ACORN Embezzler Dale Rathke liked to party

In 2008 it was revealed that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled close to $1 million from ACORN.

Big brother Wade not only engineered a cover-up for eight years, but also kept Dale on ACORN's payroll! This was too much even for the con artists of ACORN and the group's national board fired Wade in June 2008.

Later it was discovered that Dale (shown above in a photo from New York Social Diary) spent the money on the good life: trips to New York, limousines, shopping, and so on.

Read more about the depravity and gangsterism of ACORN in my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

Obama threatens reporters for -- reporting!

It is so typical of Saul Alinsky-inspired thugs to lash out and threaten reporters when information they don't like gets reported.

The Obama administration did exactly that and punished San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci when she dared to release a video of protesters interrupting an Obama speech at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel. Obama's people kicked Marinucci out of the reporting pool for doing her job and threatened other pool reporters.

Although radical leftists like Obama relish ridiculing their adversaries, they cannot tolerate it when the same is done to them.

Read more about the brutal tactics of Alinskyites in my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

The Depravity of George Soros

Kenneth Vogel of the Politico has a good piece today on the preeminent funder of the far left, the twisted George Soros.

Soros, who has been called a wartime Nazi collaborator for his actions in his native Hungary, whined about political polarization, claiming it was “endangering our open society.”

“As I see it, the two sides in the current disputes have each got hold of one half of the truth which they proclaim to be the whole truth,” Soros told an audience at the Cato Institute this week.

Blah blah blah. Tedious stuff.

In Vogel's article David Boaz of Cato says the kind of thing that embarrasses me as a libertarian. His sanctimonious Soros-like cop-out "pox on both your houses" attitude towards right and left is irresponsible. He just doesn't seem to get it and this kind of moralistic posing frequently seen among my fellow libertarians is getting really tiresome. Come on, Cato people, you're better than that.

Communist Party USA on the rise

I never thought I'd put those words in any blog post but there they are.

According to researcher extraordinaire Trevor Loudon of New Zeal, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) is experiencing a resurgence. Read his article here.

It's scary stuff. There aren't that many actual CPUSA members out there, but they tend to be very active in the labor movement, the Democratic Party, and in groups like ACORN which allows them to leverage their influence. Moreover, a large percentage of Democratic members of the House of Representatives (about 70 members in all) are virtually small-c communists. Look them up at the website of their deceptively named group, the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Like ACORN, CPUSA members are committed to using violence to bring about a radical transformation of America.

Read more about ACORN's commitment to revolutionary violence and all-around thuggery in my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

ACORN has never cared about the poor. Never.

The good people at Townhall magazine previously published a profile I wrote of ACORN.

The article is called “Stealing Democracy” Read it here. (PDF)

Here is the beginning of the article:

In the parallel universe occupied by many left-of-center Americans, the increasingly controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a high-minded poor people’s group similar to crusading civil rights groups of the 1960s. They believe ACORN is a public-spirited organization that registers the poor to vote and encourages citizen involvement in morally uplifting projects and community development. They believe it spurs production of affordable housing, protects tenants’ rights, keeps unjustly exploited borrowers in their homes and rages against predatory lenders. They believe it fights for the rights of workers, immigrants and utility ratepayers.

But it does so much more. When the extortion and vote fraud conglomerate ACORN isn’t busing schoolchildren to the nation’s capital to protest proposed tax cuts, it’s busy campaigning to expand the size and scope of government, raising the dead from cemeteries and leading them to the voting booth, and promoting the so-called Fairness Doctrine in order to bludgeon conservative-dominated talk radio. [...]

Read about the nihilistic adventures of ACORN in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

Matthew Vadum's adventure on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"

Back on Oct. 30, 2008, I appeared on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" to talk about ACORN and community organizers.

Here is a link to the video (the show's website won't allow embeds).

About a month or more before the air date, I traveled to New York City to tape a segment with John Oliver. Being in hostile territory (ideologically) I thought of the nastiest things I could say about ACORN and community organizers and I said them. There is no point, after all, in going on a left-wing show and playing along with the puppet masters. (Some conservatives criticized me for doing the show. Alas, it's impossible to please everyone.)

Everything I said had a basis in truth except for a few comments that were obviously satirical in nature. It is in fact true that mainstream media outlets have reported that ACORN and other so-called community organizations such as the NAACP Voter Fund have used crack cocaine and cigarettes as payoffs in the voter registration process, so I wasn't saying anything new.

Little did I know the show planned to juxtapose my statements with reaction shots from Bertha Lewis, ACORN's chief organizer at the time. (When the segment was shot, the producer said he wasn't sure who else was going to be interviewed for the package.) Because Lewis is a black woman, this led to some of the more idiotic leftists accusing me of racism in the absence of any evidence. The cry of "racist" is the last refuge of a desperate left-winger and tends to suggest that a conservative is doing his or her job properly. If they're not attacking you, that's likely because you're missing the target.

Just as when Andrew Breitbart summoned the courage a few months later to go into the lions' den when he appeared on Bill Maher's show on HBO (facing off against pseudo-intellectual race-baiting demagogue Michael Eric Dyson) conservatives have to be willing to take some heat in order to be effective. Go deep into liberal territory and do some damage. Don't be worried about getting sprayed with slime. You might even win some converts.

