Karen Bass’s Long March from Communist Fringe to Biden’s VP Shortlist

Joe Biden is thinking of selecting California Congresswoman Karen Bass for his Vice President running mate.  This is all you need to know about the COMMUNIST Karen Bass:

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“Bass told them:

It [the white Left] played a huge role for me. In Hamilton [High School] for example, a lot of the Jewish parents were activists and some of them were in the Communist Party. And so I grew up with a lot of red diaper babies. And there were some African American parents who were in the Communist Party. There were teachers who were in the Communist Party. So, white radicals were very influential. And at the same time you have the Panthers and the whole black movement.

“Red diaper babies” is a slang term used to describe children of members of the Communist Party USA during the Cold War.”

“Over the years, Bass has spoken frequently about her decades-long involvement with the Venceramos Brigade (VB), starting from the time she was 19-years-old in 1973. She would make eight trips to Cuba as a “brigandista” in the 1970s. Articles about her work with the Venceremos Brigade make it sound like the Cuban equivalent of Habitat for Humanity or any other praiseworthy volunteer organization providing humanitarian assistance in poor countries.

In fact, the Venceremos Brigade was a Cuban communist front group founded in 1969 by Fidel Castro and the radical members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The Brigade was run by the Cuban intelligence service, the General Directorate for Intelligence (DGI).

Horowitz and his fellow Ramparts editor, Peter Collier, explained the origins of the Venceremos Brigade in their 1989 book Destructive Generation:

In 1969, a group of radicals including SDS leader Bernadine Dohrn and Castro apologist Saul Landau traveled to Cuba to meet with the Vietnamese and launch the Venceremos Brigade. The ostensible reason for this effort was to provide help for the Cuban sugar harvest. The real reason was to meet Cuban and Vietnamese officials in Havana to map out strategies for the war in America, the “other war,” which would ultimately defeat the United States in a way that the battlefield situation in Vietnam never could have.

As you can tell she is openly and proudly a supporter of Communist dictators and ideology.  Please pass this article on to others.

Karen Bass’s Long March from Communist Fringe to Biden’s VP Shortlist

Rebecca Mansour, Bretbart,  7/31/20  

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The Democrat’s presumptive nominee Joe Biden will name his running mate as early as next week, and Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) is reportedly a top contender for job.

The California Democrat has emerged as the favorite pick of former Sen. Chris Dodd, who serves on Biden’s vice presidential search committee. According a source who spoke with Politico, Dodd has urged Biden to choose Bass because “she’s a loyal No. 2. And that’s what Biden really wants.”

On the surface, Bass’s background as a former medical professional and South Los Angeles community organizer make her an attractive candidate to serve at a time when public health and racial inequality are on the top of voters’ minds.

Her resume bears the hallmarks of a rising political star, starting with her first foray into elected office 16 years ago, when she won a seat in the California State Assembly and later became the first Black woman in the country to serve as the speaker of a state legislature when she assumed the Speakership in 2008. Prior to this, Bass worked as a physician assistant and a left-wing community activist who founded a non-profit in the 1990s called the Community Coalition. She made headlines after the 1992 L.A. riots for her fight to prevent liquor stores from being rebuilt in the neighborhoods destroyed by the uprising.

In 2010, Bass won her U.S. House seat, where her voting record has been typical of a progressive member of a Democratic Party increasingly embracing socialism.

However, a deep dive into Bass’s background reveals that her influences were not just socialist, but hardcore communist.

The VP vetting process brought renewed scrutiny to comments Bass made about Cuba’s communist dictator Fidel Castro. In a statement following Castro’s death in 2016, Bass referred to him as “Comandante en Jefe” and described his death as “a great loss to the people of Cuba.”

The honorific “Commandante en Jefe”—which translates to “commander in chief”—was criticized by Florida Democrats for being excessively deferential to a dictator with a long history of human rights abuses.

In an interview with MSNBC on Sunday, Bass attempted to walk back her use of the term. “I have talked to my colleagues in the House about that, and it’s certainly something that I would not say again,” Bass said. “I have always supported the Cuban people, and the relationship that Barack Obama and Biden had in their administration in terms of opening up relations.”

When the interviewer asked her how she would “characterize the Castro regime and its legacy,” Bass said: “I think the Castro regime and its legacy is very troubling.” However, a moment later, she appeared to dismiss the significance of Castro’s crimes by saying: “But you know what? I mean, we could talk all evening. I could tell you about a number of regimes that I think are very troubling in a variety of different ways.”

