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7/31/2019 Radical Awakening: From America Hater to Hero, by Matthew Vadum (Townhall magazine, April 2010)
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52 TOWNHALL April 2010
!The Extreme Left
7/31/2019 Radical Awakening: From America Hater to Hero, by Matthew Vadum (Townhall magazine, April 2010)
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April 2010 TOWNHALL53
The Extreme Left
id you know that a courageous
former radical helped to avert a
planned left-wing terrorist attack at the
2008 Republican National Convention
that might have killed who knows how
many Americans?
Neither did I until recently.
Thats because if you disrupt a
terrorist attack on Americans by
Islamic fundamentalists as Northwest
Flight 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa
did on Christmas Day, youre a hero;
however, if you take the initiativeto undermine a terrorist attack
on Americans by supposedly well-
intentioned left-wing fundamentalists,
you might as well be a terrorist
yourself.
Brandon Darby, who in recent years
also refused leftists invitations to get
involved in Venezuelan communist
subversion here in America and in anti-
Israeli terrorism in Palestine, learned
this unpalatable truth the hard way.
THE LEFT-WING PLOT TO
KILL REPUBLICANS
After years of in-your-face protests,
confrontational tactics and working
with America-haters, Darby eventually
experienced a political epiphany. He
rejected the radical Left and its culture of
political violence. He came to realize that
America, for all its faults, wasnt such a
bad place after all.
I felt I had a duty to atone after
badmouthing my country for so many
years, Darby told me in an interview. I
love my country.
But Darby didnt always love his
country.
Darby previously considered himself a
revolutionary. His charisma and militant
anti-Americanism made the intense
Texan a larger-than-life figure amongleftist activists in the South.
He openly called for the overthrow
of the U.S. government, which he
considered too corrupt and oppressive to
be reformed. He expressed his hatred of
police as guardians of the status quo. He
consorted with eco-terrorist tree-spikers,
radical feminists and black nationalists.
He was approached to rob an armored
car and asked to commit arson to fight
gentrification. He mouthed politically
correct slogans and platitudes about the
Bush administration. Government didntcare about people, and in his eyes, the
much-maligned response to Hurricane
Katrina proved it.
But around the same time, the former
radical community organizer was turning
away from radicalism, and at tremendous
personal risk, he undermined a left-
wing terrorist plot to attack the 2008
Republican National Convention in St.
Paul, Minn. If he hadnt taken action,
Americans exercising their free speech
rights and police officers might have
been killed.
Without informing his fellow
anarchists, Darby offered his assistance to
the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and,
at the FBIs request, infiltrated a left-
wing group known as the Austin Affinity
Group. The outfit had joined with a larger
coalition of progressive organizations
that facetiously called itself the RNC
Welcoming Committee. The committee
hoped to lay siege to the GOP convention
that nominated the presidential ticket of
John McCain and Sarah Palin.
The FBI sent Darby to meet with
anarchists who were developing their plan
at a bookstore in Austin.
It was a group of people whose
explicit purpose was to organize a group
of black bloc anarchists to shut the
Republican convention down by any
means necessary, he explained. They
showed videos of people throwing
Molotov cocktails, and
they were giving people
ideas.
The two 20-something
plotters on whom Darby
informed, David Guy
McKay and Bradley
Neil Crowder, had made
homemade riot shields
and were ready to use
them in St. Paul to help demonstrators
block streets near the Xcel Energy Centerin order to prevent GOP delegates from
participating in the convention. The
shields were discovered and confiscated.
But McKay and Crowder were
undeterred by this setback. Together
they manufactured instruments of death
calculated to inflict maximum pain and
bodily harm on people whose political
views they disagreed with.
During a search of a residence, police
found gas masks, slingshots, helmets,
knee pads and eight Molotov cocktails
consisting of bottles filled with gasolinewith attached wicks made from tampons.
They mixed gasoline with oil so it
would stick to clothing and skin and burn
longer, Darby told me.
Thanks to Darbys cooperation with the
FBI, the two anarchist would-be bomb
throwers are now languishing in prison.
