Race Riot Romance

My article from the Aug. 14, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Race Riot Romance

By Matthew Vadum

The fatal police shooting of a young black suspect in a Midwestern town last weekend has given the Left yet another opportunity to advance its destructive, racially polarizing agenda.

After 18-year-old Michael Brown, a black man was killed by police in Ferguson, a mostly black community in St. Louis County, Mo., the city and region surrounding it have been under siege. Not content to wait for the wheels of the justice system to spin, some view this tragedy as a license to riot.

Cries of “no justice, no peace” pierce the air as demonstrators hurl Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officials. Some say the police have been responding to the protesters and rioters with excessive force and have been mean by discouraging protests. Some blacks are reportedly randomly assaulting non-blacks as collective payback for what happened to Brown.

Looting and property destruction are rampant. Dozens of people have been arrested. The Federal Aviation Administration ordered aircraft to fly at least 3,000 feet over Ferguson airspace after police said their helicopters were fired on from the ground.

Witnesses give conflicting accounts of what happened to Brown. The young man was apparently walking in the street and then stopped by police. There was a scuffle over a policeman’s gun and Brown was shot. Local police are investigating as are federal officials and civil rights bureaucrats. Brown could ultimately be found to be a would-be murderer or a murder victim himself. Time will tell.

The name of the police officer who shot Brown has been withheld for the time being by police who quite justifiably fear for his safety.

All this unrest over the death of Brown seems selective, for lack of a better term.

By contrast, when James Boyd, a mentally disturbed, homeless, white man was fatally shot in the back by Albuquerque, N.M. police recently, there were some protests but no riots. In some circles, white victims are apparently less valuable than black victims.

Regardless of what he may say publicly, all this racially motivated anger and violence is fine by President Obama, an extreme-left community organizer by profession.

Voter Fraud Redefined

Here's my November 8, 2012 column from American Thinker:

Voter Fraud Redefined

By Matthew Vadum

Voter fraud ain’t what it used to be.

Left-wingers have been deliberately dumbing down the definition for years.

In all my years as a journalist covering American politics, I have understood that voter fraud, a phrase coined by lawyers, was a blanket term that refers to a host of election-related offenses.  Lawyers frequently make up terms for specialty areas — for example, elder law, environmental law, probate law, and wrongful dismissal law.

Voter fraud, also known as vote fraud, election fraud, and electoral fraud, refers to the specific offenses of fraudulent voting, impersonation, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, bribery, destroying already cast ballots, and a multitude of crimes related to the electoral process.

A quick internet search reveals a comparable definition.  One online reference site counsels:

Electoral fraud is illegal interference with the process of an election. Acts of fraud affect vote counts to bring about an election result, whether by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate, depressing the vote share of the rival candidates or both. Also called voter fraud, the mechanisms involved include illegal voter registration, intimidation at polls and improper vote counting.

Lawyers say that fraud is the most difficult crime to prove because showing that the act complained of actually happened is not enough.  It must be proven that the perpetrator had intent to defraud.  

Like any fraud, voter fraud is by its nature generally very difficult to detect and prosecute.Voter fraud in the form of actual fraudulent balloting is especially hard to demonstrate in court.  A prosecutor must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person voted without having the right to vote, used fraud (deception) in the process, and intended to defraud the victim (in this case, the public).  These facts can be hard to establish after the voter leaves the polling place.

For years now the left has been trying to muddy the waters by applying a far stricter definition of voter fraud, moving the semantic goalposts in order to define the problem out of existence.  Fraudulent registrations, of course, open the door to fraudulent voting, something the left vehemently denies.  

They deny it because the left depends on voter fraud in order to get left-wing candidates elected.  This helps to explain why they bent over backwards in recent years to defend ACORN, the voter fraud empire that filed for bankruptcy on Election Day 2010. 

Left-wing activists and think-tanks constantly churn out studies and reports financed by George Soros, purporting to prove that voter fraud is as unreal as Cookie Monster.  They claim that those on the right want to crack down on voter fraud solely as a means of preventing the poor and minorities from voting.

“Nobody claimed that voter fraud was a myth until the last couple of years,” my work colleague at Capital Research Center, Dr. Steven J. Allen, J.D., Ph.D., told me.

As Allen, who grew up amidst Alabama’s dubious politics many decades ago, observes: 

Everyone in politics openly discussed voter fraud for hundreds of years of American history. Politicians, political reporters, and everyone involved in politics openly discussed how widespread voter fraud was. Only when Republicans took over legislatures in states that had long been ruled by Democrats and where fraud was prevalent and began to do something about this problem did this myth emerge that voter fraud was nonexistent. Remember that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed specifically to prevent voter fraud which was endemic back then.

