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Introduction: We have wondered about the ascent of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a political animal. We wondered whether she might be a “ringer,” elevated and promoted by the far right and, perhaps, elements of the CIA, because she is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT from their standpoint. In fact, she is straight from the Amazon (ahem) mail order catalog: an outspoken Latina who fits neatly into the anti-Latin bigotry institutionalized in Trump’s GOP, brands as a socialist (perfect for the Karl Roves and Trumps of this world), has stated her intention to work against Democratic incumbents with whose policy positions she disagrees, and demonstrated a lack of economic sophistication in her comments about Amazon’s failed New York City Deal and in the presentation of the Green New Deal.
The ascent of AOC was effected in large measure by two overlapping organizations–Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress–both co-founded by Saikat Chakrabarti, and Indian-American, Harvard-educated, Wall Street and Silicon Valley multi-millionaire, and fan of major Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose. Brand New Congress was co-founded by a University of Pennsylvania-educated Turkish American, Cenk Uygur, who has a history of denying the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, as we shall see. (Like Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League School.)
The radical Democratic newcomers are precipitating a war within the Democratic Party, ignoring the fact that the Democrats retook Congress as a result of victories by moderate candidates in districts taken by Trump in 2016.
Chakrabarti is fundamental to the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Chakrabarti was AOC’s campaign manager and is her current chief of staff. Both Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress donated a total of $900,000 to a consulting firm also headed by Chakrabarti. Until recently, AOC sat on the board of one of them.
AOC’s political ascent itself, has a seedy underbelly (more about that in a future program.)
In a recent YouTube post defending AOC’s mercurial social media activity, Chakrabarti appeared with a T‑Shirt featuring a picture of Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist who allied himself with both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He has a habit of wearing Subhas Chandra Bose garb.
Some of Bose’s many profound relationships and operational deeds in connection with the Axis and the Second World War:
- In addition to networking with Heinrich Himmler, as pictured above, left, he met with Adolf Hitler and was praised by Der Fuhrer. ” . . . . You are fortunate having been born in a country of glorious cultural traditions and a colossal manpower. I am impressed by the burning passion with which you and your Netaji [Bose] seek to liberate your country from foreign domination. Your Netaji’s status is even greater than mine. While I am the leader of 80 million Germans, he is the leader of 400 million Indians. In all respects he is a greater leader and a greater general than myself. I salute him, and Germany salutes him. It is the duty of all Indians to accept him as their führer and obey him implicitly. I have no doubt that if you do this, his guidance will lead India very soon to freedom.”
- Bose networked with SS chief Heinrich Himmler and, ultimately, his European fighting forces were folded into the Waffen SS: ” . . . . The Indian Legion (German: Indische Legion), officially the Free India Legion (German: Legion Freies Indien) or Infantry Regiment 950 (Indian) (German: Infanterie-Regiment 950 (indisches), I.R. 950) and later the Indian Volunteer Legion of the Waffen-SS (German: Indische Freiwilligen Legion der Waffen-SS), was a military unit raised during the Second World War in Nazi Germany. Intended to serve as a liberation force for British-ruled India, it was made up of Indian prisoners of war and expatriates in Europe. Because of its origins in the Indian independence movement, it was known also as the “Tiger Legion”, and the “Azad Hind Fauj”. Initially raised as part of the German Army, it was part of the Waffen-SS from August 1944. Indian independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose initiated the legion’s formation, as part of his efforts to win India’s independence by waging war against Britain, when he came to Berlin in 1941 seeking German aid. . . .”
- Bose networked with Mussolini, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and even Emperor Hirohito himself during the course of his alignment with the Axis: ” . . . . Having met with Hitler, Italian Fascist Duce Benito Mussolini, and Japanese Premier General Hideki Tojo, Bose was, at one time or another, backed by all three of the major Axis powers. . . . Like Il Duce and the Führer before him, Bose now claimed the multiple titles and offices of head of state, prime minister, minister of war, and head of the foreign office. On the 23rd, the new chief executive officer made a state visit to Japan’s Emperor Hirohito during the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo . . . .”
- Bose also wrote for the journal of pan-Germanist philosopher Karl Haushofer. Kevin Coogan notes the philosophy of Karl Haushofer, an early influence on Hitler and Third Reich geo-politics, exemplifying some of the historical genesis of the Nazi/Hindu nationalist link. ” . . . . In the 1930’s, Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose [whose Indian national Army later received military support in World War II from both Germany and Japan] was a correspondent for the Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik. [Haushofer’s publication.] . . . .”
- In addition to Haushofer, Bose networked with other theoretical luminaries of fascism and institutions and individuals involved with clandestine operations and intelligence matters, including: The Japanese Black Dragon Society and its patriarch Mitsuru Toyama, Abwehr head Wilhelm Canaris, Haj Amin El-Husseini (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Major General in the Waffen SS, the foremost organizer of Muslim combat units for the Nazis and the first leader of the Palestinian National Movement) and Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.
- In connection with his work for Goebbels, it is worth noting that Bose’s Axis propaganda broadcasts were countered with George Orwell’s broadcasts for the Allies: ” . . . . . Bose set up the Free India Center in Berlin and began radio broadcasts from Nauen, Germany, to his far-off homeland on February 19, 1942. Bose’s British Broadcasting Corporation rival and counterpart, author Eric Blair (aka George Orwell of Animal Farm and 1984 fame), led the Allied propaganda team that fought Bose over the radio. . . . ”
It should be noted that Bose was not one of the Hindutva fascists, who belonged to the RSS and the closely-allied Hindu Mahasabha. He was, however, an Axis-allied fascist military leader, like some other nationalists in colonial territories, who sought alliance with the armies of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and, to a lesser extent, fascist Italy as vehicles for ousting their colonial masters.
Bose appears to have faked his 1945 death in a plane crash. If so, the probability is high that he continued his political work underground, very possibly in connection with some of the Axis elements with which he was associated during the war, and/or elements of CIA or other intelligence services. ” . . . . Although Netaji (Great Leader) Bose was reported killed in an air crash in August 1945 . . . . many believed then and continue to believe now that, helped by his Japanese allies, he faked his death . . . . and returned to India many years later . . . . In his inquiry report, completed in 2006, Justice Mukherjee was categoric. He concluded: ‘Netaji Bose is dead [a safe bet as he would have been 109]. He did not die in the plane crash as alleged and the ashes in the Japanese temple in Tokyo [maintained by the Indian government since 1945] are not of Netaji.’ . . .”
Cenk Uygur–the Ivy-League educated co-founder (with Chakrabarti) of Brand New Congress, has a history of denying the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War I: ” . . . . . . . . Hence, once you really examine the history of the time it becomes apparent that the allegations of an Armenian Genocide are unfounded. So the question arises of why the Armenians would bother to conjure up such stories . . . . . . . every non-Armenian scholar in the field believes it is an open question whether this event was a genocide. Is it the claim of the article that all of these people are tainted by the tentacles of the Turkish government? If not, then why is it not pointed out that no one outside of the ‘Armenian position’ believes it is a genocide? . . . ”
We note that, in addition to manifesting material supportive of the World War II Axis and denying genocide, the Chakrabarti/Uygur team has engineered much that fits neatly into the GOP strategy. The “war” they plan on “leaning into” within the Democratic Party benefits Trump/GOP/Karl Rove and might just as well have been scripted by them. ” . . . . it is the Justice Democrats who see Ocasio-Cortez as just the opening act in an astonishingly ambitious plan to do nothing less than re-imagine liberal politics in America—and do it by whatever means necessary. . . . If that requires knocking out well-known elected officials and replacing them with more radical newcomers, so be it. And if it ends up ripping apart the Democratic Party in the process—well, that might be the idea. ‘There is going to be a war within the party. We are going to lean into it,’ said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman. . . .”
With “Subhas Chandra” Chakrabarti and “What Armenian Genocide?” Uygur promoting her political ascent, we should note how much of what she says is perfect for Team Trump. AOC has intoned that jobs should be provided for people “unwilling to work,” that capitalism was “irredeemable” and adorned the fundamentally important concept of a “Green New Deal” with a progressive wish list that provided propaganda fodder for Team Trump.
Brad Parscale is heading Trump’s 2020 reelection team and, in so doing, has reassembled the Cambridge Analytica team from 2016. AOC has long been prolific in her use of social media and online communication. We wonder if AOC may have been identified, profiled and data-based by an AI-assisted data mining operation along the lines of what Cambridge Analytica engineered on behalf of Trump during the 2016 campaign?
Program Highlights Include: Bernie Sanders’ chief 2016 campaign strategist Tad Devine’s networking with Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and probable spook Paul Manafort on the early stages of the Maidan “op;” the prominent role in the Sanders Institute and AOC’s advisory team of Jeffrey Sachs, whose HIID team of advisers (with government funding) sent Russia back to the Stone Age, economically; the “handoff” to Jeffrey Sachs and his HIID of Russia and other former Soviet Republics by the Gehlen/GOP Nazis manifesting through the Free Congress Foundation; Sachs’ role in crafting the oligarch system that bedevils the former Soviet member states to this day; review of Sanders Institute member Tulsi Gabbard’s links to Narendra Modi’s Hindutva fascists and the Hare Krishna fascist mind control cult; Tulsi Gabbard’s funding from a group seen by critics as a Hindutva-supporting entity in the U.S.; Tulsi Gabbard’s position on the advisory board of Koch-Brothers funded think tank that overlaps the Neo-Confederate movement; GOP’s strategy of using “opportunity zones” designated in the Trump Tax Bill as a campaign strategy; AOC’s possible use in the GOP campaign strategy using “opportunity zones;” AOC’s clumsy use of “Subhas Chandra” Chakrabarti and “What Armenian Genocide? “Uygur’s PACs, as well as a consulting firm run by Chakrabarti; review of the Ananda Marga cult, founded and run by Bose’s nephew, roommate and political protege Sarkar; Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ family heritage with DARPA and the CIA’s Operation Peter Pan; discussion of H.L. Hunt Granddaughter Leah Hunt-Hendrix’s significant role in funding of the Democratic Party’s left; Hunt-Hendrix’s association with Gloria Steinem, whose CIA heritage we have discussed in the past; the possibility that Chakrabarti may be manifesting Subhas Chandra Bose garb as part of historical revisionism, portraying the Axis as anti-colonial liberators; rumination about the elevation of Bernie Sanders, AOC et al as part of an Underground Reich gambit to use anti-communism to enslave America.
1. We have wondered about the ascension of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a political animal. We wondered whether she might be a “ringer,” elevated and promoted by the far right and, perhaps, elements of the CIA, because she is ABSOLUTELY PERFECT from their standpoint. In fact, she is straight from the Amazon (ahem) mail order catalog. An outspoken Latina who fits the anti-Latin bigotry institutionalized in Trump’s GOP, brands as a socialist (perfect for the Karl Roves and Trumps of this world), has stated her intention to work against Democratic incumbents and demonstrated a lack of economic sophistication in her comments about Amazon’s failed New York City Deal.The ascension of AOC was effected in large measure by two overlapping organizations–Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress–both co-founded by Saikat Chakrabarti, and Indian-American, Harvard-educated, Wall Street and Silicon Valley multi-millionaire. Brand New Congress was co-founded by a University of Pennsylvania-educated Turkish American, Cenk Uygur. (Like Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania is an Ivy League School.
In a recent twitter video post defending AOC’s mercurial social media activity, Chakrabarti appeared with a T‑Shirt featuring a picture of Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian nationalist who allied himself with both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. IF Chakrabarti were what he claims to be, he would not be wearing a Subhas Chandra Bose T‑shirt.
. . . . I noticed something interesting within her Instagram posts. A video of a scruffy-looking young man, wearing a moss green t‑shirt with Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s face embossed on it. . . . . In today’s world, who finds significance in Bose? Let alone find it through a sartorial statement in the United States. Meet Saikat Chakrabarti, the chief of staff of Ocasio-Cortez. . . .
. . . . Like millions of others, he spent years in Silicon Valley. Even co-founding a web design tool named Mockingbird and working on the product team of payment processor Stripe. In between, he walked the corridors of Wall Street for a while. But unlike many, he left all that behind to join the Bernie Sanders campaign. . . .
. . . . While working on the Sanders campaign, Chakrabarti met Alexandra Rojas and Corbin Trent. Together they co-founded Justice Democrats, a political action committee whose one-line introduction says, “Our time – it’s time to usher in a new generation of diverse working class leaders into the Democratic Party.” . . .
. . . . Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, a similar committee also co-founded by Chakrabarti, worked together to recruit candidates by engaging with the masses. . . .
. . . . Out of the thousands of applications they received, Chakrabarti’s team supported 12 candidates for the Democratic Primaries. The success story of this campaign was the one of Ocasio-Cortez – the only one who was elected to the US Congress. Chakrabarti became her campaign manager and eventually her chief of staff. . .
2a. Karl Rove, Trump and company must be absolutely delighted–and may have designed–the following: ” . . . . it is the Justice Democrats who see Ocasio-Cortez as just the opening act in an astonishingly ambitious plan to do nothing less than re-imagine liberal politics in America—and do it by whatever means necessary. . . . If that requires knocking out well-known elected officials and replacing them with more radical newcomers, so be it. And if it ends up ripping apart the Democratic Party in the process—well, that might be the idea. ‘There is going to be a war within the party. We are going to lean into it,’ said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman. . . .”
The Justice Democrats helped get Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elected. Who are they after next? . . .
. . . . Although it’s Ocasio-Cortez who gets all the headlines, she arguably wouldn’t be in Congress in the first place without the group Chakrabarti founded: Justice Democrats, a new, central player in the ongoing war for the soul of the Democratic Party. It was the Justice Democrats who recruited her in a quixotic campaign early on, providing a neophyte candidate with enough infrastructure to take down a party leader. And it is the Justice Democrats who see Ocasio-Cortez as just the opening act in an astonishingly ambitious plan to do nothing less than re-imagine liberal politics in America—and do it by whatever means necessary. . . .
. . . . If that requires knocking out well-known elected officials and replacing them with more radical newcomers, so be it. And if it ends up ripping apart the Democratic Party in the process—well, that might be the idea. “There is going to be a war within the party. We are going to lean into it,” said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman. . . .
. . . . The group started meeting up even before the 2016 primary was over, and its members began looking ahead to the 2018 midterms—figuring that any Democratic president would need a very different Congress to get anything done. Along with Cenk Uygur, the progressive activist and founder of the liberal media company The Young Turks, they started a group called Brand New Congress. . . .
2b. The “war within the Democratic Party” that AOC/“Subhas Chandra” Chakrabarti and “What Armenian Genocide?” Uygur have promised is gaining steam.
The House Democratic campaign arm is nearing open warfare with the party’s rising liberal wing as political operatives close to Speaker Nancy Pelosi try to shut down primary challenges before what is likely to be a hard-fought campaign next year to preserve the party’s shaky majority. . . .
. . . . Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who owes her seat to a successful primary challenge, went so far as to encourage her 3.8 million Twitter followers to “pause” their donations to the campaign committee in protest. . . .