McKay entered a guilty plea and was
sentenced in May 2009 to 48 months
in prison plus three years of supervised
release for possession of an unregistered
Brandon Darby learnedsomething from HugoChavezs Venezuela. Oncea hard-core radical whosided with progressiverevolutionaries, Darby
prevented a left-wingterrorist attack on the2008 GOP convention.Now, this America-lovingpatriot is the target of thedomestic extremists heonce called friends.
RADICALAWAKENING:From AmericaHater to Hero
By Matthew Vadum
This picture of a wanted poster for BrandonDarby was taken in Austin, Texas. Radical lefistswanted Darby punished for his role in helping theFBI spoil a lef-wing terrorist attack. (psiopradio.com)
7/31/2019 Radical Awakening: From America Hater to Hero, by Matthew Vadum (Townhall magazine, April 2010)
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54 TOWNHALL April 2010
!The Extreme Left
firearm, illegal manufacture of a firearm
and possession of a firearm with no serial
number. A week before, Crowder cut a
deal with prosecutors and was sentenced
to 24 months in prison for possession of
an unregistered firearm.
McKay received the stiffer sentence
in part because he fabricated a tall tale
about Darbys involvement in the plot.
During sentencing, U.S. District Judge
Michael Davis went out of his way to
make a specific legal finding that McKay
obstructed justice by falsely accusing
Darby of inducing him to manufacture
the incendiary devices.
Davis told McKay he crossed the line
between peaceful dissent and violent
protest. You were leading the charge.
You and Crowder were coming up here
[to Minnesota] to do anarchy against the
system.
But now the story takes a strange turn.
After Darby, who until the end of
2008 had been a confidential FBI
informant, revealed that he had worked
with authorities to pre-empt the violent
conspiracy, he became the subject of
a campaign of vilification by the Left.
Google Darbys name and the words
snitch and rat appear. Cyber-squatters
appropriated his name and created a
hateful Web site to defame him.
The floodgates of abuse burst open
after Darby acknowledged in an open
letter posted at an alternative news Website that not only had he worked with the
FBI, but he also strongly stood behind
his decision to do so.
The irretrievably liberal New York
Times ignored his heroism. A Jan. 5,
2009, article focused not on Darbys life-
saving intervention but on the feelings of
betrayal his former allies in left-wing
anarchist circles were experiencing.
The paper showed how shocked and
appalled Scott Crow, who with Darby
co-founded the Common Ground Relief
agency in New Orleans after HurricaneKatrina, was after learning about Darbys
cooperation with the FBI.
I put it all on the line to defend him
when accusations first came out, Crow
said. Brandon Darby is somebody
I had entrusted with my life in New
Orleans, and now I feel endangered by
him. Why someone who presumably
hadnt committed a crime would feel
endangered by knowing an FBI
informant is unclear.
ACORN founder Wade Rathke, who
worked as a professional agitator for the
violent Students for a Democratic Society
in the 1960s, would have preferred that
Republican delegates be incinerated.
He denounced Darby for working with
the authorities to disrupt the domestic
terrorists. It seemed so, how should I
say it, 60s?
Its one thing to disagree, but its a
whole different thing to rat on folks,
Rathke wrote on his blog.
This response to ideological apostasy
is not altogether surprising. Leftists whoabandon their faith are demonized by
their former co-religionists. Relentless
attacks on Greenpeace co-founder
Patrick Moore and former radical David
Horowitz continue to the present day,
decades after they moved rightward.
RIGHT-WING VIOLENCE BAD, LEFT-
WING VIOLENCE GOOD?
Compare the treatment of Darby at the
hands of the Left to the respectful
often grovelingtreatment afforded
ObamaCare architect Robert Creamer.A HuffingtonPost.com contributor
and husband of shrill socialist Rep. Jan
Schakowsky, D-Ill., Creamer served prison
time for kiting checks and failing to pay
withholding taxes for his leftist nonprofit,
Illinois Public Action Fund. Just like his
liberal friends in Congress and the Obama
administration, he refused to roll back
spending and instead created a modified
Ponzi scheme in order to continue drawing
his full $100,000 salary.