As Epictetus taught, "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid."

That really says it all.

From the twisted mind of Obama green jobs czar Van Jones: America has a culture of death because we use fossil fuels

First, global warming con man Al Gore compared companies' search for energy to "junkies looking for another vein." Now self-described communist, Obama pal, and 9/11 truther Van Jones one-ups the master. Jones advances the original but totally absurd argument that oil is "death" and that because we use oil our society is death-centered. At the recent Commie Con Power Shift conference Jones passionately declared:

We have an energy system, a civilization powered by death. Fueled by death. Why do they call them fossil fuels? We act shocked, having pulled death out of the ground, that we get death out of the skies. Let's stop fueling death.

This is an argument fashioned for ignoramuses and morons, who are, of course, Jones's natural constituency.
 Let's think about his argument. Because we put "dead" stuff like petroleum to productive use instead of leaving it in the ground where it remains useless to human beings, we are exhuming death and shouldn't be surprised that we "get death out of the skies."

What does that last part even mean? How are we getting death out of the skies? Don't we have to wait for most of our food, whether vegetables or meat, to be dead in order to eat it? Doesn't virtually every living thing on the planet eat things that are dead? Should we be allowed to consume only living things such as yogurt and inanimate things such as water?

How does Jones come up with this bombastic drivel? And to think, Jones criticized my writing, the wordcraft of a professional who has been writing and getting paid for it for almost a quarter century, calling my work "purple prose." This is what Alinskyites like Jones do: they ridicule because they believe, as Alinsky taught, that ridicule is a powerful tool. Saul Alinsky's fifth rule of "power tactics" from Rules for Radicals is that ridicule "is man’s most potent weapon.” It is a rhetorical weapon of mass destruction. “It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule,” he wrote.

“Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” It is comparatively easy to get away with threatening the enemy. “You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes irrational anger.” The problem with this thinking is that once you understand what an Alinskyite like Jones is trying to do, it's fairly easy not to be bothered by such an attempt at ridicule. You can revel in it and throw it right back at him. And you should.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.


(originally posted at NewsReal)

John Atlas shrugs: ACORN's apologist defends gangster group

The war of words over ACORN continues to rage.

ACORN's institutional hagiographer John Atlas (photo below) took exception to a report of mine on the recent conviction of ACORN in a voter fraud conspiracy. (Atlas is author of Seeds of Change which was published last year. Not a bad book in terms of original research but Atlas clearly doesn't understand what ACORN is really about.)

After a misinformed commenter at POWIP unleashed a fact-free screed regarding my article, Atlas joined in, complimenting him/her on on an "impressive pithy response." It's nonsense.

Left-wing supporters of ACORN love to play word games, I responded in some detail on the comments thread. The commenter argued that ACORN wasn't convicted of actual voter fraud. The commenter is dead wrong. ACORN was convicted earlier this month in Nevada of unlawful "compensation" for registration of voters, a felony that is a type of voter fraud. There was a conspiracy and ACORN participated in it. In fact, two senior ACORN executives were also convicted in the scheme.

I suppose leftists think "voter fraud" sounds scarier than "voter registration fraud" so whenever "voter fraud" is used in the context of ACORN's misdeeds they all suddenly become election law experts and start spewing mind-numbing, hair-splitting arguments in order to show that whatever ACORN did it wasn't really so bad. (One of the worst offenders is leftist blogger Brad Friedman.)

ACORN is a criminal organization and its leaders should be in prison.

Read about the nihilistic adventures of ACORN in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

The Truth About ACORN, narrated by Megyn Kelly

In fall of 2009 Fox News Channel aired a good documentary called "The Truth About ACORN." It was narrated by Megyn Kelly.

You can watch it on Hulu.

Read about the nihilistic adventures of ACORN in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

The mysterious disappearance of ACORN boss Steve Kest

Steve Kest, who was executive director of the organized crime syndicate ACORN, became a senior fellow at John Podesta’s Center for American Progress Action Fund last year.

Kest joined self-described “communist” Van Jones who is also a senior fellow at CAP Action Fund. In the above photo Kest is shown at left beside Podesta at a 2005 CAP event.

Kest participated in the coverup of a million-dollar embezzlement at ACORN perpetrated by Dale Rathke, brother of disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

Strangely, references to Kest's appointment have disappeared from CAP's websites. I sent several emails requesting more information and CAP ignored the requests.

A November 10, 2010, notice on CAP's website acknowledged Kest's appointment:

So where did Kest go? His name has disappeared from CAP's "Experts" page.

Weird, isn't it?

Read more about the nihilistic adventures of ACORN in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

ACORN Convicted In Massive Voter Fraud Conspiracy, Legacy Media Yawns

If a radical group closely associated with the  president of the United States and known for its efforts to undermine American democracy were convicted in a massive voter fraud conspiracy you'd expect to hear something about it from the mainstream media, wouldn't you? Wrong. Except for the odd FoxNews.com report and a few local reports there has been a media blackout.

