D’Souza’s Indictment and Double Standards

My article from today's FrontPage Magazine:

Dinesh D'Souza with Matthew Vadum, 2007.

D'Souza's Indictment and Double Standards

By Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration’s indictment of critic Dinesh D’Souza on campaign finance law violations is a reminder that it’s dangerous to be in the opposition when the president is a lawless strongman who knows the media will protect him no matter what.

Democratic malefactors remained at large on Friday as D’Souza pleaded not guilty to charges that he directed two individuals to each make $10,000 donations to the campaign of Wendy Long, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, on the understanding he would reimburse them, which he did not long after.

The court in New York reportedly imposed unusually tough release conditions on the bestselling conservative author, ordering him to post a $500,000 bond and not to leave the country.

D’Souza’s attorney told U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman that the facts were more or less not in dispute. “I think there’s a dispute over how it happened and whether what happened violated federal law,” Benjamin Brafman said.

As The Blaze reports,

Outside court, Brafman said there was no corrupt intent, a necessary component of the law, in his client’s actions, and he said the $20,000 in donations fell short of the $25,000 required to bring a criminal case. He said it was a situation that was normally resolved with a fine rather than criminal charges. He said there was no request by D’Souza that Long do anything, and the Senate candidate had no knowledge that campaign finance rules had been violated. Brafman said D’Souza and Long had been friends since college and “at worst, this was an act of misguided friendship by D’Souza.”

So why was D’Souza subjected to serial killer treatment, arrested, incarcerated, maybe perp-walked, for something that’s roughly the campaign finance law equivalent of a traffic ticket?

Could it be because D’Souza went too far in criticizing the notoriously thin-skinned Obama with his compelling, scathingly critical documentary, 2016: Obama’s America? The movie brought in an astounding $33 million in revenue, making it the second most popular political documentary in U.S. history behind Michael Moore’s lie-filled, anti-George W. Bush temper tantrum from 2004, Fahrenheit 

9/11.

ACORN Crooks on the March for Obamacare

My article from today's issue of FrontPage Magazine:

ACORN Crooks on the March for Obamacare

By Matthew Vadum

A corrupt union ringleader who orchestrated massive campaigns involving identity fraud in furtherance of voter fraud and who covered up a million-dollar embezzlement involving pension funds will soon have unfettered access to confidential information on thousands of people seeking health insurance.

The union thug is disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke whose shady union will soon be helping people enroll in Obamacare exchanges.

Rathke’s labor vehicle, United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 100 in New Orleans, announced on its Facebook page Sept. 15 that it was gearing up “to do mass enrollment and help navigate people into the marketplaces in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas under the Affordable Care Act!”

“Local 100′s role as a Navigator, suggest[s] the program is less about health care and more about building a new progressive infrastructure,” says longtime ACORN-watcher Mike Flynn of Breitbart.com.

The fact that Wade Rathke, a disreputable, radical left-wing community organizer, is allowed anywhere near the enrollment process ought to give all Americans pause. The only reason Rathke hasn’t been federally investigated for racketeering is because his allies control the federal law enforcement apparatus. President Obama pretends he has no connection to ACORN and Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t care what laws have been broken because he approves of ACORN’s goals.

Of course, ACORN and the labor movement go way back. In 1979, ACORN created the United Labor Unions, which it used to organize low-wage, fast-food, and home healthcare workers in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.

Yes, that’s President Obama’s former employer, ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

ACORN is the nonprofit group that knowingly hired felons convicted of identity theft to work on voter registration drives, giving them custody of sensitive voter information.

As I showed in my ACORN/Obama expose, Subversion Inc., ACORN is also infamous for hiring felons without bothering to do background checks, storming hospital emergency rooms and city council chambers, using voter fraud to turn graveyards across the nation into Democratic electoral strongholds, using mob violence against bank executives and other shakedown targets, and for ruthlessly exploiting its own employees and going to court to seek an exemption from minimum wage laws.

The 400,000-member organization, which filed for bankruptcy almost three years ago, was the nation’s preeminent Saul Alinsky-inspired street protest group — and the creepiest by far.

Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke is urging Catholics to quit their church

President Obama isn't the only leftist to declare war on the Catholic church.

Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke is urging Catholics to quit their church:

In the fall from grace of one institution after another, religious bodies have been on a steady decline for a generation.  No institution claims more members and fills less pews now that the Catholic Church on any given Sunday, nor has any outfit taken more of a licking in the public perception.  The inability to effectively manage the staff at the boundary lines between practice and principle has led to some dioceses declaring bankruptcy, multi-million dollar damage settlements, and a general uneasiness about how faith and flock have been stewarded by priests.  Couple all of that with a rigid hierarchy that seems committed to resisting change, pushing back the clock, some verifiable degree of misogyny, and a hardening attack on the victims of priestly misconduct and venerable institutions like the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and anything that still carries the torch of the Church’s long historic leadership in the fight for social justice.
What’s to be done?  Finally, it has become crystal clear.  It’s time to leave the church and follow the nuns! [emphasis added above]

That's rich. Wade is one of the worst managers in the history of nonprofit activism. His brother Dale embezzled nearly $1 million from ACORN in 2000 and Wade covered it up for eight years. Wade's actions laid the groundwork for the collapse of ACORN. All ACORN needed was a push -- and that push was provided by James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles the next year when they caught ACORN employees on undercover video offering helpful advice on setting up a brothel for pedophiles. The video sting caused Congress to cut off funding for ACORN and scared away remaining institutional funders. ACORN filed for bankruptcy on Election Day 2010.


And wow, does Wade really hate the Catholic church.

Error in Daily Caller article

(Note: The Daily Caller corrected the article the same day. -MV)

A new profile of ACORN founder Wade Rathke in the Daily Caller inaccurately describes a key passage in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (published by WND Books).

Here's the offending paragraph from the Daily Caller:

His book opens with the provocative question, “How many dead Republicans does it take to satisfy the bloodlust of ACORN founder Wade Rathke?” referring to his contention that ACORN leaders planned “to kill delegates and police” at the 2008 Republican national Convention in Minnesota, before a turncoat helped law-enforcement dismantle the plot.

In fact I did not write in my book that ACORN leaders planned to kill delegates and police at the 2008 Republican national convention. The book makes it clear that anarchists Bradley Neil Crowder and David Guy McKay plotted to bomb the Republican convention. Crowder and McKay went to prison for their crimes. I have never claimed that Crowder and McKay were in any way associated with ACORN. (Actually, I wrote about Crowder and McKay in a Daily Caller article published January 13, 2010.)

Rathke had nothing to do with the bomb plot. He did, however, express disgust that a fellow community organizer had foiled the plot by alerting the FBI.

Here is the relevant passage from the book:

How many dead Republicans does it take to satisfy the bloodlust of ACORN founder Wade Rathke?

 We’ll never know, because the FBI thwarted the attack planned by his allies on the 2008 Republican national convention. It’s impossible to determine how many American lives were saved that September day in St. Paul, Minnesota, because Rathke’s progressive comrades-in arms were caught before they could incinerate innocent Americans who disagreed with them politically.

 This attempt by radical left-wing anarchists to kill delegates and police and to shut down the nation’s democratic process didn’t enrage Rathke, chief architect of President Barack Obama’s favorite community organizing group. On the contrary, five months later Rathke wrote a blog post without a single word of criticism for the perpetrators.

 The planned murder and mayhem didn’t interest him at all. What really drove ACORN’s patriarch nuts was that a fellow radical leftist, a member of his own political camp, had dared to work with the government to fight left-wing thuggery. On his Chief Organizer blog, Rathke denounced FBI informant Brandon Darby, formerly a fellow America-hating radical community organizer, for helping to disrupt the attack: “It seemed so, how should I say it, ’60s?”

“One thing to disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks, or, even worse, as some now allege, to try and mousetrap people,” Rathke wrote. “Why in the age of Bush did we need to go back to the 60’s and the Darth Vader times again?” Rathke continued, nostalgically gazing into his navel. “I’m not sure exactly what may have happened. Darby is suddenly not talking, but this is all both sketchy and creepy, and I want there to be different rules of engagement in the Age of Obama.” (The entire blog post is available in Appendix C.)

Human life, pain and suffering, the possibility of civil disorder, the sanctity of the American electoral process—all were less important to Rathke than protecting terrorists who shared his vision for America. Rathke must also have been incensed that the attack came so soon after the Democrats’ national convention, which had highlighted community organizers and what they do to the communities they target. And it must have made his blood boil that the terrorist attack failed at a Republican convention whose star attractions subjected his chosen profession to pitiless ridicule.

