Commentary
The recent revelation that Fox News hired longtime Democratic Party operative Donna Brazile has confirmed fears that the organization is moving further to the left.
Brazile has served as vice chair of voter registration and participation at the Democratic National Committee. She ran Al Gore’s campaign for the White House in 2000. The Washingtonian named Brazile one of the “100 most powerful women” and Essence magazine named her one of the top 50 women in America. The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation has given her an award for outstanding political achievement.
Despite all this, Brazile isn’t merely another “liberal Democrat.” The longtime political operative has spent most of her career affiliated with the socialist/Marxist wing of the Democratic Party.
Brazile has a lifelong pattern of working with the hard-left.
In 1978, Brazile’s cousins worked to elect the first black mayor of New Orleans, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, who
became one of Brazile’s “new role models.”
Morial was a founding member of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, a U.S. affiliate of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers—a known “legal” front for the former Soviet Union.
In January 1981, Brazile attended the
World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) for peace, detente, and disarmament World Forum of Youth and Students, in Helsinki, Finland. WFDY was set up by the Soviet Union in 1945 as an international front group for communist youth. It is still run by communists to this day.
According to an
article in the Los Angeles Sentinel about her autobiography, Helsinki was where Brazile “learned firsthand how negatively other peoples viewed nuclear arms.” It was “one of the factors that hardened her resolve to want to go to Washington to work toward change.”
So, Brazile moved to Washington for a job with the United States Student Association—an organization dominated through its entire history by
Communist Party supporters and Maoist-leaning radicals.
In 1984, Brazile served as mobilization director for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign. Jackson’s operation, which became known as the “
Rainbow Coalition,” was dominated by pro-China Maoist radicals from the Communist Workers Party, Line of March, and League of Revolutionary Struggle—all of which later dissolved to one degree or another into the Democratic Party.
Next up, Brazile became the national coordinator of
Savina Martin’s National Union of the Homeless. Martin was later closely aligned with the country’s largest pro-China communist group: the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
In the 1990s, Brazile served as communications director for the Washington D.C. delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, Eleanor Holmes Norton. This was a slight feint to the “right” for Brazile, because
Holmes Norton wasn’t a communist, only a socialist.
According to Boston Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Bette Denich, DSA founder Michael Harrington had “recruited her friend and future roommate Eleanor Holmes to the Young Socialist League during one of his speaking tours at Antioch College in the late 1950s.”
Holmes Norton went on to form a close bond with the DSA that endures to this day.
In 2009, Brazile was listed as a member of the advisory committee of
Wellstone Action, a Minnesota-based activist training organization built on the political legacy of that state’s late Sen. Paul Wellstone—a close ally of the DSA. Other operatives serving on the Wellstone board at the time included well-known DSA members
Frances Fox Piven and
Julian Bond, plus Communist Party USA affiliate and Minnesota Secretary of State
Mark Ritchie.
Circa-2012, Brazile served on the
board of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. affiliate of the
Socialist International—which, in turn, was affiliated at the time to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, the South African Communist Party-controlled African National Congress, and most of the “former” communist parties of Eastern Europe.
The delegates attended meetings with Cuban academics, policymakers, journalists, NGO representatives, and politicians, including Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez and Cuba’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Ricardo Alarcon.
Bass had visited Cuba before and several times since, and also has a past history with the Maoist-leaning Line of March, Communist Party USA, and DSA. Harman, who was on her second trip to the communist island, is married to Sidney Harman, an affiliate of the notoriously leftist Washington “think tank” the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
Center for Democracy in the Americas also is affiliated with the IPS and included on its advisory board at the time
Julia Sweig, one of the most prominent pro-Castro activists in the country.
Brazile is both an extreme leftist and a highly skilled communicator. She is very capable of expressing far-left views in moderate terms.
Is Fox News doing its audience a service by giving Brazile a platform to reach millions of mainly Republican-leaning viewers? Is that their definition of “fair and balanced”?
Anecdotally speaking, Fox News appears to be losing a significant portion of its base because of its perceived drift to the left. Hiring Brazile is very likely to accelerate that trend.
Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