This crusader for social justice and
political consultant to Democratic
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and
impeached Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod
Blagojevich even whined at his 2006
sentencing that he received a five-month
period of incarceration, well below the
30 to 37 months called for in federal
sentencing guidelines. The media failed
to call him on it.
Convicted cop-killing activists Leonard
Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal are
legends on the Left. Black Panther Abu-
Jamal in particular enjoys a cult followingamong radicals even though no serious
personincluding Abu-Jamal himself,
who failed to claim to be innocent at his
trialcontests that in 1981 he shot and
killed Philadelphia police officer Daniel
Faulkner in cold blood.
Creamer, Peltier and Abu-Jamal are
all heroes to the Left no matter what
they did, and to some preciselybecause
ofwhat they did.
This is because on the Left there is a
presumption of good intentions even by
fellow-traveling terrorists. As left-wingtalk radio host Thom Hartmann told me
last year: My left-wing crazies are better
than your right-wing crazies.
Hartmann explained: Your right-wing
crazies are incited to violence based on
fear and hate of people because of whom
they are, because theyre gay, because
theyre Catholic, because theyre Jewish,
because theyre black, because theyre
Hispanic. And our left-wing crazies are
incited to violence because theyre trying
Liberal activists David McKay, lef, and Bradley Crowder, the infamous Texas 2, are both serving timefollowing their foiled terrorist attack on the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis.(Freethetexas2.com)
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The Extreme Left
to create a better world. Theyre trying
to save the environment in the case
of the eco-terrorists. Theyre trying to
end the Vietnam War in the case of the
Weather Underground. Theyre trying to
bring about civil rights in the case of the
Symbionese Liberation Army and some of
the other black terrorist groups that were
operating in the 1970s (emphasis added).
To the Left, violent acts aimed at
desirable ends are worthy of praise,
especially if aimed at the other side.
Internationally known Marxist author
Naomi Klein has praised the riots that
took place during the 1999 World Trade
Organization meeting in Seattle and
openly called for violence at the 2004
Republican convention, urging protesters
to bring the Iraq War to the streets of
New York City. The Canadian writer
wasnt ostracized by the Left after her
outrageous statement; if anything, her
public stature has only grown since 2004.
If right-wing terrorists plotted to
attack a Democratic National Convention,
whoever foiled the conspiracy would be
immortalized in film, literature and song
as a savior of democracy.
If you flip the equation around and
it had been a group of conservatives
threatening to use force to prevent those
on the Left from meeting, everyone would
expect the government to infiltrate them
and they would also expect the FBI to
stop them and charge them with crimes,Darby said. But when its leftists that
organize to prevent Republicans from
being able to meet, then all of a sudden
its considered government oppression.
Theres something wrong with that, and
no one points that out, and its really
offensive and damaging to our system.
Social justice-oriented terrorism isnt
ugly and anti-American, according to the
nations entertainment-media complex;
its downright praiseworthy and hip. So it
should come as no surprise that Crowder
and McKay are in the process of beingrehabilitated by the Left.
Early on, the duo became a cause
clbre for the Left, dubbed the Texas
2. Now documentary filmmakers are
currently making a movie about them
calledyou guessed itBetter This
World. The documentary, which is
reportedly in the post-production phase,
received an HBO Documentary Films
Fellowship.
No doubt there will be more praise
heaped on them as they ascend to
the Lefts pantheon of social justice
champions, joining Bill Ayers, Bernardine
Dohrn and the Unabomber.
THE JOURNEY AWAY FROM
RADICALISM
But no one is singing the praises of Darby,
a genuine American hero.
Born in Pasadena, Texas, in 1976,
Darbys efforts in post-Katrina New
Orleans were highlighted favorably in
the media, most notably in a Jonathan
Demme documentary that was shown on
the Tavis Smiley Show on PBS.
