radical awakening: from america hater to hero, by matthew vadum (townhall magazine, april 2010)

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


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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)


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!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)

radical awakening: from america hater to hero, by matthew vadum (townhall magazine, april 2010)

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