As election law expert and New York Times bestselling author J. Christian Adams has explained, “[l]iberal foundations, public interest law firms and advocacy groups have created a permanent network of experts and organizations devoted to an arcane but critical task: monopolizing the narrative on election laws and procedures. Cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of civil rights and the right to vote, they seek to affect the outcome of the election. They challenge any effort to protect the integrity of the ballot box by denying the possibility of vote fraud and crying ‘Jim Crow.’”

Let’s look at some of the more prominent voter fraud deniers on the left.

Ari Berman of the Nation describes “election fraud” as an “extremely rare occurrence” and argues that only illegal voting constitutes voter fraud.  When South Bend, Indiana prosecutors charged local Democratic officials with faking 22 petitions to get President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards on the 2008 Indiana ballot, Berman dismissed the incident as insignificant.  “[T]here’s no evidence that the alleged forgeries played a decisive role in getting the Democratic candidates on the Indiana ballot in 2008 or determining the outcome of the primary or general election,” Berman wrote.

This is the same line of reasoning adopted by Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.) after the names of several Dallas Cowboys showed up on voter rolls in Nevada in 2008.  “Obviously it’s not right for a fake ‘Tony Romo’ to be registered in Las Vegas … but remember the basic point[:] it’s not voter fraud unless someone shows up at the voting booth on Election Day and tries to pass himself off as ‘Tony Romo.’”  How reassuring.

Adam Serwer of Mother Jones, writing in the Washington Post, agrees with Berman that “[v]oter fraud is a virtually nonexistent problem” and blames conservatives for “blurring the distinction between voter registration fraud — which is as easy as filling out a registration form incorrectly — and the actual act of casting a fraudulent ballot.”  Oh, the irony.

Brentin Mock of Colorlines goes farther, denying the very existence of the problem.  “Voter fraud as a thing has been exposed by civil rights watchdogs and a wide range of journalists as pure conspiracy theory,” Mock writes.

Of course, all of this leftist rhetoric is pure sophistry.  Even if a person “only” commits voter registration fraud, that is a necessary step along the way to fraudulent voting, and it should be prosecuted in order to protect the integrity of the electoral system.  Registration fraud is a gateway to fraudulent balloting, and it must be prosecuted.  Police don’t let a bank robber go free because he forgot to load his gun.

No single group in American history ever outdid ACORN in terms of voter registration fraud.  At least 52 individuals who worked for ACORN or its affiliates, or who were connected to ACORN, have been convicted of voter registration fraud.  ACORN itself was convicted in Nevada last year of the crime of “compensation.”  Under the leadership of ACORN official Amy Adele Busefink, who was also convicted of the same crime, ACORN paid voter registration canvassers cash bonuses for exceeding their quotas.  This is illegal because it gives people an incentive to commit fraud by adding Mickey Mouse and Mary Poppins to the voter rolls.

Under Busefink’s leadership, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote generated an impressive 1.1 million voter registration packages across America in 2008.  The problem was that election officials invalidated 400,000 — that’s 36 percent — of the registrations filed.  It is highly unlikely that typographic and other innocent errors alone generated so much bogus paperwork.  And this is only one activist group’s fraudulent activities in one election.

It is irresponsible for law enforcement officials to view those 400,000 registrations as mere mistakes.  All 400,000 bogus registrations should be presumed to constitute individual attempts at fraudulent voting that got caught early.  The hundreds of thousands of incidents of voter fraud that occur during every national election should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Left-wingers and Democrats are more likely than conservatives and Republicans to commit voter fraud.  Sometimes they justify the behavior on so-called social justice grounds.

Republican voters tend to be middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud, while “the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic,” according to Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson.  “Some liberal activists that Sabato and Simpson interviewed even partly justified fraudulent electoral behavior on the grounds that because the poor and dispossessed have so little political clout, ‘extraordinary measures [for example, stretching the absentee ballot or registration rules] are required to compensate’” (Who’s Counting, by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, pp. 8-9).

Should we not punish bad behavior just because it is more likely to be done by someone who is poor?  The left seems to suggest precisely that.

Obama’s Pre-Election Gift to Illegal Aliens

My article from today's Front Page Magazine:

Obama's Pre-Election Gift to Illegal Aliens

By Matthew Vadum

In a move more imperial than presidential, President Obama last week granted what amounts to a kind of de facto citizenship to as many as 1.4 million young illegal aliens.

