In response to all the communist-baiting hype on the right, a little Michigan history and commentary.
Betsy DeVos has several former-Commie associates and friends, with whom she chums with in her nationwide crusades to radically change and overpower democratic institutions and politics in America.
Robert Laurie,
Michigan View contributor wrote wrote a blistering defense of “aging guitar player”
Ted Nugent by bringing in Bill Ayers and connecting Ayers, whom Laurie labels a “Communist", with President Obama. It is the old guilt-by-association thing.
In "
The Motor City Madman meets Bill Ayers' pal" on the Michigan View April 18, 2012 here is Laurie:
“Ayers was one of Barack Obama's earliest supporters... Far from being mere acquaintances, their relationship lasted years."
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Back in Vogue: More with the American Radical-Right than on the Volga
Poster of Vladimir Lenin making a speech with Marxist caption (1920) |
Laurie’s article brought to mind another well-known political person, Michigan’s own
Elizabeth (Betsy) Prince DeVos, who has more than one relationship or political connection to former Communists.
If the President is to be “bound-to” and black-brushed by references to Bill Ayers,
let’s go the distance and examine those ex-Communists in Betsy DeVos’circle of friends and influence with the same degree of intensity and focus Laurie applied to Ayers:
As Chair of the Michigan GOP, Betsy invited David Horowitz to the Michigan Republican Party
Mackinac Island Leadership Conference. (Horowitz was raised by parents who were both members of the Communist Party USA. Between 1956 and 1975, Horowitz, himself is a former communist radical, a self-described “
Marxist Revolutionary,” as his autobiography "Radical Son" puts it).
On the Island Horowitz spoke at the traditional Saturday luncheon event where hundreds of leaders heard him accuse all the major journalism schools of America as being “Communist.” Jointly with Horowitz was
Lynn Cheney, together they were outlining their crusade to root out college professors who held ideological or political views of the kind Horowitz did not favor. Their organization:
The Freedom Center/Students for Academic Freedom is designed to hunt “ideological enemies” on college campuses and mount purges.
Betsy and her mother (
Elsa Prince) and brother (
Erik Prince) are heavily invested in,and advised by Father Bob.
Robert Sirico, founder of the Grand Rapids based
Acton Institute, was a Communist. They have helped to make him a rising “star” on the Rad Right. Father Bob is reported to have been one of the first ministers in the country to perform a gay marriage ceremony, and he the “house” vicar to the
Prince Family. Father Bob is council and guide to infamous “kill for hire” Erik Prince of
Blackwater infamy (Father Bob married to Erik and his second wife). Father Bob is a very useful tool in the Prince/DeVos/Amway universe-as a radical supporter and a (beck -&-call) apologist for extreme capitalism-often defending Amway-an entire corporation built on plundering the dreams (and assets) of millions of eager MLM recruits-who rapidly become drop-outs of the scheme.
Betsy never once spoke out against former commie
Marvin Olasky. Olasky has been an honored guest at her mother’s
Acton Institute’s Acton Forum (Grand Rapids, MI). Marvin, self-confessed former Communist, went on to be the architect of George W. Bush’s “appeasement/payback” federal funding scheme for his religious backers/base called
Faith-based Funding. Olasky is a harsh critic of welfare which
Olasky calls "The Tragedy of American Compassion."
The conservative Weekly Standard’s
Bill Kristol has never been called out by Betsy for being the son of a self-described former communist (
Irving Kristol), she has never questioned Neo-Conservatives and other radical right-wingers who follow in the rut laid out by Bill Buckley. It was Buckley who worked with
Willi Schlamm, ex-communist editor of
The Freeman , in the raising up of his “conservative” movement and the establishing of the National Weekly, which became the
National Review of today.
Betsy husband’s family, the
Amway (Alticor) Clan, are doing billions in business with the
Peoples Republic of China or Communist China. the Reds own/control a substantial part of their Guangzhou plant. “
The company stepped into the Chinese market in 1995. In 2008, Amway China has already become Amway's largest market” (Shanghai Daily, 2009).
All business in each Chinese Province is directly supervised by a Red Army General. Amway’s profits are stoking up the power and wealth of the Communist Reds in China. Look who’s profit-sharing with
the enemy!
How does this all link in with the ebb and flow of Darkside Ideology?