. . . . The open hostilities are just the latest in the rising tensions between an experienced party establishment focusing on what is possible in the short run and a group of young liberals chafing at such restraint. House Democrats have divided over single-payer “Medicare for all” versus incremental legislation to bolster the Affordable Care Act and over Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal versus less ambitious climate change policies. Liberal Democrats and more moderate newcomers from Republican-leaning districts have fought over Republican procedural motions. . . .
. . . . Ms. Bustos’s rule prohibits Democratic consultants and vendors working for a primary challenger to an incumbent from receiving work from the committee. It comes as ardent liberal organizations like Justice Democrats, emboldened by a pair of high-profile wins in 2018 — Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez — are aggressively gearing up to challenge centrist or old-line Democrats with liberal candidates. . . .
. . . . “We reject the D.C.C.C.’s attempt to hoard power, which will only serve to keep that talent pool — and Congress itself — disproportionately white and male,” María Urbina, the national political director for Indivisible, a progressive grass-roots group, said of the campaign committee. . . .
. . . . Many of the candidates wooed in the last campaign cycle by Justice Democrats would have run in districts that lean Republican. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had to work hard to beat those challenges back, worried that a triumph by Justice Democrats in the primary would have cost the party a possible victory in the general election.
2c. The importance of Chakrabarti to AOC’s political fortunes is illustrated by the relationship between two PACs and a Consulting firm: ” . . . . At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign committee and two PACs paid almost $900,000 to a consulting company for campaign services, providing few details on what the money was for or who ultimately received it. The unorthodox arrangement — she sat on the board of one of the PACs, both of which were co-founded by the person who is now her chief-of-staff [Saikat Chakrabarti], who also ran the consulting company — appears to have taken advantage of gaps in the law, including the low level of detail that campaigns and PACs are required to provide about their spending. . . . The nub of the charge is that Ocasio-Cortez and the two PACs — Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats — violated federal election law in paying $885,735 to the company, Brand New Congress LLC. . . .”
Democratic firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rode into office railing against the influence of big money and hidden donors in U.S. elections. Yet the political operation that helped elect her to Congress was itself less than transparent — exposing her to attacks from conservative foes.
The New York congresswoman raised a hefty $2 million for her 2018 election while refusing to take money from business-related political action committees. Of that, 61 percent came from individuals giving less than $200 — the highest rate of small-dollar funding among current U.S. House members.
At the same time, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign committee and two PACs paid almost $900,000 to a consulting company for campaign services, providing few details on what the money was for or who ultimately received it.
The unorthodox arrangement — she sat on the board of one of the PACs, both of which were co-founded by the person who is now her chief-of-staff, who also ran the consulting company — appears to have taken advantage of gaps in the law, including the low level of detail that campaigns and PACs are required to provide about their spending.
The intricate ties and the lack of transparency have opened her to charges of hypocrisy and prompted complaints to the Federal Election Commission by conservative groups, though the allegations may amount to little more than paperwork violations.
Ocasio-Cortez, in a tweet, called the complaints “bogus,” and said “This is how the misinformation machine works, folks.”
David Mitrani, a lawyer for Ocasio-Cortez, the PACs and the company, in a statement said any implication “that these entities in any way operated with less than full transparency or in some way to skirt the law, are absolutely and unequivocally false.” . . . .
. . . . The complaint getting the most attention was brought March 4 by the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-leaning nonprofit focusing on ethics issues. The nub of the charge is that Ocasio-Cortez and the two PACs — Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats — violated federal election law in paying $885,735 to the company, Brand New Congress LLC. The PACs raised that money from individual donors.
The complaint says the arrangement hid the true purpose, and actual recipients, of the money. . . .
2c. Next, we review Data Propria, the Cambridge Analytica offshoot created by Brad Parscale’s company Cloud Commerce.
The GOP hired the services of Data Propria for the 2018 mid-terms. Data Propria employs four ex-Cambridge Analytica employees, including Cambridge Analytica’s chief data scientist. Cambridge Analytica’s former head of product, Matt Oczkowski, leads Data Propia. Oczkowski led the Cambridge Analytica team that worked for Trump’s 2016 campaign, and was reportedly overheard bragging to a prospective client about how he’s already working on Trump’s 2020 campaign (which he subsequently denied). Brad Parscale ran the Trump 2016 campaign’s extensive digital operations that included extensive micro-targeting of individuals outside of the Cambridge Analytica efforts.
Matt Oczkowski is now the running Parscale Digital in addition to Data Propria. Parscale Digital is the rebranded version of Parscale’s old marketing company. As the following article notes, Parscale sold his shares in Parscale Digital in August 2017, at the same time he purchased $9 million in stock for Cloud Commerce and took a seat on its board. August of 2017 is also the same month Parscale Digital was sold to Cloud Commerce. Thus, Parscale is a co-owner of Cloud Commerce which the owner of Parscale Digital. Now Matt Oczkowski, the former head of product for Cambridge Analytica, is running Parscale Digital.
AOC has long been prolific in her use of social media and online communication. We wonder if AOC may have been identified, profiled and data-based by an AI-assisted data mining operation along the lines of what Cambridge Analytica engineered on behalf of Trump during the 2016 campaign?
Parscale Digital, a San Antonio-based digital marketing firm best known for its namesake and former owner Brad Parscale, President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign chairman, is now being run by a former executive at Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica, the now defunct data analysis company known for working on President Trump’s 2016 campaign, declared bankruptcy in 2018 after news broke that data from more than 80 million Facebook users was shared with it.
Matt Oczkowski was head of product for Cambridge Analytica before forming Data Propria in San Antonio with at least three other Cambridge Analytica alums, including its chief data scientist, David Wilkinson.
Oczkowski will take on the dual role running Parscale and Data Propria, which are both owned by CloudCommerce.
Brad Parscale sits on the board of parent company Cloud Commerce.
CloudCommerce President Andrew Van Noy announced the change Jan. 25. in an email obtained by TPR.
“Matt will continue to lead the Data Propria team and will now focus on streamlining the offerings and building out the teams between the two brands,” he said.
According to the email from Van Noy, Oczkowski will serve in an interim capacity.
Parscale Digital has been without a leader since former president Adam Brecht left the position in June 2018 after just a few months.
Data Propria reportedly assisted the Republican National Committee with midterm race polling last year and is working on Trump’s 2020 campaign.
Brad Parscale sold his half of Giles Parscale, which would become Parscale Digital, in August 2017. At the time he took $9 million in CloudCommerce stock and a seat on the board for his company assets.
Representatives of CloudCommerce didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.
According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Brad Parscale was invoiced more than $729,000 by Parscale Digital for work done for the campaign manager’s politically oriented consulting firm, Florida-based Parscale Strategy LLC.
Donald J. Trump For President, Inc paid Parscale Strategy LLC more than $3.4 million in 2018 for digital consulting and online advertising, according to the Federal Election Commission. . . .
3. Bose formed the Free Indian Legion, initially allied with the Wehrmacht, and then with the Waffen SS, as well as the armies of Imperial Japan. In addition to networking with Heinrich Himmler, as pictured at left, he met with Adolf Hitler and was praised by Der Fuhrer. ” . . . . You are fortunate having been born in a country of glorious cultural traditions and a colossal manpower. I am impressed by the burning passion with which you and your Netaji [Bose] seek to liberate your country from foreign domination. Your Netaji’s status is even greater than mine. While I am the leader of 80 million Germans, he is the leader of 400 million Indians. In all respects he is a greater leader and a greater general than myself. I salute him, and Germany salutes him. It is the duty of all Indians to accept him as their führer and obey him implicitly. I have no doubt that if you do this, his guidance will lead India very soon to freedom.” . . . .
Subhas Chandra Bose Meets Hitler
. . . . During a speech given to Indian military officers and Indian nationalist Subhash Chandra Bose in Dresden, Germany, in 1943, Hitler himself reportedly said: “You are fortunate having been born in a country of glorious cultural traditions and a colossal manpower. I am impressed by the burning passion with which you and your Netaji [Bose] seek to liberate your country from foreign domination. Your Netaji’s status is even greater than mine. While I am the leader of 80 million Germans, he is the leader of 400 million Indians. In all respects he is a greater leader and a greater general than myself. I salute him, and Germany salutes him. It is the duty of all Indians to accept him as their führer and obey him implicitly. I have no doubt that if you do this, his guidance will lead India very soon to freedom.” . . . .
4a. Bose formed the Free Indian Legion, initially allied with the Wehrmacht, and then with the Waffen SS, as well as the armies of Imperial Japan.
“Indian Legion;” wikipedia.com
Subhas Chandra Bose (left) with Heinrich Himmler.
. . . . The Indian Legion (German: Indische Legion), officially the Free India Legion (German: Legion Freies Indien) or Infantry Regiment 950 (Indian) (German: Infanterie-Regiment 950 (indisches), I.R. 950) and later the Indian Volunteer Legion of the Waffen-SS (German: Indische Freiwilligen Legion der Waffen-SS), was a military unit raised during the Second World War in Nazi Germany. Intended to serve as a liberation force for British-ruled India, it was made up of Indian prisoners of war and expatriates in Europe. Because of its origins in the Indian independence movement, it was known also as the “Tiger Legion”, and the “Azad Hind Fauj”. Initially raised as part of the German Army, it was part of the Waffen-SS from August 1944. Indian independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose initiated the legion’s formation, as part of his efforts to win India’s independence by waging war against Britain, when he came to Berlin in 1941 seeking German aid. . .
4b. Bose also networked with Mussolini, as well as Emperor Hirohito and General Tojo of Japan.
. . . . Known to his many followers as the Netaji (Respected Leader) of the Azad Hind (Free India) movement, Bose was called “the darling of the Axis” by his biographer Marshall J. Getz in Subhas Chandra Bose (2004) . . . .
Having met with Hitler, Italian Fascist Duce Benito Mussolini, and Japanese Premier General Hideki Tojo, Bose was, at one time or another, backed by all three of the major Axis powers. By 1943, he also held a trio of titles. . . .
. . . . In March 1941, Bose reached Berlin via Moscow and offered the Nazis an outright military alliance against the United Kingdom. Far from fearing a German military invasion of India that both Hitler and Field Marshal Erwin Rommel were planning, Bose wanted to include the Imperial Japanese Army as well.
For their part, the British were wary of a joint German-Soviet invasion of both Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent. Meanwhile, the Afrika Korps was capturing thousands of Indian prisoners of war who had been fighting for Britain during 1941–1942, from which Bose envisioned the future ILA that would free their country from the hated British yoke. . . .
. . . . They would end World War II as members of Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen (Armed) SS, a supreme irony for the “turban-wearing, brown-skinned men” in the ultra-racist Nazi Germany, according to author Christopher Ailsby’s book, Hitler’s Renegades: Foreign Nationals in the Service of the Third Reich.
Bose set up the Free India Center in Berlin and began radio broadcasts from Nauen, Germany, to his far-off homeland on February 19, 1942.
Bose’s British Broadcasting Corporation rival and counterpart, author Eric Blair (aka George Orwell of Animal Farm and 1984 fame), led the Allied propaganda team that fought Bose over the radio. On March 1, 1942, Free India declared war on the United Kingdom.
On May 4, Bose met with Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano in Rome and Il Duce himself on May 5, but still Berlin vetoed overall Axis support for his movement even after Mussolini fully committed Fascist Italy. . . .
. . . . It was the Japanese who came to his political rescue in February 1943. The armies of Imperial Japan, the so-called Floating Kingdom, had been welcomed with open arms by the scattered Indian population enclaves throughout Southeast Asia during their march of conquest early in 1942.
Just as in North Africa earlier, on February 19 fully 45,000 Indian soldiers of the British Army surrendered to the Japanese and were pressed into service with the Japanese version of the Indian National Army. Its initial commander, Mohan Singh, was fired by the Japanese, however, and his force dissolved on December 29.
Creating the Indian National Army: “On to Delhi!”
For his part, having had little luck with the German and Italian fascists, Subhas Chandra Bose was smuggled out of the Third Reich in a German U‑boat bound for the Far East. In Tokyo, Bose shook hands with General Tojo and got yet another lease on political life.
Nominal leader of the new Japanese Indian National Army that had a Nipponese field marshal as chief of staff, Bose hailed Imperial Japan as the liberator of both Asia and India. . . .
. . . . Bose was formally declared president of Azad Hind (Free India) on October 21, 1943. His core belief was that World War II gave India the chance to liberate itself. Like Il Duce and the Führer before him, Bose now claimed the multiple titles and offices of head of state, prime minister, minister of war, and head of the foreign office. On the 23rd, the new chief executive officer made a state visit to Japan’s Emperor Hirohito during the Greater East Asia Conference in Tokyo, while Premier Tojo ceded the islands of Andaman and Nicobar to Bose’s new regime. . . .
5. 
Bose also wrote for the journal of early Nazi and pan-Germanist philosopher Karl Haushofer: Kevin Coogan notes the philosophy of Karl Haushofer, an early influence on Hitler and Third Reich geo-politics, exemplifying some of the historical genesis of the Nazi/Hindu nationalist link. ” . . . . In the 1930’s, Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose [whose Indian national Army later received military support in World War II from both Germany and Japan] was a correspondent for the Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik. [Haushofer’s publication.] . . .”
. . . . In its struggle to break British dominance, German military intelligence also looked to nationalist independence movements in the Middle East, Asia, and Ireland. After World War I, Haushofer continued to support these anti-British groups. In the 1930’s, Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose [whose Indian national Army later received military support in World War II from both Germany and Japan] was a correspondent for the Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik. [Haushofer’s publication.]
6. Cenk Uygur has a well-documented history of denying the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire: ” . . . . “. . . . Hence, once you really examine the history of the time it becomes apparent that the allegations of an Armenian Genocide are unfounded. So the question arises of why the Armenians would bother to conjure up such stories. . . .”
...Curiously, one of the Armenian Genocide deniers has been Cenk Uygur. It may be relevant that he was born in Turkey, though his family moved to America when he was young. In 1991, while at the University of Pennsylvania, Uygur wrote an article for The Daily Pennsylvanian (the student newspaper) called “Historical Fact or Falsehood“, which is straight-out genocide denialism, imputing false claims of genocide to Armenian demands for land and money. An excerpt:
“. . . . Hence, once you really examine the history of the time it becomes apparent that the allegations of an Armenian Genocide are unfounded. So the question arises of why the Armenians would bother to conjure up such stories, and even go as far as, committing approximately 200 acts of terrorism since 1973 to further their cause, resulting in countless deaths and injuries to government officials and civilians. The answer is that they want their demands met. Their demands are that they receive close to one-half of the land of the Republic of Turkey for a new Greater Armenia, and that every Armenian claiming to be injured by the alleged genocide be compensated with cash reparations. That is why every year they push the U.S. Congress to pass a bill declaring the Armenian Genocide a historical fact. Fortunately, every year it is defeated because of the courage of people such as the 69 professors who wrote in to explain the truth of the matter. . . .”