On April 6 the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), that is, the organization itself as opposed to its employees, was convicted in Las Vegas of felony "compensation" for registration of voters. Sentencing is scheduled for August 10. Nevada forbids compensating voter registration canvassers based on the quantity of registrations because it creates a financial incentive for fraudulent or sloppy registrations.

Significantly, this is the first time ACORN itself has been convicted of a crime. The fact that the nonprofit entity was found guilty strongly suggests that ACORN’s ambitious voter-fraud schemes were sanctioned at the highest levels. The conviction came after the 2008 election cycle during which Las Vegas ACORN officials emptied the local jails to fill voter registration canvasser slots and even put individuals convicted of identity theft in charge of the registration drive. At least they hired experts, some locals quipped, according to John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins and celebrities living and dead have been registered to vote over and over again precisely because ACORN has been allowed to get away with polluting the nation’s voter rolls for so long. But this is not the first time that ACORN has found itself in legal hot water. In 2010 ACORN settled a racketeering lawsuit in Ohio out of court and agreed to withdraw from the state. In the settlement with the Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, ACORN agreed to “cease all Ohio activity” and surrender all its state business licenses.

As Judicial Watch reports, “The group has been busted for forging voter registration applications in key battleground states and submitting falsified forms in more than half a dozen others. In 2007, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State after seven workers were caught submitting about 2,000 fake registration forms.”

Moreover, there are scores of ACORN employees who have been convicted of election fraud. ACORN's conduct is habitual and has taken place in dozen of states. It's time for these gangsters to face the full weight of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). On a personal note, my op-ed in the Friday Washington Times is the #1 most-read opinion article on the newspaper's website (as of Sunday morning). It's gratifying to know that people still care about the threat that ACORN and similar groups still pose to the American republic.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.


(Obamacorn logo designed by Leo Alberti; this article was originally posted at NewsReal)

Vadum ACORN op-ed #1 at Washington Times

My op-ed, Obama's favorite gangsters convicted again, is the #1 most-read opinion article at the Washington Times right now.

It's gratifying to know that people still care about the threat that ACORN and similar groups still pose to the American republic.

Obligatory book plug: My new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, comes out soon. Pre-order it now!

Reds, Reds Everywhere, But Not a Reporter in Sight: The Media Ignores the Communists at Government Union Protests

(originally posted at NewsReal)

Is it just my perception or are labor protests nowadays consistently bringing out more communists and various assorted America-haters than they used to? Communists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and other freaks have always been hangers-on at labor demonstrations but a decade ago they tended not to be a significant portion of the crowd. As I like to say, all political parties and political movements attract kooks, but since Barack Obama became president, the kooks in the labor movement and on the left in general seem to have been multiplying like mogwai in a hot tub. The leftist protests in Madison, Wisconsin, against Gov. Scott Walker's desperately needed belt-tightening measures seemed to inspire a lot of Marxists to come out of the (union made) woodwork.

Which brings us to a recent labor rally in Chicago at which communists seemed to be in abundance. Union members and anti-American radicals attended a protest there "in solidarity" with the horribly oppressed $150,000 a year bus drivers in Wisconsin who just lost the legal right to collective bargaining. As RebelPundit observed:

We have noticed an alarming message, prevalent at every single left wing protest we have attended this year in Chicago and the Midwest. While each protest has an official message of a seemingly less alarming cause, such as; Anti-War, Anti-Deportation or “We Are One” with “Union Solidarity”, there is also an extremely disturbing trend of blatant and obvious promotion of a revolutionary transformation of America into a new socialist or communist type of economic system.

The radicals were in full force at the Chicago rally as shown on this video:



RebelPundit noted he had been invited to the rally by a senior employee of the screeching leftist Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois). If Schakowsky's not a communist in ideology, she's pretty close. She happens to be married, by the way, to community organizer and convicted felon Robert Creamer who believed in social justice so much he wrote bad checks to cover his not inconsiderable salary at a left-wing nonprofit. But I digress. All the communists were strangely invisible to the Chicago Sun-Times. That paper reported:

Laborers, carpenters, electricians, machinists, sheet metal workers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, actors, writers and pharmacists from Illinois and surrounding states marched from corners of the Loop, waving pro-union banners and chanting “We are one.”

Not one word about all the communists in attendance. Kind of reminds you of the Washington press corps, doesn't it?


Follow me on Twitter and check out my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Obama’s favorite gangsters convicted again: How many convictions before Justice Department recognizes racketeering?

I have an op-ed in today's Washington Times.

Here is the top of the article:

Are Mickey Mouse and Mary Poppins registered to vote in Nevada? In a Las Vegas courtroom last week, prosecutors found the fictional characters not guilty but convicted those impersonating them of voter fraud.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the radical left-wing activist group, was convicted in a massive voter-fraud conspiracy. It has been committing identify theft for decades.

ACORN pleaded guilty to unlawful “compensation” for registration of voters, a felony under Nevada law. The plea came after senior ACORN executives Amy Adele Busefink and Christopher Howell Edwards were convicted of providing cash bonuses to voter-registration canvassers for exceeding daily registration quotas. Campaign workers received cash if they registered 21 voters or more. Fittingly, the Las Vegas-based program was called Blackjack.
Mr. Mouse, Ms. Poppins and various celebrities living and dead have been registered to vote over and over again precisely because ACORN has been allowed to get away with polluting the nation’s voter rolls for so long.

