In recent days, investigative journalist James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas” has released a series of undercover, hidden-camera videos showing that the political consulting firm Democracy Partners and its founder, Robert Creamer, have long been collaborating with the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to dispatch trained provocateurs to instigate violence and chaos at Republican campaign events nationwide ⸺especially at rallies for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. The purpose of this strategy ⸺dubbed “bird-dogging” by Creamer and his allies ⸺is to create a public perception of “anarchy” surrounding Trump, on the theory that the shock value of such a spectacle undermines and erodes his political support.
In one of the undercover video segments released by O’Keefe, one of Creamer’s consultants, Scott Foval ⸺who in 2011 established a consulting firm called the Foval Group ⸺provided key details about the Democrat bird-dogging strategy. Specifically, Foval explained that the operation was structured in a manner that ⸺if the public were ever to find out about it⸺ would allow the DNC and the Clinton campaign to pretend that they knew nothing of it. “The thing that we have to watch is making sure there’s a double-blind between the actual campaign and the actual DNC and what we’re doing,” said Foval. “There’s a double-blind there, so that they can plausibly deny that they heard anything about it.” To help ensure that this plausible deniability was not in any way compromised, Democratic Party funding for the Foval Group was channeled through a highly circuitous path. Said Foval: “The campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, the Foval Group goes and executes the sh** on the ground.”
Democracy Partners founder Robert Creamer is a major Democrat figure with a long history of left-wing radicalism. The husband of Democrat Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Creamer formerly served as a lobbyist for George Soros’s Open Society Institute and as a leader of Citizen Action. Citizen Action was founded by veterans of: (a) the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical Sixties organization that aspired to overthrow America’s democratic institutions and remake the U.S. government in a Marxist image; and (b) the Indochina Peace Campaign, which in the 1970s worked to cut American aid to the governments in Saigon and Phnom Penh, and thus helped the North Vietnamese Communists and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge rise to power.
In 2006, Creamer was convicted of bank fraud and tax evasion. While serving a prison sentence for those crimes, he wrote a lengthy political manual whose thesis was that the Democratic Party could win a permanent majority in Congress by: (a) passing a national healthcare bill, thereby turning more people into wards of an ever-expanding government; and (b) giving amnesty to all illegal immigrants, thereby creating, virtually overnight, a large new constituency of Democratic voters. In the Acknowledgements section of the book, Creamer stated that his political views had been deeply influenced by “the legendary community organizer” Saul Alinsky.
Yet another key leader of Democracy Partners is Heather Booth, also an Alinsky acolyte who in 1969 co-published Socialism and the Coming Decade, a pamphlet urging socialist activists to eschew confrontational tactics, in favor of a stealth, incremental approach to social change. Booth later co-founded the Midwest Academy, a training institute for left-wing activism and socialist ideology. Booth taught the Academy’s continuing “socialism session,” which included lessons covering everything from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, through Michael Harrington’s democratic socialism.
A third major leader of Democracy Partners is Marilyn Katz, a former SDS radical who participated in the Chicago street riots during the Democratic Party’s 1968 national convention. During the Chicago “Days of Rage” riots the following year, Katz introduced protesters to a new weapon they could use against the police: a cluster of nails that were sharpened at both ends and fastened in the center.
Katz subsequently led another SDS remnant to form the New American Movement (NAM), a combined Old Left-New Left organization that included Communist Party USA members. NAM’s primary political text, entitled Basic Marxism: What It Is & How to Use It, revealed the group’s devotion to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Arguing that “a socialist revolution will be necessary to solve the problems of the U.S.,” NAM proudly declared: “We admire, and draw inspiration from, many accomplishments from the Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions…as representing, on balance, very positive steps forward in human history…we deeply value Lenin’s contributions to revolutionary theory and practice…We identify with Lenin’s revolutionary spirit and determination; we agree with his critique of mechanistic determinism and economism, his writings on the nature of the state, his approach to creating a ‘revolutionary alliance of the oppressed,’ and his treatment of nationalism and imperialism.”
It is highly significant that these three hard-left radicals ⸺Creamer, Booth, and Katz ⸺represent the very heart of Democracy Partners, the group at the center of the recently revealed bird-dogging scandal. It is also worth noting that another leader of Democracy Partners is none other than Christine Pelosi, the daughter of Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.
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