I trust the Daily Caller will promptly correct the error.

Flashback: Soros-Funded Documentary Embraces Left-Wing Terrorists Who Plotted To Kill Republicans

Here's a link to an interesting piece at Big Journalism by Lee Stranahan. It's about the vicious propaganda film Better This World which falsely depicts American hero Brandon Darby as a co-conspirator in a plot to attack the 2008 GOP convention with Molotov cocktails. The goal of the two actual conspirators, David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, was to kill Republicans. These two would-be murderers accused Darby of making them do it but the accusation was wholly rejected by the judge who heard the criminal case.

I was the first to report almost a year ago that this wretched pro-terrorist film was financially supported by taxpayers and George Soros. I also wrote about the film and the terrorist plot in my book Subversion Inc. ACORN founder Wade Rathke made it clear he supports the terrorists and wanted their murderous plot to succeed.

Below is the article I wrote last October that was published by Big Hollywood. It is telling that the Soros-funded Media Matters for America, which eagerly pounces whenever I write something even mildly controversial, has not published a word about my articles on Better This World and Brandon Darby. I wonder why.

Soros-Funded Documentary Embraces Left-Wing Terrorists Who Plotted To Kill Republicans

By Matthew Vadum

Radical philanthropist George Soros is bankrolling a documentary that celebrates left-wing terrorists who plotted to napalm Republicans at the 2008 GOP convention in Minnesota. Even worse, you too are bankrolling the film through your taxes.

You can be sure that if right-wing terrorists were plotting to attack the Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled that conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.



“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” said Brandon Darby, who helped the FBI thwart the planned attack.

A trailer for the left-wing film Better This World suggests that it depicts David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder as idealistic activists who, according to the official blurb, “set out to prove the strength of their political convictions to themselves and their mentor.” (Note: There was a functioning trailer when I wrote this post a few days ago, but it no longer appears to be working. -MV) In fact McKay and Crowder are convicted domestic terrorists who manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

The movie attacks a true American hero, Brandon Darby, who undermined the conspiracy by alerting the FBI. Filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega twist the facts to argue that Darby, a former revolutionary activist, manipulated McKay and Crowder into becoming would-be mass murderers.

It’s an easily disproved lie.

During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices.
McKay and Crowder had made homemade riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the Xcel Energy Center. The goal was to shut down the democratic process by preventing GOP delegates from participating in the convention. The shields were discovered and confiscated.

Communist Cult Leader Wade Rathke Doesn't Seem to Realize He is the Disaster that Hit Springfield

Wade Rathke, the America-hating 1960s radical who founded ACORN, has a deliciously ironic post up on his Chief Organizer blog.

It's titled Springfield Story: Do We Learn from Disasters? In it this terrorism-loving agitator bemoans the foreclosure rate in Springfield, Mass., and praises the man who helped to cause it, Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), calling the corrupt lawmaker --incredibly enough-- a "banking expert and one-man accountability squad."

What ACORN's real life Doctor Evil doesn't say is that he caused a disaster in Springfield years ago.

The sociopathic Rathke caused a riot in Springfield in order to advance his small-c communist objectives.

As I explain in my book Subversion Inc: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books), 

Rathke was arrested after he led an invasion of the Springfield welfare office with 250 or more women and students armed with signs reading “More for the poor, less for the war.” After the welfare director refused to give in to the crowd’s demands for winter clothing benefits they were not entitled to, Rathke’s members rioted. Millions of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed over two days of unrest.

The Soviet government used Rathke’s riot as anti-American propaganda, publishing an article about it in Pravda. Rathke’s experiences “reinforced his belief that one important resource for poor people was their ability to disrupt.” He realized that despite the failure of the action to achieve its objective, his followers felt empowered by violence directed against the system. This empowerment by rioting became a staple of ACORN’s playbook.

Rathke's a sick individual. Along with all of ACORN's leaders, he belongs in jail. 

If only we didn't have a president who was part of the problem.

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, Machiavellian pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy the book at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

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.

The Latest from Wade Rathke, ACORN's Real Life Dr. Evil

Wade Rathke, the America-hating 1960s radical who founded ACORN, isn't too happy with the adverse publicity he's been receiving lately as a result of my book Subversion Inc: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books).

