Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum’s political career has been nurtured by one of the country’s most powerful socialists: San Francisco attorney Steve Phillips, a self-identified student of “Marx, Mao, and Lenin” who has worked closely with student radicals supportive of the Communist Party of China.
In fact, a group who has become a major force in Gillum’s campaign is also supportive of the communist leadership in China. In this same vein, Gillum also spent much of 2012 studying with a communist-led activist training school based in California.
Gillum, who is currently polling six points ahead of his conservative Republican opponent Ron DeSantis, could become Florida’s next governor.
Phillips is the power behind Gillum. Author of “Brown Is the New White,” Phillips has made it his mission to support progressive candidates of color for high office. This strategy, according to Phillips, will energize minority voters to vote, pushing hard-left candidates into positions of power.
Phillips has provided vast sums of money to Gillum, who shares his hard-left ideological perspective.
Steve Phillips
Describing his radical history, Phillips wrote in a Dec. 20, 2012, article for the PowerPAC+ publication Political Intelligence:“First, let me make clear that I come out of the Left. I’ve studied Marx, Mao, and Lenin. In college ... I palled around with folks who considered themselves communists and revolutionaries. ... My political baptism was the Jesse Jackson 1984 Presidential campaign.”
Phillips was a student at Stanford University in the mid-late 1980s. The “communists” to which Phillips refers were cadres of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), a 3,000-strong pro-China revolutionary group that served as the backbone of Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition.” While Phillips has publicly denied being a member of the communist LRS, he wrote for the LRS newspaper Unity and led several LRS-influenced organizations. When LRS split in 1990, Phillips emerged as a public leader of the majority Unity Organizing Committee faction.
Phillips worked in both the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Jackson, taking a year off school in 1988 to work full-time as Jackson’s West Coast student organizer.
Phillips learned a lot from Jackson. The major lesson was that the key to building unbeatable electoral power was to couple the “progressive white” and “low propensity” voting minority populations behind leftist “candidates of color.”
Marxism and Money
After college, newly minted attorney Phillips married fellow Stanford alumni Susan Sandler, the daughter of leftist savings and loan billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler.The Sandler family has used their money to support leftist groups such as ProPublica and the Center for American Progress. The money opened doors for Phillips and Susan Sandler. They were invited to serve on influential boards. They became very influential in Democratic Party circles.
There likely would have been no President Obama without Steve Phillips.
Phillips also established PowerPAC+, PowerPAC.org, and Democracy in Color specifically to fund and campaign for “candidates of color.” Many of PowerPAC+’s board members were Phillips’s former student Maoist friends from Stanford. PowerPAC.org endorsed five “candidate of color” gubernatorial candidates in the 2018 election cycle.
Andrew Gillum, mayor of Tallahassee, served on the PowerPAC+ board from approximately 2012 to 2016.
“Our work involves researching where votes of color can make a difference in races, how demographic trends can affect [sic] change in public policy and leadership, and how civic engagement methodologies can change how campaigns are run.
“As we move forward, we will deepen our work in California as well as launching a multi-state initiative to support gubernatorial candidates of color in GA (Stacey Abrams), MD (Ben Jealous), AZ (David Garcia), CA (John Chiang), and FL (Andrew Gillum).”
The Democracy Alliance
In 2004, Progressive Insurance billionaire Peter Lewis, along with leftist mega-donor George Soros, and Herb and Marion Sandler, established America Votes “to coordinate various get-out-the-vote drives during the 2004 election,” according to New York Times reporter Matt Bai. After that didn’t go as well as planned, the Sandlers also sent their son-in-law Phillips as their representative to the October 2005 meeting of the Democracy Alliance at the Château Elan outside Atlanta.The super-secretive Democracy Alliance has since recruited more than a hundred rich leftist donors to fund “progressive” Democratic candidates across America. Both Phillips and Susan Sandler have served on the board of the Democracy Alliance.
When Gillum’s campaign was floundering, running fourth or fifth place two months out from the primary, the Democracy Alliance stepped in.
Rockwood Leadership Institute
After the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) split in 1990, many ex-members ended up in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO). Maoist-leaning and discreetly pro-China, FRSO is highly secretive and has managed to infiltrate whole networks of U.S. nonprofits and social agencies, from the Ford Foundation, to the Chinese Progressive Association (Boston and San Francisco), to Black Lives Matter, to, of course, the Democratic Party.The Oakland, California-based Rockwood Leadership Institute is very much part of the FRSO “sphere of influence.” Rockwood is basically a training school for revolutionaries.