From Bill Moyers and Michael Winship in "
Joe McCarthy’s Ghost Slithers Again" on April 27, 2012:
“Right-wing paranoia knows no bounds, as propagandists stoke dark fantasies about President Obama that revive memories of “black helicopters” from the 1990s. But Tea Party favorite, Rep. Allen West reaches back even further to the days of Joe McCarthy…”
“We’ve talked at times about George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, and the amnesia that sets in when we flush events down the memory hole, leaving us at the mercy of only what we know today. Sometimes, though, the past comes back to haunt, like a ghost. It happened recently when we saw Congressman Allen West of Florida on the news. Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are ‘card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists'.”
Statement by Teapublican
Allen West:
“I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”
Again,
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship:
“By now, little of what Allen West says ever surprises. He has called President Barack Obama ‘a low-level Socialist agitator,’ said anyone with an Obama bumper sticker on their car is ‘a threat to the gene pool’ and told liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to “get the hell out of the United States of America.’ Apparently, he gets his talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or the discredited right-wing rocker Ted Nugent.”
“But this time, we shook our heads in disbelief (at Allen West's assertion) ‘78 to 81 Democrats… members of the Communist Party?’ That’s the moment the memory hole opened up and a ghost slithered into the room. The specter stood there, watching the screen, a snickering smile on its stubbled face. Sure enough, it was the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to become one of the most contemptible thugs in American politics.”
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“Millions of Americans lapped it up, but in the end, Joe McCarthy would be done in by the medium that he had used so effectively to spread his poison: television. In 1954, legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow bravely exposed McCarthy’s tactics on the CBS program, See It Now. Edward R. Murrow: “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent,” Murrow declared. “We can deny our heritage and history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a Republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”
Excepted from Moyers & Company show transcript April 26, 2012.
In the end McCarthy was censured by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 67-22. Joe faded from the limelight in disgrace. However, McCarthy is an infamous name, and McCarthyism, a set of tactics which live on in infamy. And now Michigan View’s Laurie wants to blacken Obama with his association with Bill Ayers.
Back to Betsy's Buddy
There is no need to blacken Betsy Prince DeVos with her ongoing associations with a smarmy group of self-declared ideologues and operatives who have shifted from Far Left to Far Right (and whose book sales and lecture honorariums stack up in the process). In their efforts the former Reds have endeared themselves to Betsy, and she to them. She finds them useful “tools.” The Red Chinese continue to co-operate with Amway for the time being, and the billions in corporate profits amass, making a tempting cache of cash with which Betsy and family members can provoke and engender their favorite, private idiocies and ideologies. It is puzzling why Betsy has such an affinity for former Communists. What exactly do they have in common?
As Betsy DeVos goes about her merry way tearing down and destroying public institutions and making politics a much more sooty process (American Federation for Children): Does the radicalism of these commie friends influence her actions or promote her many fights and radical agendas? It would seem hard to rule out such possibilities.
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Way Left of Rad-Right: David Horowitz giving an ex-Leninist anti-Islamist speech
at the UNC where dozens of students walked out on him March 12, 2012. |
Let’s Take A Look at David Horowitz: Betsy Prince DeVos’ Ex-Commie Chum Illuminated
So just who is this guy that Betsy had to have keynote up on Mackinac Island to layout new strategies for the Michigan GOP? We get a pretty through description from
Justin Raimondo, who is a
Ludwig von Mises Institute Adjunct Scholar (remember that Hillsdale/Mackinac Academic Dr. Gary
Wolfram is the real von Mises fan among the Michigan rad-right), gives acute insight into Horowitz, the ex-communist and close Betsy DeVos ally. In "
David Horowitz & the Ex-Communist Confessional" in Chronicles, June 1997 this is
what Raimondo had to say about David Horowitz, former Communist:
"The literature of recanting radicals has been with us since 1917: from the recollections of Russian Mensheviks, who rued the day they joined with Lenin, to Irving Kristol's "Memoirs of a Trotskyist," in which the neoconservative godfather fondly reminisces about his youthful dalliance with dissident communism. With each successive atrocity and betrayal-Kronstadt, the Moscow Trials, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Khrushchev's admission of Stalin's crimes-library shelves grew heavier with the weight of accumulated mea culpas.