When Darby learned people were
suffering in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina, he moved there, defying police
orders not to enter the stricken city. With
$50, he co-founded Common Ground
in the home of Malik Rahim, a veteran
community organizer and former Black
Panther who did prison time for armed
robbery.
When we started, everyone in thecity was armed, everyone was scared,
and there was a complete lack of law
enforcement, said Darby. The few roving
bands of law enforcement that were
present didnt like us very much because
of the fact that we were involved with
people like Malik Rahim, who to this day
continues to advocate for those who have
attacked law enforcement personnel.
We were young, we were caught up in
the fervor of helping others and fighting
injustice, and at that time, we couldnt see
why people like law enforcement didnt
like Malik, Darby said.
Common Ground was no mere
relief agency. It was a group of far-Left
revolutionaries who viewed their work as
an extension of their politics.
In a promotional video, Rahim
thunders to volunteers: You are showing
this government that the people, that the
people in this country do care for peace
and justice and that we will stand for
peace and justice and that we will do what
it takes to restore peace and justice back
to America.
When Common Ground was
threatened, the radical Left mobilized to
defend it. Police were freaked out because
there were all these Black Panthers whod
had shootouts with the police years ago,
and theyre in this house and they refused
to leave, so it turned into this really
stressful ordeal, Darby explained.
Despite many obstacles, Common
Ground quickly became a successful
nonprofit group that helped alleviate the
suffering of poor people in the devastated
city, especially in the hard-hit 9th Ward.
Supported by donations that flowed
in from across the country, in its first
three years 22,000 volunteers worked
for Common Ground. A magnet for
outraged radicals ranging from garden-
variety collectivists to militant vegans to
pagan lesbians, the group gutted flood-damaged houses without bothering to
obtain permits and provided free health
care and meals.
The group was profiled by ABCs
Nightline, and the media treated
Darby as a savior. With its contributions
to the city, the group began to wield
political influence, Darby said. Even its
initial detractors begrudgingly admitted
Common Grounds positive impact on the
Crescent City.
Over time, a lot of the things Darby
experienced with Common Ground ledhim to question his political beliefs, and
these experiences offer a window into
what happens when the radical Left takes
over an area.
In bed with real-estate developers,
New Orleans wanted to use eminent
domain to condemn many vacant flood-
damaged houses. According to Darby,
many anarchists refused to join his
fight to protect the property rights of
homeowners, because they didnt believe
Community organizer and former Black PantherMalik Rahim speaks to an anti-war rally in SanFrancisco. Brandon Darby started CommonGround in Rahims home in New Orleans.(RobertBruce Livingston)
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!The Extreme Left
in private property.
I just started putting the call out,
and all these libertarians, Republicans
and Democrats, started showing up.
And what we would do was any time
there were bulldozers we would just get
in front of them and wouldnt let them
work, he said. We had our lawyers
file lawsuits, and so next thing you
know, they backed away from it. And
they started to work with us to identify
where the residents were, and wed ask
the residents if they wanted their place
demolished or not.
Darby defied the politically correct
consensus method of group decision-
making and riled feathers by daring to tell
aimless volunteers what to do.
After vegan volunteers took over the
Common Ground kitchen and tried
to inflict their dietary preferences on
the poor, it occurred to Darby that
the leftist-anarchist approach with its
aversion to hierarchy would never work
in the real world.
Like most people driven by a strong
dogma, the majority of the people who
took over were from Berkeley, and they
came in under the guise of helping, he
said. They tried to use the experience to
correct the culture and lifestyle of the
working-class poor. They tried to use the
black residents of New Orleans as lab rats
and guinea pigs, and I didnt like that at
alland the residents didnt like it either.For example, some of the activists tried
to organize the residents into collectives,
and another group of gay activists took
over part of a church that had donated
its space to help relief efforts. We were
helping to rebuild the church, but then
some radicals took over and started using
over half the space and designated it as a
queer safe place, Darby said.
This infuriated the church leadership
who were already uncomfortable with
being associated with so many radical
activists.Its not about you coming here and
creating your utopia, Darby explained.