Significantly, this is the first time ACORN itself, as opposed to its individual employees, has been convicted of a crime. The fact that the nonprofit entity was found guilty strongly suggests that ACORN’s ambitious voter-fraud schemes were sanctioned at the highest levels.

This is not the first time that ACORN has found itself in legal hot water. [...]

Read more about ACORN and its former star employee, Barack Obama, in my soon-to-be-released book, Subversion Inc.

Schadenfreude alert: Gay man sues Rev. Jesse Jackson for sexual harassment

The undisputed all-time Jedi Master of corporate shakedowns, Rev. Jesse Jackson, is being sued for allegedly sexually harassing a man who worked for his left-wing extortion gang, the Rainbow Push Coalition, NBCChicago.com reports.

The complaint, filed sometime last year by Tommy R. Bennett, a regular on the Tom Joyner Radio show and member of Barack Obama's LGBT Leadership Council, includes shocking allegations about Jackson's behavior toward the openly gay staffer including an allegation that the civil rights leader propositioned him.

Jackson has denied the allegations in a legal response that was filed in July 2010 and resurfaced when the Windy City Times published a story Tuesday. 

Bennett, 55, claims Jackson ridiculed him in front of other employees and required him to perform "humiliating tasks" like escorting women to Jackson's various hotel rooms, cleaning up after alleged trysts and packing his clothing.  It also includes an allegation that Jackson asked for oral sex, according to the claim. Jackson flatly denied each claim in his response.

"The Rainbow PUSH Coalition unequivocally deny Tommy Bennett’s false claims of harassment, retaliation and discrimination," the organization said in a statement released late Thursday, adding that it is "fully cooperating with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations and expect to be fully exonerated."

If Jackson (pictured above in a previous legal entanglement) didn't do what was alleged, I hope he is exonerated, but I confess it is pretty hard to feel sorry for a professional con man who became a multi-millionaire by blackmailing his many targets over the years.

His too-numerous-to-count victims didn't deserve it either.

Cynical Budget Deal Funds ACORN Wannabe Poverty Pimp Groups

I found yet another reason for conservatives to hate the budget deal.

The compromise spending legislation now before Congress funds ACORN-like radical activist groups to the tune of a whopping $680 million in fiscal 2011.

Bear in mind $680 million is virtually nothing compared to the trillions of dollars the feds regularly flush down the toilet but these nasty, parasitic pressure groups that want to bring "hope and change" to America can do a lot of damage to our society with that money. They've been trying to transform America for the worst and using your tax dollars to do so ever since left-of-center community groups started getting government funding under Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty."

As Suzanne Perry reports in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the Community Services Block Grant program is on track to take in a good chunk of change.

The program, which provides money to a network of community-action agencies across the country, would get $680-million for the fiscal year that ends September 30, according to details of the bill provided by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

As I detail in my upcoming book, Subversion Inc., President Obama always takes care of his friends.

The Community Services Block Grant program provides federal money "to states and organizations for projects that offer education, employment, health care, housing, and other services to low-income people," according to Perry. "Most of that money goes to about 1,000 community-action agencies across the country that manage local antipoverty projects."

It might as well be called the "Saul Alinsky Memorial Slush Fund."

And get this: budding Alinskyite class warriors can even earn a diploma in rabble-rousing! Community Action Partnership offers "Certified Community Action Professional," or CCAP designations, to today's community organizers.

Maybe it's a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval for left-wing thugs.

ACORN's goal is to hurt people, not help them

ACORN is a profoundly antisocial organization. It celebrates and promotes the worst pathologies in society in an effort to kill the American experiment in self-governance.

The small-c communist organization was created not to help people, but to hurt them. Growing out of the now-defunct National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), ACORN was created to get people to go on welfare.

No joke.

The group came out of the so-called welfare rights movement led by radical anti-American activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Cloward died in 2001 but Piven still teaches at CUNY and advocates violence as a tool of revolutionary political change.

Getting Americans dependent on welfare and feeling desperate and angry is what ACORN is all about. To the community organizer, violent welfare riots are a legitimate way of bringing about change.

More details to come in my soon to be published book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Matthew Vadum on the O'Reilly Factor (for the second time)

I was on the "O'Reilly Factor" in 2008 talking about MoveOn.

Although I disagree with what MoveOn wants to do, the group does it well. Bill O'Reilly did not seem to like my answer. Oh well.

Here is the video:

Community organizers hated Martin Luther King Jr.

The leaders of the group that spawned ACORN, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), hated the civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. with a passion.

NWRO activists thought King was not radical enough.

More details to come in my soon-to-be published book, Subversion Inc.

ACORN aided Sestak campaign in 2010

Despite its claim to be in extremis in the latter part of 2010, ACORN was busy on the campaign trail.

A newly rebranded Pennsylvania chapter of ACORN, Pennsylvania Neighborhoods for Social Justice, worked to promote the ultimately failed candidacy of Joe Sestak, a Democrat who sought a seat in the U.S. Senate.