In a letter to Salon in 1999, he again argued that there was no evidence for that genocide:
“. . . every non-Armenian scholar in the field believes it is an open question whether this event was a genocide. Is it the claim of the article that all of these people are tainted by the tentacles of the Turkish government? If not, then why is it not pointed out that no one outside of the “Armenian position” believes it is a genocide? Why is it assumed that the “Turkish studies side” has the burden of proof in overturning the verdict of Turkish guilt? It is because of the underlying assumption that despite what these people in “Turkish studies” say, there must have been a genocide. . . .”
This is an embarrassing position for someone to take who’s an American progressive, and over the years Uygur has taken a lot of flak for it. When an ethnic minority is “cleansed”, and you’re supposed to be supportive of minorities, it doesn’t look good for you, or your online news show, to ignore one of the greatest massacres of the 20th century. Yet ignore it Uygur did, refusing to mention it on the 100th anniversary of Bloody Sunday last year, ignoring it this year, and ignoring the questions about it he was asked in a reddit “Ask me Anything” interview. Apparently “Anything” doesn’t include genocide.
7. Next, we excerpt FTR #614, “Oleaginous Diplomacy–“Who Still Talks Nowadays of the Extermination of the Armenians?”
The program begins with discussion of the influence of the Armenian genocide on Hitler’s thinking, the program notes how he used the Armenian massacres as a precedent for his own genocidal actions.
. . . . . Hitler was well aware of Turkey’s genocide of Armenians and of the failure of the international community to respond adequately to it. As early as June 1931, Hitler commented in an interview that the ‘extermination of the Armenians’ had led him to ‘the conclusion that masses of men are mere biological plasticine’ over which Aryans would eventually triumph. He returned to this theme in a formal talk to his commanding generals on the eve of their invasion of Poland in 1939: ‘Our strength is in our quickness and our brutality,’ he exclaimed. ‘Genghis Khan had millions of women and children killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees only in him a great state builder. . . . Thus for the time being I have sent to the East . . . my Death’s Head Units with the order to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenian?’ On at least three other occasions, Hitler pointed to the brutality of Turkey’s regime and its willingness to strike without mercy as a worthy model for his own government. . . .
8. The Armenian genocide was covered-up because of a familiar dynamic—the reality of “petro-politics” or, quoting the title of the program, “oleaginous diplomacy.” Adjudication of the slaughter of the Armenians was eclipsed by the desire of the victorious powers in World War I to control the enormous oil resources becoming available in the dissolving Ottoman Empire. Turkish patriarch Kemal Attaturk exercised great cunning and savvy in manipulating the victors off against each other, in order to effect the acquittal of the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide. In addition to the openly bigoted Mark L. Bristol, one of the principals who brought about the cover-up of the Armenian genocide was Allen Dulles, who was establishing a personal and professional precedent. Dulles not only was deeply involved in the oleaginous diplomacy that divvied up the Ottoman Empire and covered-up the Armenian genocide, but played a central role in helping to finance Nazi Germany, covering up the Nazi genocide and aiding the Nazi flight capital program after the war. (For more about this, see—among other programs—FTR# 361, 578.)
. . . . Importantly, Britain, France, and the United States were at that time vying with one another to divide up the vast oil and mineral wealth of Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. Kemal skillfully played the three powers against each other and insisted on amnesty for the Ittihadists as part of the price for his support in the division of the defunct empire. Though often overlooked today, the Ottoman holdings were of extraordinary value, perhaps the richest imperial treasure since the European seizure of the New World four centuries earlier. The empire had been eroding for decades, but by the time of the Turkish defeat in World War I, it still included most of what is today Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf. The European governments sensed that the time had come to seize this rich prize. . . . The U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey was Admiral Mark L. Bristol, a man with a reputation as a bigot and a determined advocate of U.S. alliance with Mustafa Kemal. ‘The Armenians,’ Bristol wrote, ‘are a race like the Jews—they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character.’ It was better for the United States, he contended, to jettison support for the Armenian republic as soon as possible, stabilize U.S. relations with the emerging Turkish government, and to enlist Kemal’s support in gaining access to the oilfields of the former Ottoman Empire. Bristol’s argument found a receptive audience in the new Harding administration in Washington, whose affinity for oil interests eventually blossomed into the famous Teapot Dome bribery scandal. . . . As High Commissioner to Turkey, Bristol had considerably more power than might be enjoyed by any conventional ambassador. As the civil war unfolded inside Turkey, Bristol barred newspaper reporters from access to areas where renewed massacres of Armenians were taking place, purportedly to avoid inciting further atrocities against civilians. His correspondent at the State Department in Washington was Allen Dulles. After the Paris conference, Dulles had served briefly as chief of staff to Bristol, then moved on to Washington to become chief of the State Department’s Near East desk just as ‘oleaginous diplomacy’ was reaching its heyday. . . .
9a. In FTR #953, we looked at some of Bernie Sanders’ “interesting” relationships and policy positions, this against the background of the decades-long GOP strategy marrying electoral politics and covert operations. The latest political outcropping of Sanders’ political manifestation is The Sanders Institute. In addition to Tulsi Gabbard, whom we discussed in FTR #‘s 941, 942 and 945, Team Sanders features Jeffrey Sacks, a key financial adviser to Boris Yeltsin and among the architects of the economic debacle that followed the implementation of policies favored by Sachs and Company.
A political animal of Sachs’ neo-Liberal stripe is an odd inclusion in the Sanders Pantheon. We have noted others:
- Rove financed Sanders campaign through the American Crossroads super-PAC. ” . . . American Crossroads—founded by former Bush adviser Karl Rove—and several other conservative-backed super PACs have spent the last month intentionally fueling the Bern, but their zeal has more to do with an effort to weaken Hillary Clinton, whom they still see as the likely Democratic nominee and harder to defeat in the general election. . . . Crossroads is one of several groups that has released ads that have been aimed at branding Sanders as the only true progressive in the race—a strategy the Vermont senator’s campaign also embraces. . . .”
- Graham E. Fuller says that he was ” . . . . galvanized at watching the spectacle of Bernie Sanders proclaiming issues in his campaign that had been virtually off limits for political discussion for decades: gap between rich and poor, rapacious international trade deals, a fair wage, free university education, the call for US balance (gasp!) in handling the Arab-Israeli, issue, etc. The great thing about Bernie — even if he probably won’t get nominated — is that he has pushed hawkish, friend-of-Wall-Street Hillary to the left. . . .”
- Fuller’s actual views are the opposite of Sanders policy points: “. . . Fuller comes from that faction of CIA Cold Warriors who believed (and still apparently believe) that fundamentalist Islam, even in its radical jihadi form, does not pose a threat to the West, for the simple reason that fundamentalist Islam is conservative, against social justice, against socialism and redistribution of wealth, and in favor of hierarchical socio-economic structures. Socialism is the common enemy to both capitalist America and to Wahhabi Islam, according to Fuller. . . ‘There is no mainstream Islamic organization...with radical social views,’ he wrote. ‘Classical Islamic theory envisages the role of the state as limited to facilitating the well-being of markets and merchants rather than controlling them. Islamists have always powerfully objected to socialism and communism....Islam has never had problems with the idea that wealth is unevenly distributed.’ . . . .”
- Faisal Gill, a former operations director for Norquist’s Islamic Free Market Institute and official with George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security is now the head of Vermont’s Democratic Party, a post he has used to join Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard to promote Keith Ellison as head of the Democratic National Committee. Ellison is now the deputy chair of the DNC, the post formerly held by Gabbard. ” . . . . Yet some officials remain concerned that Gill apparently enjoys the political protection of Norquist, the architect of the 1994 Republican election sweep that brought Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich to power as House speaker. Norquist speaks of ‘crushing’ his political opponents and dismisses those who don’t agree with his anti-tax, anti-government agenda as ‘Bolsheviks.’ His power derives from a formidable coalition of evangelical, business and other conservative groups that he controls to push favored GOP issues, as well as from his close relationship with White House political chief Karl Rove. . . .”
The program also notes a number of other things about the Sanders campaign:
- He was promoting open primaries for the Democratic Party, which would enable Karl Rove and the Republicans to choose the Democratic nominee.
- Sanders was a Presidential elector for the Socialist Workers Party, embracing a stance which would have made him terminally vulnerable had he gotten the Democratic nomination. ” . . . . In 1980, Sanders served as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which was founded on the principles of Leon Trotsky. According to the New York Times, that party called for abolishing the military budget. It also called for “solidarity” with the revolutionary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Cuba; this was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis. . . .”
- The SWP was a vehicle for infiltration and the acquisition of a “left cover” by Nazis and spooks, including Lee Harvey Oswald.
- The Third Reich saw Leon Trotsky’s methodology as worthy of emulation. (The SWP is a Trotskyite political party.) ” . . . . ‘You should read his books,’ he [Hitler] barked. ‘We can learn a lot from him.’ . . .”
- To what extent have the GOP and the overlapping Underground Reich focused on Sanders (without his knowledge) as a vehicle for infiltrating the Democratic Party? In FTR #‘s 941, 942 and 945, we noted the numerous fascist connections of Tulsi Gabbard, one of the driving forces behind Sanders’ ascent. To what extent has the Trotskyite template served as a vehicle for Gabbard, and, perhaps, Ellison to infiltrate the Democratic Party?
- The Sanders Institute has as its members, among others: Jeffrey Sachs, Cornel West and Tulsi Gabbard.
9b. Gabbard’s 2020 Presidential run has received funding from an organization critics say is associated with the Hindutva fascist milieu in India: ” . . . . Gabbard, who is Hindu, has connections to India, the world’s most populous Hindu nation, including to the country’s Hindu nationalist movement, which is considered fascistic by observers like Rajeev Ravisankar, a PhD student in media studies at the University of Oregon and observer of Indian politics. ‘The Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, movement is one of the largest global right-wing movements in the world,’ Ravisankar told Sludge in an email. ‘It directly drew inspiration from European fascism and has developed a vast network in post-independence India.’ According to Ravisankar and other critics, like progressive Hindu organization Sadhana, Hindu nationalists in the U.S. have a political voice in the Hindu American Foundation . . . .”
“Tulsi Gabbard Took Thousands From Members of Right-Wing Hindu Group” by Eoin Higgins; Sludge; 12/26/2018.
Critics say that the Hindu American Foundation is “a pernicious organization” with ties to the Indian right wing movement.
Tulsi Gabbard, the Iraq War veteran who represents Hawaii’s 2nd District in the House of Representatives, is widely believed to be close to announcing a run for president. Gabbard hopes to capitalize on her ties to popular Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who may himself be considering a run for the White House; she’s already made moves to secure talent in advance of a run.
Despite her popularity with some liberal Democrats, however, Gabbard’s connections to right-wing groups both at home and abroad have raised eyebrows. Whether it’s the affection shown her by Steve Bannon, who set up Gabbard’s meeting with Donald Trump before the president’s inauguration, or the congresswoman’s associations with autocrats like President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Gabbard’s views on foreign policy remain problematic for some on the left.
Gabbard and her office did not answer a request for comment.
Gabbard, who is Hindu, has connections to India, the world’s most populous Hindu nation, including to the country’s Hindu nationalist movement, which is considered fascistic by observers like Rajeev Ravisankar, a PhD student in media studies at the University of Oregon and observer of Indian politics.
“The Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, movement is one of the largest global right-wing movements in the world,” Ravisankar told Sludge in an email. “It directly drew inspiration from European fascism and has developed a vast network in post-independence India.”
According to Ravisankar and other critics, like progressive Hindu organization Sadhana, Hindu nationalists in the U.S. have a political voice in the Hindu American Foundation, an organization founded in 2013 by Dr. Mihir Meghani, Aseem and Suhag Shukla, and three other individuals. The organization has received criticism over the past 15 years for its ties to right-wing Indian politicians and what some see as genocide denial. Observers on Capitol Hill say the Foundation has recently become more vocal in their support for India’s Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
“HAF’s alacrity in protecting Hindutva organizations from any kind of international censure for violence against minorities in India stands in stark contrast to its vigorous efforts to highlight the plight of Hindu minorities in countries around the world,” the Coalition Against Genocide’s Dr. Shaik Ubaid and Dr. Raja Swamy said in a statement dated April 7, 2014. “Far from being an organization committed to promoting human dignity and pluralism, HAF stands exposed as a foe of human rights, working to defend the Hindutva movement from much needed public scrutiny in the US.”
The Foundation, for its part, considers the Coalition a Hinduphobic organization and, in a Dec. 15, 2013, statement, Samir Kalra, now the organization’s senior director, referred to the Coalition as “radical extremists.”
Gabbard has been the beneficiary of the largesse of the Foundation’s board members and officers. In the 2017–2018 cycle, the Congresswoman received a maximum $2,700 donation from Shukla, and three donations totaling $1500 from her husband and foundation Board Member, Aseem; a total of $10,800 over four donations from Board Member Ravij Pandit and his wife, Priya; and two donations totaling $4,400 from Treasurer Rishi Bhutada. Meghani, HAF’s Chairman, was Gabbard’s biggest donor, maxing out to the campaign in two donations for $5,400 and delivering another $10,000 to the Congresswoman through her Time to Unite Lead and Serve with Integrity (TULSI) leadership PAC.
“The political contribution history of our Board members and officers is publicly available, and you’ll find they’ve contributed to a variety of candidates over the years at similar levels,” said Senior Director Shukla in an email to Sludge. “Indeed as the first Hindu American elected to Congress, Rep. Gabbard naturally enjoys the support of many Hindu Americans.” Ravisankar described the Foundation as “a pernicious organization that has positioned itself as a mainstream advocacy outfit simply representing Hindus in the US.” “HAF is better situated as part of the broader right-wing Hindu political sphere,” Ravisankar added.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governorship of the Gujarat province from 2001 to 2014 included being in charge during anti-Muslim riots in 2002 that claimed between 1,044 and 2,000 lives. Modi has been accused of, at best, refusing to intervene and, at worst, of encouraging the violence.
The Foundation’s support for Gabbard—over $24,000 in 2017–2018—is a not insubstantial amount, even in context of Gabbard’s total $1,394,524 haul for the cycle. And that support has been reciprocated by the Congresswoman; an internship program funnels students from the organization’s offices in Washington to Gabbard’s offices in the Capitol, Gabbard regularly attends events sponsored by the Foundation, and both Gabbard and the organization joined forces to welcome Modi to the US in September 2014. That December, at Modi’s invitation, Gabbard traveled to India and met with right wing leaders in the country. . . .
UPDATE (Dec. 27): Shukla said in an email to Sludge that the Hindu American Foundation denies any associations with groups based in India.