Its about helping these residents and
making them feel comfortable. The
radicals wanted to make residents sit
through political orientations in order to
get fed. I objected and that got me called
a dictator.
Common Ground leaders continued to
insist on indoctrinating young volunteers
and on continuing with in-your-face
protest tactics, which lost their usefulness
after the group became well established
and had connections with people in the
city, Darby said.
The people making decisions for
the city about how aid was distributed
and about where FEMA work crews
and search-and-rescue crews operated,
developed relationships with us, he
explained. They were completely open
to hear our perspective and wanted us to
participate in what decisions were made,
but unfortunately many of the other
community organizers were stuck in a
fight-the-power dogma, which ultimately
hindered their ability to serve those
in need. There was no official of local
government there that we couldnt
call on their cell phone and set up a
dinner meeting with or enjoy a cup of
coffee with.
After initially having rocky relations
with the New Orleans Police and other
local authority figures, Darby came to
realize that, in the hurricane-ravaged city,
relief volunteers and the authorities were
on the same sideboth sides wanted to
help people.
Darbys eureka moment came as
he began to accept the idea that not
everyone in government was a villain.
He credits Maj. John Bryson of the New
Orleans Police Department (NOPD) with
helping him to stop viewing everyone in
government as the enemy.Bryson, who, in the wake of Katrina,
was the NOPDs 5th District commander,
an area that encompassed the especially
hard-hit Lower 9th Ward, observed
Darbys transformation over time.
When Bryson first met Darby, he was
so up in my face it was unbelievable,
Bryson told me. Radical was too weak a
word to describe Darby, Bryson said.
When the two first met, Darby
promised that his fellow activists would
be videotaping police and that they
wouldnt hesitate to report anything theydidnt like to the media. Bryson helped to
improve the relationship by giving Darby
his cell phone number and told him to
contact him directly if police officers
misbehaved.
Bryson offered to help Darby but
cautioned him that if we find that you
are not here to help our citizens, then
were going to have a problem, Bryson
explained, and that was our agreement.
Over time, the two, who had been
filled with mutual distrust and hostility,
began to get along, even to like each
other as friends.
Bryson watched Common Ground
which, in the immediate aftermath of
Katrina, he said, had more people on the
ground than the federal government
begin to flourish. The group opened
shelters for women, families and
children, offering services to locals that
governments at the time were unable to
provide.
As relations with the police improved
dramatically, Darby confessed to Bryson
that he had never had this kind of
positive relationship with any kind of law
enforcement personnel. The feeling was
mutual.
Bryson praised Darby for cooperating
with the FBI:
Everybody [on the Left] hates
Brandon because he did the right thing
for the right reasons. Anytime anyone
in this country, in this state, in this city,
or even in this world is going to do some
horrible things to innocent people, if a
good man does not stand up, or a good
woman for that matter, then were in
trouble. And Brandon stood up and did
the right then. He stole my heart as he
said, I thought about you and how well
you worked with us, and I couldnt see
innocent people getting hurt.
PLOTS ABROAD
Although Darbys positive experiences
with New Orleans police had forced him
to begin questioning his anarchist beliefs,
a trip to Marxist Venezuela helped to kill
off his remaining radical impulses.
The trip came as the U.S. government
was taking a beating in the media for its
post-Katrina relief efforts. At the time,
Venezuelas communist strongman, Hugo
Chavez, began trying to embarrass the
Bush administration by offering aid to the
Katrina-hit Gulf Coast.
Chavez had already been runningwhat political scientists call a public
diplomacy campaign in the U.S. to help
bolster American support for his regime.
The propaganda effort consisted of
funneling discounted home heating oil to
former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedys, D-Mass.,
nonprofit group, Citizens Energy Corp.
The nonprofit then distributed the oil to
poor people, and Kennedy went on TV
to berate the Bush administration, which
he said cut fuel assistance. Kennedy
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The Extreme Left
boosted his benefactor, boasting in a
commercial that CITGO, owned by the
Venezuelan people, had helped poor
Americans while their own government
stood idly by.