At the height of the Cold War, a new subgenre grew up around the sensational revelations of ex-communists detailed in dozens of books, the most famous being Whittaker Chambers' Witness. This over-praised and overwrought work inspired many imitators, whose works became a staple of the anticommunist arsenal. With their lurid tales of a secret sub-world of subversion, a hidden labyrinth of evil beneath the placid streets of postwar America, THEY THRILLED THEIR READERS WITH A DELICIOUS FEAR.
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With the publication of David Horowitz's book "Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey" (The Free Press, 1997), a memoir detailing the author's involvement with the Black Panthers and the New Left hothouse of Berkeley in the 6O's, we are hearing the last echoes of the ex-radicals' self-abnegation. The twin themes of recantation and retribution dominate these works, from the earliest-Benjamin
Gitlow's, I Confess (1940), This is My Story, by Louis Budenz (1947), Whittaker Chambers' Witness
(1954)) and several other works by lesser-known figures-to their 60's counterparts, Phillp Abbott Luce, author of The New Left (1966), and Horowitz.
Like disappointed lovers, the authors of these works testify to the cruel seduction they were subjected to: all were innocent idealists led astray by temptation, but redeemed in the end. Budenz, like many of the ex-Stalinists, made a beeline for the Church; others, such as Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, became right-wing Social Democrats and were instrumental in crafting the CIA's penetration of the European labor movement. In time, many - Chambers, Kristol, Luce, Horowitz-would join the conservative movement.
Taking Gitlow and Horowitz-the first, and, likely, the last-as examples, a biographical pattern begins to emerge: both were born into a family of Eoisfieviks, New York Jewish immigrants who instilled their progeny with devotion to the God Who Had Not Yet Failed. Yet the biographical parallels also highlight their vivid contrasts in character, tone, and style.
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Compared to Horowitz, Gitlow the fanatic avenger and consummate opportunist-is a veritable giant. While HOROWITZ WAS ALWAYS A PERIPHERAL FIGURE ON THE LEFT, WITH NO STATUS AS AN ACTIVIST BEYOND THE BERKELEY SCENE, Gitlow was one of the founding leaders of the American Communist Party, whose defection was front-page news all across the world.
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Horowitz, on the other hand, is ambivalent about confronting the mini-Stalin of the Panther New Left milieu, Huey Newton, and he continually worried about the danger to his own safety. Typically, when he discovers that his Black Panther heroes are murderers and thugs, he blames other people: "Anger welled inside me. Why hadn't Noel said anything before? Why hadn't Charles? Or Troy? Why hadn't they warned me? The answer was clear: they did not want to be accused of betraying the Left."
The Panthers had killed their accountant, Betty Van Patter, who had been recommended for the job by Horowitz himself, but he confesses that he "was now ruled by the principle of silence." Although Horowitz knew who had killed Van Patter, and why, it took him years to go public-and he never really does come clean. For nowhere does he directly acknowledge his own complicity in her death, even though it was he who recruited her for the position that was to prove her undoing. He claims that he and other New Left activists were "blind" to the fact that the Panthers were, as Dick Gregory put it, "a bunch of thugs." But this is not very credible: What else is one to think of a group that walks into a session of the California State Assembly armed with rifles and dressed in uniforms? Huey Newton urged his followers to "pick up the gun." What else did Horowitz and friends expect but that, one day, they would pick it up-and use it?
Unlike Gitlow, Chambers, et al., Horowitz was not an activist but a self-styled theoretician, a literary type who held a key post as an editor of RAMPARTS but who deliberately avoided any organizational loyalties except in running the "Learning Center" for the Oakland branch of the Black Panthers. In spite of his best effort to inflate his own importance to the growth of the New Left movement, Horowitz never exercised any appreciable influence over its activities or direction.
When Gitlow was expelled from the Communist Party in the 1930's' along with Jay Lovestone, they took several hundred members with them; when Horowitz, the great New Left guru, announced his support for Ronald Reagan, he took exactly one of his ex-comrades with him: his longtime, friend and literary collaborator Collier.
One striking difference between the ex-commie confessionals of yesterday and Horowitz's tome is stylistic; while Gitlow is concerned with exposing the inner workings of the communist movement, its front groups, strategies, subterfuges, Horowitz is mainly interested in self-revelation.