ACORN is not dead.

It’s Time to Go Galt: Atlas Shrugged Movie is a Winner

(originally posted at NewsReal)

Finally a movie comes along that sticks it to the ruling class that is deliberately and maliciously driving America into the ground. The message of the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1,200-page opus, Atlas Shrugged, is that the productive should be able to go about their business without being hindered by the nonproductive and the anti-productive mischief makers of government. It is a celebration of the many virtues of capitalism, a topic I editorialized about previously atNewsReal.

And it turns out it’s surprisingly good! I saw the movie at a special advance screening kindly provided by the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation.

This is not to knock the feature-length film unduly, but given its subject matter it’s amazing that it works as a movie. There is so much information, so much political economy and philosophy, packed into so little movie. The novel simply doesn’t translate easily to the silver screen and yet the movie is a pleasure to watch.

If at times the dialogue seems a bit wooden, a bit unnatural, like in a soap opera where the players are constantly referencing a large cast of characters and a multitude of events outside the frame, it’s because the screenplay by John Aglialoro and Brian Patrick O’Toole is more or less faithful to the complex, wordy novel.

The movie, directed by Paul Johansson, keeps moving forward relentlessly without a mountain of distracting side plots. It has wonderful photography and excellent production values.

In the various characters such as sleazeball lobbyist Wesley Mouch (played by Michael Lerner) and twisted industrialist Orren Boyle (played by Jon Polito) you can see characters from America’s real life, unstable, thoroughly corrupt mixed economy. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and President Barack Obama did not make an appearance in the movie. They didn’t need to be there because the statist, left-wing ugliness they stand for was already well represented in the dramatis personae.

ACORN Housing bragged about destroying the housing market

Twelve years ago many Democrats* and Republicans still thought lowering borrowing standards in order to help poor, uncreditworthy people play Russian roulette with home values was a wonderful idea.

In 1999 ACORN even bragged about helping to kill reasonable underwriting standards by strong-arming banks into counting welfare benefits such as food stamps as income.

No money? No job? No problem!

ACORN Housing Corp. produced a brochure, “To Each Their Home: Success Stories from the ACORN Housing Corporation,” to highlight the group's antisocial activities.

"To each their home." Hmmm. What does that sound like? Oh yeah, I remember now.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That's from Karl Marx.


*Many Democrats still think weakening underwriting standards is a super idea. Like President Obama, they want to make the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act even stronger.

Matthew Vadum on the O'Reilly Factor

How time flies. This is the video clip from my first appearance on the "O'Reilly Factor" back in 2007.

I was talking to Bill O'Reilly about Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan, and Medea Benjamin. Code Pink is not only an antiwar group, it is firmly in the anti-American camp aligning itself with the relentless brutal Communist dictatorships of North Korea and Cuba. Here is the video:

Radical Thom Hartmann accuses Matthew Vadum of trying to bring back debtors' prisons -- or something

Two weeks ago I was on Thom Hartmann's radio show. Hartmann is essentially a communist in ideological terms. He's a member of the misnamed Democratic Socialists of America (other notable members: Noam Chomsky, Frances Fox Piven) and a proud 9/11 "truther." Hartmann thinks corporations pick through your garbage late at night or have installed mind control microchips in your dental work, or something.

Hartmann read an article of mine and somehow got it in his head that I favor debtors' prisons.

Here's a video of the interview that Hartmann streamed from his website (hats off to you if you can follow his bizarre stream-of-consciousness style):



P.S. It looks like I previously blogged about this. Whoops. Sorry to be redundant.

Unhinged leftists like Tavis Smiley are howling over the budget deal, but are there any actual cuts?

(originally posted at NewsReal)


Was the deal Speaker John Boehner made to prevent a federal government shutdown really the best he could get? Who knows, but it's far from clear if the deal actually involves a net cut in government spending.

After promising to slice $100 billion from the federal budget, the GOP capitulated and the final number dropped down to $61 billion... and then down to a mere $39 billion. The fiscal 2011 budget request from President Obama, which was never actually adopted, called for an unprecedented $3.8 trillion in spending. A $39 billion cut, if it really is a cut, represents an infinitesimally small percentage of that budget.

Mark Levin agrees that the deal is "a historic scam." He says:

Since Boehner has said the Republicans will never shut down the government and since he has said repeatedly we're only half of one third of the government, well then what the hell are they going to do on the other issues? What is their strategy exactly?

Exactly. What are the Republicans going to do about raising the debt limit and reforming out-of-control entitlement programs?

Meanwhile, the nutroots are going crazy. For example, professional America hater Tavis Smiley (at left in above photo), who frequently collaborates with pseudo-intellectual Cornel West (at right in above photo), is outraged that any cuts --if that's what they actually are (see below)-- were agreed to. From his far-left point of view the deal is "capitulation." America "avoided a shutdown of government, but now we have a lockout of the American people. Namely, the poor."

New photos posted at Subversion Inc. page on Facebook

I put up some photos of people associated with ACORN on the Facebook page for my book Subversion Inc.

