Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 28,801]

1 hour ago, cosmicway said:

Anyway.
Greek socialism is represented by Eva Kailis (the crib girl).

your socialist rants about decades old dross have so little to do with current events

they simply are not germane to the discussions

[cosmicway 1,323]

32 minutes ago, Vesper said:

your socialist rants about decades old dross have so little to do with current events

they simply are not germane to the discussions

Socialism has earned a bad name.
There are the commies who say what they do is socialism (the 49%) and the fake socialists (the other 49%)..
 

[Vesper 28,801]

2 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Socialism has earned a bad name.
There are the commies who say what they do is socialism (the 49%) and the fake socialists (the other 49%)..
 

for fucks sake and for the umpteenth time

there are NO socialist nor communist nation states in Europe or North America 

your seemingly never-ending obsession about things that do not exist anymore, or never did (in many nations' cases), is just bizarre, and of no real value in re present day political discussions about these nations

 

[Vesper 28,801]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-10-30-why-so-much-hate/

I get a lot of hate mail, especially in response to columns or posts critical of Donald Trump. My post the other day on Trump and fascism brought in some beauties.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the more printable ones:

I guess to a LIBTARD FOOL such as yourself, it’s only fascism if conservatives/Republicans/Trump are in power, even though they don’t even attempt to do such things. On the other hand, to a LIBTARD, Democrats actually BEING Fascists somehow equates to “protecting democracy” (which we don’t even live in, nor have been set up to ever be in). You fucking communist sack of disgusting, lying shit!

Some of these hate letters make a half-hearted effort to engage in arguments, but most are pure venom. Where does this hate come from, and what might damp it down so that we can return to a slightly more civil democracy?

The short answer, I think, is that the haters fomented by Donald Trump especially hate liberals. And if you bother to review the history of the past century, you can see why.

Since at least the presidency of Bill Clinton, the Democrats have become the party of educated, cosmopolitan bicoastal professionals, and have paid too little attention to the plight of ordinary working people, in small towns, rural areas, and once-thriving communities deserted by footloose factories. Along with this economic neglect has come cultural condescension. The phrase “flyover states” says it all.

If the Democratic Party were doing its job, some of the hatred would be directed at the billionaire bankers and monopolists who are raising costs, destroying jobs, and capturing income that should be going to regular Americans. But the haters don’t hate the billionaires. This would be a weird inversion of class interest, if the Democrats were a more credible populist party. But they aren’t.

Compare today’s form of hate with FDR’s day. There was hate in that era, but it was not the hate of ordinary people directed at Democrats. FDR neatly defined it when he said of bankers and economic royalists, “They are unanimous in their hatred of me, and I welcome their hatred.”

FDR, by delivering for ordinary Americans and constraining abusive capitalists, had earned their hatred. There were also elements of racial hatred during the New Deal era, which increased as Roosevelt became more of a racial liberal. At the 1936 Democratic National Convention, when a Black minister had been invited to deliver the invocation, Sen. “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, a leader of the racist Dixiecrats, loudly walked out in protest. Yet FDR carried all of the South.

Even in 1948, when Harry Truman had become far more of an explicit racial liberal than Roosevelt, Truman carried most of the white South because voters remembered with gratitude how the New Deal had saved their livelihoods.

This brings me to the tricky question of the connection between today’s anti-liberal hatred and the inevitable backlash against the post-LBJ Democrats as the party of racial and gender equality. White males suffered some relative loss of status in the household and the community, as Blacks, women, and later sexual minorities gained rights, so Democrats were guaranteed to suffer some losses.

But the losses—and the sheer hatred—would have been far less if this were not also an era of economic neglect of working people generally, combined with Clinton-style New Democrats getting in bed with bankers. Compared with two generations ago, it’s far harder to get a payroll job that supports a family, buy a home, finance college, get reliable health care, or look forward to a decent retirement. President Biden has taken some good first steps and Kamala Harris promises more, but not nearly enough to reverse the deeper trends.

And this brings me to the TV ad that the Trump campaign has been running on broadcasts of football and baseball games. The ad shows Harris with two transgender people, includes an edited clip of an old interview in which Harris appears to be saying she supports the right of prison inmates to get gender-altering surgery, and ends with the sly tagline “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

Granted, it would be a heavy lift for Democrats to go all out to support trans rights, even with more attention to what’s happened to the working class. But in the absence of a credible class politics that delivers, the Democrats are waving red flags at the proverbial bull.

If Kamala does win, it will be a long road back to damp down the hate and win back working-class support. Maybe in the next generation.

[cosmicway 1,323]

2 hours ago, Vesper said:

for fucks sake and for the umpteenth time

there are NO socialist nor communist nation states in Europe or North America 

your seemingly never-ending obsession about things that do not exist anymore, or never did (in many nations' cases), is just bizarre, and of no real value in re present day political discussions about these nations

 

By "state" you mean when change of government is not allowed.
There are n't any such in Europe or North America at the moment.
But I talked about parties that do exist. I did n't say states.

[Vesper 28,801]

A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital

Josseli Barnica is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

https://www.propublica.org/article/josseli-barnica-death-miscarriage-texas-abortion-ban

Josseli Barnica and her daughter in 2020 Credit:Courtesy of the Barnica family

 

 

Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy.

The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica.

But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “It would be a crime to give her an abortion.”

For 40 hours, the anguished 28-year-old mother prayed for doctors to help her get home to her daughter; all the while, her uterus remained exposed to bacteria.

Three days after she delivered, Barnica died of an infection.

Barnica is one of at least two Texas women who ProPublica found lost their lives after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, which fall into a gray area under the state’s strict abortion laws that prohibit doctors from ending the heartbeat of a fetus.

Neither had wanted an abortion, but that didn’t matter. Though proponents insist that the laws protect both the life of the fetus and the person carrying it, in practice, doctors have hesitated to provide care under threat of prosecution, prison time and professional ruin.

ProPublica is telling these women’s stories this week, starting with Barnica’s. Her death was “preventable,” according to more than a dozen medical experts who reviewed a summary of her hospital and autopsy records at ProPublica’s request; they called her case “horrific,” “astounding” and “egregious.”

The doctors involved in Barnica’s care at HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her case. In a statement, HCA Healthcare said “our responsibility is to be in compliance with applicable state and federal laws and regulations” and said that physicians exercise their independent judgment. The company did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Barnica’s care.

Like all states, Texas has a committee of maternal health experts who review such deaths to recommend ways to prevent them, but the committee’s reports on individual cases are not public and members said they have not finished examining cases from 2021, the year Barnica died.

ProPublica is working to fill gaps in knowledge about the consequences of abortion bans. Reporters scoured death data, flagging Barnica’s case for its concerning cause of death: “sepsis” involving “products of conception.” We tracked down her family, obtained autopsy and hospital records and enlisted a range of experts to review a summary of her care that ProPublica created in consultation with two doctors.

Barnica’s autopsy report lists her cause of death as sepsis with “retained products of conception,” meaning tissue that grew during her pregnancy but remained after her miscarriage. Credit:Highlighted and redacted by ProPublica

Among those experts were more than a dozen OB-GYNs and maternal-fetal medicine specialists from across the country, including researchers at prestigious institutions, doctors who regularly handle miscarriages and experts who have served on state maternal mortality review committees or held posts at national professional medical organizations.

After reviewing the four-page summary, which included the timeline of care noted in hospital records, all agreed that requiring Barnica to wait to deliver until after there was no detectable fetal heartbeat violated professional medical standards because it could allow time for an aggressive infection to take hold. They said there was a good chance she would have survived if she was offered an intervention earlier.

“If this was Massachusetts or Ohio, she would have had that delivery within a couple hours,” said Dr. Susan Mann, a national patient safety expert in obstetric care who teaches at Harvard University.

Many noted a striking similarity to the case of Savita Halappavanar, a 31-year-old woman who died of septic shock in 2012 after providers in Ireland refused to empty her uterus while she was miscarrying at 17 weeks. When she begged for care, a midwife told her, “This is a Catholic country.” The resulting investigation and public outcry galvanized the country to change its strict ban on abortion.

But in the wake of deaths related to abortion access in the United States, leaders who support restricting the right have not called for any reforms.

Last month, ProPublica told the stories of two Georgia women, Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, whose deaths were deemed “preventable” by the state’s maternal mortality review committee after they were unable to access legal abortions and timely medical care amid an abortion ban.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp called the reporting “fear mongering.” Former President Donald Trump has not weighed in — except to joke that his Fox News town hall on women’s issues would get “better ratings” than a press call where Thurman’s family spoke about their pain.

Leaders in Texas, which has the nation’s oldest abortion ban, have witnessed the consequences of such restrictions longer than those in any other state.

In lawsuits, court petitions and news stories, dozens of women have said they faced dangers when they were denied abortions starting in 2021. One suffered sepsis like Barnica, but survived after three days in intensive care. She lost part of her fallopian tube. Lawmakers have made small concessions to clarify two exceptions for medical emergencies, but even in those cases, doctors risk up to 99 years in prison and fines of $100,000; they can argue in court that their actions were not a crime, much like defendants can claim self-defense after being charged with murder.

Amid the deluge of evidence of the harm, including research suggesting Texas’ legislation has increased infant and maternal deaths, some of the ban’s most prominent supporters have muted their public enthusiasm for it. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who once championed the fall of Roe v. Wade and said, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness,” is now avoiding the topic amid a battle to keep his seat. And Gov. Greg Abbott, who said early last year that “we promised we would protect the life of every child with a heartbeat, and we did,” has not made similar statements since.

Both declined to comment to ProPublica, as did state Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose commitment to the ban remains steadfast as he fights for access to the out-of-state medical records of women who travel for abortions. Earlier this month, as the nation grappled with the first reported, preventable deaths related to abortion access, Paxton celebrated a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed Texas to ignore federal guidance requiring doctors to provide abortions that are needed to stabilize emergency patients.

“This is a major victory,” Paxton said.

“They Had to Wait Until There Was No Heartbeat”

To Barnica, an immigrant from Honduras, the American dream seemed within reach in her corner of Houston, a neighborhood filled with restaurants selling El Salvadoran pupusas and bakeries specializing in Mexican conchas. She found work installing drywall, saved money to support her mother back home and met her husband in 2019 at a community soccer game.

A year later, they welcomed a big-eyed baby girl whose every milestone they celebrated. “God bless my family,” Barnica wrote on social media, alongside a photo of the trio in matching red-and-black plaid. “Our first Christmas with our Princess. I love them.”

Barnica and her daughter days after she was born. Barnica loved dressing the family in matching clothing. Credit:Courtesy of the Barnica family

Barnica longed for a large family and was thrilled when she conceived again in 2021.

