The Hope & Vision to Fight Imperialism - “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”

Below is an edited transcript of Caleb Maupin’s keynote address to the Center for Political Innovation National Convention on August 15th, 2026.

We can find security in the passage of time. Today is Saturday and I don't know what tomorrow will bring, but every Saturday in my entire life has been followed by a Sunday. And every Sunday in my entire life has been followed by a Monday. And every Monday in my life, believe it or not, has been followed by a Tuesday.

And every Tuesday in my life, believe it or not, has been followed by a Wednesday. And I don't know what tomorrow will be like, but I can guarantee you it will be unlike any other Sunday that has ever existed before and ever happened before. And this is the kind of thing that humans do that brings us security. Since the beginning of time, human beings have been trying their hardest to make sense of a very insecure world, a world full of chaos and unpredictability and tension and frightening things.

We've been trying to find security in the patterns that exist. You think about ancient human beings who looked up at the stars, made up stories about the different constellations. Think about the way they track the seasons. This is something that human beings do in order to find security.

We find security in patterns and trying to predict what's happening next and trying to make sense of the world as it is. This is the human experience. It's a battle that we're all waging. How can we find security in times with so much insecurity?

How can we find peace in a world with so much chaos? How can we know that we're safe? This is the human experience going back thousands and thousands of years to the time people were living in caves all the way right up to now. 

We at the Center for Political Innovation, our message, if it really got down to anything, is that human beings can change the world and have changed the world. If fact we are the only species that has really ever changed the world.

Challenging People to Awaken, Not ‘Living Biologically’

Other species simply interact with their environment. But mankind forces the environment to serve him and by doing so masters the environment and reinvents it. And that's something you can find in the book of Genesis. That's something you can find in the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

Human beings are the species that reinvents and changes the world around them. And that is what defines humanity. And no other species can do what human beings can do. 

We live in a society that does everything it can to disempower people, to make people feel like they don't have the ability to change things, to reduce people to what we call living biologically.

A plant in your garden is alive, but it's not really changing the world. It's not fighting and asking big questions. A plant is just alive technically in the biological sense, but it's not really alive. And you know, a mouse, a rat, it's alive, but it's not asking big questions. It's not changing the world around it. It just kind of exists. It's living only in the biological sense. 

What we seek to do with the Center for Political Innovation is to challenge people to transcend a mere biological existence and become fully human.

And we have found a huge amount of inspiration in the writings of Wallace Wattles. And Wallace Wattles, I got to tell you, was a CPI member three years ago who told me about this great socialist Christian who lived in 1900, 1910 around that time and wrote a lot of self-help books way a long time ago. A good friend of Eugene Debs. I have found his work to be so inspiring.

And so we'll start out with a passage from Wallace Wattles. He says, "There are two attitudes a man may take. One makes him like a football. It has resilience. It reacts strongly when force is applied to it, but it originates nothing. There is no power within it. Men of this type are controlled by their circumstances and by their environment. Their destinies are decided by things external to themselves. But the other attitude makes man like a flowing spring. Power comes out from the center of him. He has within him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. He radiates force. He is felt by his environment. The principle of power within him is in constant action. He is self-active. He hath life within himself.”

He is talking about what it means to take on a truly human existence. What it means to find the power within yourself to change the world. And I'm going to go over everything we've done this year because we are an active organization.

An Organization of Action

I liked how Mike put it. He said, "We're not Web-olutionaries, we are revolutionaries.” We're telling people that you can actually do something. You don't have to just doom scroll and read about how bad the world is and tear down somebody else online. And you can actually step outside and not only touch grass, but take up a sign or take up a bullhorn and challenge people and challenge the world. So, I'm going to go over here the list of things that we have done so far in the year of 2026.

And keep in mind, it's only August. I know there's people here in the audience who might want to chime in and talk about some of what they've done. So, you know, if you want to shout out a couple things or whatever. On the 3rd of January, the day that Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped from Venezuela, within hours of the kidnapping, CPI members were in the streets condemning it.