9c. Gabbard is also an advisor to a Koch-funded academic think tank that overlaps the Neo-Confederate movement: ” . . . . Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her candidacy for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in January, is one of 12 advisors of a foreign policy center at the Washington, D.C.-based Catholic University of America. The Center for the Study of Statesmanship (CSS) was founded in 2017 with a $2.65 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation . . . . The Charles Koch Foundation has funded academics who have neo-Confederate ties or views, including Marshall DeRosa of Florida Atlantic University. CSS’s founding director, politics professor Claes G. Ryn, appears to be part of this trend. Ryn has appeared on the podcast of Tom Woods, a founding member of the League of the South . . . . He has written for the website of Lew Rockwell, the founder of the neo-Confederate Mises Institute and a League of the South charter member. And Ryn’s institute has published DeRosa’s work. DeRosa was once a ‘faculty member’ at the League of the South Institute, where he taught courses on subjects including on topics including ‘Why secession was, and is, constitutional’ and ‘How the ‘Fourteenth Amendment’ was never constitutionally passed by Congress nor ratified by the States.’ . . . .”
The Center’s Director Has Ties to a Neo-Confederate Group
A Democratic presidential candidate is an advisor to an academic center funded by the Republican Party’s most notorious donor, Charles Koch.
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her candidacy for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in January, is one of 12 advisors of a foreign policy center at the Washington, D.C.-based Catholic University of America. The Center for the Study of Statesmanship (CSS) was founded in 2017 with a $2.65 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation, which gives tens of millions of dollars to American colleges and universities each year, usually to fund ideological, free-market academic programs.
The position is not listed on Gabbard’s 2017 financial disclosure, the most recent available. The center, which “considers how American constitutionalism, with its emphasis on limited and decentralized power, virtue, and deliberation, relates to statesmanship in foreign and domestic affairs,” brings in professors and visiting fellows, sponsors conferences, seminars, and lectures.
Gabbard, a military veteran, has often opposed U.S. engagement in overseas conflicts, including in war-torn Syria, so she is not out of place among anti-interventionists. “Having experienced first-hand the true cost of war,” states her 2020 campaign website, Gabbard “made a personal vow to find a way to ensure that our country doesn’t continue repeating the mistakes of the past, sending our troops into war without a clear mission, strategy, or purpose.” But for a Democrat—especially a 2016 Bernie Sanders surrogate who has progressive views on campaign finance reform and single-payer health care—to accept a position at a think tank funded by Koch and staffed with several Koch-linked individuals is unusual.
Gabbard spokesperson Lauren McIlvaine told Sludge, “As a soldier and veteran of two Middle East deployments, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has been a leading voice for ending costly, counterproductive regime change wars, working to end the new Cold War and nuclear arms race, and taking the trillions of dollars being spent on these wars and using them to serve the needs of our people on things like healthcare, affordable housing, and infrastructure. The mission of CSS is aligned with the work that she has dedicated herself to, which is why she agreed to serve on their Council of Advisors.”
The Kochtopus
Over the last few decades, Charles Koch, who runs the industrial conglomerate Koch Industries, and his brother David created a large and powerful conservative political network with funds that rival those of the Republican Party establishment. The Kochs and their wealthy conservative allies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the last several federal elections, often using independent political spending groups to run ads and ground operations to boost right-wing Republican candidates.
Gabbard “has been a strong proponent for ending Citizens United and the corruptive influence of special interest money in politics,” said McIlvaine.Electoral politics is just the final step in the Koch influence operation. The Kochs’ effort to transform America begins with funding higher education, typically giving large amounts of money to finance or create free-market educational programs at American colleges and universities, such as George Mason, Florida State, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
According to long-time Koch deputy Richard Fink, investing in “intellectual raw materials,” or university research, is the core of the Kochs’ “Structure of Social Change” strategy. From universities, the Koch political operation seeks not only “intellectual raw materials” but also a pipeline of young conservative graduates to join its network.
The next step in the social change process is funding conservative think tanks that create policy proposals in line with the Kochs’ libertarian, free-market ideology, which Koch-funded political advocacy groups promote and use to impact elections. Then, the network uses direct political spending to help elect right-wing Republicans who will push these policies, such as tax cuts and environmental deregulation, that boost Koch Industries’ profits. After decades of business and political advocacy, Charles and David Koch are each worth $52 billion.
Ralph Wilson, co-founder of the activist group UnKoch My Campus and now an independent researcher, told Sludge, “Gabbard’s involvement [with CSS] shows just how successfully the Koch network has duped public figures into legitimizing their dangerous ideology and political agenda.”
…..Gabbard a dupe? If Gabbard is a dupe, her involvement with the CSS would not be omitted. Omitting such a position demonstrates careful deliberation designed to conceal the true motives behind her ostensibly progressive façade……
Koch Links at CSS
Some CSS advisors have additional ties to the Koch network. Around the same time that CSS was founded, CSS advisor Monica Duffy Toft created a similar center at Tufts University, the Center for Strategic Studies, with a $3 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. Advisor John B. Henry is the chairman and CEO of the Committee for the Republic, an anti-imperialist group co-founded by longtime Koch ally C. Boyden Gray. Gray and Koch are both major donors to George Mason University’s law school. Gray is also on the board of the Federalist Society, a network of conservative judges to which the Charles Koch Foundation is a major donor. The group’s executive vice president, Leonard Leo, who stewarded an anonymous $20 million grant to George Mason University’s law school that was given in conjunction with $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, is on the board of trustees of Catholic University and the board of visitors of its business school.
Lobbyist Bill Wichterman, a former George W. Bush advisor who is currently registered to lobby for companies including IBM and Qualcomm, is another CSS advisor. Wichterman previously lobbied for defense contractor Northrop Grumman and helped the Judicial Crisis Network, which receives funding from Koch-linked groups, shepherd Donald Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, through the nomination process.
Former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who is generally viewed as a left-wing Democrat but has defended Trump on Fox News on several occasions, is another advisor to the center.
The Charles Koch Foundation has given heavily to Catholic University in the last several years. In 2013, it granted the school $1 million so it could launch its School of Business and Economics, prompting 50 Catholic educators to write a letter in protest. “You send a confusing message to Catholic students and other faithful Catholics that the Koch brothers’ anti-government, Tea Party ideology has the blessing of a university sanctioned by Catholic bishops,” read the letter. In 2016, Koch’s foundation committed $10 million more to the business school.
Neo-Confederate Ties
The Charles Koch Foundation has funded academics who have neo-Confederate ties or views, including Marshall DeRosa of Florida Atlantic University. CSS’s founding director, politics professor Claes G. Ryn, appears to be part of this trend. Ryn has appeared on the podcast of Tom Woods, a founding member of the League of the South, which, in its current form, the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a neo-Confederate hate group. He has written for the website of Lew Rockwell, the founder of the neo-Confederate Mises Institute and a League of the South charter member. And Ryn’s institute has published DeRosa’s work. DeRosa was once a “faculty member” at the League of the South Institute, where he taught courses on subjects including on topics including “Why secession was, and is, constitutional” and “How the ‘Fourteenth Amendment’ was never constitutionally passed by Congress nor ratified by the States.”
Kucinich joins Rockwell on the advisory board of the libertarian Ron Paul Institute; Ryn is a member of the institute’s academic board. Paul once published a racist newsletter and later defended the Confederacy.
“This is another example of the Charles Koch Foundation boosting the careers of fringe operatives with deep ties to neo-Confederate and white supremacist ideology,” said Wilson. “This is taking place on a campus attempting to advance Koch’s free-market ideology with Catholic theology as a moral framework for ‘human flourishing.’”
Gabbard herself has alleged alliances with bigoted forces. As Sludge previously reported, Gabbard has ties to anti-Muslim Hindu nationalists and accepted campaign donations from members of a Hindu nationalist group. . . .
10. Tulsi Gabbard is a member of the Hare Krishna cult, as are:
- Her husband.
- Her in-laws.
- Her parents.
- Her congressional staff.
Hare Krishna cultist Tulsi Gabbard and Hindutva fascist Narendra Modi
Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders
Gabbard is highly regarded by Modi admirer Steve Bannon as well.
This program further details the Aryan/Hindu philosophy that inspired elements of esoteric Nazism.
Key points of interest/analysis include material fromThe Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of A Religious Transplant edited by Edwin F. Bryant and Maria L. Ekstrand; Columbia University Press [HC]; Copyright 2004 by Columbia University Press; ISBN 0–231-12256‑X.:
- Hare Krishna founder and chief guru Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada provided commentary on Hindu religious text “. . . . and often suggested that they had not actually been written by himself, but that God, Krishna, had revealed them to him. . . .” This was in order to “ . . . .underline the absolute position, superhuman qualities, and overall importance of the guru. [Basically, “guru” as “fuhrer”–D.E.] . . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami was fundamentally opposed to democracy. “So monarchy or dictatorship is welcome. . . . Personally, I like this position, dictatorship. Personally, I like this.”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami felt that Hinduism was in a “fallen state” and that only his discipline/teachings could restore it to its proper place. In our discussions with Peter Levenda, we have noted that fascism manifests a longing for a bygone time–one that never really existed.
- Fascist philosophies frequently invoke a by-gone, mythical “golden age,” which the fascist cadre in question will restore, after the corrupting forces have been neutralized. ” . . . . He too believed that in bygone ages a divine and scientific social system had existed in India, and like Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, he too founded a movement whose express mission was to reestablish what he often referred to as the “perfectional form of human civilization,” varnashram dharma. . . .” Note that “foreigners” or what would be termed in our society today “immigrants,” “migrants,” “Mexicans,” or “Muslims” are blamed for this degeneration. ” . . . . . . . . Indian civilization on the basis of the four varnas and ashrams deteriorated because of her dependency on foreigners, or those who did not follow the civilization of varnasham. . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami valued the traditional position of the Kshatriya warrior caste, to which the Nazi SS considered themselves as successors, according to Kevin Coogan’s brilliant analysis (in Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International.) “. . . . the kshatriyas should be taught how to fight also. There will be military training. There will be training how to kill. Kshatriya students in the ISKCON varnashram college were to practice killing: ‘Just like Kshatriyas, they have to learn how to kill.’ . . . . There is no single instance where Bhaktivedanta Swami speaks about kshatriya training without mentioning killing. . . . ‘Learn to kill. No nonviolence. Learn to kill. Here also, as soon you’ll find, the Kshatriya, a thief, a rogue, unwanted element in the society, kill him. That’s all. Finish. Kill him. Bas. Finished. . . .” It is not that because the Kshatriyas were killing by bows and arrows formerly you have to continue that. That is another foolishness. If you have got . . . If you can kill easily by guns, take that gun. All the royal princes were trained up how to kill. . . . A Kshatriya, he is expert in the military science, how to kill. So the killing art is there. You cannot make it null and void by advocating nonviolence. No, That is required. Violence is also a part of the society. . . .”
- Tulsi Gabbard’s political vector may be evaluated against the background of Bhaktivedanta Swami’s prognostication that the Hare Krishna cult could infiltrate and take over a key political party and/or government in a democracy. Recall that he viewed democracy with utmost contempt. ” . . . . Bhaktivedanta also thought that he and his movement could take over some government and rule some part of the world: ‘However in Kali-yuga, democratic government can be captured by Krishna conscious people. If this can be done, the general populace can be made very happy.’ . . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami’s teachings dovetail superbly with Nazi occult philosophy. ” . . . . Bhaktivedanta Swami, however, speaks extensively about ‘the Aryans’–at least twenty-five of his purports and over a hundred lectures and conversations contain lengthy elaborations on the topic. He places all those whom he calls ‘non-Aryan’ in a category similar to his ‘unwanted population,’ thus dividing humans into two groups: a large group of varna sankara and non-Aryans on one side, and a small group of Aryans, ie those who follow varnashram, on the other: ‘Those who traditionally follow these principles are called Aryans, or progressive human beings.’ ‘The Vedic way of life,’ he writes, ‘is the progressive march of civilization of the Aryans.’ ‘In the history of the human race, the Aryan family is considered to be the most elevated community in the world.’ . . . . In more than one fifth of his statements he clearly describes or defines them in racial terms: The Aryan family is distributed all over the world and is known as Indo-Aryan. The Aryans are white. But here, this side, due to climatic influence, they are a little tan. Indians are tan but they are not black. But Aryans are all white. And the non-Aryans, they are called black. Yes . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami’s philosophy saw Europeans and Americans as part of, and extensions of, the Aryan race: ” . . . . So we all belong to the Aryan family. Historical reference is there, Indo-European family. So Aryan stock was on the central Asia. Some of them migrated to India. Some of them migrated to Europe. And from Europe you have come. So we belong to the Aryan family, but we have lost our knowledge. So we have become non-Aryan, practically. You French people, you are also Aryan family, but the culture is lost now. So this Krishna consciousness movement is actually reviving the original Aryan culture. Bharata. We are all inhabitants of Bharatavarsha, but as we lost our culture, it became divided. So on the whole, the conclusion is that the Aryans spread in Europe also, and the Americans, they also spread from Europe. So the intelligent class of human being, they belong to the Aryans. Aryan family. Just like Hitler claimed that he belonged to the Aryan family. Of course, they belonged to the Aryan families. . . .”
- It should come as no surprise that Bhaktivedanta was pro-Hitler, viewing the Fuehrer as “a gentleman,” who had to kill the Jews because they were “financing” against him. “. . . . So these English people, they were very expert in making propaganda. They killed Hitler by propaganda. I don’t think Hitler was so bad [a] man. Hitler knew it [the atomic bomb] . . . . He was gentleman. He said that ‘I can smash the whole world, but I do not use that weapon.’ The Germans already discovered. But out of humanity they did not use it. . . . The activities of such men are certainly very great . . . Therefore Hitler killed these Jews. They were financing against Germany. Otherwise he had no enmity with the Jews. . . . Therefore Hitler decided, ‘Kill all the Jews.’ . . . .”
- An in-depth view of Bhaktivedanta Swami’s view of “shudras” reveals the deep racist/fascistic views of social class/caste. Described variously as “black” or “common,” shudras are the focus of deep ideological contempt. This should be seen against the background of the Aryan racial philosophy of Bhaktivedanta Swami. “. . . . ordinary people; the laborer class; once-born; the lowest class of men; non-Aryan; worker; the black man; he must find out a master; one who has no education; almost animal; just like a dog; he becomes disturbed; one who is dependent on others; they are ignorant rascals; unclean; equal to the animal; no training; fools, rascals. . . According to his understanding, people of black or dark skin color, as well as native Americans, are shudras, are third-class, degraded, and less intelligent: ‘Shudras have no brain. In America also, the whole America once belonged to the Red Indians. Why they could not improve? The land was there. Why these foreigners, the Europeans, came and improved? So Shudras cannot do this. They cannot make any correction. . . . A first-class Rolls Royce car, and who is sitting there? A third class negro. This is going on. You’ll find these things in Europe and America. This is going on. A first-class car and a third-class negro. . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami did not feel that the black American slaves should be freed. ” . . . . Just like in America. The blacks were slaves. They were under control. And since you have given them equal rights they are disturbing, most disturbing, always creating a fearful situation, uncultured and drunkards. What training they have got? . . . That is best, to keep them under control as slaves but give them sufficient food, sufficient cloth, not more than that. Then they will be satisfied. . . . ‘So the Kiratas, they were always slaves of the Aryans. The Aryan people used to keep slaves, but they were treating slaves very nicely.’ And that the Kiratas were Africans, he had explained many times: ‘Kirata means the black, the Africans.’ . . . .”