Trouble struck in the second trimester.

On Sept. 2, 2021, at 17 weeks and four days pregnant, she went to the hospital with cramps, according to her records. The next day, when the bleeding worsened, she returned. Within two hours of her arrival on Sept. 3, an ultrasound confirmed “bulging membranes in the vagina with the fetal head in the open cervix,” dilated at 8.9 cm, and that she had low amniotic fluid. The miscarriage was “in progress,” the radiologist wrote.

When Barnica’s husband arrived, she told him doctors couldn’t intervene until there was no heartbeat.

The next day, Dr. Shirley Lima, an OB on duty, diagnosed an “inevitable” miscarriage.

In Barnica’s chart, she noted that the fetal heartbeat was detected and wrote that she was providing Barnica with pain medication and “emotional support.”

In a state that hadn’t banned abortion, Barnica could have immediately been offered the options that major medical organizations, including international ones, say is the standard of evidence-based care: speeding up labor with medication or a dilation and evacuation procedure to empty the uterus.

“We know that the sooner you intervene in these situations, the better outcomes are,” said Dr. Steven Porter, an OB-GYN in Cleveland.

But Texas’ new abortion ban had just gone into effect. It required physicians to confirm the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening unless there was a “medical emergency,” which the law did not define. It required doctors to make written notes on the patient’s condition and the reason abortion was necessary.

The law did not account for the possibility of a future emergency, one that could develop in hours or days without intervention, doctors told ProPublica.

Barnica was technically still stable. But lying in the hospital with her cervix open wider than a baseball left her uterus exposed to bacteria and placed her at high risk of developing sepsis, experts told ProPublica. Infections can move fast and be hard to control once they take hold.

The scenario felt all too familiar for Dr. Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who used to work in Tennessee and reviewed a summary of Barnica’s records at ProPublica’s request.

Abortion bans put doctors in an impossible position, she said, forcing them to decide whether to risk malpractice or a felony charge. After her state enacted one of the strictest bans in the country, she also waited to offer interventions in cases like Barnica’s until the fetal heartbeat stopped or patients showed signs of infection, praying every time that nothing would go wrong. It’s why she ultimately moved to Colorado.

The doctors treating Barnica “absolutely didn’t do the right thing,” she said. But she understood why they would have felt “totally stuck,” especially if they worked at a hospital that hadn’t promised to defend them.

Even three years after Barnica’s death, HCA Healthcare, the hospital chain that treated Barnica, will not disclose whether it has a policy on how to treat miscarriages.

Some HCA shareholders have asked the company to prepare a report on the risks to the company related to the bans in states that restrict abortion, so patients would understand what services they could expect and doctors would know under what circumstances they would be protected. But the board of directors opposed the proposal, partly because it would create an “unnecessary expense and burdens with limited benefits to our stockholders.” The proposal was supported by 8% of shareholders who voted.

The company’s decision to abstain has repercussions far beyond Texas; the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain has said it delivers more babies than any other health care provider in America, and 70% of its hospitals are in states where abortion is restricted.

As the hours passed in the Houston hospital, Barnica couldn’t find relief. On the phone with her aunt Rosa Elda Calix Barnica, she complained that doctors kept performing ultrasounds to check the fetal heartbeat but were not helping her end the miscarriage.

Around 4 a.m. on Sept. 5, 40 hours after Barnica had arrived, doctors could no longer detect any heart activity. Soon after, Lima delivered Barnica’s fetus, giving her medication to help speed up the labor.

Dr. Joel Ross, the OB-GYN who oversaw her care, discharged her after about eight more hours.

The bleeding continued, but when Barnica called the hospital, she was told that was expected. Her aunt grew alarmed two days later when the bleeding grew heavier.

Go back, she told her niece.

On the evening of Sept. 7, Barnica’s husband rushed her to the hospital as soon as he got off from work. But COVID-19 protocols meant only one visitor could be in the room with her, and they didn’t have a babysitter for their 1-year-old daughter.

So he left and tried to get some sleep.

“I fully expected her to come home,” he said.

But she never did. Her family planned two funerals, one in Houston and another in Honduras.

Nine days after her death, Barnica’s husband was processing his shock, learning how to be a single dad and struggling to raise funds to bury his wife and the son he had hoped to raise.

Meanwhile, Lima was pulling up Barnica’s medical chart to make an addition to her records.

The notes she added made one point abundantly clear: “When I was called for delivery,” she wrote, “the fetus no longer had detectable heart tones.”

“They Should Vote With Their Feet”

Texas has been on the forefront of fighting abortion access.

At the time of Barnica’s miscarriage in 2021, the Supreme Court had not yet overturned the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. But Texas lawmakers, intent on being the first to enact a ban with teeth, had already passed a harsh civil law using a novel legal strategy that circumvented Roe v. Wade: It prohibited doctors from performing an abortion after six weeks by giving members of the public incentives to sue doctors for $10,000 judgments. The bounty also applied to anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion.

A year later, after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling was handed down, an even stricter criminal law went into effect, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison and $100,000 in fines.

Soon after the ruling, the Biden administration issued federal guidance reminding doctors in hospital emergency rooms they have a duty to treat pregnant patients who need to be stabilized, including by providing abortions for miscarriages.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton fought against that, arguing that following the guidance would force doctors to “commit crimes” under state law and make every hospital a “walk-in abortion clinic.” When a Dallas woman asked a court for approval to end her pregnancy because her fetus was not viable and she faced health risks if she carried it to term, Paxton fought to keep her pregnant. He argued her doctor hadn’t proved it was an emergency and threatened to prosecute anyone who helped her. “Nothing can restore the unborn child’s life that will be lost as a result,” he wrote to the court.

No doctor in Texas, or the 20 other states that criminalize abortion, has been prosecuted for violating a state ban. But the possibility looms over their every decision, dozens of doctors in those states told ProPublica, forcing them to consider their own legal risks as they navigate their patient’s health emergencies. The lack of clarity has resulted in many patients being denied care.

In 2023, Texas lawmakers made a small concession to the outcry over the uncertainty the ban was creating in hospitals. They created a new exception for ectopic pregnancies, a potentially fatal condition where the embryo attaches outside the uterine cavity, and for cases where a patient’s membranes rupture prematurely before viability, which introduces a high risk of infection. Doctors can still face prosecution, but are allowed to make the case to a judge or jury that their actions were protected, not unlike self-defense arguments after homicides. Barnica’s condition would not have clearly fit this exception.

This year, after being directed to do so by the state Supreme Court, the Texas Medical Board released new guidance telling doctors that an emergency didn’t need to be “imminent” in order to intervene and advising them to provide extra documentation regarding risks.

But in a recent interview, the board’s president, Dr. Sherif Zaafran, acknowledged that these efforts only go so far and the group has no power over criminal law: “There’s nothing we can do to stop a prosecutor from filing charges against the physicians.”

Asked what he would tell Texas patients who are miscarrying and unable to get treatment, he said they should get a second opinion: “They should vote with their feet and go and seek guidance from somebody else.”

An immigrant from El Salvador who works 12-hour shifts, Barnica’s husband doesn’t follow American politics or the news. He had no inkling of the contentious national debate over how abortion bans are affecting maternal health care when ProPublica contacted him.

Now he is raising a 4-year-old daughter with the help of Barnica’s younger brother; every weekend, they take her to see her grandmother, who knows how to braid her hair in pigtails.

All around their home, he keeps photos of Barnica so that the little girl grows up knowing how much her mother loved her. He sees flashes of his wife when his daughter dances. She radiates the same delight.

When asked about Barnica, he can’t get out many words; his leg is restless, his eyes fixed on the floor. Barnica’s family calls him a model father.

He says he’s just doing his best.

[Vesper 28,801]

Private videos reveal Trump adviser Russ Vought’s “shadow” plans for using the military on protesters, defunding the EPA and villainizing civil servants.

https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-vought-center-renewing-america-maga

Russell Vought speaks during an event on federal guidance and enforcement in 2019. Credit:Evan Vucci/AP Photo

 

A key ally to former President Donald Trump detailed plans to deploy the military in response to domestic unrest, defund the Environmental Protection Agency and put career civil servants “in trauma” in a series of previously unreported speeches that provide a sweeping vision for a second Trump term.

In private speeches delivered in 2023 and 2024, Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, described his work crafting legal justifications so that military leaders or government lawyers would not stop Trump’s executive actions.

He said the plans are a response to a “Marxist takeover” of the country; likened the moment to 1776 and 1860, when the country was at war or on the brink of it; and said the timing of Trump’s candidacy was a “gift of God.”

ProPublica and Documented obtained videos of the two speeches Vought delivered during events for the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank led by Vought. The think tank’s employees or fellows include Jeffrey Clark, the former senior Justice Department lawyer who aided Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election result; Ken Cuccinelli, a former acting deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump; and Mark Paoletta, a former senior budget official in the Trump administration. Other Trump allies such as former White House adviser Steve Bannon and U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Scott Perry either spoke at the conferences or appeared on promotional materials for the events.

Vought does not hide his agenda or shy away from using extreme rhetoric in public. But the apocalyptic tone and hard-line policy prescriptions in the two private speeches go further than his earlier pronouncements. As OMB director, Vought sought to use Trump’s 2020 “Schedule F” executive order to strip away job protections for nonpartisan government workers. But he has never spoken in such pointed terms about demoralizing federal workers to the point that they don’t want to do their jobs. He has spoken in broad terms about undercutting independent agencies but never spelled out sweeping plans to defund the EPA and other federal agencies.

Vought’s plans track closely with Trump’s campaign rhetoric about using the military against domestic protesters or what Trump has called the “enemy within.” Trump’s desire to use the military on U.S. soil recently prompted his longest-serving chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, to speak out, saying Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Other policies mentioned by Vought dovetail with Trump’s plans, such as embracing a wartime footing on the southern border and rolling back transgender rights. Agenda 47, the campaign’s policy blueprint, calls for revoking President Joe Biden’s order expanding gender-affirming care for transgender people; Vought uses even more extreme language, decrying the “transgender sewage that’s being pumped into our schools and institutions” and referring to gender-affirming care as “chemical castration.”

Since leaving government, Vought has reportedly remained a close ally of the former president. Speaking in July to undercover journalists posing as relatives of a potential donor, Vought said Trump had “blessed” the Center for Renewing America and was “very supportive of what we do,” CNN reported.

Vought did not respond to requests for comment.

"Since the Fall of 2023, President Trump’s campaign made it clear that only President Trump and the campaign, and NOT any other organization or former staff, represent policies for the second term,” Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement. She did not directly address Vought’s statements.

Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, added there have been no discussions on who would serve in a second Trump administration.

In addition to running his think tank, Vought was the policy director of the Republican National Committee’s official platform committee ahead of the nominating convention. He’s also an architect of Project 2025, the controversial coalition effort mapping out how a second Trump administration can quickly eliminate obstacles to rolling out a hard-right policy agenda.

As ProPublica and Documented reported, Project 2025 has launched a massive program to recruit, vet and train thousands of people to “be ready on day one” to serve in a future conservative administration. (Trump has repeatedly criticized Project 2025, and his top aides have said the effort has no connection to the official campaign despite the dozens of former Trump aides and advisers who contributed to Project 2025.)

Vought is widely expected to take a high-level government role if Trump wins a second term. His name has even been mentioned as a potential White House chief of staff. The videos obtained by ProPublica and Documented offer an unfiltered look at Vought’s worldview, his plans for a Trump administration and his fusing of MAGA ideology and Christian nationalism.

A Shadow Government in Waiting

In his 2024 speech, Vought said he was spending the majority of his time helping lead Project 2025 and drafting an agenda for a future Trump presidency. “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Vought laid out how his think tank is crafting the legal rationale for invoking the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The Washington Post previously reported the issue was at the top of the Center for Renewing America’s priorities.

“We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’” he said. Vought held up the summer 2020 unrest following George Floyd’s murder as an example of when Trump ought to have had the ability to deploy the armed forces but was stymied.

Vought’s preparations for a future Trump administration involve building a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel, he told the gathered supporters in May 2023. That office, part of the Justice Department, advises the president on the scope of their powers. Vought made clear he wants the office to help Trump steamroll the kind of internal opposition he faced in his first term.

Historically, the OLC has operated with a degree of independence. “If, all of a sudden, the office is full of a bunch of loyalists whose only job is to rubber-stamp the White House’s latest policy directive, whose only goal is to justify the ends by whatever means, that would be quite dangerous,” said an attorney who worked in the office under a previous Republican administration and requested anonymity to speak freely.

Another priority, according to Vought, was to “defund” certain independent federal agencies and demonize career civil servants, which include scientists and subject matter experts. Project 2025’s plan to revive Schedule F, an attempt to make it easier to fire a large swath of government workers who currently have civil service protections, aligns with Vought’s vision.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

Vought also revealed the extent of the Center for Renewing America’s role in whipping up right-wing panic ahead of the 2022 midterms over an increase in asylum-seekers crossing at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In February 2022, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich released a legal opinion claiming the state was under “invasion” by violent cartels and could invoke war powers to deploy National Guard troops to its southern border. The legally dubious “invasion” theory became a potent Republican talking point.

Vought said in the 2023 speech that he and Cuccinelli, the former top Homeland Security official for Trump, personally lobbied Brnovich on the effort. “We said, ‘Look, you can write your own opinion, but here’s a draft opinion of what this should look like,’” Vought said.

The nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight later obtained an email in which Vought pitched the “invasion” framework to Brnovich.

Brnovich wrote in an email to ProPublica that he recalled multiple discussions with Cuccinelli about border security. But he added that “the invasion opinion was the result of a formal request from a member of the Arizona legislature. And I can assure you it was drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”

In the event Trump loses, Vought called for Republican leaders of states such as Florida and Texas to “create red-state sanctuaries” by “kicking out all the feds as much as they possibly can.”

“Nothing Short of a Quiet Revolution”

The two speeches delivered by Vought, taken together, offer an unvarnished look at the animating ideology and political worldview of a key figure in the MAGA movement.

Over the last century, Vought said, the U.S. has “experienced nothing short of a quiet revolution” and abandoned what he saw as the true meaning and force of the Constitution. The country today, he argued, was a “post-constitutional regime,” one that no longer adhered to the separation of powers among the three branches of government as laid out by the framers.

He lamented that the conservative right and the nation writ large had become “too secular” and “too globalist.” He urged his allies to join his mission to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”

And in one of his most dramatic flourishes, he likened the 2024 election to moments in America’s history when the country was facing all-out war.

“We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,” Vought told his audience, referring to years when the colonies declared independence from Britain and the first state seceded over President Abraham Lincoln’s election. “God put us here for such a time as this.”

Vought said that independent agencies and unelected bureaucrats and experts wield far too much power while the traditional legislative process is a sham. He extended that critique to agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve, whose independence from the White House had long been protected by both political parties.

“The left in the U.S. doesn’t want an energetic president with the power to motivate the executive branch to the will of the American people consistent with the laws of the country,” he said in the 2024 speech. “They don’t want a vibrant Congress where great questions are debated and decided in front of the American people. They don’t want empowered members. They want discouraged and bored backbenchers.”

He added, “The all-empowered career expert like Tony Fauci is their model, wielding power behind the curtains.” Fauci was one of the top public health experts under Trump at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and a key figure in coordinating the national response.

What sets Vought apart from most of his fellow conservative activists is that he accuses powerful organizations on the right of being complicit in the current system of government, singling out the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, the conservative and libertarian legal network co-chaired by activist Leonard Leo. The society is widely seen as an instrumental force in cultivating young conservative lawyers and building a bench of future judges whose embrace of legal theories like originalism and textualism have led to decisions overturning abortion rights, environmental protections and social welfare policies.

Yet in his 2024 speech, Vought accused the Federalist Society and “originalist judges” of being a part of the problem, perpetuating the “post-constitutional structure” that Vought lamented by not ruling more aggressively to weaken or dismantle independent regulatory agencies that Vought and his allies view as illegitimate or unconstitutional.

It was “like being in a contract quietly revoked two decades ago, in which one party didn’t tell the other,” he said. “At some point, reality needs to set in. Instead, we have the vaunted so-called Federalist Society and originalist judges acting as a Praetorian Guard for this post-constitutional structure.”

Echoing Trump’s rhetoric, Vought implicitly endorsed the false claim of a stolen 2020 election and likened the media’s debunkings of that claim to Chinese Communist propaganda.

“In the aftermath of the election, we had all these people going around saying, ‘Well, I don’t see any evidence of voter fraud. The media’s not giving enough [of] a compelling case,’” he said. “Well, that compelling case has emerged. But does a Christian in China ask and come away saying, ‘You know, there’s no persecution, because I haven’t read about it in the state regime press?’ No, they don’t.”

Vought referred to the people detained for alleged crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021, as “political prisoners” and defended the lawyers Jeffrey Clark and John Eastman, who have both faced criminal charges for their role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Federal law enforcement agencies, he added, “are keeping political opponents in jail, and I think we need to be honest about that.”

The left, Vought continued, has the ultimate goal of ending representative democracy altogether. “The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” he said, “in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.”

When Democrats called Trump an “existential threat to democracy,” they were not merely calling for his defeat at the ballot box, he said, but were using “coded language the national security state uses overseas when they are overthrowing other governments” to discourage the military from putting down anti-Trump protests should he win.

“They’re making Trump out to be a would-be dictator or an authoritarian,” he said. “So they’re actively working now to ensure, on a number of levels, that the military will perceive this as dictatorial and therefore not respond to any orders to quell any violence.”

Trump, Vought insisted, has the credibility and the track record to defeat the “Marxist” left and bring about the changes that Vought and his MAGA allies seek. In his view, the Democratic Party’s agenda and its “quiet revolution” could be stopped only by a “radical constitutionalist,” someone in the mold of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. For Vought, no one was in a better position to fill that role than Trump.

“We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country,” Vought said. “He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country.

“That,” he added, “is nothing more than a gift of God.”

[Vesper 28,801]

https://www.propublica.org/article/2024-election-certification-ads-georgia-wisconsin-pennsylvania

Earlier this month, subscribers to the Wisconsin Law Journal received an email with an urgent subject: “Upholding Election Integrity — A Call to Action for Attorneys.”

The letter began by talking about fairness and following the law in elections. But it then suggested that election officials do something that courts have found to be illegal for over a century: treat the certification of election results as an option, not an obligation.

The large logo at the top of the email gave the impression that it was an official correspondence from the respected legal newspaper, though smaller print said it was sent on behalf of a public relations company. The missive was an advertisement from a new group with deep ties to activists who have challenged the legitimacy of recent American elections.

The group, Follow the Law, has placed ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin news outlets serving attorneys, judges and election administrators — individuals who could be involved in election disputes. In Georgia, it ran ads supporting the State Election Board as its majority, backed by former President Donald Trump, passed a rule that experts warned could have allowed county board members to exclude enough Democratic votes to impact the presidential election. (A judge later struck down the rule as “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”)

In making its arguments about certification, Follow the Law has mischaracterized election rules and directed readers to a website providing an incomplete and inaccurate description of how certification works and what the laws and rules are in various states, election experts and state officials said.

“Anyone relying on that website is being deceived, and whoever is responsible for its content is being dishonest,” said Mike Hassinger, public information officer for Georgia’s secretary of state.

Certification is the mandatory administrative process that officials undertake after they finish counting and adjudicating ballots. Official results need to be certified by tight deadlines, so they can be aggregated and certified at the state and federal levels. Other procedures like lawsuits and recounts exist to check or challenge election outcomes, but those typically cannot commence until certification occurs. If officials fail to meet those deadlines or exclude a subset of votes, courts could order them to certify, as they have done in the past. But experts have warned that, in a worst-case scenario, the transition of power could be thrown into chaos.

“These ads make it seem as if there's only one way for election officials to show that they're on the ball, and that is to delay or refuse to certify an election. And just simply put, that is not their role,” said Sarah Gonski, an Arizona elections attorney and senior policy adviser for the Institute for Responsive Government, a think tank working on election issues. “What this is, is political propaganda that’s dressed up in a fancy legal costume.”

The activities of Follow the Law, which have not been previously reported, represent a broader push by those aligned with Trump to leverage the mechanics of elections to their advantage. The combination of those strategies, including recruiting poll workers and removing people from voting rolls, could matter in an election that might be determined by a small number of votes.

Since Trump lost the 2020 election, at least 35 election board members in various states, who have been overwhelmingly Republican, have unsuccessfully tried to refuse to certify election results before being compelled to certify by courts or being outvoted by Democratic members. Last week, a county supervisor in Arizona pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to perform election duties when she voted to delay certifying the 2022 election. And last month, the American Civil Liberties Union sued an election board member in Michigan after he said he might not certify the 2024 results. He ultimately signed an affidavit acknowledging his legal obligation to certify, and the ACLU dismissed its case. Experts have warned that more could refuse to certify the 2024 election if Trump loses.