Gavin was in the streets of Davenport, Iowa standing against it. Penny was in the streets of Minneapolis standing against it. We had members in New York City were in the streets just hours after Nicolás Maduro was kidnapped. CPI was out there condemning this illegal action by the United States.

And then on the 10th of January, we were all gathered our New Jersey event. And we felt like if we're all so close to the jail where Maduro is being held, we got to do something about it. So, we piled into a 15-passenger van and we drove to downtown Brooklyn and we had a “Free Maduro!” rally outside the jail. Mike was there and Penny was there and Gavin was there. They ran up to the guards and it made them nervous outside the jail and we chanted: “FREE MADURO NOW!”

It was epic. We were there outside the jail with signs with a megaphone.

Dan spoke beautifully. Gave a very epic speech from the back door of the jail. 

The next day, we then had our New Jersey event that we'd all gathered in New Jersey for, our New Year's event called “Earth is Awakening! America should join!”

At that event, we presented award an award to Lisa Davis, a leader of the Black is Back Coalition. We presented an award to Christina Khalil, a pro-Palestine Egyptian-American candidate for the Green Party who ran for the US Senate. She was really honored to receive recognition.

We also honored Jessica Coco for her lifelong work as an anti-imperialist. So, we're really glad you're here, Jessica! And you gave a great presentation about going to Belarus and the confusion of the left and and all of your experiences. That was really, really great.

The end of January and the beginning of February, I was in Minneapolis for a couple weeks because there was a lot of unrest and I got to spend a lot of time with Penny and we had some reading groups and all of that. We had a lot of dialogue with people about getting beyond the red team versus blue team situation in Minneapolis. It was quite a tense situation out there. Even the Uber driver said he couldn't drive his black van anymore because the anti- ice people were chasing him down.

On the 23rd of February, we co-signed a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council and to the UN Secretary General. It was a letter from the Islamic Human Rights Commission of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And it was signed by a number of intellectuals around the world, members of parliament from all over the world, the leaders of nonprofits and foundations from all over the world, some very prominent names signed on to it like Norman Finkelstein and others. The Center for Political Innovation was listed in this letter condemning the idea of the USA attacking Iran. 

On the day before that, February 22nd, our members went out in the snow in Times Square in New York City. We joined Manhattan Family Church to rally in support of Dr. Hak Ja Han, a pro peace activist, a voice for peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula who's being prosecuted right now in South Korea. And we were out there in Times Square in the snow with a crowd of people, and we said, "Please release the Mother of Peace! Please release the Mother of Peace!”

February 28th, we called a national day of action for no war against Iran because we saw that it was coming. And that ended up being the day that the USA murdered the Supreme Leader of Iran and launched the completely unprovoked unjustified, completely illegal attack against Iran. And while that war was breaking out, we had members in eight cities across the country in the streets in New York, in Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Joshua Tree, California, Iowa, and St. Louis, Missouri.We had people out in the streets with CPI banners opposing this illegal war and this illegal attack. 

On the 4th of March, I was invited onto an Iranian TV program to represent the anti-war majority in America. And I spoke to the Iranian audiences, making clear that the American people do not support this war. That polls show 75% to 80% of Americans did not agree with Trump's unjustified, completely illegal move to attack Iran.

And it was really an honor to come on Iranian TV and be on there for a while representing the true side of America as our government was doing criminal and horrific things. We know about the bombing of the elementary school in Manab and and all the awful things there. 

The 15th of March is the Ides of March and so in Minneapolis and in Los Angeles we had City Builders Day house parties to tell the story of the assassination of Julius Caesar. We told the story of the assassination of Julius Caesar. We talked about imperialism in Minneapolis. You had a great house party. We set up at University in California.

So then March 28th, that was a day I will never forget. That was a wild day. And I'm sure Paul will never forget it. Noah will never forget it. Phil will never forget it. Jessica will never forget it. 