We learn everything we never needed to know about the messy little ups and downs of his personal life: an affair with a "psychic healer" who "heals" him out of his marriage his relationship with a crack-addicted drifter who left him suddenly after draining him of considerable sums of money and affair with Abbie Rockefeller. Particularly maddening is the fact that the author, in detailing this Bacchanalia, keeps asserting his growing disenchantment with the counter-cultural values an lifestyle of his generation.
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Horowitz... in detailing his own psychosexual peccadilloes at such length-while all the time proclaiming his growing devotion to conservative family values-succeeds only in proving his own hypocrisy. Reflecting the self-absorption so typical of his generation, Radical Son chronicles Horowitz's every mood swing in excruciating detail. To relieve the tedium, the author recalls his brushes with the glitterati: how he hung out with some Kennedy kids as they snorted coke and mingled with the Hollywood crowd, dropping plenty of names along the way.
But the star of this show is the author. IN A PROLOGUE THAT READS LIKE A MARKETING STRATEGY, the tirelessly self-promoting Horowitz declares, "I was like Whittaker Chambers in their generation-a young man, inspired by the high-minded passions of the Left who had broken through to the dark underside of the radical cause. Like Chambers, I had encounters with totalitarian forces that involved betrayal and death. Like him, I had been demonized for my second thoughts. . . Like Chambers, I had become the most hated ex-radical of my generation."
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"HERE IS A NARCISSISM SO INFLATED THAT IT EXPLODES IN A BURST OF PURE ABSURDITY: Picture Chambers, defying the establishment, taking on a man like Hiss, and standing up to the power of the Soviet Empire. Now look at Horowitz: he swims with the tide, not against it, and breathlessly announces, at this late date, that socialism is evil and the Black Panthers were not Boy Scouts. As for comparing the resources and power of the Soviet Union to what is little more than a street gang, Newton was no Stalin, but an ordinary street thug. Horowitz is no Chambers, nor even a Gitlow or a Budenz, but an ordinary disillusioned liberal with nothing of interest to reveal but his own self-obsession.
While Chambers held his audience spellbound with tales of secret papers in the pumpkin patch, and Gitlow mapped the route by which Moscow's gold flowed into communist coffers, all Horowitz has to offer is a couple of friendly dinners with an unnamed Soviet official. These discussions were always held at the best restaurants, and on such occasions Horowitz claims to have argued against Soviet repression...."
(emphasis added)
David Horowitz’s former pro-communist life and current work as a key Hard Right ideologue is illustrative of any number of Hard Left, former Communists who have found refuge and a paying occupation now in service of the Rad Right.
Their former diehard commitment to the Communist Party has become a strong point in the respect some radical “conservatives” hold for them.
The following excerpt is from "
The Apparat: George W. Bush's back-door political machine: It's anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional, and is working to create a one-party America" by
Jerry M. Landay of
Mediatransparency.org, March 18, 2004:
"Rob Stein, an independent Washington researcher, follows the money flow to the radical activist establishment. He estimates that since the early 1970s at least $2.5 to $3 billion in funding has been awarded to the 43 major activist organizations he tracks that constitute the core of the radical machine.
He terms the big 43 the "cohort" -- an "incubator of right-wing, ideological policies that constitute(d ) the (Bush) administration's agenda, and, to the extent that it has one, runs its policy machinery."
He calls the cohort "a potent, never-ending source of intellectual content, laying down the slogans, myths, and buzz words that have helped shift public opinion rightward." The movement's propulsive energies are largely generated within the cohort.
Stein describes it as movement conservatism's "intellectual infrastructure" -- multiple-issue, non-profit, tax-exempt, and supposedly non-partisan. The apparatus includes think tanks, policy institutes, media-harassment enterprises, as well as litigation firms that file lawsuits to impose their ideological templates on the law.
They mastermind the machinery of radical politics, policy, and regulations. They include campus-based centers of scholarship, student associations, and scores of publications. The shorthand of their faith is well known: less government, generous tax cuts for the privileged, privatization or elimination of Social Security and Medicare, rollbacks of environmental safeguards, major curbs on the public's right to go to court, and a laissez-faire free market system unfettered by regulations or public-interest accountability. Bush campaigns to advance the ideological agenda of the right, and the radical front in turn campaigns for Bush."