Follow the Law bills itself as a “group of lawyers committed to ensuring elections are free, fair and represent the true votes of all American citizens.” It’s led by Melody Clarke, a longtime conservative activist with stints at Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy organization, and the Election Integrity Network, headed by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

This summer, Clarke left a leadership position at EIN to join the Election Transparency Initiative, a group headed by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official. The two groups work together, according to Cuccinelli and EIN’s 2024 handbook.

The banner ads that appeared in Georgia and Wisconsin outlets disclosed they were paid for by the American Principles Project Foundation. ETI is a subsidiary of a related nonprofit, the American Principles Project. Financial reports show that packaging magnate Richard Uihlein has contributed millions of dollars to the American Principles Project this year through a political action committee. Uihlein has funneled his fortune into supporting far-right candidates and election deniers, as ProPublica has reported.

Cuccinelli, Clarke and a lawyer for Uihlein did not respond to requests for comment or detailed lists of questions. Cuccinelli previously defended to ProPublica the legality of election officials exercising their discretion in certifying results. “The proposed rule will protect the foundational, one person-one vote principle underpinning our democratic elections and guard against certification of inaccurate or erroneous results,” Cuccinelli wrote in a letter to Georgia’s State Election Board.

The most recent ads appear to be an extension of a monthslong effort that started in Georgia to expand the discretion of county election officials ahead of the November contest.

In August and September, Follow the Law bought ads as Georgia’s election board passed controversial rules, including one that empowered county election board members to not certify votes they found suspicious. As ProPublica has reported, the rule was secretly pushed by the EIN, where Clarke worked as deputy director.

Certification “is not a ministerial function,” Cuccinelli said at the election board’s August meeting. The law, he argued, “clearly implies that that board is intended and expected to use its judgment to determine, on very short time frames, what is the most proper outcome of the vote count.”

However, a state judge made clear in an October ruling the dangers of giving county board members the power to conduct investigations and decide which votes are valid. If board members, who are often political appointees, were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge” and refuse to certify election results, “Georgia voters would be silenced,” he wrote, finding that this would be unconstitutional. The case is on appeal and will be heard after the election.

Despite that ruling, and another from a different judge also finding both certification rules unconstitutional, Follow the Law’s website section for Georgia still asserts that a State Election Board rule “makes crystal clear” that county board members’ duty is “more than a simple ministerial task” without mentioning either ruling. The state Republican party has appealed the second ruling.

In a Telegram channel created by a Fulton County, Georgia, commissioner, someone shared what they called a “dream checklist” for election officials this week that contains extensive “suggestions” for how they should fulfill their statutory duties. The unsigned 15-page document, which bears the same three icons that appear on Follow the Law’s website, concludes, “Resolve all discrepancies prior to certification.”

On the same day the Georgia judge ruled that county board members can’t refuse to certify votes, Follow the Law began running ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin legal publications. The communications argued that certification is a discretionary step officials should take only after performing an investigation to ensure an election’s accuracy, largely continuing the line of argument that Cuccinelli pushed to Georgia’s election board and that the lawyers took before the judge. “Uphold your oath to only certify an accurate election,” said banner ads that ran in WisPolitics, a political news outlet. Another read: “No rubber stamps!” WisPolitics did not respond to requests for comment.

In Pennsylvania, the ad claimed that “simply put, the role of election officials is not ‘ministerial’” and that election officials are by law “required to ensure (and investigate if necessary) that elections are free from ‘fraud, deceit, or abuse’ and that the results are accurate prior to certification.”

Follow the Law has also directly contacted at least one county official in Eureka County, Nevada, pointing him to the group’s website, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch.

Follow the Law’s ads and website overstate officials’ roles beyond what statutes allow, state officials in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin said.

The group’s Wisconsin page reads: “Canvassers must first ensure that all votes are legally cast and can only certify results after verifying this.” But officials tasked with certifying elections are scorekeepers, not referees, said Edgar Lin, Wisconsin policy strategist and attorney for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections. Lin and other experts said officials ensure the accuracy of an election’s basic arithmetic, for example, by checking that the number of ballots matches the number of voters, but they are not empowered to undertake deeper investigations.

Gonski said that in addition to overstating certifiers’ responsibilities, Follow the Law’s messaging underplays the protections that already exist. “Our election system is chock-full of checks and balances,” Gonski said. “Thousands of individuals have roles to play, and all of them seamlessly work together using well-established procedures to ensure a safe, accurate and secure election. No single individual has unchecked power over any piece of the process."

Ads in the Wisconsin Law Journal and the Legal Intelligencer in Pennsylvania also presented the findings of a poll that Follow the Law said was conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a company whose credibility the ad emphasizes. But Rasmussen Reports did not conduct the poll. It was conducted by Scott Rasmussen, who founded the polling company but has not worked there in over a decade.

Both the company and pollster confirmed the misattribution but did not comment further. The Wisconsin Law Journal and ALM, which owns the Legal Intelligencer, declined to comment.

Sam Liebert, a former election clerk and the Wisconsin director for All Voting is Local, said he wants the state’s attorney general to issue an unequivocal directive reminding election officials of their legal duty to certify.

“Certifying elections is a mandatory, democratic duty of our election officials,” he said. “Each refusal to certify threatens to validate the broader election denier movement, while sowing disorder in our election administration processes.”

 

Do you have any information about Follow the Law or other groups’ efforts to challenge election certification that we should know? Have you seen Follow the Law ads or outreach elsewhere? If so, please make a record of the ad and reach out to us. Phoebe Petrovic can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal at 608-571-3748. Doug Bock Clark can be reached at 678-243-0784 and [email protected].

[NikkiCFC 7,950]

6 hours ago, cosmicway said:

Socialism has earned a bad name.
There are the commies who say what they do is socialism (the 49%) and the fake socialists (the other 49%)..
 

You know older people here always say how it was all much better under communist Tito 😏 

[Vesper 28,801]

https://projects.propublica.org/christian-nationalism-origins/

In the beginning — in this case, the 1970s — some Christians feared their influence in society was waning. The Supreme Court had outlawed school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings and had legalized abortion.

In response, religious figures began to organize around the idea that they had a duty to bring Christianity back into public life. Several Christian-influenced organizations, including Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and James Dobson’s Family Research Council, were soon formed and went on to shape Republican policies for decades to come. Evangelical Protestants of different denominations joined forces and united with conservative Catholics, like Paul Weyrich, the founder of the think tank the Heritage Foundation, to advance their shared political goals. Under the banner of “pro-family politics,” the New Christian Right movement fought against abortion access, feminism and gay rights as attacks on traditional family values.

Inside a red-rimmed sports arena, more than 15,000 evangelicals gathered with conservative activists to discuss how to get Christians more involved in politics.

They had come to an event known as the National Affairs Briefing because the evangelists Billy Graham and Bill Bright reported that God had issued each of them the same warning: America had only 1,000 more days of freedom. After speaking with the pair, televangelist James Robison said God had urged him to host a conference that would “refocus the direction of America.”

The sea of believers roared as Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan took the podium.

“This is a nonpartisan gathering, and so I know that you can’t endorse me,” Reagan said. “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.”

The moment underscored an important shift in American politics, helping to cement evangelical Christians as a reliable conservative voting bloc.

But while Reagan took the spotlight, backstage in Dallas, Robert Billings, a Reagan campaign adviser who had helped found the Moral Majority, nodded to a less prominent visionary: R.J. Rushdoony, the father of a more extreme movement known as Christian Reconstructionism.

“If it weren’t for his books, none of us would be here,” Billings remarked, as recalled in an essay by Gary North, an economic historian and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.

“Nobody in the audience understands that,” replied North.

“True,” said Billings. “But we do.”

The conversation at the National Affairs Briefing shows the early influence of previously obscure elements of the Christian right that have surfaced in recent years. Other groups and figures that emerged in that period remain influential. Robison and Dobson became spiritual advisers to former President Donald Trump, helping him gain support among religious voters. The Heritage Foundation recently crafted Project 2025, a plan to concentrate executive power and promote far-right policies should Trump win the presidential election. Trump has disavowed the plan, though some members of his administration worked on it.

The idea that Christians should be in power has become a central mission of today’s Christian right, but the idea was taking root decades ago. In remarks strikingly similar to today’s rhetoric, Bob Weiner, founder of a major ministry focused on college campuses, said in 1985, “We should be the head of our school board. We should be the head of our nation. We should be the senators and the congressmen. We should be the editors of our newspapers. We should be taking over every area of life.”

As Billings and North noted backstage at the National Affairs Briefing, the New Christian Right owed a lot to another movement, known as Christian Reconstructionism. The fundamentalist movement held that all aspects of society, including government, education, economics and culture, should conform to a strict interpretation of the OId Testament. Though less recognized, Reconstructionism heavily influenced the more mainstream New Christian Right and its aspirations for Christians to infiltrate systems of power.

Up until the 1970s, the way many evangelicals believed the world would end gave them little incentive to get involved in politics. When the rapture came, the faithful would ascend to heaven, leaving the troubled world behind. That sense of remove began to fade due to the influence of Reconstructionists, who, by contrast, believed they had to build God’s kingdom before Christ would return — which required political action.

The movement’s founder, Rushdoony, received less acknowledgement from politicians, in part because of his extreme views, which included justifying slavery, denying the Holocaust and endorsing the death penalty for homosexuality and adultery. But with Reconstructionists’ prolific writings about what Bible-centered institutions should look like, including Rushdoony’s 1973 book, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” adherents provided instruction manuals for the modern Christian right. Reconstructionists wanted to eliminate public education by slowly dismantling it, and they led the way in developing Christian schools and promoting homeschooling. Thanks in large part to that leadership, their principles spread.

Amid the swampy summer air, scores of evangelical preachers and Christian leaders crowded onto the stone steps of the Lincoln Memorial to sign “A Manifesto of the Christian Church.” The document detailed their beliefs and the policies they would promote, such as fighting abortion, homosexuality and the teaching of evolution as a “monopoly viewpoint in public schools.”

A group called the Coalition on Revival had brought representatives from many denominations to the memorial. Its mission: to “rebuild civilization on the principles of the Bible.” Founder Jay Grimstead anticipated they’d have more political success by uniting evangelicals across denominations and persuasions.

“Christians are everywhere, and we’re going to exert our influence in all walks of life,” Grimstead bellowed to the crowd.

The Coalition on Revival helped evangelicals set aside their differing end-times beliefs and move toward political action by focusing on Reconstructionists’ ideas for reshaping society. Positions articulated in the manifesto, such as denouncing the “state usurpation of parental rights,” foreshadowed some of today’s policy debates.