- Bhaktivedanta Swami had some “choice” things to say about women: ” . . . . Generally all women desire material enjoyment.Women in general should not be trusted. Women are generally not very intelligent. It appears that women is a stumbling block [sic] for self-realization. . . . Although rape is not legally allowed, it is a fact that a woman likes a man who is very expert at rape. When a husbandless woman is attacked by an aggressive man, she takes his action to be mercy. Generally when a woman is attacked by a man—whether her husband or some other man—she enjoys the attack, being too lusty. . . .”
12. In FTR #‘s 1008, 1022 and 1023, we examined how probable U.S. intelligence officer and 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort networked with the Hapsburg Group and associates of Viktor Yanukovych to effect the transition of Ukraine from the Russian orbit to the Western sphere of influence.
Tad Devine–Bernie Sanders’ chief strategist in his 2016 campaign–worked with Manafort.
Tad Devine, during his run as chief strategist for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, railed against the corrupting influence of money in politics. . . .
. . . . Thanks to Robert S. Mueller III’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman and sometime business associate of Devine, we now have an unusual glimpse into the role the Democratic ad man had in electing and preserving the power of Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, a crooked pro-Putin autocrat. Though American political consultants routinely rake in cash from foreign leaders — even shady ones — Devine’s seamless pivot from advocate for antidemocratic thug to champion of a principled democratic reformer shows extraordinary flexibility. . . .
13a. Conceived by Allen Dulles, the CFF was overseen by Richard Nixon. Its chief spokesperson was Ronald Reagan. The State Department official responsible for bringing “fascist freedom fighters” like the OUN/B into the United States was William Casey (Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager in the 1980 Presidential race and later Reagan’s CIA director.) The Nazi wing of the GOP was installed as a permanent branch of the Republican Part when George H.W. Bush was the head of the Republican National Committee.
The OUN/B was a key element of the GOP’s ethnic outreach organization. It is noteworthy that the organizations that were represented in the GOP subgroup were all affiliated with the SS during World War II. Prior to the commencement of hostilities, the SS formed effective liaison with the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Bulgarian National Front and the OUN/B, among other organizations. This relationship was cemented and strengthened during the war and remained operational when these elements jumped to U.S. intelligence and, through that relationship, to the Republican Party. (This tape excerpt is from the September 6, 1992 installment of AFA #37. The text is excerpted from “The Republican Party and Fascists: The Old Nazis and the New Right” by Russ Bellant, published in Covert Action Information Bulletin Issue #33.
13b. It is important to note that, in effect serving as an advance element or Fifth Column for the neo-Liberal policies presided over by Yeltsin and crafted by Sachs & Company, the Free Congress Foundation served as an extension of The Crusade For Freedom and the projection of the ABN milieu into the GOP. This was the political predecessor to the Yeltsin policies.
Dominating the Reagan administration, the ABN milieu was projected back into Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union by the Free Congress Foundation, heavily overlapped with Laszlo Pasztor and the GOP Nazis dating from the Crusade For Freedom.
Heavily overlapping the Free Congress Foundation of Paul Weyrich, the GOP “ethnics” and the OUN/B, in particular, played a leading role in the political tutoring of Boris Yeltsin’s IRG organization. Ultimately, Yeltsin’s forces were instrumental in breaking up the U.S.S.R.
We note that the head of the liberation sub-group of the Free Congress Foundation was Hungarian Arrow Cross veteran Laszlo Pasztor, the head of the GOP “ethnics.” (This audio excerpt is from AFA #36. The text is from “The Free Congress Foundation Goes East” by Russ Bellant and Louis Wolf, from Covert Action Information Bulletin Issue #35.
“The Free Congress Foundation Goes East” by Russ Bellant and Louis Wolf; Covert Action Information Bulletin #35; Fall/1990.
With the rapid pace of political change sweeping Eastern Europe and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, many opportunities have emerged for western interests to intervene in the politics of that region. In some cases, such a vacuum has been created that virtual strangers to the area several years ago are now able to actively participate in changing those societies from within.
These interventions are not only being practiced by mainstream organizations. The involvement of the United States Far Right brings with it the potential revival of fascist organizations in the East. One U.S. group, the Free Congress Foundation, has been plahying a role in Eastern European and Soviet politics and has ties to Boris Yeltsin and the Inter-Regional Deputies Group (IRG) in the U.S.S.R.
The Free Congress Foundation (FCF) was founded in 1974 by Paul Weyrich as the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. Weyrich, who had started the Heritage Foundation the year before, was heavily funded by the Coors family for both organizations.
Weyrich has kept one foot in the right wing of the Republican Party while dallying with the racist Right and the extreme Christian Right. In 1976, for instance, he and a handful of other New Rights (William Rusher, Morton Blackwell, Richard Viguerie) attempted to take over the segregationist American Independent Party (AIP), formed by George Wallace in 1968. The AIP was an amalgam of Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society elements. . . .
. . . . The IRG was established by Andrei Sakharov, Boris Yeltsin and others in the summer of 1989. By the end of that year, a training school had been established for candidates to put forward the IRG program. Their electoral success this year propelled Yeltsin to the leadership of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. He immediately began forging collaborative relationships with the deeply reactionary leaders of the Lithuanian Sajudis party. The IRG has also served as a source of right-wing pressure on Gorbachev to dismantle socialism and the Soviet Union itself.
One of the key dangers in this agenda is the political vacuum it creates, allowing ultra-nationalist forces in a number of republics to take power. Such nationalist and fascist elements are already evident in Lithuania and the Ukraine. In the latter republic, the pro-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) has gained influence in several parties and has mobilized large demonstrations that honor OUN leaders who abetted Hitler’s war on the Eastern Front. Similarly, several deputies Sajudis deputies served in German military units in 1944, and Sajudis has made declarations against ethnic Russians living in Lithuania. According to some reports, Poles have also been denigrated.
It should also be noted that the “radical reformer” Boris Yeltsin has dallied with Pamyat, the foremost Russian fascist group to emerge in the last several years. Pamyat’s virulent anti-Semitism compares to the crude propaganda of the early German Nazi Party in the 1920’s.
The FCF is not entirely disconnected from the history of the OUN. The Treasurer of the FCF board is Georgetown University Professor Charles Moser. Moser is also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Ukrainian Quarterly, published by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, a group dominated by the OUN. The Ukrainian Quarterly has praised military units of the German SS and otherwise justified the OUN alliance with the Third Reich which reflects the fact that the OUN was politically and militarily allied with Hitler and the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine.
The OUN, an international semi-secret cadre organization headquartered in Bavaria, has received financial assistance from the late Franz Joseph Strauss, the rightist head of the Bavarian state. Strauss also had a working relationship with Weyrich. . . .
. . . . Finally, FCF’s insinuation into the politics of the East must be judged by their selection of Laszlo Pasztor to head their Liberation Support Alliance, “which seeks to liberate peoples in Central and Eastern European Nations.”
Pasztor’s involvement in East European politics began in World War II when he joined the youth organization of the Arrow Cross, the Nazi party of Hungary.
When the Arrow Cross was installed in power by a German commando operation, Pasztor was sent to Berlin to help facilitate the liaison between the Arrow Cross and Hitler.
Pasztor was tried and served two years in jail for his Arrow Cross activities after an anticommunist government was elected in 1945. He eventually came to the U.S. and established the ethnic arm of the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon. He brought other Nazi collaborators from the Eastern front into the GOP. Some were later found to have participated in mass murder during the war.
The dormant Arrow Cross has surfaced again in Hungary, where there have been attempts to lift the ban on the organization. Pasztor spent several months in Hungary. When Weyrich later conducted training there, he was provided a list of Pasztor’s contacts inside the country. Weyrich reports that he conducted training for the recently formed and now governing New Democratic Forum.
Pasztor claims to have assisted some of his friends in Hungary in getting NED funds through his advisory position with NED. In 1989 he spoke at the Heritage Foundation under the sponsorship of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a multinational umbrella organization of emigre fascists and Nazis founded in alliance with Hitler in 1943. It is led by the OUN. Pasztor spoke for the “Hungarian Organization” of ABN, which is the Arrow Cross. . . . .
13c. After the ABN–acting through the GOP and Free Congress Foundation, achieved its goal of fragmenting the Soviet Union, it handed the economic ball off to Bernie Sanders economic adviser Jeffrey Sachs, who sent Russia back to the Stone Age and was, arguably, the major architect of the oligarch system that bedevils not only Russia but other former Soviet republics to this day.
. . . . Sachs was an advisor to the Yeltsin government in Russia from 1991 to 1994, and also advised Poland, Slovenia, and Estonia as they were beginning their transitions to capitalism. The last three are mixed successes — on the surface, Poland looks like a success to some, but with the transition came higher unemployment, falling real wages, and aimless cycles of political discontent. Russia, though, was a thorough disaster, one of the worst collapses in human history. Living standards fell and the population shrank, an almost unprecedented event in a country not at war.
[U2 Singer] Bono’s new best friend refuses to accept any blame for the disaster, offering the defense that the Russians didn’t take his advice, and the West didn’t come through with the big aid package he insisted was necessary. Apparently this is an well-practiced strategy. A 1992 Euromoney profile notes: “Sachs is reluctant to acknowledge mistakes, defining them in terms of regret when governments do not take his advice.” In that case, he blamed Poland for not privatizing fast enough. Contrasting with Sachs’s regrets over advice not taken, several governments he’s consulted with have since characterized the material produced by him and his associates as irrelevant, or, as a Slovenian official put it at the time, “simplistic...kindergarten stuff.”
But the outcome illustrates precisely the danger of having the likes of Sachs parachute in bearing the timeless truths of neoclassical economics. Anyone who knew Russia knew that any rapid privatization would immediately lead to the creation of a new corrupt elite through massive theft of state property. Anyone who knew Washington knew that no big aid package was ever going to come through; adding to usual U.S. cheapness, a lot of hardliners wanted to see Russia ground into the dirt. In the words of former World Bank economist David Ellerman, who frequently collided with Sachs’s work in Slovenia and has followed him intently ever since, “Only the mixture of American triumphalism and the academic arrogance of neoclassical economics could produce such a lethal dose of gall.” . . . .
During what officialdom called the transition, there were divisions between those who wanted to reform the existing socialist system and experiment with hybrid forms of ownership, and what Ellerman calls the “clean postsocialist revolutionaries,” many of them with American economics PhDs, who dismissed the reformers as tainted nomenklatura and wanted immediate privatization. Adding to the prestige of the revolutionaries were their trusted foreign advisors, like those from the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), led by Jeffrey Sachs and partly funded by the U.S. government. . . .
. . . . HIID eventually collapsed in scandal, when it was revealed that the principals of its Russian project, Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay, along with their wives (who happened to be mutual fund managers), had been buying Russian stocks and dickering for the privilege of getting the country’s first mutual fund license, while dispensing advice to the Russian government. (Shleifer was one of the trinity of so-called Harvard Wunderkinder who were to Russia what the Chicago Boys were to Pinochet’s Chile; the other two were Lawrence Summers — and Sachs.) The U.S. government sued, and Harvard shuttered the institute. Sachs, who was not involved in the scandal, decamped to Columbia . . . . Sachs admits to no responsibility for the Russian catastrophe. When I interviewed him in November 2002, I asked him to comment on the (incontrovertible) fact that he’s viewed by scores of millions of Russians, as one journalist has put it, as either an emissary of Satan or of the CIA. He answered that he found this question “disgusting,” “perverse,” and like nothing he’s ever been asked before. The global elite leads a very insulated life. . . .
14a. Jeffrey Sachs is now advising AOC.
. . . . JS: I am supporting Alexandria [Ocasio-Cortez]. I’ve been working with the Congressional Progressive Caucus for quite a while on this People’s Budget, and want to continue to develop that. I can make a contribution of getting the numbers in place and showing that this is completely feasible and it’s completely what the American people would actually like. . . .
14b. In the course of rolling out the “Green New Deal,” Team AOC unthinkingly included a provision of paying people “unwilling to work,” and fumbled their response to critics: ” . . . . First her team falsely claimed it was doctored by the GOP, then said it was part of a draft version that was mistakenly released. . . .”
This sort of thing is perfect for the propagandistic purposes of the far right. Did a Cambridge-Analytica-like AI program identify her early in her online and social media activity? Is she a ringer for the far right and Team Trump?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez couldn’t distance herself fast enough last week from a promise on her website that the Green New Deal would take care of people who are “unwilling to work.” First her team falsely claimed it was doctored by the GOP, then said it was part of a draft version that was mistakenly released.
But advocates for the ambitious program, known as universal basic income (UBI), say paying everyone isn’t a typo or a bug — it’s the whole point. Their vision of a country that takes care of everyone’s basic needs is gaining traction from socialist gatherings in Brooklyn to the Silicon Valley tech futurist set.
But with three simple words, Ocasio-Cortez exposed just how difficult the idea will be to sell to the public.
Critics turned “unwilling to work” into the plan’s unofficial and unwanted tagline. It was repeated ad nauseum in conservative media circles. The trolly site unwillingtowork.org encourages you to join the unwilling and be handed a new high-paying job, or “paid passions” as the page announces they will now be called.
The reaction was not a surprise to universal basic income advocates, who say Republicans have always fought wealth redistribution programs. But they saw a chance for Democrats to double down.
“This idea that somehow people who are unwilling to work are bad or lazy is a horrible idea. Because whenever there’s a job offer and somebody doesn’t want it, what you have is a dispute about wages and working conditions,” said Karl Widerquist, a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar. “We need to change the discussion, reframe it, go on offense.”
Instead of trying to flip the switch from lazy workers to cheap employers, Democrats ran for the hills. The drafters of the Green New Deal dismissed the wording as an editing error in an early draft. Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff said it was not in regard to universal basic income but pensions for coal miners. Even defenders of the Green New Deal’s other hugely ambitious proposals dismissed universal basic income.
“I think it’s a nonstarter. It’s not just a political barrier, it’s substantively dumb to pay people who are unwilling to work. It’s offensive to most Americans who are working really hard,” said Rep. Ro
Khanna, an ardent supporter of the Green New Deal. . . .
14d. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has an unfortunate habit of making statements that are absolutely perfect from the standpoint of Team Trump/Fox News/Karl Rove et al.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) on Saturday called capitalism “irredeemable.”
“Capitalism is an ideology of capital — the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit,” she said during an interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, according to Bloomberg News.
“To me, capitalism is irredeemable,” she added, arguing that capitalism’s goals come at a cost to people and the environment, Bloomberg reported. . . . .
14e. A “New Green Deal” is requisite to prevent a planetary and species-wide catastrophe. The “New Green Deal” as crafted by Team AOC (including Subhas Chandra Chakrabarti) dilutes the dire necessity of the environmental program with other, important issues too complex and challenging in, and of, themselves to be included in a hastily-considered blanket agenda.
“What’s Green? What’s the Deal? [Editorial];” The New York Times; 2/24/2019 [Western Edition].
