Activities of the Center for Political Innovation, 2021-2026
By Caleb Maupin, Founder & Director
The Center for Political Innovation has existed for five years now, and in that time it has far exceeded my expectations. I always intended for the group to be an organization of action, bringing people into the struggle against globalism/imperialism, functioning as a network of activists.
The first in-person gathering was in June 2021 in Saxton, Pennsylvania. We gathered for three days in a rented hunting lodge. The gathering included 42 people in total, from different regions of the United States and different backgrounds. I gave a series of interactive classes we have called “The Saxton Lectures,” laying out an organizational vision and perspective.
Nicaragua Solidarity & Exposing BreadTube
At the time we called ourselves “The City-Building Tendency” and viewed our movement as a form of anti-revisionist Communism. There were many people who joined the group with competing visions.
After the Saxton Lectures we threw ourselves into Nicaragua solidarity, supporting this socialist country in Central America. We defended the foreign minister of Nicaragua when he spoke at church in Manhattan that was besieged by anti-government exiles. We also sent a three-person delegation to Nicaragua to monitor the elections, for which we were highlighted in Business weekly.
Plaza de la Revolucion in Managua on Election Night, 2021.
While in Nicaragua, I got to have a conversation with the son of President Daniel Ortega, Laureano Ortega, about economics and the way imperialism was breaking down. The Sandinistas really valued our support and publicizing their election giving a popular mandate to their Christian Socialist anti-imperialist government that has lifted millions from poverty.
During these early months, I exposed BreadTube, a network of popular YouTube channels and social media influencers speaking in the name of socialism while preaching hatred for Russia and waging cancel culture hate campaigns against anti-imperialist voices. My book was called BreadTube Serves Imperialism.
I revealed that a known US intelligence operative was advising them and that they were most likely a psychological operation to confuse young people inspired by Bernie Sanders. While my work was initially mocked, it has now been confirmed we were far more correct than we knew. Max Blumenthal revealed that one of the top BreadTube personalities was on the payroll of British intelligence. Since then, ties to Hillary Clinton have also been revealed.
Clashing with the Communist Party
The Communist Party USA became desperate and vicious in response to us. Entire meetings of the National Committee were devoted to the “threat” of CPI. We never wanted hostility toward the Communist Party and many of our early members were registered in both organizations.
Many times, I called the Communist Party’s office offering to talk with the leaders and come to some kind of understanding. Many times my personal cell phone number was given to CPUSA chairman Joe Simms by party members who wanted the unnecessary tension to be resolved. The Communist Party refused to communicate, but instead ultimately published a deranged smear piece which remains on their website to this day.
The piece quotes our textbook “We are City Builders,” which honors the Black Panthers and hails the heroic anti-racist work of their organization, claiming it is somehow a “white supremacist” book. The article claims we are “fascist” because we call for a “Government of Action” which is similar to phrases used by Oswald Mosley, and because we honor Louisiana Governor Huey Long, a beloved populist of the 1930s for whom Black Panther leader Huey Newton was named. The real reason they think we are “fascist,” of course, is because we did not march behind Joe Biden and his anti-Russia hysteria.
At the time the Communist Party USA was panicking about CPI, State Department employees were regularly stopping in at their 23rd Street, New York City headquarters, urging them to be more anti-Russian. A woman with a mysterious history of wrecking organizations and burning bridges, who had presided over the collapse of Workers World Party in 2017, was suddenly leading the Young Communist League and making sure they barely functioned, all while obsessively talking about the Center for Political Innovation and why it must be stopped at every meeting.
The smear piece on the Communist Party website is a badge of honor. David Rovics’s song mocking US Communist groups says “The CP will just do their thing / And pretend the others don't exist” referring to how the Communist Party generally considers itself above polemics against rival organizations, considering itself to be in a different league. Well, the CPUSA may not be threatened by some Trotskyite sect or a teenage Anarchist club, but they certainly are threatened by the Center for Political Innovation, despite the fact that we always sought to be on good terms with them. While we meant no hostility, the truth is that our anti-imperialist work, carried out while educating people about the best moments in their own history exposes their current existence as a Democratic Party volunteer squad for the betrayal it truly is.
The fact that we maintained a street presence, having rallies in Central Park, doing regular canvassing and outreach in different regions of the country, in addition to the constant online livestreaming made us even more threatening.
“Russia is not our enemy!”