In the 1980s, as evangelicals became more active in politics and megachurches sprang up across the country, some charismatic Christians — a subset of Protestants who incorporate supernatural elements like faith healing and prophecies — were increasingly moving away from traditional denominations and into independent churches. Those churches were connected by informal networks in which some leaders were considered apostles and prophets. The shift captivated C. Peter Wagner, a seminary professor who specialized in helping churches grow. He considered it the biggest change in Christianity in centuries, called it the New Apostolic Reformation and helped it flourish.

Starting in the late 1990s, Wagner held seminars to shape its tenets and cultivate new leaders. Key to his success was his partnership with Cindy Jacobs, a spiritual leader considered a prophet by some, who helped Wagner understand the world of charismatics.

NAR leaders adopted dominionism and promoted it to their followers. They also advanced the idea of “strategic spiritual warfare,” in which church leaders directed prayers to battle demons they believe control physical territory and influence world affairs. The rapid growth in independent charismatic churches has helped NAR become a formidable political force on the right. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee in 2008, attended a church that frequently welcomed NAR leaders to give guest sermons. But the NAR rose to national prominence in 2016 after their leaders united behind Trump.

The mob stormed the Capitol. They beat police officers, smashed windows and flooded inside, disrupting the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Outside, on the steps and the scaffolding set up for the inauguration, the crowd seethed. The air filled with tear gas and shouts of “1776” and “Hang Mike Pence.” A gallows loomed on the lawn.

And on a stage by the southeast corner of the Capitol, a group of people looked on, blowing shofars and speaking in tongues. They raised their hands toward the sky as they prayed. While some of their followers joined the assault on the building, these leaders of the NAR stayed put, battling in the spiritual realm. One man intoned that he saw a massive serpent with its tail over the Senate and asked God to dispatch angels to yank the demon out.

Flags rippled throughout the crowd: U.S., Confederate, Gadsden, militia and Trump flags — and one used by the NAR. White with a green pine tree and the words “An Appeal to Heaven,” the flag became associated with the movement thanks to Dutch Sheets, an NAR leader known as an apostle, who began promoting it in 2013. Colonists had flown the flag during the American Revolution. The NAR sees it as a symbol of spiritual revolution, a visual prayer for God to create a truly Christian nation. One rioter used the flag to push past police. Another entered the Capitol wearing the flag as a cape. Police later recovered it, soiled with blood and mace.

Sheets had not traveled to Washington, but as the riot raged on, he led a prayer call online with several thousand people listening. Someone held a phone to a microphone so Sheets’ words could ring out at the Capitol.

“We ask you, by your spirit, to hover over the Capitol now and bring order from the chaos,” he said. “This violence, and the spirit of violence and the spirit of wrath, does not produce righteousness. We take authority over it now.”

Jacobs later posted on social media that she condemned “what happened inside the Capitol.” In a statement provided by his ministry, Sheets said, “Those conducting the gathering were concerned when the unrest began. They asked me to join them in praying for peace and protection for all present.”

The NAR helped popularize the concept that Christians should conquer the seven spheres of society: family, religion, government, arts and entertainment, business, education and media. The idea took off in the 2010s when Lance Wallnau, a pastor considered an NAR prophet, repackaged the concept as the Seven Mountain Mandate. Wallnau wrote he learned about the concept when Loren Cunningham, an evangelical leader, told him that God had separately given Cunningham and Bright the same seven arenas in a message decades before. It was an evolution of Reconstructionists’ dominion theology.

Wallnau has popularized the mandate into a powerful framework for conservative evangelicals to influence all aspects of society by taking “territory” and, as he told an audience in September, “penetrating the systems and the culture and the organizational environment of what’s around you in a community.” The mandate has guided some Christians as they built media empires, Christian schools and businesses, and as they sought elected office.

On a hot fall day, a couple hundred evangelical Christians sporting shirts and hats with Trump slogans and Bible verses gathered on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. For hours, they communed inside a cavernous convention center. They worshiped. They sang. They swayed and spoke in tongues. They listened as speakers shared prophecies and conspiracy theories about election integrity. They spoke of the devil and demons and their individual mandate to cast out the forces of evil by voting for Trump. At midday, the Republican nominee for vice president, JD Vance, graced the stage, lending the event the campaign’s imprimatur.

It was the fifth stop of Wallnau’s swing-state Courage Tour, which blended charismatic Christianity, conspiracy theories and conservative politics in an effort to deliver Trump back to the White House.

Years earlier, during the 2016 campaign, Wallnau visited the then-candidate at Trump Tower. He claimed that after he left, God told him to read Isaiah 45: “Thus says the Lord to Cyrus, His anointed, whose right hand I have held — to subdue nations before him.”

Just as God had chosen the heathen Persian emperor Cyrus to restore the Jewish people from exile, Wallnau wrote in an October 2016 op-ed, God had chosen Trump to restore conservative Christians’ cultural power.

“I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus,” he wrote.

Wallnau and others saw it as a prophecy that justified evangelicals’ support for Trump, a twice-divorced man with a history of adultery, who bragged about sexual assault and whom hundreds of people said had cheated them in business dealings. Wallnau’s prophecy played a critical role in coalescing evangelical voters behind Trump.

[Vesper 28,801]

Ziklag, an invitation-only charity organization for rich Christians, aims to take dominion over what it sees as the seven major spheres of public life, which it calls “mountains”: business, science and technology, family, arts and media, church, education and government. Credit: Nesma Moharam, special to ProPublica

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ziklag-secret-christian-charity-2024-election

The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It’s spending millions to make a big political push for this election — but it may be violating the law.

A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.

These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.

ProPublica and Documented obtained thousands of Ziklag’s members-only email newsletters, internal videos, strategy documents and fundraising pitches, none of which has been previously made public. They reveal the group’s 2024 plans and its long-term goal to underpin every major sphere of influence in American society with Christianity. In the Bible, the city of Ziklag was where David and his soldiers found refuge during their war with King Saul.

“We are in a spiritual battle and locked in a terrible conflict with the powers of darkness,” says a strategy document that lays out Ziklag’s 30-year vision to “redirect the trajectory of American culture toward Christ by bringing back Biblical structure, order and truth to our Nation.”

Ziklag’s 2024 agenda reads like the work of a political organization. It plans to pour money into mobilizing voters in Arizona who are “sympathetic to Republicans” in order to secure “10,640 additional unique votes” — almost the exact margin of President Joe Biden’s win there in 2020. The group also intends to use controversial AI software to enable mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states.

In a recording of a 2023 internal strategy discussion, a Ziklag official stressed that the objective was the same in other swing states. “The goal is to win,” the official said. “If 75,000 people wins the White House, then how do we get 150,000 people so we make sure we win?”

According to the Ziklag files, the group has divided its 2024 activities into three different operations targeting voters in battleground states: Checkmate, focused on funding so-called election integrity groups; Steeplechase, concentrated on using churches and pastors to get out the vote; and Watchtower, aimed at galvanizing voters around the issues of “parental rights” and opposition to transgender rights and policies supporting health care for trans people.

In a member briefing video, one of Ziklag’s spiritual advisers outlined a plan to “deliver swing states” by using an anti-transgender message to motivate conservative voters who are exhausted with Trump.

But Ziklag is not a political organization: It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charity, the same legal designation as the United Way or Boys and Girls Club. Such organizations do not have to publicly disclose their funders, and donations are tax deductible. In exchange, they are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.

ProPublica and Documented presented the findings of their investigation to six nonpartisan lawyers and legal experts. All expressed concern that Ziklag was testing or violating the law.

The reporting by ProPublica and Documented “casts serious doubt on this organization’s status as a 501(c)(3) organization,” said Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law.

“I think it’s across the line without a question,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a University of Notre Dame law professor.

Ziklag officials did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Martin Nussbaum, an attorney who said he was the group’s general counsel, said in a written response that “some of the statements in your email are correct. Others are not,” but he then did not respond to a request to specify what was erroneous. The group is seeking to “align” the culture “with Biblical values and the American constitution, and that they will serve the common good,” he wrote. Using the official tax name for Ziklag, he wrote that “USATransForm does not endorse candidates for public office.” He declined to comment on the group’s members.

There are no bright lines or magic words that the IRS might look for when it investigates a charitable organization for engaging in political intervention, said Mayer. Instead, the agency examines the facts and circumstances of a group’s activities and makes a conclusion about whether the group violated the law.

The biggest risk for charities that intervene in political campaigns, Mayer said, is loss of their tax-exempt status. Donors’ ability to deduct their donations can be a major sell, not to mention it can create “a halo effect” for the group, Mayer added.

“They may be able to get more money this way,” he said, adding, “It boils down to tax evasion at the end of the day.”

“Dominion Over the Seven Mountains”

Ziklag has largely escaped scrutiny until now. The group describes itself as a “private, confidential, invitation-only community of high-net-worth Christian families.”

According to internal documents, it boasts more than 125 members that include business executives, pastors, media leaders and other prominent conservative Christians. Potential new members, one document says, should have a “concern for culture” demonstrated by past donations to faith-based or political causes, as well as a net worth of $25 million or more. None of the donors responded to requests for comment.

Tax records show rapid growth in the group’s finances in recent years. Its annual revenue climbed from $1.3 million in 2018 to $6 million in 2019 and nearly $12 million in 2022, which is the latest filing available.

The group’s spending is not on the scale of major conservative funders such as Miriam Adelson or Barre Seid, the electronics magnate who gave $1.6 billion to a group led by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. But its funding and strategy represent one of the clearest links yet between the Christian right and the “election integrity” movement fueled by Trump’s baseless claims about voting fraud. Even several million dollars funding mass challenges to voters in swing counties can make an impact, legal and election experts say.

Ziklag was the brainchild of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Ken Eldred. It emerged from a previous organization founded by Eldred called United In Purpose, which aimed to get more Christians active in the civic arena, according to Bill Dallas, the group’s former director. United In Purpose generated attention in June 2016 when it organized a major meeting between then-candidate Trump and hundreds of evangelical leaders.

After Trump was elected in 2016, Eldred had an idea, according to Dallas. “He says, ‘I want all the wealthy Christian people to come together,’” Dallas recalled in an interview. Eldred told Dallas that he wanted to create a donor network like the one created by Charles and David Koch but for Christians. He proposed naming it David’s Mighty Men, Dallas said. Female members balked. Dallas found the passage in Chronicles that references David’s soldiers and read that they met in the city of Ziklag, and so they chose the name Ziklag.

The group’s stature grew after Trump took office. Vice President Mike Pence appeared at a Ziklag event, as did former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Sen. Ted Cruz, then-Rep. Mark Meadows and other members of Congress. In its private newsletter, Ziklag claims that a coalition of groups it assembled played “a hugely significant role in the selection, hearings and confirmation process” of Amy Coney Barrett for a Supreme Court seat in late 2020.