Where these folks find their "
Roots":
"In the early 1970s, when the movement was spawned, most of the seed funding came from a relative handful of private foundations established by far-right industrialists and inherited wealth.
They included, most notably, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, the John M. Olin Foundation of New York City, the quartet of foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh, the Smith Richardson Foundation (Vicks), the Castle Rock Foundation (Coors beer), and the Koch family foundations (energy).
Today, the right's funding base has hugely expanded. The NCRP now identifies a total of 79 private foundations that make grants to right-wing political action groups. The NCRP estimates that those foundations granted some $253 million to the 350 activist organizations between 1999 and 2001 alone.
Scores of for-profit corporations add millions more to the funding stream. These include Time-Warner, Altria (Philip Morris), AT&T, Microsoft, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and other members of the pharmaceutical industry, the two titans of the military-industrial complex Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as telecommunications, banking, real estate, and financial interests. Precise information on corporate contributions to tax exempt organizations is scarce since the IRS does not require their public disclosure.
The NCRP report concludes that the right-wing domain these billions has built has "undoubtedly helped advance, market, and strengthen the conservative agenda in all policy realms," from international relations and so-called "preventive" war-making, to a raft of domestic issues."
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"Political commentator David Gergen has noted that the integrated propaganda organs of the far right have created "a new politics in America," with its "ability to mobilize and interact with core constituencies on issues ranging from immigration to tax policy to welfare reform."
The machine's efforts, which are misperceived by the populace as divorced from the GOP and the Bush White House, allow the President to appear above the fray at photo-ops and fund-raisers, while the unofficial machine augments his firepower and campaign bank accounts."
Note: In Michigan, the DeVos clan helped finance and establish the
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which shares funders with the organizations and their associated foundations listed above.
Back to "
The Apparat" analysis:
"During the Sixties and early Seventies “Domestic tranquility had been shattered by racial unrest, assassinations, and burning cities. "The glory hath departed," intoned the Rev. Jerry Falwell on CBS, as he organized his Moral Majority to "save" the nation. America, he preached, had lost its power, lost its values, lost its virtues. And he blamed the liberal movement for all the ills. With the Nixon landslide against McGovern in 1972, the right also sensed its moment. The Reagan victory in 1980 confirmed it.
The ultra-conservative William Simon, a financier, Treasury Secretary, and then president of the Olin Foundation, decided it was time to bring conservative wealth, manpower, and organizational ability to bear on the creation of a "counter intelligentsia" to roll back the "despotism" of the "Liberal Establishment."
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce widely distributed an influential memo by a Richmond attorney named Lewis Powell (the Powell Memo), who would subsequently become a Supreme Court justice, calling for a conservative assault against what he viewed as the central echelons of liberal power -- the campus, the media, the courts, and politics.
Out of this tempest emerged what Sidney Blumenthal has called the "counter-establishment." A host of right wing intellectuals would staff "new institutes, writing policy papers and newspaper editorials ... serving as political advisers, lending the power of the word" to a movement to lead the counter-charge.
Many of these intellectuals were defectors from Communism, disillusioned by the excesses of the system, their personal quest for status and power unrequited. They were joined by disaffected liberals, ambitious operatives hungry for the power to make things happen. Both were familiar with the byzantine state machinery that ran the former Soviet Union."
(emphasis added)
And so it came to pass conservative tactics and goals become more and more like the tactics and goals of the former communists who sought to hold hegemony and control over everything public: national, state, and local.
In the end, personal liberty and true freedom falls victim to these left or right wing tyrants. Some writers have taken up the issue. What’s the difference between the so-called conservatives / TeaPartisans and the former old style Communist ideology and practices? Not much they say.
Let’s go ask Betsy about this issue, after all she chums around with a bunch of former commies.
On the Reader:
Read about David Horowitz's latest escapades in "University of North Carolina students walk out on David Horowitz as he compares Muslims to Nazis" in the Daily Tar Heel and Islamophobia Today.
Related Slates:
“Queen” Elizabeth: Betsy DeVos, nouveau-riche, anti-social queen of mean - Betsy DeVos & The Amway Clan’s Abject Failure to Reach High Moral Ground via “Corporate Social Responsibility” -
Betsy DeVos’ Chum Bucket: Deep Inside - An Agenda & Dangerously Flawed Beliefs
Merged content from a multi-part Part 1 and Part 2 original.