- Ellen Friedman, a former member of the Socialist Feminist Network
- Shiree Teng, a former LRS member, now part of FRSO-aligned consultancy firm RoadMap
- Mei-ying Williams, a veteran of the 2004 Venceremos Brigade to Cuba and a one-time member of the Ad-Hoc Left Committee, alongside FRSO members Michelle Foy and Tim Thomas and Northern California Communist Party USA leader Juan Lopez.
Rockwood runs annual year-long training courses for about two dozen radical activists every year.
Gillum was in the 2012 cohort alongside former STORM member Cindy Wiesner.
New Florida Majority
Miami-based New Florida Majority (NFM) is modeled directly on its Virginia counterpart and is a major force in voter registration efforts among Florida’s black and Latino communities. Like NVM, most of its leadership are FRSO or Rockwood affiliated.Founding executive director Gihan Perera (now with the Ford Foundation) studied with Rockwood in 2005 and was a founder of the FRSO front group Right to the City Alliance.
Current executive director Andrea Cristina Mercado studied with Rockwood in 2013 and previously worked for the heavily FRSO-influenced National Domestic Workers Alliance.
Former NFM Political and Alliance Officer Badili Jones is one of the very few non-secret FRSO members.
“In response to the Florida primary results, Andrea Cristina Mercado, director of the NewFM’s state PAC, the New Florida Vision PAC comments, ‘Tonight we see the remaking of the Florida Democratic Party by Andrew Gillum. Gillum won against all odds and he did it by giving often ignored voters’ clear transformative solutions that inspired them to get involved.’
“New Florida Vision PAC set out to expand the electorate by reaching out to Black and Latino voters categorized as ‘infrequent’ voters and subsequently often ignored by electoral campaigns. The PAC performed doorknocking, phone and text, radio and digital ads, and non-traditional tactics like a Colombian-style Chiva party bus, barbeques, taco Tuesdays, karaoke, and murals in the Wynwood and Liberty City neighborhoods to connect with target voters. Within the 150,000 voters targeted by the New Florida Vision PAC, there was a 300% increase in early voting in 2018, not including election day, compared to the 2014 midterm and at least a 20% increase from the Presidential election of 2016.”
“FLIC Votes joins the growing momentum towards victory, not just for Andrew Gillum as the most likely governor representing the interest of all the people, but for the energizing impact his candidacy will have with disenchanted voters to come out and revive our ailing democracy for the benefit of all Floridians,” wrote Maria Rodriguez (Rockwood Leadership Institute class of 2009, affiliated with FRSO), executive director of FLIC’s political action committee (PAC) FLIC Votes.
Gillum replied: “In 2018, immigrants are under attack, and they need a Governor to stand in the gap for them. I’m deeply honored to receive the endorsement of FLIC Votes in our race to take back Florida and make it a place where everyone is welcome—no matter what they look like.
“I’m running for Governor to help every Florida family have access to the same opportunities my siblings and I had, and the Florida Immigrant Coalition will be an integral partner in that fight when I’m Governor.”
Like their counterpart NVM, NFM and FLIC also want to restore felons’ voting privileges immediately (current Florida law gives felons the opportunity to apply for a restoration of their voting privileges after being crime-free for five years). Both organizations are backing the “Second Chances” campaign and Florida ballot measure “Amendment 4,” which would expedite restored voting rights to a claimed 1.4 million Florida felons.
“Gillum has also expressed enthusiastic support for the Second Chances campaign, which would restore the right to vote to over 1.4 million Floridians who have been disenfranchised due to prior felony convictions,“ states FLIC’s endorsement statement. ”Gillum understands the importance of this campaign on a personal level, as his own brothers are returning citizens who would benefit from Second Chances.”
NFM, FLIC, and Gillum seemingly understand that an extra several hundred thousand likely Democratic voters will provide an enormous advantage to Democratic candidates and will be a leap toward the goal of turning Florida blue, a goal already accomplished in Virginia by the NVM. A “blue” Florida will have huge implications in future presidential elections.
Not a Socialist?
Republican gubernatorial candidate DeSantis has accused Gillum of being a socialist. Gillum denies it. He says he’s a “progressive Democrat.” The truth is that Gillum has been financed, trained, and supported his entire political career by Maoist-leaning pro-China radicals.Gillum was funded and guided in his “Rainbow Coalition” strategies by “former” Maoist Phillips.
He was trained in activist principles by the FRSO/Maoist-affiliated Rockwood Leadership Institute.
His come-from-behind victory can be directly attributed to the massive “minority” voter registration drives carried out by FRSO-affiliated NFM and the FLIC.
Classical Maoism is all about manipulating minorities to achieve political power. In China, they did it with propaganda and guns. In America, they’re doing it with propaganda and “minority” voter registration drives.
Either way, the end result will be the same.
If Florida conservatives do not turn out large numbers, Florida will have its first “Maoist” governor come November.