Right after Russia’s special military operation was launched, our rallying cry was “Russia is not our enemy!” We marched in the streets and convened a successful conference in Austin, Texas themed around solidarity with the people of the Donbass against the NATO regime. Our conference made a big splash.
At the time, certain social media influencers who appear to have been coordinating with the FBI approached us, appearing friendly. They then began recruiting people inside the organization to function as agents for a major attempt to destroy our organization that failed.
We continued holding “Russia is not our enemy” rallies around the country, and held a national training school in Linn Valley, Kansas. We then proceeded to build a major anti-imperialist conference in Chicago. Just a week before the conference, the FBI raided the homes of the Uhuru Movement activists in St. Louis, Missouri, and St. Petersburg, Florida. We immediately called them offering full solidarity and support, and welcomed them as heroes to our August 2022 convention in Chicago. We also honored Tara Reade for her work as a journalist in the face of a huge amount of state repression from the Democratic Party.
Prior to the convention, I was blackmailed. An ex-member who had been recruited and was consulting with and working alongside the social media influencers spoke to me on the phone and said, “you’re going to have to cancel the conference.” Other speakers at the conference received similar mysterious messages. The FBI clearly did not appreciate that we were about to publicize and call out their attack on a group of Black anti-imperialists. One of the members who had been recruited to act as an informant insisted we shouldn’t oppose the raids on Black activists who had been labelled “a cult.”
Despite all the pressure I was placed under, we decided we would proceed with the conference. It was a smashing success. The Uhuru Movement was welcomed as heroes. Tara Reade gave a stirring anti-imperialist speech. Garland Nixon and other allies found the day’s events to be inspiring and exhilarating. Nick Brana of the Peoples Party left the event inspired to organize some kind of anti-war rally in Washington, DC.
As retaliation for this anti-imperialist conference and for supporting the Uhuru movement and calling out the FBI, vicious personal attacks were unloaded against me and CPI on the internet. The accusations were baseless. A lot of innuendo, reinterpretation of events, and outright lies. Meanwhile, people in the group who had been recruited by these social media personalities proceeded to try and destroy our organizational assets. There was a struggle to keep control of the website, bank accounts, Twitter and YouTube accounts, etc.
This is the manner in which the Cult Awareness Network, coordinating with US intelligence and/or the FBI normally targets organizations. Members are recruited and planted as “sleepers,” mainstream media is coordinated with, the attack comes all at once with disinformation everywhere. This is how Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party was crushed as far back as 1985. The Democratic Workers Party led by Marlene Dixon was targeted in a similar manner. Various religious and political groups that have become the target of the deep state have undergone similar operations.
The deep state assumed that because we had not been functioning as an organization for very long, we would immediately buckle and surrender. They were wrong. We did shed a number of people who did not have the stamina for such attacks and were not really loyal to the project. Because we still categorized ourselves as a “communist” group we had a number of people who had no real loyalty to our principles and teachings and just wanted to identify with the hammer and sickle. Such people are not very useful in building a real organization. If they can’t stand internet sex gossip and smearing, how can they pretend they will be Che Guevara when the moment arrives? It’s unfortunate how for many young people political activism is just a kind of internet fantasy. For CPI, it never has been this. We intend to rescue our country from the nightmare of imperialist/globalist decay and build an anti-monopoly coalition.
Back at the Center of the Action
We re-emerged publicly 3 months after the attack. Almost immediately, we were once again at the center of attention as official sponsors of the Rage Against the War Machine protests in Washington, DC. Nick Brana and Angela McArdle of the Libertarian Party had been inspired to call the rally and our logo was featured on all the protest posters and communications. When Scott Ritter was forced to step out of the rally, we rented a hotel in downtown DC and organized an “after party” where he was welcomed to a thunderous crowd chanting “Scott! Scott! Scott!” Our after-party was attended by over 200 people from around the country, including Noah Schenck whose life circumstances had finally permitted him to become fully involved.
We followed the successful Washington, DC demonstration with a gathering called the “Summit Against Hypocrisy” to counter Biden’s ‘Summit for Democracy.’ This three-day anti-imperialist conference was yet another smashing success. Not only did we gather anti-imperialist voices, protest at the White House and allow anti-imperialists to network, but we then confronted Tsai Ing-wen on the streets of New York City just days afterward saying “Stop Selling War in Our Country! We don’t want a new war against China! China is not our enemy!”
