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The Radicalism of Bill de Blasio
National Review Online ^ | September 23, 2013 | Stanley Kurtz

Posted on 09/23/2013 10:53:35 AM PDT by neverdem

Today’s New York Times features an in-depth look at the radical background of Bill de Blasio, the man poised to become the next mayor of New York.

De Blasio is a longtime admirer and supporter of Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinistas. He helped raise funds for the Sandinistas in the 1980s, subscribed to the party’s newspaper, Barricadda (Barricade), and unlike many others, remained supportive even after the Sandinistas lost power. To this day de Blasio speaks admiringly of the Sandinistas (while offering some token criticism of their handling of dissent), and remains interested in the Latin American left. De Blasio honeymooned in Cuba, in violation of the U.S. travel ban.

Asked about his goals for society at a meeting in 1990, de Blasio “said he was an advocate of ‘democratic socialism’”. Today he describes himself as “progressive,” yet also characterizes his views, in the eighties and today, as a mix of admiration for European social democratic movements, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and liberation theology.

Today’s Times profile focuses on de Blasio in the 1980s and early 1990s. As the piece ends, de Blasio is voicing distress at a newly-elected President Clinton’s efforts to pull the Democratic Party closer to the center. This was shortly after de Blasio had said he favored democratic socialism. So it makes sense that, according to a 2009 profile in City Limits, in the 1990s de Blasio served as Executive Director for New York branch of the New Party, a leftist third party that described itself as “social democratic” and had many prominent “democratic socialists” as members.

As I reported last year, President Obama was also a member of the New Party, and falsely denied this during his election and re-election campaigns. And as I laid it out in Radical-in-Chief, Obama’s political past shares many other parallel’s with Bill de Blasio.

ACORN, for example, represents an interesting point of connection between Obama’s radical past and de Blasio. ACORN exercised substantial de facto control over the leftist New Party. Former ACORN head Bertha Lewis has close ties to de Blasio and has predicted a comeback for ACORN’s successor group under a de Blasio administration. Patrick Gaspard, a former New Party staffer with close ties to ACORN is not only a former Obama White House Political Director, but is one of de Blasio’s closest friends, and played a central role in shaping de Blasio’s campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination.

Joe Lhota, the Republican mayoral nominee, has called de Blasio a “radical,” and plans to emphasize his leftism in the campaign. As today’s New York Times profile makes clear, Lhota is not exaggerating. The leftist world of ACORN, the New Party, and Sandinista-supporting activists is looking less-and-less like some long-gone relic of Obama’s past and more-and-more like the future of the Democratic Party.


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: billdeblasio; daviddinkins; deblasio; dinkinsville; newparty

1 posted on 09/23/2013 10:53:35 AM PDT by neverdem
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To: neverdem
"De Blasio is a longtime admirer and supporter of Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinistas."

Holy cow Bullwinkle. That guy got trapped in the WayBack machine apparently.

2 posted on 09/23/2013 10:56:14 AM PDT by Paladin2 (h)
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To: neverdem

NYC will be in sharp decline with this guy as mayor. Will people never learn?


3 posted on 09/23/2013 10:57:52 AM PDT by clintonh8r (Don't twerk me, Bro!)
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To: neverdem

It’s amazing how truly low intelligence the city dwellers are; they pawn themselves off to be the higher, elite, highly intelligent with the PhDs and such but live in some kind of bubble.


4 posted on 09/23/2013 10:58:54 AM PDT by CincyRichieRich (“Life is hard, but it’s harder when you’re stupid.” John Wayne)
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To: clintonh8r

The people of NYC follow the motto of “D” is for free. Sad.


5 posted on 09/23/2013 11:00:25 AM PDT by bc42875
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To: neverdem

New Yorkers should have voted for Weiner when they had the chance.


6 posted on 09/23/2013 11:05:27 AM PDT by Standing Wolf (No tyrant should ever be allowed to die of natural causes.)
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To: neverdem

When a “progressive” politician claims to be a fan of european democratic socialism, he means that “I plan to get as rich as I possibly can in office, and screw the taxpayers to the max.”