Here's what cult leader Rathke, who's not a bad writer sometimes, has to say about yours truly:

It isn’t hard to hear the death rattle of desperation in the latest farcical efforts of Congressman Steve King to try to revive a dying political career and a blogger trying to flack a mail-order book at the expense of ACORN, the once great community organization. [emphasis added] 

Elsewhere in the post Louisiana's leading sociopath describes me as "a blogger trying to generate sales for his mail-order book attacking ACORN" and simply as "the blogger."

Apparently "blogger" is intended as an epithet. I guess I am one but I don't use the term because I started out in print journalism years ago (not that there's anything wrong with being a blogger). Whatever floats Rathke's boat.

Anyway, it's amazing that Rathke and his embezzling little brother Dale remain at large.

(Oh, and I've seen the book for sale at Barnes and Noble so mail order isn't the only way you can get your hands on the book that G. Gordon Liddy calls "dynamite with a short fuse.")

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, Machiavellian pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy the book at Amazon. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

USS Cesar Chavez? Why not the USS Saul Alinsky?

Incredibly, the U.S. Navy has decided to name a cargo ship after the guy who came up with the Obama campaign slogan, "Yes, we can!" That man is the late labor agitator and community organizer Cesar Chavez. Chavez's union, the United Farm Workers, used the saying he coined as its official motto. (In Spanish, "¡Sí se puede!")

The decision to name a Navy ship after this radical is remarkable not only because President Obama's teleprompter has the phrase "Yes, we can!" burnt into it from the phrase's overuse, but because the far-left leader was a disciple of communist sympathizer Saul Alinsky. Chavez, who died in 1993, worked for the Community Service Organization from 1952 to 1962. CSO was a pressure group created by Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. Chavez has been lionized by the left because he hated capitalism and shared Alinsky's contempt for the American system. The man even sounded like Alinsky, insisting he loved America while working to undermine its institutions. Chavez said

Until the chance for political participation is there, we who are poor will continue to attack the soft part of the American system - its economic structure. We will build power through boycotts, strikes, new union - whatever techniques we can develop. These attacks on the status quo will come, not because we hate, but because we know America can construct a humane society for all its citizens - and that if it does not, there will be chaos.

"There will be chaos?" Prediction or threat? You decide.

Chavez is also connected to ACORN founder Wade Rathke, a fact I reported in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

When Rathke was employed as an organizer at ACORN's parent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), he was trained by a man named Bill Pastreich who had studied Alinsky’s in-your-face organizing techniques. Pastreich had also been employed by Chavez's United Farm Workers.

Is it just a matter of time before the Obama administration commissions the USS Saul Alinsky? No doubt it will be a destroyer.

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


(originally posted at NewsReal blog)

ACORN plan: 'Tactics that include extra-legal activity': Book uncovers president's links to 'undisguised authoritarian socialism'

WND highlights the fondness of ACORN founder Wade Rathke for violence. 

WND has the story here.

Buy the book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which is now available in fine bookstores near you. If you'd like an autographed copy, order it directly from  the publisher, WND Books, here.

ACORN’s Charismatic Cult Leader Embraces Political Violence and Cyberterrorism: ‘Subversion Inc.’ Book Preview (Part 3 of 4)

NewsReal blog has another preview article on my new book Subversion Inc.

Read the article here.

This preview focuses on the small-c communist cult leader Wade Rathke. He founded ACORN in 1970 and was fired as chief organizer in 2008 following an embezzlement scandal and subsequent cover-up.

Buy the book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which is now available in fine bookstores near you. If you'd like an autographed copy, order it directly from  the publisher, WND Books, here.

Obama administration aided ACORN India

I had an exclusive story in the Daily Caller last year about how the Obama administration used U.S. government resources to help ACORN spread the gospel of socialism in India.

ACORN founder and racketeer Wade Rathke engineered the U.S. government's embrace of a group committed to furthering Jawaharlal Nehru's socialist agenda in India. Socialism, of course, is what has kept India in poverty ever since that nation gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

Since ACORN is all about keeping people miserable, sick, and poor, it makes perfect sense that it would open branch offices in India.

Read more about ACORN adventures on the Indian subcontinent 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 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!

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!