From the Rose Garden of the White House on Friday Obama announced plans to bypass Congress and partially implement the so-called DREAM Act which would have offered a path to U.S. citizenship for youthful illegals who served in the armed forces or attended college. The administration says 800,000 illegal aliens could benefit although Jon Feere of the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies says the true number is closer to 1.4 million.

The cynical move came mere days before Obama was scheduled to speak at a major gathering of Hispanic activists in Florida.

Within hours of the announcement Obama’s reelection campaign sent out a mass email to supporters romanticizing this cohort of illegals as “Dreamers” who love America. These illegal aliens “should be able to dream as big as they want,” wrote Katherine Archuleta, national political director for the campaign.

The president said the new decree would take effect immediately in order to “lift the shadow of deportation from these young people.” Why this shadow needed to be lifted right now, while record unemployment levels plague the nation, was not explained.

“Let’s be clear, this is not amnesty, this is not immunity, this is not a path to citizenship, this is not a permanent fix,” Obama said. “This is the right thing to do.”

Of course the former constitutional law lecturer knows full well that any executive order that withholds prosecution for unlawful acts is by definition an amnesty, that is, an act of official forgiveness for past offenses.

Like all amnesties it rewards lawbreaking and serves as a flashing green light to would-be illegal immigrants, inviting them to jump the queue. Amnesties beget amnesties. Each one increases the likelihood that another immigration amnesty will follow in the future – and so on and so on and so on.

VADUM: Revving up the race card: Democrats’ backers deploy radical tactics to expand welfare state

Here is my oped from the Friday edition of the Washington Times:

VADUM: Revving up the race card: Democrats’ backers deploy radical tactics to expand welfare state

A George Soros-funded pressure group is behind a new drive to teach Democratic congressmen how to smear their opponents as racist.

By Matthew Vadum

Last week House Democrats were tutored by the radical, left-wing, racial spoils group known as the Center for Social Inclusion. The group was brought in “to address the issue of race to defend government programs,” Joel Gehrke reported in the WashingtonExaminer.

“The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious,” Mr. Gehrke wrote.

Trainer Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion lectured the assembled lawmakers that “conservative messages” are “racially ‘coded,’ ” and suggested ways to combat this sinister subliminal messaging cooked up by the Wile E. Coyotes of the Republican National Committee.

Facts don’t matter in Ms. Wiley’s estimation. “It’s emotional connection, not rational connection that we need,” she said.

Ms. Wiley argued that Newt Gingrich labeling President Obama a “food stamp president,” cannot possibly be “a race-neutral statement, even if Newt Gingrich did not intend racism.” In other words, even though the federal food stamp program has ballooned under the Obama administration, all criticism of Mr. Obama for that increased welfare spending – however seemingly legitimate – is rooted in racism.

Ms. Wiley, who in leftist parlance is a “civil rights” lawyer, also happens to be the daughter of the late George Wiley. As leader of the now-defunct National Welfare Rights Organization, Mr. Wiley worked closely with radical academic activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven to recruit people onto welfare rolls, as I note in “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.”

Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American

Here's a new piece of mine that was published today by American Thinker.

Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American 

By Matthew Vadum

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians.  Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. 
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.  It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. 
A decade before the Motor-Voter law that required states to register voters at welfare offices was enacted, NAACP official Joe Madison explained the political economy of voter registration drives.
"When people are standing in line to get cheese and butter or unemployment compensation, you don't have to tell them how to vote," said Madison, now a radio talk show host in Washington, D.C.  "They know how to vote."
Like Madison, Barack Obama grasped this basic truth when he worked for ACORN's Project Vote affiliate in 1992.
"All our people must know that politics and voting affects their lives directly," the future president said.  "If we're registering people in public housing, for an example, we talk about aid cuts and who's responsible."
Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn't about helping the poor.  It's about helping the poor to help themselves to others' money.  It's about raw so-called social justice.  It's about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.
Registering the unproductive to vote is an idea that was heavily promoted by the small-c communists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, as I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
In an infamous 1966 Nation magazine article, the radical university professors urged that the welfare apparatus be used to destroy the American system.  Borrowing a phrase the ultra-leftist Leon Trotsky used in one of his many anti-Stalin tracts, The Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927), they titled their blueprint for radical change "The Weight of the Poor."

Economic Terrorism’s Big Comeback

(originally published at Front Page Magazine, a publication of David Horowitz Freedom Center)


Economic Terrorism’s Big Comeback

By Matthew Vadum

Radical activist groups associated with President Barack Obama have launched a campaign of economic terrorism and sabotage – possibly with his blessing. Mortgage and student loan strikes, crippling bank boycotts, intimidation, and who knows what else are all on the agenda.