Bass’s walk back has not quieted questions about her electability in the battleground state of Florida with its large population of Cuban Americans whose families fled Castro’s murderous regime.

But these comments are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Bass’s long and troubling association with communism and the communist regime in Cuba. 

GROWING UP WITH ‘RED DIAPER BABIES’

Bass discussed her earliest political influences growing up on the Westside of Los Angeles and attending Alexander Hamilton High School in a 2008 interview with progressive authors Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon for their book Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities.

“Many of Karen Bass’s early influences, as she notes, were among the city’s most prominent white and Jewish leftists,” the authors write.

Bass told them:

It [the white Left] played a huge role for me. In Hamilton [High School] for example, a lot of the Jewish parents were activists and some of them were in the Communist Party. And so I grew up with a lot of red diaper babies. And there were some African American parents who were in the Communist Party. There were teachers who were in the Communist Party. So, white radicals were very influential. And at the same time you have the Panthers and the whole black movement.

“Red diaper babies” is a slang term used to describe children of members of the Communist Party USA during the Cold War.

This 2008 interview would not be the first or last time that Bass talked about her communist influences. On January 30, 2017, Bass took to the floor of the U.S. House to eulogize her “friend and mentor” Oneil Cannon, who was a leading member of the Communist Party USA. In its obituary for Cannon, the communist website People’s World noted his work as the Communist Party USA’s education director in the Southern California District and as a member of the Party’s Southern California and National Central Committees.

“These are not accidental or incidental connections whatsoever,” author and 1960s historian David Horowitz told Breitbart News.

Horowitz, a “red diaper baby” and self-described former radical, was the intellectual founder of the New Left movement in the 1960s and co-editor of the leading radical magazine of the era, Ramparts.

Horowitz said Bass’s praise of communists “doesn’t happen by accident” and was not a default position for idealistic leftists of Bass’s generation. “There was a New Left movement which distanced itself from the Communist Party. We despised the communists. You could be a radical, and you didn’t have to be connected to the Communist Party. She’s obviously deeply into it.”

Those connections run especially deep when it comes to Bass’s involvement with the Venceremos Brigade.

LEADER OF A COMMUNIST FRONT GROUP

Over the years, Bass has spoken frequently about her decades-long involvement with the Venceramos Brigade (VB), starting from the time she was 19-years-old in 1973. She would make eight trips to Cuba as a “brigandista” in the 1970s. Articles about her work with the Venceremos Brigade make it sound like the Cuban equivalent of Habitat for Humanity or any other praiseworthy volunteer organization providing humanitarian assistance in poor countries.

In fact, the Venceremos Brigade was a Cuban communist front group founded in 1969 by Fidel Castro and the radical members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The Brigade was run by the Cuban intelligence service, the General Directorate for Intelligence (DGI).

Horowitz and his fellow Ramparts editor, Peter Collier, explained the origins of the Venceremos Brigade in their 1989 book Destructive Generation:

In 1969, a group of radicals including SDS leader Bernadine Dohrn and Castro apologist Saul Landau traveled to Cuba to meet with the Vietnamese and launch the Venceremos Brigade. The ostensible reason for this effort was to provide help for the Cuban sugar harvest. The real reason was to meet Cuban and Vietnamese officials in Havana to map out strategies for the war in America, the “other war,” which would ultimately defeat the United States in a way that the battlefield situation in Vietnam never could have.

The public rationale for the Venceremos Brigade was to organize six-week work trips for American volunteers to assist Cubans in harvesting Castro’s sugar cane crop. “The first thing Castro did when he came to power was ruin Cuba’s economy,” Horowitz told Breitbart News. “The big propaganda was that the imperialists had made Cuba a one crop country, which was sugar cane. And under Castro the production of sugar cane went down dramatically. And so they called on American volunteers to help them harvest sugar cane. But they also trained them politically.”

A 400-page FBI report from 1976, based on information obtained from former Cuban intelligence officers, explained that the Venceremos Brigade was used as a recruitment tool to co-opt American radicals as assets for the communist regime by fostering revolutionary fervor, which sometimes included guerrilla training.