Confidential donor networks regularly invest hundreds of millions of dollars into political and charitable groups, from the liberal Democracy Alliance to the Koch-affiliated Stand Together organization on the right. But unlike Ziklag, neither of those organizations is legally set up as a true charity.

Ziklag appears to be the first coordinated effort to get wealthy donors to fund an overtly Christian nationalist agenda, according to historians, legal experts and other people familiar with the group. “It shows that this idea isn’t being dismissed as fringe in the way that it might have been in the past,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and University of California, Davis law professor.

The Christian nationalism movement has a variety of aims and tenets, according to the Public Religion Research Institute: that the U.S. government “should declare America a Christian nation”; that American laws “should be based on Christian values”; that the U.S. will cease to exist as a nation if it “moves away from our Christian foundations”; that being Christian is essential to being American; and that God has “called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

One theology promoted by Christian nationalist leaders is the Seven Mountain Mandate. Each mountain represents a major industry or a sphere of public life: arts and media, business, church, education, family, government, and science and technology. Ziklag’s goal, the documents say, is to “take dominion over the Seven Mountains,” funding Christian projects or installing devout Christians in leadership positions to reshape each mountain in a godly way.

To address their concerns about education, Ziklag’s leaders and allies have focused on the public-school system. In a 2021 Ziklag meeting, Ziklag’s education mountain chair, Peter Bohlinger, said that Ziklag’s goal “is to take down the education system as we know it today.” The producers of the film “Sound of Freedom,” featuring Jim Caviezel as an anti-sex-trafficking activist, screened an early cut of the film at a Ziklag conference and asked for funds, according to Dallas.

An excerpt from Ziklag’s “Declaration and 30-Year Vision for the Mountains of Influence.” The document outlines Ziklag’s mission to reshape each major aspect of American society so that it operates according to a biblical worldview. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica and Documented

 

The Seven Mountains theology signals a break from Christian fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson. In the 1980s and ’90s, Falwell’s Moral Majority focused on working within the democratic process to mobilize evangelical voters and elect politicians with a Christian worldview.

The Seven Mountains theology embraces a different, less democratic approach to gaining power. “If the Moral Majority is about galvanizing the voters, the Seven Mountains is a revolutionary model: You need to conquer these mountains and let change flow down from the top,” said Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies and an expert on Christian nationalism. “It’s an outlined program for Christian supremacy.”

“The Amorphous, Tumultuous Wild West”

The Christian right has had compelling spokespeople and fierce commitment to its causes, whether they were ending abortion rights, allowing prayer in schools or displaying the Ten Commandments outside of public buildings. What the movement has often lacked, its leaders argue, is sufficient funding.

“If you look at the right, especially the Christian right, there were always complaints about money,” said legal historian Ziegler. “There’s a perceived gap of ‘We aren’t getting the support from big-name, big-dollar donors that we deserve and want and need.’”

That’s where Ziklag comes in.

Speaking late last year to an invitation-only gathering of Ziklaggers, as members are known, Charlie Kirk, who leads the pro-Trump Turning Point USA organization, named left-leaning philanthropists who were, in his view, funding the destruction of the nation: MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; billionaire investor and liberal philanthropist George Soros; and the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

“Why are secular people giving more generously than Christians?” Kirk asked, according to a recording of his remarks. “It would be a tragedy,” he added, “if people who hate life, hate our country, hate beauty and hate God wanted it more than us.”

“Ziklag is the place,” Kirk told the donors. “Ziklag is the counter.”

Similarly, Pence, in a 2021 appearance at a private Ziklag event, praised the group for its role in “changing lives, and it’s advanced the cause, it’s advanced the kingdom.”

A driving force behind Ziklag’s efforts is Lance Wallnau, a prominent Christian evangelist and influencer based in Texas who is described by Ziklag as a “Seven Mountains visionary & advisor.” The fiery preacher is one of the most influential figures on the Christian right, experts say, a bridge between Christian nationalism and Trump. He was one of the earliest evangelical leaders to endorse Trump in 2015 and later published a book titled “God’s Chaos Candidate: Donald J. Trump and the American Unraveling.” More than 1 million people follow him on Facebook. He doesn’t try to hide his views: “Yes, I am a Christian nationalist,” he said during one of his livestreams in 2021. (Wallnau did not respond to requests for comment.)

Donald Trump shakes hands with Lance Wallnau, a self-described Christian nationalist. Credit: Lancewallnau.com

 

Wallnau has remained a Trump ally. He called Trump’s time in office a “spiritual warfare presidency” and popularized the idea that Trump was a “modern-day Cyrus,” referring to the Persian king who defeated the Babylonians and allowed the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem. Wallnau has visited with Trump at the White House and Trump Tower; last November, he livestreamed from a black-tie gala at Mar-a-Lago where Trump spoke.

Wallnau did not come up with the notion that Christians should try to take control of key areas of American society. But he improved on the idea by introducing the concept of the seven mountains and urged Christians to set about conquering them. The concept caught on, said Taylor, because it empowered Christians with a sense of purpose in every sphere of life.

As a preacher in the independent charismatic tradition, a fast-growing offshoot of Pentecostalism that is unaffiliated with any major denomination, Wallnau and his acolytes believe that God speaks to and through modern-day apostles and prophets — a version of Christianity that Taylor, in his forthcoming book “The Violent Take It By Force,” describes as “the amorphous, tumultuous Wild West of the modern church.” Wallnau and his ideas lingered at the fringes of American Christianity for years, until the boost from the Trump presidency.

The Ziklag files detail not only what Christians should do to conquer all seven mountains, but also what their goals will be once they’ve taken the summit. For the government mountain, one key document says that “the biblical role of government is to promote good and punish evil” and that “the word of God and prayer play a significant role in policy decisions.”

For the arts and entertainment mountain, goals include that 80% of the movies produced be rated G or PG “with a moral story,” and that many people who work in the industry “operate under a biblical/moral worldview.” The education section says that homeschooling should be a “fundamental right” and the government “must not favor one form of education over another.”

Other internal Ziklag documents voice strong opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender rights. One reads: “transgender acceptance = Final sign before imminent collapse.”

Heading into the 2024 election year, Ziklag executive director Drew Hiss warned members in an internal video that “looming above and beyond those seven mountains is this evil force that’s been manifesting itself.” He described it as “a controlling, evil, diabolical presence, really, with tyranny in mind.” That presence was concentrated in the government mountain, he said. If Ziklaggers wanted to save their country from “the powers of darkness,” they needed to focus their energies on that government mountain or else none of their work in any other area would succeed.

“Operation Checkmate”

In the fall of 2023, Wallnau sat in a gray armchair in his TV studio. A large TV screen behind him flashed a single word: “ZIKLAG.”

“You almost hate to put it out this clearly,” he said as he detailed Ziklag’s electoral strategy, “because if somebody else gets ahold of this, they’ll freak out.”

He was joined on set by Hiss, who had just become the group’s new day-to-day leader. The two men were there to record a special message to Ziklag members that laid out the group’s ambitious plans for the upcoming election year.

The forces arrayed against Christians were many, according to the confidential video. They were locked in a “spiritual battle,” Hiss said, against Democrats who were a “radical left Marxist force.” Biden, Wallnau said, was a senile old man and “an empty suit with an agenda that’s written and managed by somebody else.”

Wallnau speaks with Drew Hiss, Ziklag’s executive director, about the group’s goals for political engagement. Credit: Obtained by ProPublica and Documented

 

In the files, Ziklag says it plans to give out nearly $12 million to a constellation of groups working on the ground to shift the 2024 electorate in favor of Trump and other Republicans.

A prominent conservative getting money from Ziklag is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer and Trump ally who joined the January 2021 phone call when then-President Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to flip Georgia in Trump’s favor.

Mitchell now leads a network of “election integrity” coalitions in swing states that have spent the last three years advocating for changes to voting rules and how elections are run. According to one internal newsletter, Ziklag was an early funder of Mitchell’s post-2020 “election integrity” activism, which voting-rights experts have criticized for stoking unfounded fears about voter fraud and seeking to unfairly remove people from voting rolls. In 2022, Ziklag donated $600,000 to the Conservative Partnership Institute, which in turn funds Mitchell’s election-integrity work. Internal Ziklag documents show that it provided funding to enable Mitchell to set up election integrity infrastructure in Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

Now Mitchell is promoting a tool called EagleAI, which has claimed to use artificial intelligence to automate and speed up the process of challenging ineligible voters. EagleAI is already being used to mount mass challenges to the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of voters in competitive states, and, with Ziklag’s help, the group plans to ramp up those efforts.

According to an internal video, Ziklag plans to invest $800,000 in “EagleAI’s clean the rolls project,” which would be one of the largest known donations to the group.

Conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, seen speaking at an event with then-President Donald Trump, received funding from Ziklag for her efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Credit:Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

Ziklag lists two key objectives for Operation Checkmate: “Secure 10,640 additional unique votes in Arizona (mirroring the 2020 margin of 10,447 votes), and remove up to one million ineligible registrations and around 280,000 ineligible voters in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.”

In a recording of an internal Zoom call, Ziklag’s Mark Bourgeois stressed the electoral value of targeting Arizona. “I care about Maricopa County,” Bourgeois said at one point, referring to Arizona’s largest county, which Biden won four years ago. “That’s how we win.”

For Operation Watchtower, Wallnau explained in a members-only video that transgender policy was a “wedge issue” that could be decisive in turning out voters tired of hearing about Trump.

The left had won the battle over the “homosexual issue,” Wallnau said. “But on transgenderism, there’s a problem and they know it.” He continued: “They’re gonna wanna talk about Trump, Trump, Trump. … Meanwhile, if we talk about ‘It’s not about Trump. It’s about parents and their children, and the state is a threat,’” that could be the “target on the forehead of Goliath.”

The Ziklag files describe tactics the group plans to use around parental rights — policies that make it easier for parents to control what’s taught in public schools — to turn out conservative voters. In a fundraising video, the group says it plans to underwrite a “messaging and data lab” focused on parental rights that will supply “winning messaging to all our partner groups to create unified focus among all on the right.” The goal, the video says, is to make parental rights “the difference-maker in the 2024 election.”

According to Wallnau, Ziklag also plans to fund ballot initiatives in seven key states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Montana, Nevada and Ohio — that take aim at the transgender community by seeking to ban “genital mutilation.” The seven states targeted are either presidential battlegrounds or have competitive U.S. Senate races. None of the initiatives is on a state ballot yet.

“People that are lethargic about the election or, worse yet, they’re gonna be all Trump-traumatized with the news cycle — this issue will get people to come out and vote,” Wallnau said. “That ballot initiative can deliver swing states.”