Among them are ACORN funder George Soros, ACORN funders Herb and Marion Sandler, ACORN founder and destroyer Wade Rathke, ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis, ACORN supporters Bill Ayers and Noam Chomsky, and ACORN supporter and racist traitor Van Jones.

Son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg Admits One Parent’s Guilt

Ron Radosh, who figures prominently in my upcoming book Subversion Inc., has an eye-opening piece up at Pajamas Media.


Here's the top of it:

In an interview with New York Times reporter Sam Roberts, Robert Meeropol, the younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, admitted on Wednesday that “his father deserved to have been convicted of the legal charges that led to his parents’ execution. ‘Yes, he was guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage,’”Meeropol told him.
After decades of denial, and insistence that his father was framed up and was innocent, Robert Meeropol for the first time has admitted that his father — but not his mother — was legally guilty of the charge for which he had been indicted.
Moreover, Meeropol seemed to have been stunned and surprised by the revelation that Steven Usdin and I had in our Weekly Standard article about the case two weeks ago, in which co-defendant Morton Sobell revealed to us that on a July 4^th weekend in 1948, he and three other men, including Julius Rosenberg, photographed top secret documents obtained for them by scientist William Perl, which they passed on directly to a KGB officer.
On this, Meeropol wrote: “I’d be less than honest if I did not admit that the latest news that Morton Sobell, my father and two others provided aeronautical information to the Soviet Union in 1948 gives me pause. My parents wrote in their last letter to me and my brother: ‘Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience.’ My father, at least, doesn’t seem quite so innocent anymore.”
What he neglected to say is that this story, first outlined decades ago by my co-author Joyce Milton and I inThe Rosenberg File, was sharply attacked by Michael, Robert’s older brother, in the book they co-authored in its second 1986 edition. Michael Meeropol had argued that this entire incident had been fabricated by the FBI in order to frame Perl and to force him to testify against his parents. Now, it seems that at least Robert Meeropol has acknowledged that the incident did take place, and that his father was engaged in very real espionage. [...]

The Smallness of Saul (Alinsky), a book review

(this article by Matthew Vadum was originally published in the October 2010 issue of the American Spectator)


Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky

By Nicholas von Hoffman
(Nation Books, 214 pages, $26.95)

"Although Alinsky is described as some kind of liberal left-winger in actuality big government worried him," writes Saul Alinsky protégé Nicholas von Hoffman in his gossamer memoir,Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky. "He feared the gigantism of government, corporation and even labor union."

Von Hoffman is trying to recast Alinsky as a government-fearing libertarian in order to make his communistic beliefs more marketable. It's a project doomed to failure.

Alinsky's right-hand man 50 years ago, von Hoffman paints an almost unrecognizable portrait of the Industrial Areas Foundation founder, depicting him as an idealistic fighter for the little guy, a champion of democracy. This is a Sisyphean task because Alinsky's thuggish tactics, which Americans rightly regard as outside the legitimate political process, provide incontrovertible evidence of his small-c communism. Nonetheless, von Hoffman deems it necessary to downplay Alinsky's ugly real-life views because they call into question the legitimacy of community organizing and today's political leaders who emerged from that radical, un-American tradition. Today's most famous community organizer, of course, and the reason for the recent surge in interest in Alinsky, lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Von Hoffman is an accomplished journalist who wrote Citizen Cohn, a brutal, nasty biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's counsel Roy Cohn. Cohn's prosecutorial skills sent Communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. Von Hoffman, like so many Communist sympathizers, assumes falsely that the Rosenbergs were innocent and crucifies Cohn for doing his job.

Von Hoffman is mightily peeved that the right dared to discover Alinsky. He invokes the fifth rule of "power tactics" in Alinsky's Rules for Radicals -- "ridicule is man's most potent weapon" -- heaping scorn on the "right-wingers" and "tea baggers" who have discovered the power of Alinsky's agitation techniques. "They are buying Rules by the thousands, which should be making Saul happy wherever he is, and are using it as their 'playbook' after adjuring each other to skip the parts containing its nonexistent Marxism."

A few months before von Hoffman's book came out, Reason magazine's Jesse Walker bought into von Hoffman's fantasy. He seemed to suggest that if Alinsky, who died in 1972, were alive today he might even have had a soft spot for the Tea Party movement. "Alinsky, after all, was always a decentralist at heart." He "distrusted government planners, and while he was by no means opposed to redistribution in itself he was an acute critic of the welfare state as it functioned in practice." Perhaps reading Alinsky's writings would disabuse Walker of this notion. Yes, Alinsky was uncomfortable with aspects of the welfare state apparatus but only because he saw the welfare state as a half-measure. He wanted a complete reorganization of society and didn't trust bureaucrats -- "buttinskies" in von Hoffman's words -- to carry it out.

Planned Parenthood: Killing Is Big Business

I wrote a profile of Planned Parenthood last year that's worth revisiting now that Congress is fighting over defunding the notorious group.

With permission from Townhall magazine, here it is. (PDF)

DNC-Sponsored Mob Violence Possible: ACORN, Obama Behind Plan To Dump Garbage On Speaker Boehner’s Home?

