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Brandon Darby learned something from Hugo Chavezs Venezuela. Once a hard-core radical who sided with progressive revolutionaries, Darby prevented a left-wing terrorist attack on the 2008 GOP convention. Now, this America-loving patriot is the target of the domestic extremists he once called friends.
involved in Venezuelan communist subversion here in America and in antiIsraeli terrorism in Palestine, learned this unpalatable truth the hard way.
anti-Americanism made the intense Texan a larger-than-life gure among leftist activists in the South. He openly called for the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he considered too corrupt and oppressive to be reformed. He expressed his hatred of police as guardians of the status quo. He consorted with eco-terrorist tree-spikers, radical feminists and black nationalists. He was approached to rob an armored car and asked to commit arson to ght gentrication. He mouthed politically correct slogans and platitudes about the Bush administration. Government didnt care about people, and in his eyes, the much-maligned response to Hurricane Katrina proved it. But around the same time, the former radical community organizer was turning away from radicalism, and at tremendous personal risk, he undermined a leftwing terrorist plot to attack the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. If he hadnt taken action, Americans exercising their free speech
rights and police ofcers might have been killed. Without informing his fellow anarchists, Darby offered his assistance to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and, at the FBIs request, inltrated a leftwing group known as the Austin Afnity Group. The outt had joined with a larger coalition of progressive organizations that facetiously called itself the RNC Welcoming Committee. The committee hoped to lay siege to the GOP convention that nominated the presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin. The FBI sent Darby to meet with anarchists who were developing their plan at a bookstore in Austin. It was a group of people whose explicit purpose was to organize a group of black bloc anarchists to shut the Republican convention down by any means necessary, he explained. They showed videos of people throwing Molotov cocktails, and they were giving people ideas. The two 20-something plotters on whom Darby informed, David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, had made homemade riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the Xcel Energy Center in order to prevent GOP delegates from participating in the convention. The shields were discovered and conscated. But McKay and Crowder were undeterred by this setback. Together they manufactured instruments of death calculated to inict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with. During a search of a residence, police found gas masks, slingshots, helmets, knee pads and eight Molotov cocktails consisting of bottles lled with gasoline with attached wicks made from tampons. They mixed gasoline with oil so it would stick to clothing and skin and burn longer, Darby told me. Thanks to Darbys cooperation with the FBI, the two anarchist would-be bomb throwers are now languishing in prison. McKay entered a guilty plea and was sentenced in May 2009 to 48 months in prison plus three years of supervised release for possession of an unregistered
April 2010 TOWNHALL
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Liberal activists David McKay, lef , and Bradley Crowder, the infamous Texas 2, are both serving time following their foiled terrorist attack on the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.
(Freethetexas2.com)
ACORN founder Wade Rathke, who worked as a professional agitator for the violent Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, would have preferred that Republican delegates be incinerated. He denounced Darby for working with the authorities to disrupt the domestic terrorists. It seemed so, how should I say it, 60s? Its one thing to disagree, but its a whole different thing to rat on folks, Rathke wrote on his blog. This response to ideological apostasy is not altogether surprising. Leftists who abandon their faith are demonized by their former co-religionists. Relentless attacks on Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and former radical David Horowitz continue to the present day, decades after they moved rightward.
