The Left’s Spring Offensive

My article in today's Front Page Magazine:

The Left’s Spring Offensive

By Matthew Vadum

Communist Van Jones and MoveOn have begun training up to 100,000 activists across the nation in the fine art of terrorizing corporations and the general public in order to force change that the American people don’t want.

The activists plan to disrupt shareholder meetings of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and 30 other large corporations. They also plan to conduct “actions” against education lender Sallie Mae and businesses they accuse of profiting from student indebtedness. Their strategy is remarkably similar to the subversive plan pushed by SEIU’s Stephen Lerner that aims to destroy the nation’s financial system.

Their first multi-day training session in allegedly nonviolent direct action tactics began on April 9 and took place in hundreds of locations across the country. This “Spring Training” is named after the Arab Spring of 2011 in which popular revolts ousted various leaders in the Middle East and cleared the way for Islamofascists to take over.

Although the 100,000 figure provided by organizers from MoveOn and Jones’s Rebuild the Dream organization is no doubt a gross exaggeration, the training already appears to be paying off.

Supposedly nonviolent Occupy Wall Street activists attacked police and a Starbucks coffee shop in lower Manhattan on April 14. In a bitter taste of things to come, using 8-foot-long metal pipes and bottles as weapons the anarchists and communists dressed in black terrorized coffee drinkers at the Astor Place outlet. Three protesters were reportedly arrested. Charges ranged from inciting to riot, assault, and disorderly conduct.

The Spring Training is endorsed by three ACORN-related organizations:  the Working Families Party, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE). As I explain in my book, Subversion Inc: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, WFP is ACORN’s political party and ACCE and MORE are rebranded ACORN state organizations.

The training session is also endorsed by small-c communist Heather Booth’s Midwest Academy and by Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. Iowa CCI is the Marxist group whose members screamed at Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney at the Iowa State Fair last August. (The group is part of a larger Saul Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action.)

Jones long ago tired of the democratic process. He favors using brutal in-your-face tactics to bring down American capitalism yet claims to embrace Gandhi’s nonviolent political action. (Of course with the Left there is virtually no such thing as nonviolent protest. Nonetheless, progressive leaders often pretend to be opposed to violent tactics.)

“You cannot change this country from D.C. down. It’s got to be bottom up and top down and the bottom up has been missing,” Jones said on MSNBC.

Until this past fall, you got the young people with 350.org who broke the seal and said we are going to do civil disobedience against the Obama White House. Everybody goes, “Oh no! This can’t happen! You’ll be destroyed!” And instead what happened is they got a big victory on [the] Keystone [pipeline]. They gotta fight to keep it. And then –that was August– and then September the young people and struggling folks who founded Occupy Wall Street and they changed the actual conversation overnight from austerity, austerity to economic inequality. This stuff works.

Unfortunately, Jones is right about one thing. Thanks to Occupy Wall Street even many conservatives now mindlessly repeat the false Marxist dichotomy that pits the “1 percent” against the “99 percent.” How much money people have –as opposed to how much money they earn as income— seems to have become a public issue that candidates from both major parties feel compelled to address.

MoveOn’s history is well documented but Jones’s Rebuild the Dream organization is new on the political scene. (Rebuild the Dream also just happens to be name of his new book.)

Rebuild the Dream is a 501c4 nonprofit and contributions to it are not tax-deductible for federal income tax purposes. Contributions to its sister charity, Rebuild the Dream Innovation Fund, a 501c3 nonprofit, are tax-deductible. It is unclear who is funding these two San Francisco-based groups.

The Fund uses the Oakland, California-based Movement Strategy Center as a fiscal sponsor. A fiscal sponsor covers its administrative costs by shaving a few percentage points off donations earmarked for a charity and then hands over the remainder to the charity. The Center, in turn, has taken in funds from the usual suspects in the world of leftist philanthropy including: George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($800,000 since 2006) and his Foundation to Promote Open Society ($150,000 in 2009); Tides Foundation ($770,000 since 2001); Ben & Jerry’s Foundation ($30,000 since 2009); Ford Foundation ($1,555,000 since 2004); Surdna Foundation Inc. ($1,140,000 since 2003); and Rockefeller Brothers Fund Inc. ($248,000 since 2004).

With media-savvy Jones’s charisma, it’s just a matter of time before he begins to tap into the vast reservoirs of tax-free foundation money earmarked for the destruction of America as we know it.