In September of that year, I had the honor of conducting a face-to-face sit-down interview with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi when he was at the United Nations. The interview was only possible because of my job as an RT reporter, but also my years of visiting Iran and speaking up against Israeli crimes. The fact that I was trusted by the Iranian head of state and his team for a sit-down conversation, something heads of state are especially careful about granting with American journalists, testifies to how much our organization is valued by anti-imperialist forces across the planet.
In February 2024, the Center for Political Innovation led the US delegation to the World Youth Festival in Sochi, Russia. We held a press conference at the United Nations raising the Uhuru case and talking about US threats against those who visited Russia and told the truth about the Ukraine conflict. At the World Youth Festival, Noah and I were invited to a special session where we got to directly speak to the Russian President, and speak for the American majority that is tired of the wars and wants a better relationship with the world.
The Streamer Raid & Khrushchev-ist Fight
When I returned from Russia, we were able to hold a training workshop in Vermont, but almost immediately we faced yet another organizational conflict. In reality we were hit with two major attacks at once. The first came from outside forces, the same social media influencers who had pretended to be friendly to us while coordinating the major attack in 2022. They formed a new “party” and with advertising from CNN and other mainstream media outlets, insisted they were the new vanguard of the American working class. We contacted them and they told us they wanted no relationship with CPI, however, they called up our members around the country and urged them to quit CPI.
We lost a few people, but not very many. Those we lost were mostly chronically online people who had never really plugged into the actual activism of the group. This “party” formed by social media influencers is nothing more than a social media fan club. Members of the group have had the FBI come to their homes, and rather than speaking up to support them, the “party” just expels or disavows them. Despite claiming to support Russia and having people from millionaire families in leadership positions, this “organization” did nothing to support the Uhuru movement in light of the FBI’s efforts to to criminalize pro-Russia speech.
At the same time as we had to deal with the streamer raid, two people in the leadership of CPI had a Khrushchev-ist meltdown. Unlike the streamers and wreckers, these people most likely had good intentions and suffered from some genuinely hard personal circumstances. However, they were determined to prove to family members or romantic partners that CPI conformed to liberal standards, something no genuine anti-imperialist organization will ever do. They held pessimistic feelings about organizational growth, and continued to try and invent procedures or bureaucratic structures where they could prevent activism from taking place in order to prove to themselves we were “democratic.”
It’s quite interesting because CPI remains pretty loose in terms of regulating members. Our membership contains people with a variety of different perspectives on social issues who support our overall mission. We permit people to speak for themselves on social media and create their own writings and content if they desire.
However, it wasn’t enough simply to have freedom for members, the Khrushchev-ists wanted structures to prevent the organization from taking action. They were desperate to create some kind of mechanism through which they could silence or suppress me, the founder and director, in order to prove the organization was not a “cult of personality” as their hostile, pro-imperialist relatives and romantic partners insisted. It was an absurd demand to make, and could never be clearly articulated. They were both asked if there were certain reforms they wanted in order to remain involved, and they couldn’t specify any. All they could offer was gloomy hopelessness about the future of the organization, and liberal platitudes about “cult of personality.”
The Khrushchev-ists may have had good intentions, but despite being only two people, they managed to do significant damage when they departed, wrecking the dues collection system among other things. New active members now study the book Khruschevism: A Study in Psychological Warfare as part of their training.
Surging Forward in the 2024 Election
After they departed, simultaneously with the streamer raid, CPI surged ahead once again. The book I had written on Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris and the Future of America was banned from Amazon on the very day she became the presumptive nominee of the Democrats in the 2024 election. With CPI being featured on many major YouTube channels, and Amazon backing down and restoring the book seven days later, we suddenly had lots of funds coming in from book revenue and lots of new members signing up.
We dispatched a team of volunteers to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where we distributed 1,000 copies of the Kamala Harris book to crowds outside the convention. We then launched our “PeaceMAGA” operation, bringing a huge banner of Trump and Kim Jong Un shaking hands to the streets of Manhattan, with the words “Only Peace Can Make America Great Again.” Our PeaceMAGA campaign made a huge splash, featured various media outlets such as the New Yorker and USA Today. We took the banner to the inauguration as well and distributed thousands of anti-imperialist booklets to those attending Trump’s swearing-in ceremony in the freezing streets of DC.
We did not endorse Trump, as we do not endorse any political candidates and do not support political campaigns or electioneering of any kind. Most of our members did not vote for Trump, though a few may have. We made the strategic decision to boost the anti-war messaging in his 2024 campaign and emphasize that this is what the American people wanted from their president. This message created the political space for many within MAGA to break with the White House for betraying these promises.