. . . . Unfortunately, that rollout was anything but smooth, due largely to the bungling of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s staff, which posted on her website a set of pugnacious and poorly written talking points (later disavowed) that scared even moderate Democrats. . . . The talking points made other dubious promises, including jobs even for Americans “unwilling” to work. The immediate result of this amateurish mess was to hand Mr. Trump and other climate change deniers irresistible political talking points. . . .
. . . . Whether such measures will satisfy the activists who have gathered around Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is another matter. After all, her talking points, as well as the resolution itself, speak also of providing higher education for all Americans; universal health care; affordable housing; remedies for “systemic injustices” among the poor, the elderly and people of color; and a federal job guarantee insuring “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security.”
Which raises a question: Is the Green New Deal aimed at the climate crisis? Or is addressing the climate crisis a cover for a wish-list of progressive policies and a not-so-subtle effort to move the Democratic Party to the left? At least some candidates—Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota among them—seem to think so. Read literally, the resolution wants not only to achieve a carbon-neutral energy system but also to transform the economy itself. As Mr. Markey can tell you from past experience, the first goal is going to be hard enough. Tackling climate change in a bi way is likely to be transformative. We should get on with it.
16a. Bezos’ father, who jump-started his son’s business career with a quarter of a million dollars, came to the U.S. through Operation Peter Pan.
....“My dad came to the US when he was 16 as part of Operation Pedro Pan,” Jeff Bezos in a statement explaining the donation. “He landed in this country alone and unable to speak English. With a lot of grit and determination — and the help of some remarkable organizations in Delaware — my dad became an outstanding citizen, and he continues to give back to the country that he feels blessed him in so many ways. MacKenzie and I are honored to be able to help today’s Dreamers by funding these scholarships.” . . .
16c. Operation Peter Pan was a CIA operation initiated by Antonio Veciana and Maurice Bishop, aka David Atlee Phillips.
“The CIA, Cuba and Operation Peter Pan” by Nelson P. Valdes and Saul Landau; Counterpunch; 12/16/2011.
On November 19, 2011 NPR broadcast “Children Of Cuba Remember: Their Flight To America.” Reporter Greg Allen claimed the 1960–62 journey from Cuba to the United States of 14,000 plus Cuban children “was made possible because of a deal a priest in the Miami diocese [Father Bryan Walsh] … worked out with the US State Department. The agreement allowed him to sign visa waivers for children 16 or under.” Allen then interviewed several right-of-center Cuban Americans to offer “objective” perspective on the facts surrounding Operation Peter Pan.
Curiously, Allen omitted the CIA from his report, although ample evidence shows the Agency in the early 1960s conspired with the Church to spirit kids out of Cuba.
Once inside the nurturing borders of the greatest country in the world “Pedro Pan kids have done well,” Allen concluded, without explaining what “well” means. Now adult Pedro Pan kids remain “firmly opposed to any normalization of relations with the Castro regime, the regime that was responsible for breaking up their families and forcing them from their homeland.”
NPR staff might have discovered a more complex and sinister story – had they looked. The CIA refuses to release Peter Pan documents, but abundant testimony shows the Agency forging documents and spreading lies, with Father Walsh and the regional Catholic hierarchy. Their goal: separate elite children from parents (a Cuban brain drain) and generate political instability.
One Operation Peter Pan conspirator, Antonio Veciana, now living in Miami, told us how Maurice Bishop (aka CIA official David Atlee Phillips) recruited him in 1960 “to wage psychological war — to destabilize the government.” Veciana described how the Agency forged a law to make affluent Cubans believe the revolutionary government planned to usurp parental control. Bishop’s agents in Cuba spread this rumor, backed by a forged simulation of the supposed law, to members of the professional and propertied classes. The forgery “declared that parents would lose control of their kids to the state.”
Veciana recounted how “CIA agents claimed they’d stolen the document from the Cuban government.” This false document “created tremendous panic.” On October 26, 1960, CIA-controlled Swan island radio station, south of Cuba, broadcast breaking “news.” Cuba’s government, the radio asserted, planned to remove children from parents so as to indoctrinate them. Radio Swan reported another lie: the Cuban underground had obtained a copy of the forthcoming “law.”
Minimal research would have revealed that Leopoldina and Ramón Grau Alsina, niece and nephew of former Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martín, had confessed to Cuban security officials after being arrested in 1965 to having printed the false law in Havana, circulated it clandestinely and then lied to parents.
Article 3 of the apocryphal document stated: “When this law comes into effect, the custody of persons under 20 years of age will be exercised by the state via persons or organizations to which this power has been delegated.” Priests and CIA agents both recruited kids and persuaded parents to “trust us. The US government will care for them.”
The clergy circulated the phony document among their Cuban upper middle-class flock. Catholic school officials feared Castro’s rapidly expanding public instruction program would undermine their virtual educational monopoly among moneyed sectors.
In March 1960, President Eisenhower ordered the CIA to overthrow the Cuban government. Agency plotters designed Peter Pan to run alongside political propaganda and economic strangulation policies. These parallel tracks would weaken Castro’s government while US trainers prepared a Cuban-exile invasion force, which, in turn, would coordinate with CIA-backed urban terrorists and guerrillas.
Operation Peter Pan (recall the Disney film?) used Cuban kids and parents to further their goal: overthrowing the revolutionary government. NPR’s claim of “no evidence” of CIA involvement would have dissolved had they asked Veciana or questioned why the CIA still refuses to release its 1500 plus documents on that Operation — while de-classifying archives on the Bay of Pigs and the 1962 Missile Crisis?
Writer Alvaro Fernandez’ father Angel Fernandez Varela, recruited by the CIA in Havana, taught at the Jesuit run Colegio Belen. Before he died in Miami, wrote Alvaro, Angel told his family “he had been one of those responsible for drafting the false law that gave rise to the hysteria.”
NPR’s report doesn’t ask: who obtained the kids’ visas, airplane tickets and contacts abroad and why did KLM and Pan American Airlines issue Peter Pan kids free tickets?
Nor does NPR Allen follow up. The US government didn’t maintain contact between parents and children, nor grant visas to most of the parents that remained in Cuba. The UN High Commissioner tried to reunite parents and children, but Washington didn’t back him.
Veciana helped facilitate this dirty trick, but later mused: “Afterward I wondered: was this the right thing to do? Because we did create panic about the government, but we also separated lots of kids from their parents.”
In fact, Cuba has won accolades for its treatment of children. “In Cuba, there are no children on the streets, no children out of school, no children without access to health services or culture, and there are no unprotected children without opportunities for development,” said Jose Juan Ortiz, UNICEF representative in Cuba.
Paradoxically, the CIA attributed its own objective to the Cuban government: separating children from their parents. Maybe, if NPR staff thought ironically they would’ve done a more accurate report on Operation Peter Pan.
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16d. The “Opportunity Zones” designated by the GOP in their tax bill may evolve into a campaign theme with AOC positioned as “anti-business” through her stance on the NYC/Amazon deal.
A little-noticed section in the $1.5 trillion tax cut that President Trump signed into law late last month is drawing attention from venture capitalists, state government officials and mayors across America.
The provision, on Page 130 of the tax overhaul, is an attempt to grapple with a yawning hole in the recovery from the Great Recession: the fact that, in huge swaths of the country, the economic recovery has yet to arrive.
The law creates “Opportunity Zones,” which will use tax incentives to draw long-term investment to parts of America that continue to struggle with high poverty and sluggish job and business growth. The provision is the first new substantial federal attempt to aid those communities in more than a decade. And it comes as a disproportionate share of economic growth has been concentrated in so-called superstar metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and New York.
If the zones succeed, they could help revitalize neighborhoods and towns that are starved for investment.
They could also deliver a windfall, in the form of avoided capital gains taxes, for corporations and financiers who invest in the Opportunity Zones.
Yet risks remain, including whether investors will steer dollars toward areas that really need investment.
The zones were included in the tax law by Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who was born into poverty in North Charleston, and based on a bill he co-sponsored in 2017 with several Democrats. The effort to create the zones was pushed by an upstart Washington think tank, the Economic Innovation Group, and its patron, the tech mogul Sean Parker, of Napster and Facebook fame, who enlisted Mr. Scott and others to sponsor the legislation.
“I had to explain it several times to folks,” said Mr. Scott, whose co-sponsors on a previous iteration of an opportunity zone bill included Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, and House lawmakers from both parties. “I came out of one of these communities, so I believe that there’s untapped potential in every state in the nation.”
Mr. Scott said that he had discussed the plan with Mr. Trump and that the president had later spoken approvingly of it. But in the rush to pass the bill over the course of a few frenzied weeks, the idea was never debated on the floor of the House or Senate. It was never promoted by Republican leaders or the White House.
“This is a little billion-and-a-half dollar part” of the law, Kevin Hassett, the chairman of Mr. Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview. “But if it’s successful, we’ll look back 10 years from now and say this was one of the most important parts of the tax bill, and one we didn’t talk nearly enough about.”
Mr. Hassett has a longtime interest in providing tax incentives for economic development in distressed areas. He said he first began discussing opportunity zones with Mr. Parker several years ago at a meeting in Mr. Parker’s Greenwich Village home. Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Hassett wrote several white papers to help elevate the idea as part of an extensive, multiyear effort by the Economic Innovation Group to win support.
Mr. Hassett said he was never paid for any of that work. His interest, he said, stems from growing up near Turners Falls, Mass., which has struggled since the closing of its longtime paper mills.
Mr. Parker, who made his fortune as the first president of Facebook, was looking for a way to steer investors to parts of America that have been starved for economic activity in the wake of the Great Recession.
One in six Americans lives in what the Economic Innovation Group calls a “distressed community,” where median household incomes remain far below the national level, which is $59,000 a year, and the poverty rate is well above the national average. Those communities are urban, rural and suburban. On average, the communities lost 6 percent of their jobs and a similar share of their business establishments from 2011 to 2015, according to census data.
The national economy grew and added jobs during that period, but that growth was disproportionately in large cities. Metropolitan areas with at least one million residents provided just under half of America’s jobs in 2010. But from 2010 through 2016, those metropolitan areas accounted for nearly three-quarters of the country’s net job creation, according to new research by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Rural areas accounted for just 3 percent of the job growth in that time. From 2010 to 2014, according to the innovation group’s research, rural areas saw more businesses close than open.
Economic development professionals in those areas have struggled to attract the attention of companies and venture capitalists, who channel most of their money to major cities. To bring those investors into distressed communities “you have to hit them in their sweet spot, and their sweet spot is, they pay a lot of capital gains taxes,” said Donald Hinkle-Brown, president and chief executive of Reinvestment Fund, a community development group.
The new tax law provision plays to that sweet spot. It instructs governors in each state and territory, along with the mayor of the District of Columbia, to designate Opportunity Zones from a pool of low-income, high-poverty census tracts, subject to certification by the Treasury secretary. States cannot nominate all their qualifying tracts for that status — they are limited to only a quarter of eligible tracts. Investors, like banks or hedge funds, then create Opportunity Funds to seed either new businesses in those areas, expansions of existing ones or real estate development.
The people who invest in Opportunity Funds are able to minimize their tax burden through preferential treatment of capital gains.
More than $2 trillion in unrealized capital gains are sitting on individual and corporate balance sheets across America, according to the Economic Innovation Group, the result of profitable investments in stocks and mutual funds. Normally, the proceeds from the sale of those assets would be taxed as a capital gain, at a maximum federal rate of 20 percent plus a 3.8 percent surtax. The new law offers investors an alternative: to roll those unrealized gains into an Opportunity Fund, and defer federal taxes on the profit, at least temporarily.
That deferral grows into capital gains tax relief the longer the investment is held. An investor who retains an investment for seven years will pay only 85 percent of the capital gains taxes that would have been due on the original investment. If the investment is held beyond 10 years, the investor permanently avoids capital gains taxes on any proceeds from the Opportunity Fund investment.
“This becomes its own asset class, and it could be a very large asset class,” Mr. Parker said in an interview, referring to Opportunity Funds.
Investors are already starting to take notice. A two-hour session on Opportunity Funds drew a standing-room-only crowd last week at the Winter Innovation Summit in Salt Lake City, said Patrick McKenna, founding partner of the venture capital firm High Ridge Global. Mr. McKenna has invested in distressed communities such as Baltimore and over the last year has tried to steer Silicon Valley dollars to struggling areas such as Youngstown, Ohio, out of a belief those areas contain untapped potential for growth and prosperity.
Civic leaders are beginning to pitch state economic development officials on designating tracts of their communities as Opportunity Zones. “It’s very exciting,” said Michael Tubbs, the mayor of Stockton, Calif., which the Economic Innovation Group ranks as the eighth-most distressed large city in America. “It makes communities like Stockton more attractive for investment.”
Turning distressed communities into attractive investments, however, is not a guarantee. One critique of the plan is that it might not leverage much investment in areas that really need it — be they Stockton, or Youngstown, or any other distressed community. Research suggests many previous federal attempts to increase investment in particular regions, such as Clinton-era Enterprise Zones, were largely ineffective. A more successful effort was the New Markets Tax Credit, a program that still exists and similarly gives incentives to invest in distressed areas but that is relatively limited in scope.
Proponents say the new Opportunity Zones are designed to be more effective than earlier programs, and likely to generate far more investment than congressional scorekeepers predicted in assessing the tax bill. The Joint Committee on Taxation predicted the provision would reduce tax revenues by $1.6 billion over 10 years, suggesting a modest amount of additional capital gains investment.
State economic development officials worry that if they designate the wrong areas as Opportunity Zones, they could end up subsidizing investments that were in the pipeline anyway.
“Job one is getting the areas correct and really levering this, in the intent of the program,” said Stephanie Copeland, executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade. “Not just making venture capitalists more money.”
Mr. Parker said he planned to educate fund managers on how to best capitalize on the possibilities in distressed areas.
“Eventually,” he said, “I think it’s important that I put my money where my mouth is by investing in Opportunity Funds myself.” He said that he expected it would take a year or two for the funds to catch on, but that the results would exceed expectations once they did.
18. One of the main financiers of the left wing of the Democratic Party is Leah Hunt-Hendrix, H.L. Hunt’s granddaughter. A driving force behind Indivisible, she also founded the Solidaire network.
. . . . For the Solidaire network and its founder—a 34-year-old oil heiress and newcomer to San Francisco named Leah Hunt-Hendrix—the Krasner primary proved that relatively small amounts of money can have a big impact if given to an on-the-ground organization with deep local ties. Solidaire has 150 members across the country, many of them young inheritors of wealth like Hunt-Hendrix. But ever since Hunt-Hendrix moved west from New York in late 2015, the network has been buoyed by self-made Silicon Valley recruits, including Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger and his philanthropist wife, Kaitlyn Krieger; Google vice president of product Jonathan Alferness; and Color of Change cofounder and former tech entrepreneur James Rucker. . . .
. . . . Solidaire has up to 20 overlapping members with the Democracy Alliance, Soros’s secretive national network of super-donors committed to giving at least $200,000 a year to liberal causes. . . .
