El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells’ Communist Fixation
Slowly but surely the anti-vaxx/anti-mask crowd is revealing their extremist connections, along with their tenuous connection to reality. I guess once you start buying into conspiracy theories it’s hard to stop. And the way to distract people from facts is to yell the loudest.
At a Friday afternoon rally by “Reopen San Diego,” SDPD Sgt. Matt Randolph claimed, “Today we’re at war again.” I’m guessing he’s into the glories of violence.
“We are experiencing 1776 all over again” and referenced the biblical David who slayed Goliath, telling the crowd to “stay in prayer, but also understand that prayer is not enough, as even David had to pick up a rock.”
The crowd cheered him.
A 17 year old kid illegally carrying a weapon of war across state lines has been exalted to sainthood, leaders in congress refuse to condemn acts (or threats) of violence, and a street gang (Proud Boys) have proclaimed themselves as enforcers for the anti-anti-anti crowd.
Yeah, I can see how supporters of Reopen San Diego would cheer that kind of crap.
El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells apparently didn’t think glorifying violence was enough. He wanted the crowd to be afraid, but lacking any real ideas, resorted to adding some buzzwords wrapped in lies.
“The people who are pressing these vaccine mandates on us are the same people who are allowing our border to be open, that are allowing ‘Critical Race Theory’ to be taught to our children, that of course are using COVID as a reason to take away our rights, to thrust tyranny upon us, to tear America down to its studs and remake it in a Communist utopia,” he said.
Say what? Wells has got to have the most flexible spine in the world if he can reach that far up his rectum to come up with “facts” like that.
The same sort of public health measure that dates back to George Washington (who required his troops to smear smallpox pus on themselves so they’d build antibodies) is now part of a communist plot?
Wait! Were communists even invented back then?
Didn’t Communism, Inc. get sold to Oligarchs R Us more than three decades ago? Aren’t the Chinese the ones who are smart enough to know that holding the mortgage on a run down property is better than paying rent?
I’m confused. Where are these communists directing public officials to not make America great again?
The fact is that these communists Bill Wells and his cohorts talk about don’t exist.
If you put conservtaive politicians into a corner on the question of who the communists are, they’ll probably name some leftish elected Democrats.
None of them espouse communist programs. Some of them are Democratic Socialists, ala that thing they do in Europe called a social safety net..
When conservatives use the socialist/commie descriptors, they’re quick to draw comparisons with totalitarian regimes, Cuba, China, Venezuela, North Korea. That’s called “projection,” as so many of the right flock to authoritarian countries to soak up the “freedom” of anti-semitism, gay bashing, and even old fashioned white supremacy. They accuse others of doing what they’re doing.
In other democracies, our lefty Democrats are mainstream or even conservative. This may come as a shock to some folks, but the United States (by most rankings) is now considered a flawed democracy.
From the Guardian:
The US has fallen to a new low in a global ranking of political rights and civil liberties, a drop fueled by unequal treatment of minority groups, damaging influence of money in politics, and increased polarization, according to a new report by Freedom House, a democracy watchdog group.
The US earned 83 out of 100 possible points this year in Freedom House’s annual rankings of freedoms around the world, an 11-point drop from its ranking of 94 a decade ago. The US’s new ranking places it on par with countries like Panama, Romania and Croatia and behind countries such as Argentina and Mongolia. It lagged far behind countries like the United Kingdom (93), Chile (93), Costa Rica (91) and Slovakia (90).
Are conservatives really speaking of economic freedom? Again, the arrows point in the other direction. The global economic rankings compiled by the Heritage Foundation show the US has dropped from 10th to 21st place in the past decade.
So where are all these alleged communists infiltrating our government with silly ideas like public health programs and honest history courses?
You have to look back to 1958, and a two day meeting in Indianapolis where the John Birch Society was formed. The funders of the group included retired candy executive Robert W. Welch and Fred C. Koch (daddy to Charles and David), who provided much of the initial funding.
Welch’s Blue Book of the John Birch Society was the foundational document.
"...both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'”
Welch saw collectivism as the main threat to western culture, and American liberals as "secret communist traitors" who provided cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with a one-world socialist government. "There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general," he wrote, "but Communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction."
While Republicans and conservatives in general initially viewed the JBS as an extremist group, the core beliefs espoused in Indianapolis have come to dominate the right in recent years.
Communism is now the verbal stand-in for words like globalists, elite technocrats, Islamist cabal, cultural Marxists and global bankers. And, when righties think they can get away with it, they’ll drop in the name George Soros as code for Jews.
Calling out one's political enemies as communists was the gold standard for Republicans and their fellow travelers back in the day. The infamous McCarthy era witch hunts actually occurred when the party was in decline and may have actually amplified its influence..
Communists as a political force in the US waned in influence thanks to Comrade Stalin’s on again/ off again embrace of Herr Hitler and Nikita Kruschev’s mid fifties decision to denounce his former patron. (That’s the short version.)
What made the Communist Party attractive to many in the US prior to WWII (and scared the heck out of reactionaries) was its (seemingly) internal discipline and focus on the welfare of downtrodden and otherwise excluded parts of society. It was also essentially a social gathering point for intellectuals.
The propaganda connection made by segregationists in the 1950s and 60s between Communists and civil rights advocacy was based on the CPUSA arguing for ending segregation long before Brown vs. Board of Education.
One area where they had lasting success was professional sports.
The Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, which was published in New York City, began campaigning for integration in baseball shortly after Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Sportswriters for The Daily Worker, including sports editor Lester Rodney, compared the racism in Nazi Germany to the racism in the United States.
During the next decade, that paper published hundreds of columns and articles calling for the desegregation of baseball. Its sportswriters excoriated the baseball establishment for perpetuating the color ban and pressured major league owners to give tryouts to black ballplayers.
Over the years I have, in fact, met some people who called themselves communists, some of whom even were capital “C” communists. In the 1970s, when I lived in Washington DC, we’d shy away from them because they were a) bossy and b) probably FBI informants.
As the New Left metastasized, there were all kinds of groups claiming they were the “real communists.” Some of them exist in some fashion today. None of them could have even imagined the concept of public health measures as an organizing technique. When they weren’t fighting each other, they were mostly working hard at coming up with the Perfect Analysis.
The myth keeping them meeting late into the night was that any group who could cram the Bolsheviks (or Trotskyists, or Maoist) wisdom into a founding document in plain English would be rewarded with the undying loyalty of the working class. Taking over the county health department was never part of the agenda.
None of these people, even if they are still active today, have ever met or had enough access to influence any of the politicians who the El Cajon Mayor claims are dooming us.
So when you hear Bill Wells and his ilk going on about communists, understand that what they are really after is keeping people afraid.
Push the right buttons and you can get people to do a lot of things… burning books… bringing weapons to otherwise peaceful protests… assaulting retail employees in defense of the “freedom” to not wear a mask… and even shutting down governmental meetings…
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