Mega-wealthy, far-left attorney Steve Phillips, through his political action committee PowerPAC+, is throwing huge sums of money and resources “under the radar” to back Democratic candidate Mike Espy in the tight Mississippi U.S. Senate race that will be decided on Nov. 27.
While Espy paints himself as a relatively moderate Democrat, Phillips—who is based in San Franscisco—is intent on winning another Senate seat, both to counter President Donald Trump and to help re-build a permanent Democratic Party majority, based on his strategy laid out in his Obama-endorsed 2016 book “Brown Is the New White.”
All three races relied on the same strategy: Phillips and his mega-wealthy leftist friends financed Maoist-leaning socialist networks in each state. These groups organized mass voter-registration drives and “get out the vote” efforts among their respective states’ Democratic-leaning, but “low propensity” voting, black and Latino citizenry.
New American Majority
As a Stanford University law student in the 1980s, Phillips was involved with the League of Revolutionary Struggle, a pro-China communist organization. Along with his Maoist comrades, Phillips played a leading role in Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” of the 1984 and 1988 presidential election cycles.Jackson’s race-obsessed Rainbow Coalition was all about organizing minorities (colors of the rainbow) into one large “progressive” electoral coalition to achieve a socialist America. In Jackson’s day, minorities made up 12 percent of the population. Today, they make up 38 percent, and Phillips wants to finish the job Jackson started.
Phillips wrote, in an article for the PowerPAC+ publication Political Intelligence: “Every progressive person in America should support Cory Booker’s campaign for U.S. Senate. Lest there be any confusion on the Left, allow me to make the case for why this needs to be a priority for all progressive-minded people.
“First, let me make clear that I come out of the Left. I’ve studied Marx, Mao, and Lenin. In college, I organized solidarity efforts for freedom struggles in South Africa and Nicaragua, and I palled around with folks who considered themselves communists and revolutionaries ... and I did my research paper on the Black Panther Party. ... My political baptism was the Jesse Jackson 1984 presidential campaign, and I’ve drawn my inspiration from Malcolm, Martin, and Mandela rather than Democratic Party triumvirate of Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton.”
After college, Phillips married his Stanford sweetheart, Susan Sandler, the daughter of savings and loan multi-billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler.
Through his organization PowerPAC+, Phillips uses Sandler’s money to back “candidates of color,” particularly in the Southern states. Phillips’s goal, outlined in “Brown Is the New White,” is to build an electoral alliance of “progressive” whites and America’s growing numbers of minority voters to build a “new American majority.”
According to Phillips, the left already has a majority in America: 23 percent of the electorate are “progressive people of color” and 28 percent are “progressive whites.” Get them all to the polls, the theory goes, and America will face an unbeatable Democrat-led coalition: a new Rainbow Coalition that will be in power indefinitely.
Espy Campaign Support
Flipping a Mississippi Senate seat to Democrat from Republican would be a huge boost to Phillips’s plans. PowerPAC+ endorsed three candidates this election cycle: Espy and two in California (Gil Cisneros and Ammar Campa-Najjar).“Over the last two weeks, a PAC called POWERPACPLUS has, according to FEC reports, quietly launched nearly a $400,000 spend in the US Senate race in Mississippi. ...
“Five separate independent expenditures ... totaling $392,200.16 have been made by the San Francisco based PAC in the last two weeks.
“Banking billionaire Herbert Sandler of California dropped $600K into the PAC on 8/24/18, and the PAC is closely associated with the Sandler family.
“POWERPACPLUS starting with the October 2018 quarterly filing was almost entirely bankrolled for the most immediate spend by Herbert Sandler. ...
“Of the $392K, about $99K is going to radio ads. ... About $71,000 has gone to a company called Onyx Communications for phone banking ... they were listed as one of the companies that POWERPAC.org used for the Doug Jones effort in Alabama. Those transactions through the affiliated PowerPAC.org were largely funded by Sandler’s son in law Steve.”
After a video surfaced of Espy’s Republican challenger, Cindy Hyde-Smith, complimenting a friend and supporter by saying, “I would fight a circular saw for him. If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row,” PowerPAC+ swung into action. The PAC released an ad featuring Hyde-Smith and a group of white people at a lynching with graphic depictions of the victims.
“The use of these horrific images to sow the seeds of racial division, strictly for political purposes, is reprehensible. Mike Espy should immediately call for the removal of this despicable political ad and condemn its use in his campaign,” he said, according to Y'all Politics.
Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Like his namesake father and a Jackson mayor before him, Lumumba was elected to office through the support of the pro-China group Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO).“In 2013, the late Chokwe Lumumba, father of Chokwe Antar Lumumba, wowed the entire country when he became mayor of Jackson. We know that a second people’s victory is challenging because those in power have already seen a glimpse of what a people’s platform looks like in practice. Today, the vision will be restored.
“FRSO/OSCL stands with the oppressed and working people of Jackson and the candidate that they have chosen, Chokwe Antar Lumumba. We’re here today driving folks to the polls, phone banking and poll watching! Dare to struggle! Dare to win!”
The FRSO supported its friend Lumumba because the Maoist revolutionary strategy is to build solid bases in the countryside and smaller towns, before attempting to “conquer” larger population centers. The FRSO is intent on destroying what they call “The New Confederacy”—conservatism’s Southern stronghold. This dovetails perfectly with Phillips’s plan to use minority voting power to permanently destroy the Republican Party’s dominance in the South.
Many FRSO members have come out of Phillips’s former League of Revolutionary Struggle. In 2013, Phillips even helped fund a major new FRSO front group called LeftRoots. By supporting Espy, Lumumba is helping the friend of a friend.
One of Espy’s key new campaign hires, LaTosha Brown, also has FRSO connections.
“One of Espy’s guests, LaTosha Brown, served an instrumental role in that victory [of Doug Jones]. In Alabama’s special election for U.S. Senate last year, Brown led the Alabama Grassroots Mobilization Project, which put ‘boots on the ground’ in 18 counties, helped pay for about 400 organizers, and provided voter transportation services. For the first time since 1986, Alabama sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. …
“‘Yes, Doug Jones is in the Senate,’ Espy said. ‘But I know, because I studied that race, if it were not for Latosha Brown, Doug Jones would not be in the Senate today.’”
At the Jackson campaign office opening, Espy explicitly criticized the president’s tariffs on China. Espy said the “tariffs are hurting Mississippi’s farmers because China retaliated by imposing tariffs on agricultural goods in the U.S. like soybeans,” according to the Jackson Free Press.
It’s worth remembering that Phillips’s League of Revolutionary Struggle was pro-China, and that the FRSO more discretely carries on that tradition.
Maybe Espy really was looking out for Mississippi’s hardworking farmers?
Or maybe he was just pandering to his Maoist base?