7 posted on 09/23/2013 11:11:04 AM PDT by DPMD
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To: clintonh8r

They learn and they forget. No “D” mayor has been elected in 20 years in NYC, so they have to make sure that’s some distinction between them and “Republican” Bloomberg.

Joe Lhota can use your support, people!


8 posted on 09/23/2013 11:13:47 AM PDT by Tanniker Smith (Rome didn't fall in a day, either.)
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To: clintonh8r

“NYC will be in sharp decline with this guy as mayor. Will people never learn?”

Never assign to malice that can be explained by stupidity. In the case of NYC, it IS gross stupidity if this scum becomes mayor. But, Liberals love dictators until it’s their ox being gored.


9 posted on 09/23/2013 11:32:36 AM PDT by MasterGunner01
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To: neverdem

Interesting in that the NY Slimes appears to be doing the bidding of their Upper East Side fanbase and is making a run at kneecapping him.


10 posted on 09/23/2013 11:34:00 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: neverdem

If New Yorkers elect this guy, they will deserve what they get and will lose my support.


11 posted on 09/23/2013 12:09:28 PM PDT by Dapper 26
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To: Paladin2
Holy cow Bullwinkle. That guy got trapped in the WayBack machine apparently.

How do you figure? "Red Danny" Ortega, DeBlasio's icon, is again chief of state in Nicaragua and a member of a functioning Red Axis in northern South America.

And China's running the Suez Canal.

12 posted on 09/23/2013 2:40:43 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: Standing Wolf
New Yorkers should have voted for Weiner when they had the chance.

LOL.

Well, maybe Huma will run next time.

13 posted on 09/23/2013 2:42:21 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: neverdem

It’s probably not a good time to invest in NYC.

You couldn’t pay me enough to live there.


14 posted on 09/23/2013 3:26:11 PM PDT by Mister Da (The mark of a wise man is not what he knows, but what he knows he doesn't know!)
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To: Dapper 26

New York City to the rest of America: COME TOGETHER ON THE ROAD TO SERFDOM

New York City’s Marxist Power Couple
“You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” Nikita Khrushchev.

NEW YORK CITY’S MARXIST POWER COUPLE

10/14/2013
by Cliff Kincaid

“De Blasio opens up to Baldwin” is how MSNBC described Alec Baldwin’s show with New York City’s Obama-backed Democratic “progressive” mayoral candidate, Bill De Blasio. “I was an early supporter of de Blasio’s,” Baldwin acknowledged.

Having been a virtual arm of the Obama White House for years, MSNBC is now turning into an arm of the de Blasio campaign. De Blasio, a former aide to socialist New York City Mayor David Dinkins, faces law-and-order Republican candidate Joe Lhota on November 5.

De Blasio’s support for communist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua, and his embrace of Islam as an emerging political force, were highlighted in a recent New York Times article. The paper also noted his illegal “honeymoon” to Communist Cuba. However, the mysterious trip occurred in either 1991or 1994, depending on which paper you read, and much about the nature of the travel remains unknown.

Our review of documents concerning de Blasio’s involvement in the communist-front Nicaragua Solidarity Network confirms that notes of one meeting in 1991 say that he stated that Islam was an emerging “power,” and wondered if there were “progressive elements” in Islam “we can work with.”

Marxists like de Blasio who were sympathetic to the Sandinista “liberation” struggle in Nicaragua were typically active in support of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a Soviet/Cuban-backed terrorist group. Indeed, anti-Israel and pro-PLO material was found in the archives of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network.

Another document regarding the “vision” of the group says, “End world capitalism and replace it,” and next to de Blasio’s initials are the words “democratic socialism.”

Baldwin’s comments during his MSNBC de Blasio interview included such observations as, “You seem to have a very warm positive healthy home life.” De Blasio, who is white, married a black woman and former lesbian, Chirlane McCray, and they have had two children together.

Modern-day progressives usually consider it wrong to even discuss the option of voluntarily leaving the homosexual lifestyle, but they have let the matter of McCray’s rejection of lesbianism pass without critical comment.