“A very limited number of [Venceremos Brigade] members have been trained in guerrilla warfare techniques, including use of arms and explosives,” the report stated. “This type of training is given only to individuals who specifically request it and only then to persons whom the Cubans feel sure are not penetration agents of American intelligence.”

The Venceremos Brigade was not just a harmless volunteer organization helping the Cuban victims of American “imperialism.” It was a communist front group controlled and organized by the Cuban intelligence service, which was itself an extension of the Soviet intelligence service at a time when Americans were engaged in a hot war with the communists in Vietnam.

“Sympathy for America’s alleged victims developed into an identification with America’s real enemies,” Collier and Horowitz explained in Destructive Generation.

The relationship between the Cuban DGI, the Soviet KGB, and the Venceremos Brigade was explained in a 1982 Senate Subcommittee hearing on “Security and Terrorism” convened by Sen. Jeremiah Denton (R-AL). In sworn testimony before the subcommittee, Gerardo Peraza, a former high-ranking Cuban official in the DGI who defected to the United States in 1971, said that the Cuban intelligence service was a direct subsidiary of the Soviet Union’s vast intelligence organization.

“The Cuban intelligence service’s structure was placed under the KGB,” Peraza stated. The Cuban branch, however, had a very specific aim.

“The principal function of the Directorate of Intelligence was penetration and recruitment in the United States of America,” Peraza said. With America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) primarily focused on its Soviet counterpart, the smaller Cuban intelligence service could operate with greater impunity, Peraza explained.

The greatest service Cuban intelligence officials provided for their Soviet masters was to entice Americans into betraying their country by helping America’s enemies. The DGI had an easier time recruiting American assets because American radicals felt more affinity for Cuban communists than for Russians. All of this made Cuba’s intelligence apparatus a major asset to the Soviets in their Cold War efforts to defeat the United States.

“The Soviet Union utilizes Cuba because of its great potential in the intelligence field against the United States,” Peraza said. “The Soviet intelligence officers always saw in the Cuban intelligence service a great potential of penetration in the United States, because Cuba is a small country, not a great power, and many people in the United States feel a certain sympathy toward a small country.”

This sympathy coincided with the rise of the New Left movement following the death of Josef Stalin and the revelations about his murderous crimes. Many American radicals sought to distance themselves from the Soviet Union and its atrocities while still maintaining their revolutionary beliefs. This presented a challenge to Soviet intelligence gathering, which in the past could always rely on American leftists to assist the communist cause.

As Collier and Horowitz explained in Destructive Generation, “Castro saw that the American Left, still wary of the U.S.S.R., could be made to support Soviet aims indirectly because if its ties—affective even more than political—with him and his revolution… At the same time he was making Cuba’s economy a satellite of Russia’s, and Cuba’s intelligence services and military forces instruments of the Soviet state, Castro began the creation of what amounted to a new Communist international. …[T]he anti-Soviet attitudes of the New Left and the isolation of the Communist Party had frustrated the penetration efforts of the Soviet intelligence services. But in 1969, Castro worked with American radicals to create the Venceremos Brigades, placing them under the control of Cuban intelligence operatives.”

This arrangement allowed the Cuban officials to get from the Venceremos Brigade members “the first great quantity of information through American citizens that was obtained in the United States,” according to Peraza.

The Brigade also allowed the Cubans to co-opt American radicals as “useful idiots” in planting the communist regime’s propaganda. Collier and Horowitz illustrated this point in an anecdote about Brigade members in the ’70s who were used to promote Castro’s propaganda:

One almost amusing struggle session occurred with members of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), a church-funded group with pro-Castro loyalties, which described its purpose as providing an “intelligence-gathering arm” for the Left and which had helped set up the Venceremos Brigade. A delegation from NACLA came to our editorial offices [at Ramparts magazine] with an article they wanted printed. The piece proposed itself as a report on the progress of “socialist democracy” in Cuba, focusing on the passage of a recently enacted “anti-laziness” law as evidence of the “people’s rule.” The article claimed that more than three million Cubans—a third of the population—had actively participated in the making of the law. We asked the obvious question: If the people’s civic involvement was as high as this, why was the law necessary at all? In the confrontation that followed, the NACLA members told us that because of our “white skin privileges” we had “no right to judge” anything that third world revolutionaries did. In the words of one of the NACLA spokesmen: “Your revolutionary responsibility is to print the piece and shut up about it.”

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