March 28th, the Democrats called one of their silly “No Kings” rallies. You remember that? And even though public opinion was so overwhelmingly opposed to attacking Iran, their “No Kings” parade was sponsored by a lot of wealthy Zionists. And so they didn't include condemning attacking Iran in their call. So we assembled. Noah came down from Boston. Jessica came in from New Jersey. Gabby came in all the way from Chicago. And what did we do? We blocked the parade. We assembled along Fifth Avenue.

We had placards, signs, Iranian flags and American flags. And we blocked the No Kings parade. And we chant, what did we chant? “Democrats can stop the war, Hands off Iran! Democrats can stop the war, Hands off Iran!”

The marshals tried to move us. We wouldn't move. We were blocking the march. They eventually had to call the NYPD to clear us out. But even though we were blocking their parade, the overwhelming majority of the people that were participating in the No Kings parade agreed with us and supported us and were giving us high fives and thumbs up because they're against this war! And that gives me the hope that we can get past this silly red team versus blue team politics that is keeping us behind a broken political establishment.

So then the following day, Noah and Gabby were still in town. So we kicked off our outreach campaign around a special pamphlet we had. It's called Why is it impossible to get this flower in America? Well, that flower is Kimilsungia. It is the flower from Indonesia that was named after Kim Il Sung, the founder of People's Korea.

It was named after him by Sukarno, the anti-imperialist leader in Indonesia, just months before he was killed in the US back coup. And it is now a national symbol of North Korea. On the back it says “Someday this flower will grow in the White House Rose Garden and the Halls of Congress,” and that's true. 

We've distributed thousands of these pamphlet across America to educate people about anti-imperialism and start a conversation. It's a conversation starter. So the day after we blocked the “No Kings” parade, Noah and Gabby went to the historic Riverside Church where they have a very big morning services and they stood outside of Riverside Church and handed out Kimilsungia pamphlets.

If you watch CNN you would think North Korea is just a 24/7 military parade. Well, if we're showing people a beautiful flower, that's showing another side. It's showing that the people there are human. That's what it's showing. These are people with dreams and aspirations just like us. It shows that there could be potential for peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula and win-win cooperation and trade. It's the kind of optimistic message that is kind of the trademark of our organization. We're not here to preach resentment and negativity. We're here to give people hope!

March 31st, the last day of March, we participated in the United Nations Women's History Month closing ceremony, which was a really big honor and many leaders of nonprofits and NGOs from around the world were there. Different organizations were represented there and I gave a message on behalf of the Center for Political Innovation to this United Nations event. I highlighted the crimes of Japanese imperialism against women on the Korean Peninsula and throughout the Pacific during the Second World War, the comfort women atrocities.

And it was quite an event. Gabby was there, Noah was there. We did the event. I was declared and named an official peace ambassador by the Universal Peace Federation. So that was a real honor. 

In the month of April in both Los Angeles and Minneapolis, we decided to counter the Falun Gong and their their song and dance extravaganza called “China Before Communism.” And the slogan that the LA folks and the Minneapolis folks went out with was "China before communism was feudalism!” And we had stuff about footbinding and we had stuff about the impoverishment of the peasantry and how China has raised so many people out of poverty and that narrative that “oh, everything was great and grand in China before the communists came along,” well, It's actually the opposite! It's the communists that built modern China and made it a strong and powerful country. And so we countered the Falun Gong in their message.

It's unbelievable the fact they can have this show all across America called “China Before Communism” and no one thinks, what was the life expectancy before communism? What is it now? What was the rate of electrification? The level of improvement that the Communist Party has brought to China should be very very obvious.

Then on the 21st of April, we had to speak up for our friend Dr. Ranjeet Brar in Britain. His sister Joti Brar is the leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain, (Marxist-Leninist), and she has spoken at CPI conferences before. He is also a high ranking member of that party. He gave a speech supporting Iran and supporting the Palestinians. He shouted “Victory to Iran!” and so they arrested him and they took him from his home. This guy is a surgeon! They took him from his home for his speech and arrested him. 

So Penny and Gary went out in the streets in Minneapolis educating people about Dr. Ranjeet and talking to people and leafleting about the arrest for a speech of our friend in Britain.