(originally posted at NewsReal)


The Democratic Party is officially encouraging supporters to go to Speaker John Boehner’s house and dump garbage on his lawn in order to intimidate him into rubber-stamping President Obama’s destructive spending spree. Such protests can easily turn violent, especially with the tense, hyper-partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill right now.

Is it a coincidence that not long after longtime ACORN operative Patrick Gaspard took over as executive director of the Democratic National Committee the DNC is planning destructive ACORN-like protests?  Not bloody likely. As chief of the DNC’s day-to-day operations, Gaspard runs Organizing for America, the Saul Alinsky-inspired organization created to wage war on American democracy. Gaspard’s fingerprints are all over this. It’s what the former Obama White House political director does for a living.

But how do we actually know this is a DNC-approved event? Because the event advertised on Facebook is organized by longtime DNC employee Jonah Goodman.

Goodman is listed as a member of the DNC network on his Facebook page. According to Facebook rules (under the heading “How do I join a supported Facebook network?”) this means he is an employee of the DNC. Facebook instructs users as follows: “To join a work network, you need to have a work email address from a supported company. This will put you on a network with your coworkers.” If Goodman ceased to be an employee he was required to leave the Facebook network. The other organizer of the event is Nolan Treadway who is the political and logistics director for the leftist organization Nutroots Netroots Nation. (His Facebook profile is here.)

There is no limit to what these despicable Alinskyites will do. They don’t care how many people get hurt in the process of radically transforming America.


Follow me on Twitter and please buy my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

ACORN convicted of voter fraud in Nevada

For the first time ever ACORN has been convicted in a conspiracy to commit massive voter fraud.

Voter fraud, sometimes called electoral fraud, is a blanket term encompassing a host of election-related improprieties. In this case the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now pleaded guilty this week in Las Vegas to felony compensation for registration of voters. Sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 10.

ACORN executives conspired to provide cash bonuses to voter registration canvassers. Nevada law forbids such practices because they give canvassers an incentive to file fraudulent registrations.

The ACORN executives previously convicted and sentenced in the conspiracy are Amy Adele Busefink and Christopher Howell Edwards.

(Obamacorn logo credit: Leo Alberti)

Barbara Espinosa interviews Matthew Vadum

Arizona-based blogger Barbara Espinosa (and co-host Vernon Parker) interviewed me on Oct. 25 last year regarding ACORN and other things.

Here is the radio interview from KFNX 1100 AM  in video form (why the video shows a still photo of me with the "world's tallest female econoblogger" is a mystery):

American Hero and Badass for Liberty Glenn Beck to End Fox TV Show

(originally posted at NewsReal)

The man who ignited grassroots opposition to the hideously un-American Big Government policies of President Barack Obama when virtually no one else cared will end his highly rated show on Fox News Channel in December. Glenn Beck and Fox News Channel announced Wednesday they had agreed to let their contract run out. “Glenn intends to transition off his daily program, the third highest rated in all of cable news, later this year,” they said in a joint release.

America owes a debt of gratitude to Glenn Beck. Whatever his foibles, in the dark days of early 2009 as patriotic Americans began to realize that America was (and still is, for that matter) being transformed into a socialist state by the nation’s Community Organizer-in-Chief, Beck was there, exposing and harassing Obama and his cadre of radicals. (Note: Rick Santelli of CNBC also played a big role in fighting Obama but it was Beck who sold the idea to the viewing masses and fomented a glorious rebirth of patriotism.)

I am personally thankful for Beck for giving me the opportunity to appear on his show multiple times (see above photo) to discuss my research into ACORN, the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and the Tides Foundation. Beck even let me help him design one of his famous tree diagrams.

Beck, it’s also worth noting, is a secret badass. Although you can’t tell it from the above picture, the white dots on his tie are winged biker-style death’s heads. (I blew the image up from another photo taken a few seconds later and posted it below.) Maybe after a Jean Paul Gaultier tie featuring tiny stylized dollar signs woven in black and red silk that I used to wear, it was the coolest necktie I’ve ever seen.

It is entirely fitting for a trailblazer like Beck: He’s a badass for liberty. He lives his life by the noble credo of Epictetus: “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” Or as skiers say, If you’re not falling down you’re not trying hard enough. Sometimes people have to risk scorn for the greater good and Beck has done it over and over again, sometimes losing, but usually winning.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-Crazytown)

I have long maintained that the District of Columbia's nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives, Eleanor Holmes Norton, is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. She's buddies with racist agitator Al Sharpton and has long been a member of the kooky (and misnamed) Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is tied to America's largest Marxist group, Democratic Socialists of America.

Yet more proof has surfaced.

The Hill is reporting Del. Norton is very unhappy about the congressional fight over the budget, which has the effect of holding up the District's budget. “District residents are being treated as colonists of the Congress of the United States," Norton said. "We are absolutely outraged. This is the functional equivalent of bombing innocent civilians."

Norton continued blathering on:

"We've sustained attack after attack as the Republicans invade our right to govern ourselves," Norton said, adding she is not confident lawmakers will reach a deal.
"I'm not confident. But if they don't get a deal done, if these Republicans insist that if they don't get the whole pie, they'll take the whole country down with them, then we have got to make them pay the price."