De Blasio says one of his wife’s poems about “growing up as a young African-American girl in a racist society” helped him to fall in love with her.

There is no indication that McCray abandoned Marxism after living in an enclave known as the Combahee River Collective.

The Combahee River Collective had issued a “revolutionary” 1977 statement saying, “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources.

We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

The “collective” has been depicted by the media as a respectable group of feminist intellectuals, who were merely “radical” in some of their thinking.

The Combahee River Collective “statement” was favorably cited by Harvard Professor Richard Levins in a Monthly Review article called, “Continuing Sources of Marxism: Looking for the Movement as a Whole.”

In discussing the emergence of the Combahee River Collective and other such groups, he wrote, “In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state that what distinguishes communists from other socialists is internationalism and looking for the movement as a whole. ‘Looking for the movement as a whole’ is a fluid concept that expands to embrace ever more inclusive struggles against capitalism and for a just and sustainable world. Increasingly, a movement centered on the working class has to champion the entire cause of the species.”

He mentions the Combahee River Collective after noting that a “core of strong proto-feminist women [had] emerged in the Communist Party USA just at the time when McCarthyism was making all red organizing difficult.”

He went on, “Groups such as Redstockings, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, and the Combahee River Collective and publications such as Sojourner developed a stance against the whole system of oppression. Within feminism, Marxists have played a leading role in insisting on a class analysis that showed that ‘women’ cannot be treated as a homogeneous mass with common interests, and also struggled against racism within the feminist movement.”

Bringing the situation up to date, New York magazine ran a story declaring that Chirlane McCray “would be a First Lady in the mold” of Hillary Clinton.

On a Spanish language New York radio station, WADO 1280 AM, de Blasio was asked about his Cuba trip and he proved evasive: “What did you see in Cuba, what is your impression going on your honeymoon in a country that hasn’t had free elections in the last 50 years. What did you get from the trip?” The radio host went on, “If I can ask you one thing you came back from Cuba with, what was that thing?”

As noted by the New York Daily News, de Blasio dodged the questions and replied, “I didn’t go on a trip to fully study the country, I don’t pretend to have full perspective on the country. I have a huge critique of the current government there because it’s undemocratic.”

But it was just as undemocratic then as it is now. So why did he visit the communist-controlled island, and what did he see and do there?

De Blasio’s opponent, Joe Lhota, has said that de Blasio “needs to explain himself—and explain himself now—to the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who escaped Marxist tyranny in Asia, Central America, and from behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.”

Lhota noted that de Blasio’s involvement with the communist Sandinistas “didn’t happen in 1917; it happened 70 years later when the cruelty and intrinsic failure of communism had become crystal clear to anyone with a modicum of reason.”

He added that de Blasio, who promises to tax the rich and spend more public money, is pursuing a “class warfare strategy” that is “directly out of the Marxist playbook.”

The new MSNBC show, “Up Late with Alec Baldwin,” did include some legitimate news reaffirming de Blasio’s controversial announced intention to crack down on police surveillance of terrorists and criminals. De Blasio opposes the stop-and-frisk practices of the New York Police Department (NYPD) and wants to replace Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has authorized surveillance of radical Muslims in order to thwart terrorist attacks.

“There have been 16 known terrorist plots against New York City since September 11, 2001,” the NYPD says.

The current mayor is Michael Bloomberg, a liberal who has nevertheless been a strong supporter of aggressive police tactics against potential criminals and terrorists.

Bloomberg says, for example, that overturning stop-and-frisk would turn “over the streets to the criminals.”
Mike Long, the chairman of the Conservative Party of New York, told Emily Miller of The Washington Times, “I don’t often agree with Mike Bloomberg, but stop and frisk has made New York City that much safer. It has clearly saved the lives of people of color and is absolutely an important tool for making New York City one of the safest cities in the country.” Long said that without this enforcement mechanism, “we will be like Chicago in very short order.”

But the liberal media are betting that Lhota’s “Republican” label will be more objectionable than the communist sympathies of de Blasio and his wife, sympathies that are being played down by most reporters.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism.


15 posted on 11/04/2013 5:02:29 PM PST by Dqban22
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