Then on the 15th of April I was invited to attend an important conference in Moscow fr the founding of the International Association for Political and Electoral Expertise. 

Whenever they have elections around the world, there are these elections monitoring organizations that work for the Pentagon and work for NATO and Wall Street. They go and they put their narrative out on the country. If they don't like the country's elections, they don't like who won, they they find irregularities. If they like the country, well, even if there are problems like there have been in many South American elections lately, they ignore them. 

Well, this new association has been founded in Moscow with people from all over the world to counter and and serve as an alternative to the biased western electoral observation organizations. The Center for Political Innovation was a founding participant in that association.

Then, I had to get on a plane and come back from Moscow. The next day I had to go right back to the airport because I had to speak at the plenary of the African People's Socialist Party in St. Louis, Missouri.

Where the Uhuru 3, Chairman Omali Yeshitela, Penny Hass, and Jesse Neville, who've been fighting the FBI in federal court, charged with being Russian agents, etc., they had their national gathering of their organization, and they rolled out the red carpet for me. They gave me two opportunities to speak. The Chairman thanked CPI very profusely for all that we have done. We raised the case directly with Russian President Putin at the World Youth Festival. We sponsored a United Nations press conference. And the words that Chairman Omali of the Uhuru movement gave to us were very glowing. They deeply appreciate our support.

We really should be humble. We don't deserve that huge amount of praise because everyone else should have been doing the same thing. Everyone who's concerned about free speech should have been speaking up for the Uhuru movement!

We set the example. We spoke up for the Uhuru movement and we're speaking up for the Cuba folks now. It's not a matter of agreeing with people. It's not a matter of liking people. It's a matter of “Should we be able to get up and say anti-imperialist things or not?” 

John McCarthy has done more than anybody to be our liaison to connect us with the Uhuru. Thank you for all your hard work, John.

You have worked very very hard to stand with them and we you're an inspiration to all of us. He really stepped up. We had a conference here in Chicago in 2022 and it was just a few days after the raid on the Uhuru House. We invited them. We welcomed them and said to stand with them against the FBI raids. That was the first CPI thing John had ever been to in person and he was moved. He stepped up to be the liaison between our organizations.

They got a video message we're going to be showing later tonight in the evening session where Matt Weinglass is going to be speaking as well. That relationship that we have with Chairman Omali and the Uhuru Movement is is really important. John is responsible for that relationship. So, thank you, John.

The Los Angeles Festival of Books happened on April 18th and the LA team, which we've got quite a team out there. Dan has really organized the people. They go out there all the time. Dan and Tim and Steven and I there's a whole crew of people I'm not mentioning who couldn't make it. Ishmael is a really loyal, dedicated guy. 

They all went to the LA Festival of Books, talked to people, handed out leaflets, engaged with people about anti-imperialism.

On May 1st, Penny went to the University of Minnesota with the Kimilsungia booklet. She spent hours out there handing out the Kimilsungia flower booklet and engaging with students. That was really, really great.

It's just really beautiful. We're going out there and engaging with people. This is not the huge glamorous work. This isn't running and getting on CNN, but just being there and and having those one-on-one conversations is so, so important. Outreach, outreach, outreach. That's what we're all about. We want to reach people who would never go looking for this. We don't want to reach people who this is part of their internet niche. We want to reach people who would never in a million years go looking for this. We want to challenge them to think. 

On May 2nd, we decided we needed to have an event for Victory Day. We decided to theme it around the fact that a new film version of George Orwell's Animal Farm had just been released with Seth Rogan.

So, we protested outside the movie theater in Times Square, challenging Orwell's narrative. And then we had an educational forum. It was actually Noah's idea to counter the George Orwell film. And Noah gave a great presentation kind of debunking George Orwell and the narrative, the pessimistic narrative that he puts out there that kind of seems edgy because it's kind of vaguely critical of the establishment, but it leads to a negative place. 