Darby traveled to Caracas in 2006 as
part of a Common Ground delegation to
the Chavez government to seek funding to
keep Common Ground afloat.
I had this idea of having Chavez
trailers for displaced residents to live
in. This would embarrass FEMA into
supplying trailers, he said.
Darby said he didnt realize when he
came up with the concept that using
money from abroad to influence the U.S.
government might be illegal, but Chavez
government officials he met with insisted
it would violate U.S. law.
They told me I would get in trouble,
and they wanted to work out a way to
make the project happen, he said.
In the month he was there, Venezuelan
officials introduced him to executives
of PDVSA, the government-owned
oil company that owns CITGO, which
operates a chain of gas stations in the
U.S. They pressured Darby to journey
to neighboring Colombia to meet with
a group aligned with the narco-terror
organization FARC and to visit another
revolutionary group in Maracaibo,
Venezuela.
According to Darby, Chavez wanted to
create a terrorist network in Louisianaafter Hurricane Katrina. This is the
same Chavez who blamed the recent
earthquake in Haiti on the United States
and who called President George W.
Bush the Devil during a United Nations
speech, so some might find his efforts
at subversive activities in the United
States hard to take seriously. However,
its important to remember that Chavez
has close ties to Iran and Cuba and allows
terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah to
operate offices in Caracas.
(Long before he learned of the RNCplot, Darby reached out to the FBI to
undermine terrorism. A longtime Texas
friend, the late Riad Hamad, had tried
to hijack Darbys plan to provide medical
assistance in war-torn parts of the world.
Darby wanted to create a group called
Critical Response that would have sent
medics into war zones to help civilians
caught in the crossfire in places such as
Lebanon and Darfur. Hamad, founder
of the much-investigated Palestinian
Childrens Welfare Fund, told him he
wanted to send medics to Israel and put
explosives on motorcycles and booby-
trap ambulances in order to kill Jews.
Hamad also hatched an elaborate plan to
funnel money to Hamas and Hezbollah.
Around the same time, Darby viewed
a very graphic Israeli first responders
training video. At the time I was
conflicted about what to do, but seeing
the dead bodies of Israeli children in
that tape made the so-called Palestinian
activists chant no justice, no peace, take
on a whole new meaning. I decided the
only ethical thing to do was to tell law
enforcement what I knew.)
To Darbys astonishment, during
his stay in Caracas, senior officials in
the Chavez government and in PDVSA
told him they wanted him to create a
revolutionary army of guerrillas in the
swamps of Louisiana.
At the very last meeting they rampedup the pressure, Darby said. They
taunted him, saying, What? Youre not a
revolutionary?
Despite intense pressure from his
Venezuelan hosts, he refused.
This was the last straw for him.
I realized I didnt like Venezuela,
the authoritarianism of it, and I started
to realize how brilliant and miraculous
the American system of checks and
balances was, Darby said. There was still
something brilliant about the fact that
this nation had institutionalized a system
of checks and balances that has been
working since this nation was founded. I
realized just how hard a task that is.
Common Ground, divided by
radical factions with harebrained ideas
constantly warring with each other, was
a living example of left-wing radicalism
in action.
When I would leave Common Ground
for a few days I would be worried that a
power vacuum could develop and factions
could displace me while I was away, and
thats just the way things are in places like
Venezuela, he said. It is actually absurd
to want the United States government to
go away, and thats when it really hit me
that my ideas were wrong.
Darby said hes still proud of his
Common Ground experience on the whole.
Im proud of helping people, but
Im ashamed of what I used to believe,Darby admitted. Thankfully, I had
the honor of serving my country by
working undercover with the FBI and
participating in efforts to protect the
safety and civil rights of others.
Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at
Capital Research Center, a Washington,
D.C., think tank that studies the politics
of philanthropy.
This poster, created by the RNC Welcoming Committee, a radical anti-Republican, lefist group,
called on activists to rally against the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. (RNCWelcoming Committee, nornc.org)