“Community Organizing” and Stealth Socialism

By Al Benson Jr.

Up until 1970 I had never even heard the term “community organizer.” In 1970 I heard the term applied to a man who had been hired to lecture college students. The man was a puredee Communist Party member. So for years I could honestly say “The only man I ever heard about who was a community organizer was a Communist.” Turns out that wasn’t really all that far off.

Stanley Kurtz, in his book Radical-In-Chief—Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism has some informative comments on community organizers. He notes, quite accurately, that: “Community organizing is a largely socialist profession. Particularly at the highest levels, America’s community organizers have adopted a deliberately stealthy posture—hiding their socialism behind a ‘populist’ front. These organizers strive to push America toward socialism in unobtrusive, incremental steps, calling themselves ‘pragmatic problem-solvers’ all the while. Barack Obama’s colleagues and mentors were some of the smartest and most influential stealth- socialist community organizers in the country. Their strategies of political re-alignment and social transformation guide the Obama administration to this day.”

In referring to the president, Kurtz observed: “Obama is a community organizer who sincerely believes what other community organizers believe. The problem is that community organizers are not forthcoming about the true nature of their beliefs. All too often, they consciously mask a hard-edged socialism in feel-good euphemistic code.” In other words, folks, they lie to us about what their real intent is. They cover up bad intentions with “feel-good” terminology. Sadly, due to the immense lack of discernment so apparent in our day, they get by with it because we are dumbed-down enough so that we don’t know what we don’t know. These people have as their agenda the destruction of our country as we know it and the removal of our liberties and we are so occupied with trivia that we haven’t got time to be bothered learning how to do anything about it.

David Horowitz, a former leftist radical who now runs the website http://www.frontpagemag.com interviewed Stanley Kurtz back in January of 2011 regarding his book. He said: “And what Stanley has shown is just what I said, that Barack Obama was raised as a leftist and starting right out of college was part of the Marxist Socialist, what I call Neocommunist left.”

Mr. Kurtz, in this interview, had some very interesting comments about the evolution of socialism in this country over the past eighty years or so. In commenting about the research he did for his book he stated: “I kept running into evidence of real Socialism, people who thought of themselves as Socialists, Marxists, hardcore. And a variety of Socialism and Socialists that I hadn’t known about that I think you could still call it hardcore, but it was a revised form of Socialism that took over the movement after the 1960s and that most Americans know nothing about.”

It was noted by Kurtz that there are lots of conservatives out there, even today, who really are not comfortable with the idea that Obama is a Socialist. They liken that to what they think they heard from the John Birch Society or from Joe McCarthy, and they’ve been taught that, as good “conservatives” they’re not to pay any attention to any of that. They’ve been taught that ultra-liberals are really nice folks, just a little misguided and that, maybe, if you are nice to them they will not bother anyone. That’s all a pile of cow chips, but they’ve bought it and so anyone that exposes the machinations of the leftists to them can expect a stern lecture back on why they are not “loving” enough toward the people that are trying to tear the country down. I’ve been a member of the John Birch Society in past years and most of the folks I knew there (and still know) were and are among the most decent and honorable people I know. They have a concern for the leftist direction they see the country headed in and they try to do what they can to stem that tide. Everyone should have their concern, but most don’t. As far a Joe McCarthy, he was, and still is, one of the most maligned people in the country. That’s the price you pay anymore for trying to tell people the truth. Contrary to what you’ve heard, McCarthy did not “destroy” the lives of thousands. There were only a certain few he went after and he already had overwhelming evidence of Communist affiliation about them, which is why he went after them—and some of them were in high positions in government.

Anyway, back to Mr. Kurtz and the Socialists. Kurtz noted that: “Even knowledgeable ex-leftists don’t have full awareness of the Socialism I discuss in this book because it comes from a group of community organizers who represented one particular faction within contemporary American Socialism and they were secretive.”

Kurtz notes several Socialist conferences that Obama attended and he says: “…when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I was truly amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at these Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. Now, what do I mean? Well, for one thing, these Socialist conferences touted community organizing as the key to the future for American Socialism.”

Mr. Kurtz shed even more light on the way these stealth-socialists operate. He stated: “So he (Obama) ran into organizations like ACORN and Project Vote, at these Socialist conferences. They were considered the future of Socialism. And there was another theme at these conferences and that was that rainbow coalitions led by minority political leaders, particularly African Americans, were the key to the future of Socialism in the United States. And the model of all this was Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago…In fact, Jeremiah Wright was deeply involved in Harold Washington’s various electoral campaigns…Well, there were an awful lot of Socialist community organizers in Chicago. And these Socialist community organizers were really the key to Harold Washington’s success.” So Washington was willing to work with the Socialists and they saw his administration as one that would promote their goals and agendas.

So these people labored to create an anti-business, ‘quasi-Populist’ movement that leaned left and was the result of the agitation of these community organizers. At some point, some of these community organizers rise to the top of the heap and become politicians themselves, and from their new positions of prominence they lead this “coalition” of community groups with an agenda of anti-business and economic populism, which is really controlled by the Socialists behind the scenes. They don’t call themselves Socialists anymore. Now they are “Populists” or “Communitarians” (stealth-Socialists) and they talk about “democratizing power.” But when you look at what really goes on, you find that it’s nothing but Socialism with a new name tag and you have Socialists running all these “Populist” groups. This is what “community organizers” really do.

The minute Obama told people he had been a “community organizer” that should have set warning bells off. And the “news” media knew all this, and the Republican establishment knew all this. All that remained was to make sure the American people didn’t find out about any of it. Mr. Kurtz’s book is still available on Amazon.com and I would urge folks to order a copy while it can still be had.