Some have criticized the PeaceMAGA campaign, but the fruits of our work are everywhere to be seen. When Trump launched his illegal war on Iran, betraying his campaign promises, a big chunk of his supporters broke with him. Joe Kent, his counterterrorism director stepped down. Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene spoke up loudly against him.
The Innovationist Turn
Around this time we decided to break with “Communism” as a political identity, because we have transcended to a higher stage. We are anti-imperialists and we advocate a society where profits are no longer in command and the economy is organized to serve the public good, but we do not believe in the destructive philosophy of dialectical materialism. Innovationism is a higher stage of thinking to which we have ascended. Our focus is on celebrating human creativity and enabling people to find their voice, and building a community of resistance where people can be embraced as they join the struggle. This is not what “Communism” means to most people, and it’s not what “communist” groups are doing.
Furthermore, begging for a place within the train wreck that calls itself “communism” in America, trying to own or compete within a dead, tainted brand of politics, is not productive. Communism in the 20th century had big victories against imperialism, and we uphold and celebrate what was achieved. However, the rising new economies around the world no longer espouse the dialectical perspective but emphasize unity and community. The rising new economy in the east embraces markets as part of their overall pro-growth economy, led by a popular state rooted in anti-colonial struggles. Calling ourselves “communist” doesn’t communicate who we are effectively or show what we are trying to do, and it doesn’t help people understand what we are trying to communicate about the world.
We are proud to call ourselves Innovationists, building on the foundations of all our work, and all the heroic anti-imperialist struggles that have come before.
A Consistent Voice of Anti-Imperialism
In 2025 we launched massive distributions of our book Who Are the Houthis? What Are They Fighting For? The book has been well received by different layers of US society. Iranian-Americans have been so moved by the book that it has been translated into Farsi and is being widely studied across Iran.
In 2025, we held our national convention honoring Angela McArdle for her anti-war work and supporting the Uhuru movement. We also began holding rallies honoring Ibrahim Traoré, the leader of Burkina Faso as an anti-imperialist icon and example of the kind of revolutionary leader the world desperately needs. These rallies have been very well received by Americans and international audiences alike. Our member Penny Arcos has written two books going into depth about Traore’s achievements as an example of a “government of action.” Her first book is Africa’s Flame: The Rise of Ibrahim Traoré. Her newer book is The AES Effect: How the Alliance of Sahel States is Building a New World.
When Maduro was kidnapped, we swung into action. Not only were we in the streets that same day, but we brought a delegation of activists to the very gates of the jail where he is being held, saying “Free Maduro Now!”
We have defined ourselves as outspoken anti-war voices, being featured on prominent YouTube channels in Los Angeles and blocking the “No Kings” parade in New York City waving Iranian flags and placards calling out the Democrats and advocating solidarity with the Islamic Republic against Zionist war.
We have begun distributing a booklet about anti-imperialism featuring the flower Kimilsungia called “Why is it impossible to get this flower in America?” The book has been handed to hundreds of college students and others as a way of starting a conversation about the struggle against imperialism and the achievements of socialism in People’s Korea. We held 14 sessions of the Juche Study Group.
Marching Ahead
Our Los Angeles team is frequently in the streets as is our Minneapolis team, and the New York City local group has begun functioning more regularly with forums and protests in Manhattan.
During our national convention and 7-day program in Chicago this summer we protested the Obama library saying “Obama Killed Gaddafi! Long Live Gaddafi!” We also said “France out of Africa!” with a spirited rally supporting Ibrahim Traoré at the French consulate.
We have a workshop in Los Angeles scheduled for November 21, register here: https://forms.gle/hYaoLcsrhg85uPKU7
We have a book release event in New York City set for December 16, register here: https://forms.gle/nn9qpgXh7ETptEvH8
No other organization has done anything near the amount of serious work educating people and building up anti-war solidarity with the rising new economy around the world. We are in the streets, reaching new people, challenging the lies of the war-makers, and promoting the need for a government of action that fights for working families. We ask those who appreciate our efforts to donate so we can sustain our work in this period where costs are high and funds can often be tight. DONATE
It has been five years of constant evolution and perfection of our organizational methods and thought. Each operation we carry out and each internal battle have led us to sharpen our abilities more sharply. We are in a process of organizational ego development, learning our actual size and strength, and effectively utilizing our abilities.
This is an exciting journey we are embarking on together, building the movement urgently needed to rescue this country from the decay of an irrational system. If you are ready to get involved and feel empowered to change the world, we suggest you JOIN.