Of course District of Columbia residents have no constitutional right to govern themselves. The District is subject to the will of Congress. If Norton doesn't like this arrangement she should campaign for a constitutional amendment to give the District true self-government.

Subversion Inc. Facebook page now online!

Feel free to "like" Subversion Inc. (WND Books) on Facebook.

Follow this link to visit the Facebook page.

Community organizers LOVE getting arrested!

Community organizers LOVE getting arrested! Really, they do. Both Saul Alinsky and ACORN founder Wade Rathke have said that getting arrested is a great way to advance the cause.

In this photo longtime community organizer and ACORN funder Donna Edwards, now a Democratic congresswoman representing Maryland, gets arrested at a Darfur protest somewhere.

Read all about the sheer joy Alinskyites derive from getting the handcuffs slapped on them in my book Subversion Inc.

Books I'm quoted or cited in (as of April 6, 2011)

I've been keeping a running tab of the books that reference my work and/or quote me.

Note that authors on the left, such as Arianna Huffington and Center for American Progress visiting fellow Shirley Sagawa, have given my work a vote of confidence by relying on it. And this is just a list of books that reference my work. :)

Here is the list as of April 6, 2011:

* asterisk indicates New York Times bestseller

In reverse chronological order:

28) The New Reagan Revolution: How Ronald Reagan's Principles Can Restore America's Greatness Today, by Michael Reagan with Jim Denney, Thomas Dunne Books, 2011, 340n17.

27) Death by Liberalism: The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies, by J.R. Dunn, Harper, 2011, 289

26) Breaking the System: The Obama Team’s Strategy for Changing America, by David Horowitz and Liz Blaine, David Horowitz Freedom Center, 2010, 24n51

25) The Marxist Goliath Among Us: The David We Need To Be, by Ronald J. Lawrence, Xulon Press, 2010, 316

*24) Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Destroying the American Dream, by Arianna Huffington, Crown, 2010, 259n141

23) Global Governance, Poverty and Inequality, by Rorden Wilkinson and Jennifer Clapp (editors),

Routledge, Jun 21 2010, 228, 233

22) Dissed Trust: America's Crisis of Truth, Faith, and Freedom, by William DeMersseman, WestBow Press, 2010, 58n192-3

21) Wake Up, America! We're Headed in the Wrong Direction, by Suzanne Vergotte, iUniverse.com, 2010, 17

20) Citizen-in-Chief: The Second Lives of the American Presidents, by Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss, Harper Paperbacks, reprint edition, 2010, 359n282

19) The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America, by Pamela Geller with Robert Spencer, Threshold Editions, 2010, 359n21-2

18) The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America, by Shirley Sagawa, Jossey-Bass, 2010, 195n22

*17) To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, by Newt Gingrich and Joe DeSantis, Regnery Press, 2010, 113 (and 2011 revised updated edition in paperback,131)

*16) The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists, by Aaron Klein with Brenda J. Elliott, WND Books, 2010, 144, 146, 201, 303n78, 304n85, 313n36 and 38, 339

15) Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, by Christopher C. Horner, Regnery Press, 2010, 224, 366n67, 370n36

14) The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care), by Rob Witwer and Adam Schrager, Speaker's Corner, 2010, xxv, 178, 180, 226

*13) Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack, by Marc Thiessen, Regnery Press, 2010, 250, 388 [250 recites research MV conducted]

12) I Can’t Believe You Said That!, by Fred Gielow, Accuracy In Media, 2009, 45

11) Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy And How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them, by Peter Schweizer, Harper, 2009, 192n42, 198n47

*10) Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies, by Michelle Malkin, Regnery Press, first edition, 2009, 242, 292, 355n36, 356n48 (and 2010 reprint edition in paperback, 272, 280, 282, 334, 410n36, 412n55)

9) The Threat Closer to Home: Hugo Chávez and the War Against America, by Douglas E. Schoen and Michael Rowan, Free Press, 2009, 213n10

8) Stealing Elections, by John Fund, Encounter Books, 2008, second edition, 220n60 (references Foundation Watch, June 2008, of which MV is co-author)

7) Shadow World: Resurgent Russia, the Global New Left, and Radical Islam, by Robert Chandler, Regnery Press, 2008, 580n88, 585n89

6) The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama's War on American Values, by Brad O'Leary, WND Books, 2008, 200, 226n25

*5) The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate, by David Freddoso, Regnery Publishing, 2008, 266n52 and 57, 267n90

4) 100 Richest People in the World: Illustrated history of their life and wealth, by MobileReference, 2007, page citation unknown

3) Zoning and Planning Law Handbook, edited by Patricia E. Salkin, Clark Boardman Co., 2006, 613n1

2) Eminent Domain Use and Abuse: Kelo in Context, edited by Dwight H. Merriam and Mary Massaron Ross, American Bar Association, Section of State and Local Government Law, 2006, 45n27

1) The Money Making Guide to Bonds: Straightforward Strategies for Picking the Right Bonds and Bond Funds, by Hildy Richelson and Stan Richelson, Bloomberg Press, 2002, 261n5