The last prong of Ziklag’s 2024 strategy is Operation Steeplechase, which urges conservative pastors to mobilize their congregants to vote in this year’s election. This project will work in coordination with several prominent conservative groups that support former president Trump’s reelection, such as Turning Point USA’s faith-based group, the Faith and Freedom Coalition run by conservative operative Ralph Reed and the America First Policy Institute, one of several groups closely allied with Trump.

Ziklag’s website outlines its three major operations and which mountains each one targets. Credit: Screenshot by ProPublica

 

Ziklag says in a 2023 internal video that it and its allies will “coordinate extensive pastor and church outreach through pastor summits, church-focused messaging and events and the creation of pastor resources.” As preacher and activist John Amanchukwu said at a Ziklag event, “We need a church that’s willing to do anything and everything to get to the point where we reclaim that which was stolen from us.”

Six tax experts reviewed the election-related strategy discussions and tactics reported in this story. All of them said the activities tested or ran afoul of the law governing 501(c)(3) charities. The IRS and the Texas attorney general, which would oversee the Southlake, Texas, charity, did not respond to questions.

While not all of its political efforts appeared to be clear-cut violations, the experts said, others may be: The stated plan to mobilize voters “sympathetic to Republicans,” Ziklag officials openly discussing the goal to win the election, and Wallnau’s call to fund ballot initiatives that would “deliver swing states” while at the same time voicing explicit criticism of Biden all raised red flags, the experts said.

“I am troubled about a tax-exempt charitable organization that’s set up and its main operation seems to be to get people to win office,” said Phil Hackney, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and an expert on tax-exempt organizations.

“They’re planning an election effort,” said Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division. “That’s not a 501(c)(3) activity.”

Edited October 31 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,801]

1 hour ago, NikkiCFC said:

You know older people here always say how it was all much better under communist Tito 😏 

Nikos Zachariadis- Tito's dagger stabs the People's Democratic Greece in the back

https://www.idcommunism.com/2018/07/nikos-zachariadis-titos-dagger-stabs-the-peoples-democratic-greece-in-the-back.html

Note: The article below, written by Nikos Zachariadis, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece from 1931 to 1956, was published in the newspaper-organ of the information Bureau of the Communist and Workers Parties- "For a lasting Peace, for a People's Democracy" on 1/8/1949. In the article, Zachariadis refers to the role of Josip Broz Tito's leadership during the struggle of Greece's guerrilla Democratic Army (DSE) against the bourgeois Greek Army and the imperialists, between the years 1946-1949. 

Tito's dagger stabs the People's Democratic Greece in the back

By Nikos Zachariadis.

"Dimokratikos Stratos" magazine, Issue 8, August 1949.
Translation: In Defense of Communism.
 

The People's revolutionary movement in our country has faced- in December 1944 with the armed english intervention- and faces serious difficulties in the harsh road towards victory.

 

Every inhabitant of Greece knows that monarcho-fascism would not be able to hold out even for a few months had it not been for the all-round and open aid of the American and British imperialists to the Greek reactionaries.

Our main difficulties rise from the fact that the Anglo-American imperialism is stubbornly trying to retain a foothold in Greece, both because the country is highly important to them for strategic reasons, as well as because they are trying to turn it into a vital military bridge head against the People’s Democracies and the Soviet Union. Churchill’s intentions towards this direction are well-known.

 

However, foreign imperialism’s positions in Greece were badly shaken last year by the military defeat of monarcho-fascism in the Grammos-Vitsi area and by the collapse of its strategic plan for 1948. The People’s revolutionary movement and the Democratic Army were extending and consolidating their positions in Peloponnese, Rumeli, Thessaly and on the islands of Samos and Eubeia. Also in a number of other islands, including Mytilene, Ikaria, Kefalonia and Crete, monarcho-fascism had been proved unable, despite its immense superiority, to exterminate our movement.

The reactionary forces in our country were in a critical position. The reports of the highest monarcho-fascist military leadership, such as the ones by General Papagos, Vendiris, Tsakalotos and others openly admitted that the army morale had been shaken. Hundreds of soldiers and officers were executed. King Paul himself spoke about the moral crisis in the army. The Athens clique was facing severe economic difficulties and the political crisis was steadily sapping the foundations of monarcho-fascism. Both foreign and Greek political actors, people who were by no means our friends, began to realise that the only way out for the reactionaries was to reach a peaceful settlement and conclude an agreement.
 

The treachery of the Tito was disclosed at the very moment when the crisis of monarcho-fascism was sharpening. Tito’s treachery meant serious new difficulties for our people’s democratic movement, for it multiplied the determination of the Anglo-American imperialists to retain, at all costs, their hold on Greece for the very purpose of making full use of the treachery by Tito and extending their bridge in the Balkans. At the same time the Tito clique’s treachery raised the deflated hopes of monarcho-fascism. These are the consequences of Tito's treason. It was a stab in the back of our movement.

 

It is a fact that no one celebrated Tito's treason against our movement more than the Greek monarcho-fascists and their imperialist despots. The people’s democratic movement of our country has never, since the time of the first occupation, known of such a cunning and abhorrent enemy as the Tito clique.

 

Tito clique's Great Serbia chauvinism in relation to the resistance movement in Greece was evident as far back as 1943 and was presented with the following position (of the Yugoslav Communist Party): The KKE follows an erroneous policy and betrays the struggle. Zachariadis is a traitor too. The people of the Aegean Macedonia could only win their liberation within the framework of Yugoslavia. The corollary of this was that it was the prime duty of all Macedonian patriots to fight against the Communist Party of Greece and EAM and instead to collaborate with the Tito agents.

This was the directive followed by Tito’s man in Aegean Macedonia, Tempo (Bukmanovic); this was the directive applied in practice by their chief agent, Goce. Today is it being carried out by Goce-Koramidjiev gang. During all these years the Tito clique sent thousands of its agents into the Communist Party of Greece and into EAM in order to undermine the Communist Party of Greece and break the unity of the people’s liberation movement.

We must say openly that the Greek reaction and Anglo-American imperialism could not have found a better ally than the Tito clique in their struggle against the people's revolutionary movement in Greece.

 

[…]

 

We must point out here an extremely characteristic detail: In October 1944 when the British landed in Greece, Tempo, who had a major role in the provocative movement against the Communist Party of Greece, informed the Communists of Aegean Macedonia that he has asked Tito for two divisions to occupy Thessaloniki. This was before the December events and the British were not sure that they could hold Greece. Now it's very clear that the British imperialists would prefer Tito to take Thessaloniki.

 

Back then, in October 1944, the British parachuted weapons onto the airport of Ghrupista. These were subsequently sent on to Vapsori by Tito’s agents - Tempo, Goce and Pios - to be used against ELAS. During the Hitler occupation Goce and Pios formed groups of Macedonian and collaborated with Tempo. Today, we consider an established fact that, as a consequence, Evans, the then representative of the British military mission in Macedonia, insisted on the network of these groups being extended. It was at the help of these groups that Goce, Pios and Keramidjiev carried out their disruptive activities against the people’s liberation movement in Greece.
 

In December 1944 Tito, who dreamt of snatching Thessaloniki from people’s democratic Greece, did nothing to help us fight the British, in spite of all his earlier pompous statements. If anything, he stepped up his slander campaign against the Communist Party of Greece, especially within the people of the Aegean Macedonia.

The result of Tito's policyt was mass emigration of Macedonians to Yugoslavia thus depriving Aegean Macedonia of its Macedonian population.

 

Incidentally, the Greek monarcho-fascists have been trying to the same thing for many years, hoping to change the ethnical composition Aegean Macedonia. From their side, Tito and Kolysevski were trying to recruit agents from these refugees who, after the necessary training, are sent to Greece to operate against the Communist Party of Greece, EAM and our people’s revolutionary movement.

 

Since 1943 the Greek Communist Party and revolutionary movement have been two fires: on the one side the foreign imperialists and monarcho-fascist, on the other- the Tito clique and its executive organ, the Goce- Keramidiev gang which had and still has hundreds of Yugoslav intelligence servicemen in Aegean Macedonia. In 1944, acting on orders from Skopje, Goce crossed over to Yugoslavia with his detachment. Today Goce and Keramidjiev have their headquarters in Skopje.

Time and again the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece drew the attention of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party to the counter-revolutionary actions of these agents, proved by irrefutable documentary evidence, and demanded that their activities should be stopped. The Central Committee of the Yugoslav Party, however, did not do a thing to cut short these provocation actions.

It has been proved beyond doubt that Christos Vlachos, who in 1947 in Thessaloniki killed Yiannis Zevgos, a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Greek Party, was an agent of the Yugoslav intelligence, service and had received his instruction from Skopje. He arrived in Thessaloniki on orders of the Yugoslav intelligence, placed himself at the disposal of General Zervas, an agent of the British Intelligence Service, and later murdered Zevgos. Five monarcho-fascist officers, some of them murderers of the people, escaped to Yugoslavia from a war prisoner’s camp with the help of Rankovic. The Central committee of the Yugoslav Party stated that it knew absolutely nothing about this, even though we gave them details of the date and the exact spot where the monarcho-fascists had crossed the border. Border officers and soldiers had informed us that the monarcho-fascists had crossed into Yugoslavia.

We have captured dozens of Yugoslav intelligence officers. In December 1948 two Yugoslav agents, Gounaris Menos and Gallios Mitsos, were detained in Prespa. These agents disclosed the names of the Yugoslav intelligence officers who had sent them and the assignment they had been given.

The Communist Party of Greece has at its disposal other damning proof of the treachery and disruptive activity of the Tito clique against the revolutionary movement in Greece. The nationalist gang of the treacherous Yugoslav leadership was always a mortal enemy to the Communist Party and people of Greece. Recent events are fresh evidence that the Tito clique helped and is continuing to help Greek and international reaction against the Greek people more and more openly.

In its communiqué of July 6, 1949 the General Headquarters of the Democratic Army stated that on July 5, 1949 monarcho-fascist troops used Yugoslav territory in order to bypass units of the Democratic Army in the Kaimakchalan area. The same day the “Free Greece” telegraph agency, basing itself on an official document (the report of lieutenant colonel Petropoulos, commander of the monarcho-fascists’ 516th battalion, to General Grigoropoulos, commander of the 3rd army corps), reported that on July 4, 1949, that is, on the eve of the day when the monarcho-fascists crossed Yugoslav territory, a meeting of Yugoslav and monarcho-fascist Greek officers had been held in the area of Popovolossi and Kaimakchalan. This meeting was attended by British and American officers. The Tanjug agency did not refute this fact, neither did the representative of the British Foreign Office when asked about this meeting. Again, neither did Tito deny it in his speech at Pola (Istria), on July 10, 1949. Like the Tanjug agency, he merely tried to refute the fact that an agreement had been reached allowing the monarcho-fascist to use Yugoslav territory.