. . . . In an op-ed published in February by Politico, Hunt-Hendrix criticized the Democratic establishment for its caution and fealty to moneyed interests. Solidaire doesn’t just want Democratic wins, Hunt-Hendrix says. It wants “systemic change”—a radical restructuring of the economic system that Solidaire’s members have so richly benefited from.. . .
. . . . Hunt-Hendrix set off to study politics at Duke and then went on to a PhD program at Princeton, where Cornel West was one of her advisers. Studying in the Middle East during grad school, Hunt-Hendrix was invigorated by the weekly Palestinian protests of the West Bank wall from 2006 to 2009. “That’s when she changed,” Hunt recalls. “That’s when Leah saw what could happen when people rose up.” (At the same time, Hunt was herself growing more radicalized: She was arrested for the first time in her life, on the lawn of the Bush White House, in a 2008 Iraq war protest.) . . . .
In an op-ed published in February by Politico, Hunt-Hendrix criticized the Democratic establishment for its caution and fealty to moneyed interests. Solidaire doesn’t just want Democratic wins, Hunt-Hendrix says. It wants “systemic change”—a radical restructuring of the economic system that Solidaire’s members have so richly benefited from. . . .
19. Leah Hunt-Hendrix’s mother is close to Gloria Steinem.
“The Man Who Wants to Save Your Marriage” by Jessica Weisberg; Pacific Standard; 3/16/2015.
. . . . [La Kelly] Hunt, who was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame for her philanthropic work, counts the feminist Gloria Steinem among her closest friends. . . .
20a. Suposedly killed in a plane crash at the end of the war, many suspected that Bose had faked his death in order to go underground.
If true, this raises the question of possible collaboration between Bose and his nephew and protege Sarkar. In 1955. Sarkar founded Ananda Marga, an international Yoga organization with a million plus followers around the world.
Some elements of the organization have been involved in violent incidents, chiefly against the West Bengali government and communist elements, as well as opposing Indira Gandhi.
The group’s symbol involves a rising sun and a swastika. The swastika is an ancient hindu symbol. The rising sun, of course is a symbol of the Japanese empire. While the use of the symbols MAY be innocent, they might also indicate a degree of continuity between some elements of the Ananda Marga organization and the Axis with which Sarkar’s uncle was affiliated.
If Bose did indeed survive the war, it raises the question about his relationship to Sarkar and the Ananda Marga group. Might some elements have continued Bose’s armed ideological struggle?
Ananda Marga is discussed in AFA#7, at considerable length.
On September 16th, 1985, in a dilapidated house in Faizabad, formerly the capital of Oudh province in India, a reclusive holy man known as Bhagwanji or Gumnami Baba (‘the saint with no name’) breathed his last. Locals had long suspected that he was none other than Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945), the Indian quasi-Fascist leader who in the 1930s had advocated a violent revolution against the British Empire to gain total independence for India.The Second World War had enabled him to practise what he preached and his Indian National Army had fought with the Japanese in Burma attempting to drive the British out of the subcontinent.
Although Netaji (Great Leader) Bose was reported killed in an air crash in August 1945 . . . . many believed then and continue to believe now that, helped by his Japanese allies, he faked his death . . . . and returned to India many years later to lead the secret life of a hermit. Surprisingly for a poor sadhu (mystic) the ‘saint with no name’ left behind many trunks of possessions and in 1986, realising that these might solve the mystery once and for all, Bose’s niece Lalita obtained a high court order for an inventory to be made of their contents. Among the 2,673 items indexed, Lalita claimed she saw letters in her uncle’s handwriting and family photographs. Gumnami Baba’s belongings were re-packed in 23 boxes and sent to the District Treasury. . . .
. . . In his inquiry report, completed in 2006, Justice Mukherjee was categoric. He concluded: ‘Netaji Bose is dead [a safe bet as he would have been 109]. He did not die in the plane crash as alleged and the ashes in the Japanese temple in Tokyo [maintained by the Indian government since 1945] are not of Netaji.’ He was more narrowly legalistic about the Faizabad connection:
In the absence of any clinching evidence to prove that Bhagwanji/Gumnami Baba was Netaji the question whether he died in Faizabad on September 16th,1985, as testified by some of the witnesses, need not be answered.
Nevertheless, caught off guard in a TV interview in January 2010, Mukherjee can clearly be heard saying that he thinks Bhagwanji and Bose may well be the same person. . . .
. . . When the story of Bose’s death in 1945 reached Viceroy Wavell he said: ‘I suspect it very much. It is just what should be given out if he meant to go “underground”.’ In 1946 Gandhi claimed that ‘inner voices’ were telling him ‘Subhas is still alive and biding his time somewhere’. Bose certainly had form as an escaper. He spent his life moving easily, sometimes secretly, from country to country. In 1941 he escaped from British house arrest in Calcutta and reached Afghanistan from where, aided by the Italian ambassador and disguised as an Italian businessman ‘Orlando Mazzota’, he travelled up through central Asia to Moscow and from there to Berlin. Soon Britons and Indians could hear his propaganda broadcasts stirring up revolt against the British Empire and boasting about his Indian Legion, a body of soldiers trained by and intended to fight alongside the German Wehrmacht.
In 1943, discouraged by Hitler’s lacklustre support for Indian independence and aware that the theatre of war where he needed to pit his troops was now the Far East, he travelled half-way round the world under water by first German and then Japanese submarine to Japan. Admired there, he received official support and set up his 50,000-strong Azad Hind Fauj or Indian National Army (INA), recruited largely from Indian soldiers of the British Empire Army who had been captured by the Japanese in their successful offensive of 1942. . . .
20b. We flesh out our presentation of the career and institutional attachments of Bose with an excerpt from AFA #7.
In material from Kempei Tai: The Japanese Secret Service Then and Now by Richard Deacon and Spies and Traitors of World War II by Kurt Singer, we looked at Bose’s links to intelligence services, clandestine networks and their operators and some of the other fascist “nationalist leaders.”
Some of these connections include:
- Bose’s links to the Black Dragon Society (the most important of the Patriotic and Ultranationalist Societies that brought fascism to Japan) and Mitsuru Toyama, its leader.
- Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr.
- The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem–founder of the Palestinian National Movement, Major General in the Waffen SS, and a key German geopolitical operative.
- Third Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
20c. Ananda Marga founder Sarkar had a strong belief in his uncle and former housemate Subhas Chandra Bose. Both believed in armed struggle in order to achieve their aims.
Violence and New Religious Movements; James R. Lewis
. . . . Sarkar was interested in the Indian struggle for home rule and had a maternal family tie to Indian independence fighter Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945), who was his uncle. One of Sarkar’s most important books on social philosophy Problems of the Day (1959) is dedicated to Bose with the following inscription “To the great hero Subhas Chandra Bose, whom I did love, and whom I do love even now.” Like Bose, Sarkar was a believer in armed struggle, and he fashioned the ideology of his movement accordingly. . .
20d. Both Bose and Ananda Marga share the saying “Liberation of Self and Service to Humanity.”
“What Is the Link Between PROUT and Ananda Marga?”
. . . . In 1959, Sarkar, who is also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti, extended the scope of Ananda Marga philosophy to encompass certain socio-economic principles, which have become known as Prout – an acronym for Progressive Utilization Theory. This theory blends spiritual with socialistic idealism – a formula familiar in Eastern India, where prominent nationalists such as Vivekananda and Subhas Chandra Bose also made use of the present Ananda Marga slogan – “Liberation of Self and Service to Humanity”. . . .
20e. Next, the program reviews more information from AFA #7, examining Ananda Marga in the context of a possible “Boseian” or “Boseist” post-war underground. The excerpt consists of reading from two San Jose Mercury News articles: “Ananda Marga: A Deadly Mix of Yoga, Violence” by Bernard Bower; San Jose Mercury News; 8/15/1982 and “Cult Guru Inspires Devotion” by Bernard Bower; San Jose Mercury News; 8/15/1982.
Ostensibly a yoga organization, Ananda Marga has a credible history of violence, including acts directed at Indian communists. (Communist parties have a history of prominence in some Indian regions.)
21. In Ftr #‘s 1018, 1019 and 1020, we examined Baba Ramdev, whose yoga and supplement/food operations have bolstered Narendra Modi’s regime in India. We wonder if yoga has been selected as a “cover” by select fascist and/or Nazi groups? If so, is Ananda Marga one of them?
A significant contribution to contemporary Yoga discipline was made by a Danish Nazi sympathizer named Niels Bukh. ” . . . . Dozens of modern ashtanga yoga postures are similar or identical to those found in a gymnastic routine introduced to India by the British in the first decades of the 20th century and originally developed by a Danish fitness instructor named Niels Bukh, who later became notorious for his pro-Nazi sympathies. . . .”
The Yoga influence on Nazism and Hindutva fascism should NOT be misconstrued as casting aspersions on the discipline or its many adherents with the onus of totalitarian ideology.
“Baba Ramdev’s Holy War” by Robert F. Worth; The New York Times Magazine; 7/29/2017.
. . . . This narrative about yoga’s ancient roots has become a sacrament for Hindu nationalists, and it is echoed in the West. But it is mostly myth, an idealized origin story of the kind so many would-be nation-builders, from ancient Rome to the Zionists, have fostered about themselves. The oldest Hindu scriptures contain almost no mention of physical postures. Even the Yoga Sutras, the so-called bible of yoga, include only a few short verses suggesting comfortable postures for sitting. Many of the postures practiced in yoga today appear to have emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Dozens of modern ashtanga yoga postures are similar or identical to those found in a gymnastic routine introduced to India by the British in the first decades of the 20th century and originally developed by a Danish fitness instructor named Niels Bukh, who later became notorious for his pro-Nazi sympathies. Bukh, needless to say, has been conveniently forgotten by both Indians and the yoga-loving celebrities of Hollywood. . . .
23. More about Niels Bukh: ” . . . . His system of exercise became highly popular in Germany, and in 1933 Bukh publicly expressed his allegiance to the National Socialist cause and its aim of improving the health of the Aryan race through gymnastics. . . .”
. . . . His 1924 book “Grundgymnastik eller primitiv gymnastik” (Basic or primitive gymnastics) was a manual in his method, which was later adopted by organizations such as the YMCA. Historian Mark Singleton has argued that through the YMCA and their gymnastics training in British India, Bukh’s exercises influenced Tirumalai Krishnamacharya’s style of Yoga[2][3][4] In 1931 his gymnastics team toured the world, visiting Japan where his system became highly influential. His system of exercise became highly popular in Germany, and in 1933 Bukh publicly expressed his allegiance to the National Socialist cause and its aim of improving the health of the Aryan race through gymnastics. This made Bukh unpopular in Denmark, especially after the German occupation of Denmark in 1940. . . .
24. Yoga’s popularity in Weimar Germany translated into an affinity for the discipline expressed by Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler, who also saw the physical regimen as an extension of the ancient “Aryan” past of India. That mythical Aryan past also became part of SS and Nazi atavistic occult ideology. ” . . . yoga was recommended to death camp guards in Nazi Germany. But that’s exactly what historian and yoga expert Mathias Tietke found as he researched his new book, ‘Yoga In National Socialism’. . . .”
“Nazi Leaders Fascinated by Yoga” [Yoga Journal Editors]; Yoga Journal; 2/24/2012.
Yoga is many things to many people—for some it is a spiritual practice while others consider it a physical exercise. But for most, what comes to mind when they think of yoga are scenes of peace and tranquility—at the least the search for peace and tranquility.
It’s hard to imagine, then, that yoga was recommended to death camp guards in Nazi Germany. But that’s exactly what historian and yoga expert Mathias Tietke found as he researched his new book, Yoga In National Socialism.
“It is associated with mental equilibrium, the search for wisdom and inner peace and is not considered to be about force or persecution,” Tietke told The Daily Mail. “Never the less, there is also this side to the history of yoga.”
It’s a very dark history.
Tietke’s research shows that not only were there S.S. leaders who were fascinated with yoga, they even used yoga’s history and philosophy to justify the Holocaust. S.S. Captain Jakob Wilhelm Hauer wrote “yoga can internally arm us to prepare us for the forthcoming battles,” while Commander Heinrich Himmler actually considered the Bhagavad Gita as a blueprint for cruelty. He identified with the attitude of “unscrupulous killing for one’s ‘higher purpose,’ ” wrote Tietke.
25. More about the SS/Yoga connection: ” . . . . It was seized on by race experts in the party as being the pursuit of ‘Ayran’ people. Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, an S.S. captain and yoga expert, who influenced his chief Himmler and convinced him that ‘yoga can internally arm us and prepare us for the forthcoming battles.’ . . . . Himmler, obsessed as he was with hocus-pocus race theories and mysticism relating to his S.S. ‘supermen,’ carried around a German copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him wherever he went. He regarded the ancient Sanskrit epic as being a blueprint for cruelty and terror, using it, said Tietke, to ultimately justify the Holocaust. He wrote; ‘He identified himself and the SS with the old Indian Kshatriya caste and its publicized attitude of unscrupulous killing for one’s ‘higher purpose.’ . . . . ”
This dovetails with the SS mythology/ideology, which saw the SS as the embodiment and fulfillment of the “Aryan” race.
” ‘Ve Hav Vays of Making You Relax’: How SS Recommended Yoga to Death Camp Guards as a Good Way to De-Stress” by Alan Hall; Daily Mail Online [UK]; 2/22/2012.
A German historian has discovered how the SS in Nazi Germany recommended its members — including death camp guards — practice yoga to enrich their ‘mind, bodies and spirits.’
The first ever book probing the Third Reich’s fascination with the ancient discipline — intended to attain ‘perfect spiritual insight and tranquility’ — was published this week, entitled Yoga In National Socialism by historian and yoga expert Mathias Tietke.
It shows how S.S. overlord Heinrich Himmler was fascinated with the discipline and perverted it and its ancient roots into a philosophy to justify the Holocaust. . . .
. . . . Tietke ploughed through thousands of Third Reich documents to chronicle the history of this most peaceful of pursuits in the time of the savagery of Nazism.
As well as the book he is planning an exhibition in Berlin later this year in the Gestapo museum called the Topography of Terror.
The Nazi interest in yoga lay in its roots in the 19th century when India mysticism was a favourite pursuit of the middle and upper classes and a great influence on romantic poets and philosophers.
During the Wiemar Republic, as the Nazis gained strength, yoga enjoyed a boom among a people weary of war, inflation, unemployment and misery.
More than 50 yoga books were published in the 1920’s in Berlin alone. And, as the Nazis corrupted most things they touched, so it was with yoga.
It was seized on by race experts in the party as being the pursuit of ‘Ayran’ people. Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, an S.S. captain and yoga expert, who influenced his chief Himmler and convinced him that ‘yoga can internally arm us and prepare us for the forthcoming battles.’
In 1937, four years after the Nazis attained power, the country’s first yoga centre opened up in Berlin and operated until it was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943.