This crusader for social justice and political consultant to Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and impeached Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich even whined at his 2006 sentencing that he received a ve-month period of incarceration, well below the 30 to 37 months called for in federal sentencing guidelines. The media failed to call him on it. Convicted cop-killing activists Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal are legends on the Left. Black Panther AbuJamal in particular enjoys a cult following among radicals even though no serious personincluding Abu-Jamal himself, who failed to claim to be innocent at his trialcontests that in 1981 he shot and killed Philadelphia police ofcer Daniel Faulkner in cold blood. Creamer, Peltier and Abu-Jamal are all heroes to the Left no matter what they did, and to some precisely because of what they did. This is because on the Left there is a presumption of good intentions even by fellow-traveling terrorists. As left-wing talk radio host Thom Hartmann told me last year: My left-wing crazies are better than your right-wing crazies. Hartmann explained: Your right-wing crazies are incited to violence based on fear and hate of people because of whom they are, because theyre gay, because theyre Catholic, because theyre Jewish, because theyre black, because theyre Hispanic. And our left-wing crazies are incited to violence because theyre trying
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Bruce Livingston)
Community organizer and former Black Panther Malik Rahim speaks to an anti-war rally in San Francisco. Brandon Darby started Common Ground in Rahims home in New Orleans.(Robert
in the home of Malik Rahim, a veteran community organizer and former Black Panther who did prison time for armed robbery. When we started, everyone in the city was armed, everyone was scared, and there was a complete lack of law enforcement, said Darby. The few roving bands of law enforcement that were present didnt like us very much because of the fact that we were involved with people like Malik Rahim, who to this day continues to advocate for those who have attacked law enforcement personnel. We were young, we were caught up in the fervor of helping others and ghting
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PLOTS ABROAD
Although Darbys positive experiences with New Orleans police had forced him to begin questioning his anarchist beliefs, a trip to Marxist Venezuela helped to kill off his remaining radical impulses. The trip came as the U.S. government was taking a beating in the media for its post-Katrina relief efforts. At the time, Venezuelas communist strongman, Hugo Chavez, began trying to embarrass the Bush administration by offering aid to the Katrina-hit Gulf Coast. Chavez had already been running what political scientists call a public diplomacy campaign in the U.S. to help bolster American support for his regime. The propaganda effort consisted of funneling discounted home heating oil to former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedys, D-Mass., nonprot group, Citizens Energy Corp. The nonprot then distributed the oil to poor people, and Kennedy went on TV to berate the Bush administration, which he said cut fuel assistance. Kennedy
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This poster, created by the RNC Welcoming Committee, a radical anti-Republican, lef ist group, called on activists to rally against the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. (RNC
Welcoming Committee, nornc.org)
Childrens Welfare Fund, told him he wanted to send medics to Israel and put explosives on motorcycles and boobytrap ambulances in order to kill Jews. Hamad also hatched an elaborate plan to funnel money to Hamas and Hezbollah. Around the same time, Darby viewed a very graphic Israeli rst responders training video. At the time I was conicted about what to do, but seeing the dead bodies of Israeli children in that tape made the so-called Palestinian activists chant no justice, no peace, take on a whole new meaning. I decided the only ethical thing to do was to tell law enforcement what I knew.) To Darbys astonishment, during his stay in Caracas, senior ofcials in the Chavez government and in PDVSA told him they wanted him to create a revolutionary army of guerrillas in the swamps of Louisiana. At the very last meeting they ramped up the pressure, Darby said. They taunted him, saying, What? Youre not a revolutionary? Despite intense pressure from his Venezuelan hosts, he refused. This was the last straw for him. I realized I didnt like Venezuela, the authoritarianism of it, and I started to realize how brilliant and miraculous the American system of checks and balances was, Darby said. There was still
something brilliant about the fact that this nation had institutionalized a system of checks and balances that has been working since this nation was founded. I realized just how hard a task that is. Common Ground, divided by radical factions with harebrained ideas constantly warring with each other, was a living example of left-wing radicalism in action. When I would leave Common Ground for a few days I would be worried that a power vacuum could develop and factions could displace me while I was away, and thats just the way things are in places like Venezuela, he said. It is actually absurd to want the United States government to go away, and thats when it really hit me that my ideas were wrong. Darby said hes still proud of his Common Ground experience on the whole. Im proud of helping people, but Im ashamed of what I used to believe, Darby admitted. Thankfully, I had the honor of serving my country by working undercover with the FBI and participating in efforts to protect the safety and civil rights of others.
Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank that studies the politics of philanthropy.
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