 2300 people had been injured and 58 had lost their lives. (As one news source wrote at the time, the RCP had been “’working’ the various ethnic and immigrant groups for years” and during that time had celebrated every May Day by whipping up violent confrontations with the police.)

carl-dix-600x330 — Carl Dix and Cornel West

Dix has long worked in partnership with the so-called public intellectual Cornel West, a former professor at Harvard and Princeton. Together they led a successful campaign to end the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, which had helped make New York the safest large city in the United States. In 2011, they founded the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN) to “stop the slow genocide of mass incarceration” and “the police murder of Black, Latino and other oppressed peoples.”

dixferguson — Dix and friends in Ferguson

In 2014, it was Dix & co. that fomented riots in New York City, Oakland, and Ferguson, Missouri, after the grand jury decided not to prosecute police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, a black man. Innumerable protesters in these cities carried signs bearing the RCP’s web address, and Dix himself was on the ground in Ferguson, where flyers bearing Dix’s byline described Wilson as a “murdering pig” and called on the public to block traffic, take over university buildings, stay away from work, and so on.

30tarantino-facebookjumbo — Dix and Quentin Tarantino marching together against “killer cops”

In 2015, when police officers from around the U.S. called for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie because the director had described cops as murderers, Dix came to Tarantino’s defense, comparing the police to Mafiosos.

Last year he led a group that burned a flag outside the Republican National Convention, explaining helpfully to a reporter that the action was a “political statement about the crimes of the American empire. There’s nothing great about America.”

Posted on February 10, 2017February 4, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

Debra Messing’s favorite Maoist?

This week we’ve been covering the life of Bob Avakian, longtime head of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP). An ardent promoter of the ideas of Stalin and Mao, he’s been a staple of the left ever since the 1960s.

bob-avakian-and-cornel-west-in-harlem — Bob Avakian with Cornel West at Riverside Church

And he’s still out there slugging. In November 2014, Avakian broke with his longtime secretiveness to appear onstage with his good buddy Cornel West, the former Princeton and Harvard professor and frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. The event took place at Riverside Church in New York City and was billed as a discussion about “Revolution and Religion.”

In fact, there was less discussion than there was haranguing by Avakian. After being introduced by his underling Carl Dix, who told the audience that the RCP leader had “brought forward a new synthesis of Communism,” Avakian – in the windy oratorical tradition of Fidel Castro and any number of other Communist dictators – stood at a lectern and ranted for two hours straight without saying anything particularly interesting or original. (Israel, he charged, is guilty of “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.”) Then he and Cornel West sat down together and talked for almost two more hours, with Avakian, again, taking up most of the time pontificating. The RCP paid $70,000 for a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting the event.

In June 2015, a student journalist at Harvard, Gram Slattery, probed the RCP, which drew his interest because of its bookstore in Harvard Square. Despite efforts to arrange an interview with the Dear Leader, he didn’t get to meet Avakian, but did get a sit-down with another party leader who, echoing RCP doctrine, dismissed the “narrative that Mao was a mass murderer, that he was personally responsible for 50 to 100 million deaths,” and asserted that Avakian “has dedicated himself to looking at what actually happened” in Mao’s China. Avakian, stated the RCP member, is “precious for humanity.” The RCP, reported Slattery, clung fast to “its reverence for Mao” and its defense of Stalin. (In the party’s view, “the Soviet Union went downhill once Khrushchev took over.”) Slattery also pointed out that the RCP, for a long time, had regarded Peru’s Shining Path terrorists – who “executed thousands of peasants and even took to torturing deviant Marxists in the early ’90s” – as role models.

Avakian ain’t down yet. He and his party have made a big splash since the election of Donald Trump. It was the RCP that was behind a widely published campaign to stop a Trump presidency before the inauguration.The centerpiece was an ad headlined “We REFUSE to accept a Fascist America!” It was signed by (among others) actor Ed Asner, activist Bill Ayers, comedian Margaret Cho, playwright Eve Ensler, director John Landis, actress Debra Messing, novelist Alice Walker, and (of course) Cornel West. One wonders how many of them knew they were part of an initiative run by unreconstructed Maoists.

To promote the campaign, West and RCP co-founder Carl Dix appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News on January 5. You can watch the interview below. Perhaps the highlight was when Dix likened Trump to Hitler. Interesting words indeed from a representative of a party that still celebrates the glorious legacies of Stalin and Mao.

Which, by the way, brings us to the question: what is Carl Dix’s story? We’ll get to him tomorrow.

Posted on February 9, 2017February 4, 2017 by usefulstooges 1

America’s #1 Commie

Cornel West, the former Harvard and Princeton professor and author of Race Matters, has called him “a long distance runner in the freedom struggle against imperialism, racism and capitalism.” Howard Zinn, the late author of A People’s History of the United States, praised his memoir as “a humanizing portrait of someone who is often seen only as a hard-line revolutionary.” Among his other admirers are Georgetown University sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson, the author of Race Rules, and activist Cindy Sheehan.

The man in question? Bob Avakian, longtime chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP). Now 73, he’s been a veritable Zelig of the American far left, described in a 2005 profile as “the marathon man of the international anti-imperialist struggle.”

Attracted in his youth (he was an undergraduate at – where else? – Berkeley) to various New Left groups – among them the Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement, the Weathermen, and (although he’s white) the Black Panthers – Avakian became a community organizer in Richmond, California, where he sought to convert workers to Communism. In 1968, he and several Bay Area comrades founded their own organization, the Revolutionary Union, which took its inspiration from both Stalin and Mao, whose deadly Cultural Revolution was then in full swing.

During a 1971 visit to China, Avakian experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand, finding it “wondrous”; four years later, under his leadership, the Revolutionary Union morphed into the Mao-besotted RCP. Though upset by Mao’s death the next year and by China’s subsequent embrace of capitalism, Avakian soldiered on, declaring that, with Beijing’s betrayal, he and his RCP brethren were now “the true upholders of Maoism” on the planet. Around this time, the RCP shifted its emphasis from “workplace organizing [to] an increasingly hysterical militancy in the streets”; after he and other party members were arrested for rioting, assaulting cops, etc., etc., during Deng Xiaoping’s 1979 visit to Washington, D.C., Avakian skipped bail and fled to France from what he has called America’s “suffocating climate of intolerance.”

Ever since, Avakian has consistently insisted on the greatness of Mao and Stalin. “If the bourgeoisie and its political representatives can uphold people like Madison and Jefferson,” he wrote in his memoir, From Ike to Mao and Beyond, “then the proletariat and its vanguard forces can and should uphold Stalin.” And he’s devoted his life to the RCP, which runs a newspaper, a website, and a chain of stores called Revolutionary Books, all of which serve to advance the cause of Mao and Stalin.

But in addition to promoting Mao and Stalin, Avakian has unashamedly promoted himself. As Mark Oppenheimer wrote in a 2008 profile, the RCP – thanks in part to Avakian’s Stalin-like purges of other party leaders – gradually became “a cult of personality focused on him.” One tool in Avakian’s effort to turn himself into a cult figure was invisibility: for a long time almost nobody knew where he lived, and he never appeared in public; in his frequent writings (as in North Korea and Mao’s China, the shelves of his bookstores groan with copies of the Dear Leader’s works), Avakian continued to describe himself as being in exile, even though all charges against him were dropped in 1982, and even though he returned to the U.S. from Europe some time after the turn of the century. As Oppenheimer put it, “the chairman is still on the run, even if nobody is chasing him.”