You can watch the videos of that educational forum we did about Animal Farm, about George Orwell, the demonstration, and also the demonstration. There were like two or three people that were just walking by who came to the demonstration and were amused, then came to the dinner and banquet with speeches afterwards. So there were two or three people that just kind of came along and that was pretty neat as well. The LA team protested the Orwell film outside of Universal Studios in Hollywood.

On the 5th of May, we launched the American Juche Study Group. And once a week, every Tuesday evening, Noah has been leading online sessions. And we actually published this book, Juche for American Workers, the ideology of the of the Korean Revolution. We've done 14 sessions studying the ideology of Kim Il Sung and the Korean Revolution.

The streams are open, anyone can join talking about Kim Il Sung and North Korea. It’s important to read Kim Il Sung's works. 

On May 12th, Tim was among among our members in Los Angeles June 12th who went outside the World Cup match, right? Switzerland and Argentina were playing a game, and Tim and the hands-off Cuba committee of LA had a spirited demonstration to raise solidarity with Cuba outside the LA Cup match.

Making New Connections, Teaching Ideology

On the 27th of June, Penny, myself, and Noah all appeared on a 2-hour TV panel that was broadcast on Pan-African TV in Cameroon on a program called Global Insights. We were joined by academics. 

They gave CPI the floor, three of our members, and for two hours we were on there talking about the work that we've done, largely the work that we've done to promote Ibrahim Traoré, the great African leader. He's a really important figure and we have been out in the front saying that he's the example of the kind of leader that we need.

Something interesting happened on June 30th. 

So, lets be clear, we don't call ourselves communists. We started out with that label, but it became clear that we're doing something new and unique.

We're celebrating human creativity. If you talk about communism in America, it immediately turns into a conversation about making everyone equal. And that's not what we're trying to do. We want to rationally organize the economy to unleash human creativity to reach a state of abundance.

Are we “left?” Are we “right?” Well, we're neither. We are Innovationists.

We can speak to things that people on the right are concerned about and that people on the left are concerned about.

Something interesting happened on June 30th, which is I got an invitation to go on a podcast called Revolutionary Change. Peter Hager and Jen Pearlman are some, you know, podcasters in Florida. I think Jen Pearlman has run for office as a DSA kind of candidate.

They're kind of a leftist podcast and they invited us on and we talked about Trotsky and the Neoconservatives, and we talked about Innovationism. We talked about everything. I was the second guest. And you know who the first guest was before they had me on?

It was Dr. Cornel West, the very prominent theologian and activist. And I thought, "Wow, what is going on here?" I thought the left hated me. And they're having me on on podcast with Cornel West.

This is interesting. The folks at Revolutionary Change seem to like us. And they did a show just two days ago to promote this convention. Its an interesting the relationships that we're building.

We'll work with anybody who will work with us around opposing imperialism, left, right, center, or whatnot. 

Its important to note that Really American podcast promoted our LA branch. They let Dan go over the four-point program. They interviewed him extensively about CPI. They did this kind of video that was a satire thing about a crusade. And then at the end, they just brought Dan on. They brought him on to talk about our four-point plan, to talk about Innovationism. They just kind of gave us the floor on this YouTube channel that has a million subscribers and all of that. Again, we'll work with anybody. If you want to stop the wars, if you want to fight for working families, we'll work with you.

We're not playing the left/right game. 

Somali Independence Day was July 1st. Our members out in Minneapolis went out to talk about Ibrahim Traoré at Somali Independence Day, and they got a great response. Many people of Somali descent are inspired by Ibrahim Traoré and what he's doing and that they were out there, Gary and Penny were out there with with the Ibrahim Traoré banner and talking to people and engaging with people. It went went very very well.

And this this effort to popularize Ibrahim Traoré, this is really important because we're not talking about a leader who's bad. We're not talking about a leader we hate. We're talking about a leader we like. And we're showing that in this impoverished African country of Burkina Faso that's part of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), when they have a government that invests in people and opposes the imperialists, they can do so much.