The idea of leftists using terrorism to achieve political objectives isn’t new. Leon Trotsky supported the use of terrorism to advance so-called social justice. Decades before an ice-axe found its way into his skull, Trotsky argued in Dictatorship vs. Democracy that Communists who reject “terrorism in principle” weren’t bona fide Communists. Years before that, he justified “proletarian terrorism” because the capitalist state itself, with its “entire state apparatus with its laws, police, and army is nothing but an apparatus for capitalist terror.” In the upside-down world of Marxists, radical activists’ frightening, violent, in-your-face tactics are thought of as merely fighting fire with fire.

Richard Kim of the Nation magazine: Clueless, useful idiot, or coverup leader?

ACORN was founded in part to carry out a subversive plot to radically transform America into a socialist nation.

Small-c communist professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven wrote an article called "The Weight of the Poor" that was published in the far-left magazine the Nation in 1966. The plan was to overwhelm welfare rolls to bring the system to collapse.

Nowadays Piven claims she didn't mean what she wrote, insisting it was just a modest essay published in an obscure magazine. She never mentions that the article was so popular the magazine printed an extra 30,000 copies, an unprecedented number, and that it gave a major boost to the so-called welfare rights movement.

Nation magazine senior editor Richard Kim offered an incredibly lame defense of Cloward and Piven's infamous blueprint for radical sociopolitical transformation and treated his readers as morons.

Cloward and Piven couldn’t possibly have wanted to overthrow capitalism because “the words ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’ never appear in their article,” argued Kim, thinking his readers were as dumb as a bag of hammers.

Liberals generally think Americans are stupid and need to be told what to do but it's another thing altogether for a left-wing magazine to regard its own audience as imbeciles.

Follow me on Twitter and read more about the Cloward-Piven Strategy and President Obama's wholehearted embrace of it in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Please buy my book!

I have a preview article out on my new book, Subversion Inc.

Read the article here. (PDF)

Here is the beginning of it:

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is part political group, part crime syndicate, part terrorist organization. Much of the time it operates outside the legitimate political process, waging war against the framework of society. ACORN is in the business of subverting the American system, so what Americans saw on the undercover “pimp and pro” videos released in 2009 was just another day at the office at ACORN.

But the darkest side of ACORN has remained largely unexplored – until now

ACORN, which until it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last year was America’s largest poor people’s group, was founded on political violence and intimidation.

ACORN grew out of another notorious group called the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). NWRO was founded in 1966—the same year Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s seminal article “The Weight of the Poor” was published in the Nation magazine. The so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy called for activists to double America’s welfare rolls in order to destabilize the American system of government. Placing impossible demands on states and localities would force them to ask Congress for a guaranteed annual income scheme and thereby set in motion the transformation of America into a socialist state.

NWRO grew out of the organizing efforts of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky and other veteran radical agitators. Cloward and Piven also helped bring NWRO into the world. They acknowledge they “were intimately involved in the affairs of NWRO: we participated in discussions of strategy, in fund-raising efforts, and in demonstrations.” [...]

Buy the book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which comes out Tuesday, May 10. Pre-order it now! If you'd like an autographed copy, order it directly from WND Books here.

Bloodthirsty Leon Trotsky inspired Cloward and Piven

It's May Day, a day of celebration for communists and community organizers alike.



On that note, although the bloodthirsty Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky was long dead before community organizing picked up steam in the United States in the 1960s, he served as an inspiration to Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. Trotsky, who was assassinated in 1940, was instrumental in the Bolshevik Revolution and founded the Red Army.

Cloward and Piven were, like Trotsky, what Joseph Stalin referred to as "ultra-leftists." Stalin, himself a homicidal monster, considered ultra-leftists to be dangerous and uncontrollable because they were content to set the whole world on fire in order to bring all nations under Communist domination. Stalin called such people "Trotskyite wreckers." Trotskyite is a pejorative term unlike the more neutral Trotskyist.

Cloward and Piven belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America, a Marxist group founded by Trotskyist Michael Harrington. Scholars credit Harrington with inspiring the destructive War on Poverty launched by President Lyndon Johnson in the mid 1960s.

Cloward and Piven named their influential 1966 blueprint for radically transforming America, "The Weight of the Poor." It's a phrase coined by Trotsky.

All of the above doesn't conclusively prove Cloward and Piven were Trotskyists, but there is a lot more evidence of the connection.

Read more 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!

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.