The teacher who ran it had disciples in 50 German towns and cities. Himmler, obsessed as he was with hocus-pocus race theories and mysticism relating to his S.S. ‘supermen,’ carried around a German copy of the Bhagavad Gita with him wherever he went.
He regarded the ancient Sanskrit epic as being a blueprint for cruelty and terror, using it, said Tietke, to ultimately justify the Holocaust.
He wrote; “He identified himself and the SS with the old Indian Kshatriya caste and its publicised attitude of unscrupulous killing for one’s ‘higher purpose.’ ”
Tietke says Himmler’s attitude to ‘karma’ was never better displayed than at the secret speech he made to senior S.S. men at Poznan in 1943 when he spoke of the noble, virtuous work his butchers were performing in eliminating the Jews of Europe and Russia.
Himmler was also interested in other early Indian religious writings of India, including the Rigveda which contains the mythology of the Hindu gods. “These celebrated the racism of the Aryan immigrating from central Asia to India, killing and driving out designated ‘inferior’ opponents,” said Tietke.
28. In his book–one of the most important in recent memory–Yasha Levine sets forth vital, revelatory information about the development and functioning of the Internet.
Born of the same DARPA project that spawned Agent Orange, the Internet was never intended to be something good. Its generative function and purpose is counter-insurgency. In this landmark volume, Levine makes numerous points, including:
- The harvesting of data by intelligence services is PRECISELY what the Internet was designed to do in the first place.
- The harvesting of data engaged in by the major tech corporations is an extension of the data gathering/surveillance that was–and is–the raison d’etre for the Internet in the first place.
- The big tech companies all collaborate with the various intelligence agencies they publicly scorn and seek to ostensibly distance themselves from.
- Edward Snowden, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Jacob Appelbaum and WikiLeaks are complicit in the data harvesting and surveillance.
- Snowden and other privacy activists are double agents, consciously channeling people fearful of having their communications monitored into technologies that will facilitate that surveillance!
. . . . In the 1960s, America was a global power overseeing an increasingly volatile world: conflicts and regional insurgencies against US-allied governments from South America to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. These were not traditional wars that involved big armies but guerrilla campaigns and local rebellions, frequently fought in regions where Americans had little previous experience. Who were these people? Why were they rebelling? What could be done to stop them? In military circles, it was believed that these questions were of vital importance to America’s pacification efforts, and some argued that the only effective way to answer them was to develop and leverage computer-aided information technology.
The Internet came out of this effort: an attempt to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval. . . .
29. More about the development of the Internet as an information weapon in the context of counterinsurgency:
. . . . Ranch Hand got going in 1962 and lasted until the war ended more than a decade later. In that time, American C‑123 transport planes doused an area equal in size to half of South Vietnam with twenty million gallons of toxic chemical defoliants. Agent Orange was fortified with other colors of the rainbow: Agent White, Agent Pink, Agent Purple, Agent Blue. The chemicals, produced by American companies like Dow and Monsanto, turned whole swaths of lush jungle into barren moonscapes, causing death and horrible suffering for hundreds of thousands.
Operation Ranch Hand was merciless, and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. It remains one of the most shameful episodes of the Vietnam War. Yet the defoliation project is notable for more than just its unimaginable cruelty. The government body at its lead was a Department of Defense outfit called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Born in 1958 as a cash program to protect the United States from a Soviet nuclear threat from space, it launched several groundbreaking initiatives tasked with developing advanced weapons and military technologies. Among them were project Agile and Command and Control Research, two overlapping ARPA initiatives that created the Internet. . . .
29. In the early 1960’s, there was a plot afoot on the part of Nazi elements to use anti-Communism to enslave America. Might some of the elements we have seen in this series have coalesced in such a context? One cannot use anti-Communism to enslave America without Communists. Is this why we see far-right and explicitly fascist elements grouped around Bernie Sanders and AOC?
. . . . Garrison did not provide an explanation for all of the [David Ferrie] note’s subject matter. However, he did know the meaning of “flying Baragona in the Beech.” “Beech” refers to the model of Ferrie’s airplane, a Beechcraft. Baragona was a Nazi from Fort Sill. . . .
. . . . Garrison also obtained a transcript of a letter written by Ferrie to Baragona. Next to Baragona’s name, Garrison wrote: “Note Baragona is important.” The letter had been sent to Garrison by Glenn Pinchback, and a carbon copy was sent to Mendel Rivers, a congressman from Georgia. (Pinchback worked in the Operations Command at Fort Sill, where he intercepted mail.) In the letter, Ferrie shared his dream of the re-unification of Germany and living in a world where all the currency was in Deutschmarks. Pinchback’s summation of the letter described a “Neo-Nazi plot to enslave America in the name of anti-Communism,” and “a neo-Nazi plot gargantuan in scope.” The Ferrie letter spoke of the need to kill all the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . Pinchback also reportedly obtained a letter from David Ferrie to Baragona confessing his role in the assassination of Robert Gehrig, who was a Nazi and Fort Sill soldier. . . .”
30. We wonder if Subhas Chandra Bose will be a focal point for pro-Axis historical revisionism, positioning the fascists of World War II as “anti-colonialist” liberators?
An adulatory article in the Institute for Historical Review (published by the Holocaust revisionist and pro-Nazi Liberty Lobby) hails Bose, not Mahatma Gandhi, as the true liberator of India.
Interestingly, and perhaps significantly, the writer–Ranjan Borra–has a background as a writer for the Unification Church run and owned Washington Times. In FTR #970–among other programs–we examined the Unification Church as an extension of the Japanese Patriotic and Ultranationalist Societies, the most important of which was the Black Dragon Society, with which Subhas Chandra Bose networked.
Also interesting, and possibly significant is the fact that the hearsay allegation that Bose–not Gandhi–was responsible for the liberation of India is attributed to a Bengali politician named P.B. Chakrabarty. The last name differs by one letter from Bengali-American and Bose worshipper Saikat Chakrabarti. For all we know, this may be a very common Bengali last name.
We do wonder, however:
Is there any familial relation? Did Saikat’s family change the spelling of the name? Are there differences in translation and/or transliteration from Bengali?
. . . . Ranjan Borra . . . . contributed articles on Asian political affairs to various periodicals, including the daily Washington Times newspaper. . . .
Fascism and the Dangers of Economic Concentration
Here’s something potentially noteworthy in Saikat Chakrabarti’s background regarding the possibility that Chakrabarti has ties to Peter Thiel:
According to Chakrabarti’s LinkedIn profile, he joined Stripe, the online payment company, as a “Founding Engineer” in February of 2011 and worked there until May 2013. He built up the product team at Stripe during this period according to the Politico profile on Chakrabarti, so he was clearly a very important person at the company at this early stage.
Here’s the possible Thiel connection: Stripe was started in 2010 by Patrick and John Collison in 2010. According to the following article on the beginnings of the company, the brothers started working on Stripe in early 2010, spent about six months developing the core idea, and at that point they realized they were on to something big but needed institutional backing. The brothers went to Y Combinator to raise their capital. Y Combinator is a ‘startup accelerator’ that Patrick had already used to start an earlier company, Auctomatic. Y‑Combinator only invested $20,000-$30,000.
According to the article, it was that next summer (the summer of 2011) that the Collison brothers met with Peter Thiel after Thiel spoke at a Y‑Combinator dinner. Thiel, who co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk, had a number of insights into the online payment marketplace and offered to invest in Stripe. Thiel brought in Elon Musk, Sequia Capital, and Andreeseen Horowitz as investors and they raised $2 million.
So Chakrabarti joins Stripe in February of 2011 and in the summer of 2011 they meet Thiel who brings in a number of new investors. But as we’re going to see, that meeting with Thiel and the new investments must have happened well before the summer of 2011 because there is a Tech Crunch article from the end of March 2011 talking about Thiel and the rest of the new investors raising $2 million for Stripe. And in the actual interview that following article is based on, Patrick Collison makes it sound like Strip got its $2 million investment in the fall of 2010. It raises the question of whether or not Chakrabarti was brought on board after Thiel and the rest of his team of investors got involved. And if Chakrabarti’s involvement with Stripe only happened after Thiel invested, that raises the question of whether or not Chakrabarti already knew Thiel before joining Stripe. And whether or not he knew Thiel before joining Stripe, there’s still the question of what his relationship with Thiel is after joining Stripe and before jumping into left-wing politics.
As we’re also going to see, the following article is based on an interview that Patrick Collison. It’s a little over an hour. And at ~36 minutes into that interview, Patrick recounts that early fundraising and he puts a time frame of them getting funding from these investors at the end of the summer of 2010 and then spending the period from August 2010-September 2011 building the initial Stripe product. So based on that chronology, the hiring of Chakrabarti as the head of product development would have happened after this team of investors got involved:
“After 6‑months they determined they were onto something big and that they could create the user experience that they wanted. Both John and Patrick started working on it full-time in the fall of 2010. The company was still bootstrapped, but the founders were starting to realize that as a payment startup they would need institutional credibility that an investor could provide. According to them they “didn’t look great on paper.” (To each his own standards but in my book they qualified as extremely legit. Note first two paragraphs above) John became the President and Patrick the CEO.”
So in the Fall of 2010, the Collison brothers realized they were on to something big but needed investment. Y‑Combinator provides an initial $20k-$30k. But it was after they met Thiel at a Y‑Combinator dinner that Thiel the company raised $2 million. According to the article, this happened “that next summer”, which would have been the summer of 2011:
But according to the full interview that the article was based on, the timeline is somewhat different. Collison describes the initial investments from Thiel as happening in August of 2010 and then the company spent the next 14 months working on the product:
“[00:36:27.6] Patrick Collison: Then we basically spent the next fourteen months building the infrastructure that could actually make this work. Something from like August 2010 to the end of September 2011, it was building infrastructure. We finally launched it to the public I think it was 30th September 2011. Just over six months ago.”
Based on the interview transcript, it sounds like that 14 month period of building the Stripe infrastructure started in August of 2010 and took place after they raised their capital. So that’s a little mysterious. But then it gets weirder: According to the following article from March 28, 2011, the $2 million was raised by that point, but Stripe at that point wouldn’t comment on whether or not the financing happened at all. So we can be confident that the $2 million investment was made before the end of March 2011, but we don’t know when exactly it happened in part because Stripe wouldn’t even confirm it happened at all at that point:
“Apparently Stripe really doesn’t suck, because the company has taken approximately $2 million in a venture round from PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as well as Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz and SV Angel. Stripe was valued at around $20 million in the round, we’ve heard but haven’t confirmed. The company wouldn’t comment on whether or not the financing occurred at all.”
We’re left with a range of time when this investment led by Peter Thiel happened: some time between August of 2010 and March of 2011. And Chakrabarti joined Stripe in February 2011. So the available evidence strongly suggests Chakrabarti was one of the first people brought on board after this $2 million investment.
But regardless of when exactly it happened, the fact that Chakrabarti was apparently a key employee in this early phased of Strip suggests that Chakrabarti likely got to know Peter Thiel as a result of working there if he didn’t already know him. And given Thiel’s role as a key financier of far right politics in the US and Chakrabarti’s clear enthusiasm for Subhas Chandra Bose, the question of what kind of relationship Chakrabarti had with Thiel in the lead up to his decision to drop everything and jump into left-wing politics is a pretty relevant question.
Also keep in mind that if it does turn out to be the case that Chakrabarti has ties to Thiel, he wouldn’t be the only wealthy Silicon Valley veteran with ties to Thiel to jump into left-wing politics in recent years. Recall that Reid Hoffman, one of the early PayPal employees who went on to co-found LinkedIn, financed that ‘experiment’ by New Knowledge to run a network of twitter bots in the 2017 Alabama Senate race that posed as a Russian bot network in order to generate headlines about Russia trying to meddle in that race. New Knowledge was one of the companies that wrote the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the role Russian disinformation operations played in the 2016 election. Also recall that Hoffman has some rather disturbing right-wing views, like an opposition to government regulation, the New Deal, and a desire to see the Uber-style gig-economy model vastly expanded. So it would also be interesting to know what kind of history Chakrabarti might have with Hoffman.
@Pterrafractyl–
Although not decisive, this is substantively interesting and suggestive.
Recall that Thiel has German roots, possible I.G. Farben heritage, Sullivan & Cromwell employment (as discussed in FTR #718.) https://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ftr-718-in-your-facebook-a-virtual-panoptican/
In September of 1942, Chakrabarti’s apparent idol–Subhas Chandra Bose–founded the Deutsche-Indische Gesellschaft, which is the largest German bilateral organization in the Federal Republic and specializes in facilitating German professinals in India’s IT sector.
That organization is now headed by Surya Kumar Bose, SC’s grandnephew, who moved to Germany at the suggestion of Alexander Werth, the translator for S.C. Bose’s European fighting forces, which were ultimately folded into the Waffen SS.
S.K. Bose and Werth then collaborated with other World War II associates of Subhas Chandra Bose to concoct a glowing biography of “The Duce of Bengal.”
https://spitfirelist.com/news/supplement-to-the-socialists-for-trump-and-hitler-the-assistance-series-walkin-the-cobra-in-india/
One wonders if this concatenation may play a role in any Thiel-Chakrabarti collaboration in the political field?
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Dave
Feds probing AOC’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti after sudden resignation
By Mary Kay Linge and Jon Levine August 3, 2019 | 9:40pm | Updated
https://nypost.com/2019/08/03/feds-probing-aocs-chief-of-staff-saikat-chakrabarti-after-sudden-resignation/
@Roberto Maldonado–
I will be updating Chakrabarti in the next show, to be recorded this week.
He comes from Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world and a significant capital backer of Palantir.
James Comey was their chief legal counsel, before he became head of the FBI and helped Trump in office.
AOC’s resume and the tangle of entities set up by “Subhas Chandra” Chakrabarti absolutely stink.
I will be linking this concatenation to what I believe to be an “Immigrant Psy‑O.”
“Subhas Chandra” Chakrabarti may well be linked to Thiel through the online payment company Stripe. Covered this some time ago and will review it in one of the next shows.
My take on AOC initially was that she was an unwitting tool, identified by social media-scouring AI’s early on in her prospective ascent.
Now I am not so sure. She might be an operative.
Certainly, she is working tirelessly to brand the Democrats as the Illegal Immigrant Party, which will not sit well with voters.
Guys like the El Paso shooter are following along a well-established path.
Trump did not pave the road–he, too, is traveling that path, having joined it on an on-ramp (the Christian West GOP.)
Oh well.
Best,
Dave
Cenk Uygur Defends Joining WHITE SUPREMACIST Charlie Kirk at Fascist Rally On Stage At MAGA Event: Progressives Want to ‘Overthrow Our Establishment, Too’
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/cenk-uygur-defends-joining-charlie-kirk-on-stage-at-maga-event-progressives-want-to-overthrow-our-establishment-too/ar-AA1wotRx
Cenk Uygur from the Young Turks has undergone in the past few months, which has culminated in his joining racist Charlie Kirk on stage at a Turning Point USA event in Arizona, where they shook hands and discussed drinking beers with one another, despite their “differences of opinion.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a12iprkq3BU&t=216s