And so imagine what we could do here in the wealthiest country in the world. If he can raise his people up and have a farming explosion, it's really really amazing. So this this Ibrahim Traoré popularization campaign, Penny's got a new book that everyone got a copy of when they came called The AES Effect. It will be available for purchase online soon. 

A Community of Resistance

July 4th, we had protests in Times Square in New York City and in Los Angeles. And our theme was “Finish the American Revolution, End the British Empire system and its Wars.” This literal placard behind was being held in Times Square and we had bullhorns. 

They were out in the streets of LA and we were actually in a smaller community, went to a July 4th Parade.

In Times Square, There was what looked like a military recruiting event happening around the same place, but they were all giving us thumbs up and they were all posing for pictures next to the sign. 

We have this image of veterans on there, it says “We won't fight another rich man war." Uniformed military guys that are doing recruitment are saying “I agree!” and taking selfies. That's amazing. That shows where the politics are, and the potential of our times.

I guess I'll just add that we are all gathered here in Chicago for our 7-day program and our national convention. And of course we're not just going to let that time pass. Yesterday was a very busy day. I had a headache like something else. We worked hard yesterday. 

What did we do in the morning? We went to the Barack Obama Presidential Library that just opened with a placard of Maumar Gaddafi that said “Anti-imperialist Hero.” And we all had copies of The Green Book. We marched outside the Obama Presidential Library saying “Long Live Gaddafi! Obama killed Gaddaffi!” 

That was an excellent moment, and its already been viewed all over the world.

Then we took a lunch break and then we went to the French consulate and we unfurled our Ibrahim Traoré banner and we said “France out of Africa! Ukraine out of Africa!” We stood with the Alliance of Sahel States and the positive response we got from people was very very amazing. A lot of people were actually watching us giving us a lot of eye contact and listening to what we were talking about because we covered all kinds of topics.

The potential is out there. If people would do what CPI did, this would be a very, very different country. The problem is people aren't doing it. Well, we're doing it. We're doing it and we want other people to do it with us. 

I'm going to get into now my analysis and my annual report.

There are two ways in this life that you can find happiness. You can find happiness by connecting with other people and experiencing love and human connection, tenderness. And you can find happiness by building, constructing and creating something.

The Center for Political Innovation is built to enable people to do both of those things because there is a real love and solidarity between us. And we are working to carry out operations. Being part of this organization has really meant a lot to a lot of people, myself included. 

There was a time I was kind of isolated by the left. I couldn't be doing the activism that I once did. All the people that once appreciated me were calling me all kinds of nasty names.

I just wasn't meant to live biologically. I knew I had to organize. So I started live-streaming on my YouTube channel. One thing led to another and now we have CPI. In 2020 CPI was born and we just keep going. It’s a very exciting project. I just can't tell the people in this room enough how much I care about them, and how much your dedication to this project, your loyalty to this project means to me. 

We're doing something here. We're setting an example here and people are trying to catch up with what we are doing. We are a go! go! go! organization that gets things done! We're getting things done. Our message is DARE TO STRUGGLE! DARE TO WIN!

Trump’s Betrayal and Failure

Now, I'm going to say something. I'm even now a little bit hesitant to say it.

The reason that I'm hesitant to say it is because so many people were saying it long before we did. They were saying it without any nuance, without any thought, without any analysis or sophistication. They were saying it in a childish kind of way, just going along with things. They were saying it on the command of mainstream media.

Well, we're not doing this on the command of mainstream media. We're not saying this because we want to fit in with The New York Times. We're not saying this because we want to be liberals.

We're saying it because it's just the reality. And what I'm going to say is: “Fuck Donald Trump! Fuck Donald Trump!"

We gave him a chance. Let's be real. We went to his inauguration with a big banner and we showed Donald Trump how he could go down in history, how he could be remembered.

We had a banner of him shaking hands with Kim Jong Un that said “Only Peace Can Make America Great Again!” We wrote a beautiful letter to President Donald Trump, we made it a video message. It was about what he could do if he stood up to the Israel lobby, if he stood up to the war makers.