Such was the Belgrade version when the United Nations Balkan Commission in Athens published its communiqué on July 21, 1949. The sole aim of this communiqué was to cover up Tito’s collaboration with the monarcho-fascists, a collaboration that had been laid bare by the General Headquarters of the Democratic Army and the Free Greece radio on July 6, 1949. This communiqué of the Balkan Commission is highly significant since, to begin with, for the first time in its history the Commission admitted that the monarcho-fascists had violated the Yugoslav frontier in the Kaimakchalan area on many occasions. It claimed, however, that this had been done by artillery and aircraft and not by infantry. Secondly, the communiqué admitted that a meeting of monarcho-fascist and Yugoslav officers had been held in the Kaimakchalan area.

After the Tito clique’s betrayal of the Greek people’s liberation struggle had been exposed in the eyes of progressive mankind and the Yugoslav people, the Yugoslav leaders found it necessary to mobilise yet another provocateur. On July 24, following the example of Tito and Djilas, Kardelj also made a statement to Tanjug on the Greek question. He denied everything: the agreement with Tsaldaris, the negotiations in the Kaimakchalan area, and the use of Yugoslav territory by the monarcho-fascists. He concluded by giving the Jesuit assurance that the Belgrade Government “continues to sympathise” with the movement of the Greek people, but that it “cannot force its assistance on them” and that “the agents of the Information Bureau who slandered Tito” are responsible for this.

We have never doubted the sympathy of the Yugoslav people. As for those who are responsible, “The Times” makes it clear when it writes that in his statement at Pola, Tito gave the Americans the necessary guarantees in advance for the dollars which he needs.

 

Nikos Zachariadis

In order to mask their treachery, the traitors Tito, Djilas, Kardelj and company would have the world believe that morale of the Greek democrats is at a low ebb and that they are losing confidence in victory. As a matter of fact these Titoites are doing everything to undermine the morale of the Greek democrats. Tito’s treachery and his long-standing subversive activities against the people’s democratic movement in Greece are causing us serious difficulties. Tito has a deadly hatred for the Geek people’s liberation movement and is viciously fighting against it. But he is mistaken, and so are his monarcho-fascist allies and their common masters, if they think that they will be able to crush us.

 

Throughout Greece – in Rumelia, Thessaly, Peloponnese, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace and on the islands – the Greek Democratic Army is continuing its struggle against the enemy with unshaken courage in the face of enormous difficulties. A broad strike movement covering tens of thousands of factory and office workers is gaining strength in the cities. Hundreds of thousands of peasants who are literally starving to death in the cities where they have been forcibly driven by the monarcho-fascists, hate the Athens Government with all their soul. Reaction in Greece is in the throes of an economic, political and moral crisis from which it can find no way out. The Greek Democratic Army will come face to face with monarcho-fascism in the great battles that will be fought in Grammos and Vitsi.

We are fight because we want peace, because we want to establish democracy and the independence of Greece. Reaction is out for war. It wants to crush us at all costs and is using the Tito clique for this purpose. Thanks to the assistance and solidarity of progressive mankind, including the Yugoslav people, the people of Greece will be victorious both in war and will win a people’s democracy and national independence.

Edited October 31 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,801]

Memorials dedicated to communist guerrillas unveiled by the KKE in northern Greece 

https://www.idcommunism.com/2024/10/memorials-dedicated-to-communist-guerrillas-unveiled-by-the-kke-in-northern-greece.html

With two events held in the northern provinces of Florina and Kastoria on Sunday 27 October, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) unveiled two new memorials dedicated to the struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece, the communist-backed guerrilla army which fought against the bourgeois forces and their imperialist allies during the 1946-1949 Civil War.

Both events were attended by the General Secretary of the CC of the KKE Dimitris Koutsoumbas. 

 

In the small village of Kottas, close to Florina, Koutsoumbas stated: “This event was a due honor towards the heroic fighters, the 311 dead of the Democratic Army, who gave their lives here on the heights, around the village of Kottas, for the freedom and honor of the people, at the peak of the class struggle in Greece back then. We honor their memory. We continue their struggle, we continue the fight”.

Hundreds of KKE members, supporters and local residents attended the unveiling of the monuments, shouting slogans such as “neither in exile nor in prisons did the Communists ever bend” and “A century of struggle and sacrifice, the KKE in the vanguard”.

The first monument is located in Kottas, where a mass grave of Democratic Army fighters has ben found and refers to those who fell mainly during the last battles in the broader area, in August 1949.

The second one is located in the village of Kallithea, in Prespa, close to the Museum dedicated to EAM-ELAS and DSE and refers to the fallen heroes of ELAS (Greek People's Liberation Army) and the Democratic Army during the 1941-1949 period, that is during the  Anti-Nazi resistance and the Greek Civil War.  

 

  IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ©   

[Vesper 28,801]

😃

[cosmicway 1,323]

8 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

You know older people here always say how it was all much better under communist Tito 😏 

Well, some may always fancy Tito.
But here is Freud psychology at play again. The old man was 21 years old during Tito's time, he could go to Brijuni island and chase the beauties. So it was better and why not Tito as well ?
The same with Papadopoulos for the Greeks, Salazar for the Portuguese.

[cosmicway 1,323]

7 hours ago, Vesper said:

Memorials dedicated to communist guerrillas unveiled by the KKE in northern Greece 

https://www.idcommunism.com/2024/10/memorials-dedicated-to-communist-guerrillas-unveiled-by-the-kke-in-northern-greece.html

With two events held in the northern provinces of Florina and Kastoria on Sunday 27 October, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) unveiled two new memorials dedicated to the struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece, the communist-backed guerrilla army which fought against the bourgeois forces and their imperialist allies during the 1946-1949 Civil War.

Both events were attended by the General Secretary of the CC of the KKE Dimitris Koutsoumbas. 

 

 

In the small village of Kottas, close to Florina, Koutsoumbas stated: “This event was a due honor towards the heroic fighters, the 311 dead of the Democratic Army, who gave their lives here on the heights, around the village of Kottas, for the freedom and honor of the people, at the peak of the class struggle in Greece back then. We honor their memory. We continue their struggle, we continue the fight”.

Hundreds of KKE members, supporters and local residents attended the unveiling of the monuments, shouting slogans such as “neither in exile nor in prisons did the Communists ever bend” and “A century of struggle and sacrifice, the KKE in the vanguard”.

The first monument is located in Kottas, where a mass grave of Democratic Army fighters has ben found and refers to those who fell mainly during the last battles in the broader area, in August 1949.

The second one is located in the village of Kallithea, in Prespa, close to the Museum dedicated to EAM-ELAS and DSE and refers to the fallen heroes of ELAS (Greek People's Liberation Army) and the Democratic Army during the 1941-1949 period, that is during the  Anti-Nazi resistance and the Greek Civil War.  

 

  IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ©   

Historian -war hero Chris Woodhouse disputes all this.
The communists were not so popular in Greece.
For the very early days after the liberation there are no opinion polls but he says there is no reason for the two major parties the conservative people's party and the liberals to have lost support - since neither of them was accused of being a quislig party and they were involved in the resistance,
In elections held later the atmosphere was a Mc Carthy sort of atmosphere but nevertheless the results verify him.

The communists were about 15% in all probability.
But from October 1944 when Greece was liberated to December when the communists attempted the ir coup d' etat everybody liked the Soviet Union and Stalin - because of the Soviets were allies.
It was the war time alliance and you could see Soviet flags in the balconies in Kolonaki district (also Holywood movies praising the USSR).
Then the communists were armed whereas Greece had no army - just a few soldiers.
There was the British contingent in Athens who finally held the communists but between commies - Greek army the analogy was 5 to 1 or 10 to 1.
So to the commies this relative superiority in arms is the same as ... popular support.

In 2015 during the economic crisis I don't know.
The Syriza commies can claim they won - but now the red camp was split in two.
Yet a little later the Syriza lot went to visit Trump and bowed to their knees infront of him.

But the orthodox commies are not making any progress.
They have strange ideas. They won't cooperate even with their Syriza cousins.
They are afraid some unexpected revisionism will creep in.
Back in the days they were dying for a popular front.
But it was different. They reckonned a popular front will take Greece out of NATO into the neutralist camp. Then the Soviet tanks will move in -no problem. Then we catch the popular front dupes and execute them - simples. But now they hate popular front.




 

 

 

Edited October 31 by cosmicway

[cosmicway 1,323]

7 hours ago, Vesper said:

Memorials dedicated to communist guerrillas unveiled by the KKE in northern Greece 

https://www.idcommunism.com/2024/10/memorials-dedicated-to-communist-guerrillas-unveiled-by-the-kke-in-northern-greece.html

With two events held in the northern provinces of Florina and Kastoria on Sunday 27 October, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) unveiled two new memorials dedicated to the struggle of the Democratic Army of Greece, the communist-backed guerrilla army which fought against the bourgeois forces and their imperialist allies during the 1946-1949 Civil War.

Both events were attended by the General Secretary of the CC of the KKE Dimitris Koutsoumbas. 

 

 

In the small village of Kottas, close to Florina, Koutsoumbas stated: “This event was a due honor towards the heroic fighters, the 311 dead of the Democratic Army, who gave their lives here on the heights, around the village of Kottas, for the freedom and honor of the people, at the peak of the class struggle in Greece back then. We honor their memory. We continue their struggle, we continue the fight”.

Hundreds of KKE members, supporters and local residents attended the unveiling of the monuments, shouting slogans such as “neither in exile nor in prisons did the Communists ever bend” and “A century of struggle and sacrifice, the KKE in the vanguard”.

The first monument is located in Kottas, where a mass grave of Democratic Army fighters has ben found and refers to those who fell mainly during the last battles in the broader area, in August 1949.

The second one is located in the village of Kallithea, in Prespa, close to the Museum dedicated to EAM-ELAS and DSE and refers to the fallen heroes of ELAS (Greek People's Liberation Army) and the Democratic Army during the 1941-1949 period, that is during the  Anti-Nazi resistance and the Greek Civil War.  

 

  IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ©   

 
D' you know Zachariades recanted ?
In the seventies he wanted to return to Greece and did n't mind even if they put him to trial.
But the Soviets were holding him prisoner in Siberia, with two tanks outside his house continuously watching for years.
In the end he hanged himself.

Edited October 31 by cosmicway

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,919]

Ooof I dont think any of the presidents really helped Kamala during this election.