If had done “no new wars” like he'd actually said; If he'd fulfilled his promises; why his face would be on Mount Rushmore, instead of him standing in front of Mount Rushmore on July 4th and giving some old man speech about the commies. The commies are coming to get us! The commies are coming to get us!

Donald Trump had a chance. We gave him a chance and he chose to betray the people not only of the country in general, but of the people who voted for him.

What was our strategy during the 2024 elections? We did not endorse Trump. Let's be clear about that. We didn't endorse Kamala Harris. Our strategy was to boost the anti-war messaging within Trump's campaign. And that was the right thing to do. 

I'll tell you why it was the right thing to do. Because when Donald Trump made this decision to attack Iran, Joe Kent, the US Counter-terrorism Director, stepped down and resigned in protest. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was the MAGA congresswoman, she opposed it. Tucker Carlson opposed it. And a big section of the Trump camp had become so committed to that anti-war message that when Trump betrayed it, they didn't follow the Donald.

And our boosting of the anti-war message within his campaign was very important and very strategic. And we have nothing to apologize for doing that. But we can still now say “Fuck Donald Trump!” 

I heard a joke. The joke is when Baron was younger, they wouldn't let Donald Trump go trick-or-treating with with with Baron because there was an unfortunate incident. Apparently, the rumor is that little Baron Trump was a big Harry Potter fan. And so, you know, he was going to go trick-or-treating with with Donald Trump and he was he was dressed in his Harry Potter costume. 

Donald Trump said, "Oh, Baron, what are you dressed as for Halloween?" He said, "I'm dressed as a wizard. I'm dressed as a wizard." And he said, “Really? That's amazing. You know, your grandfather, he was a wizard. He was a wizard. He was the best wizard. He was such a good wizard. They called him the GRAND WIZARD. That's what a good wizard he was.”

I've been sitting on that joke for years, folks. So, there you go. 

War-Mongering Expats

But one thing I do want to say to folks in the Republican camp, they talk about immigration. We don't pretend that the fact that millions of people can't live in their own country; that they're they find dead bodies along the border of people trying to get here. We don't pretend that's a good thing. It's a bad situation that people can't live in their homelands and are fleeing. It's a bad situation. 

The solution to it is not criminalizing and terrorizing the immigrant communities. Fuck ICE and their violations of our rights, going into homes without warrants. Fuck ICE and their terrorism against the American working people.

But at the same time, there there is an issue there. We don’t just shrug off the crisis of mass migration as something to celebrate. Its a problem, rooted in the breakdown of this globalist/imperialist system.

One thing I would say to anyone in the conservative camp who is concerned about immigration is that there's a bit of a double standard. There's so many conservatives that are really, really angry at a guy from Guatemala or a guy from Honduras or a guy from El Salvador who's washing dishes to feed his kids to send money back home. 

But then they're totally okay with Miami Cubans or the Shahs of Sunset Park, the Persians, or the Likudniks from Israel, coming here and not only interfering in our politics, but trying to lobby us to get our kids killed in some war that has no benefit to the American people.

They they are totally fine with these war-mongering expats that come into our country and try to manipulate our politics and they don't give a fuck about America. Let's be real. The Likudniks don't care about America. The Miami Cubans don't care about America. The Shahs of Sunset Park, they don't care about America. They want to settle the score with the regime back home. They want to get Americans killed for their own political agenda, for their own family vendetta.

If you're concerned about foreign influence, if you're concerned about immigrants, shouldn't that be much more of a threat than some guy washing dishes? That's what I think more than anything. And that hypocrisy. I think we need to popularize this phrase “war-mongering expats.”

I guess we are talking at this point about “war-mongering expats," we're obviously talking about the one who's now our secretary of state, right?

Marco Rubio, right? I guess was he was he born here? His family are war-mongering expats from Cuba. So, a couple weeks ago, the US State Department published a document going over allegations of Cuban influence in America, alleged Cuban influence in in this country. In that document, they mentioned a number of groups.

And those groups that they mentioned were groups that are Democrat aligned groups like the People's Forum and PSL, Trump derangement socialists that have ties to Cuba. We weren't mentioned because we're not one of those. 

When Biden was running the Department of Justice, he sent the Department of Justice to go after the Uhuru movement because they're seen as criticizing Obama. He sent the Department of Justice to go after Scott Ritter, who's a lifelong Republican, who's anti-war.

Now that Marco Rubio's in, he's sending the Department of Justice, and he's using his position as Secretary of State to target anti-war, anti-imperialist voices that are aligned with the Democratic party, that are critical of the Republicans. We weren't mentioned in that document. We don't want to be. We don't want to be subpoenaed. We don't want to be harassed by the government. 

July 4th, 1976

But something very strange is on that document on page 45 with no explanation, no caption, not related to anything in the text. They included this photograph.

Isn't that interesting? Very weird. And this isn't the only time we've used this photograph, mind you. This is on the cover of our textbook, Out of the Movement to the Masses.

I have done whole streams about the history of where this photo came from, which is some of what we're going to get into today. 

A couple weeks before the document was published, we released the poster of this convention featuring this historic image. And this was on page 45 of their document about supposed Cuban influence with no explanation. That says to me they're watching us and they should be because we have something very very special to offer and we play a very very important role.

But what is the history of this image? This this image comes from July 4th, 1976, 50 years ago.

And that was the bicentennial anniversary, the 200-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And there was a big patriotic rally with President Gerald Ford in Philadelphia to celebrate it. The Communists of America at that time, you had the New Communist Movement of the 1970s, various communist groups that were trying to form a new communist party that would be aligned with China, decided they were going to counter it. There were actually two protests against it.

So, flashback to the 70s. We're going to get some history. Anyone ever heard of Weatherman? The Weather Underground? The Weather Underground were underground and they were doing their bombing campaign at that time. They were blowing things up. But they realized they weren't getting a lot of attention.

So, they started something called the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, which was like their above ground legal supporters network. People that were saying the weathermen were good but were not engaging in illegal activities. They had loads and loads of money. Bill Ayers was their leader, who lives in this city, I think his family owns the power company or something in this city.

So in January of 1976, they called a conference here in Chicago called the “National Hard Times Conference” and it was to be a communist conference to plan for rallies to oppose the bicentennial. They had a lot of money and there were about 2,000 people there and it was an utter shitshow from what I understand.

There were people throwing chairs at each other and different communist groups fighting each other. It was kind of chaos. But out of that conference, they called for a rally to counter the bicentennial called “Bicentennial Without Colonies” on July 4th in Philadelphia.

Another communist group that existed back then called the Revolutionary Communist Party. They'd been called the Revolutionary Union, but in 1975 they changed their name. They were the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). They were not invited to that conference. They were banned. They were unwelcome from the National Hard Times Conference. They were being shunned.

So they decided to call their own rally to counter the bicentennial on the other side of town. As an alternative to “Bicentennial Without Colonies” they called their own rally, called “We've carried the rich for 200 years. Now let's get them off our backs.” 

At that point the RCP controlled the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). This photo was the VVAW contingent at the “We've carried the rich for 200 years, Now let’s get them off our backs!” rally in 1976 on July 4th.

This photo is iconic. The rally that the Revolutionary Communist Party did by themselves, it was much smaller. They had maybe 5,000 people, maybe only 2,000 people at their rally. Whereas the other rally that was called by all the other leftist groups had about 30,000, maybe even 60,000 people at it. 

But if you get on the internet today, it is almost impossible to find a picture of “Bicentennial Without Colonies.” Meanwhile, this image and other images from “We've carried the rich for 200 years” are very easily found. And why is that? 

“Bicentennial Without Colonies” was a collection of different groups. The Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, Native Americans bussed in from reservations, the LGBT movement, the feminist movement. There was a group of pagan witches who assembled and did some kind of witchcraft ceremony. And it was just a collection of people on the 200-year anniversary of America saying, "We're pissed." 

However, the RCP's rally was very, very pointed, and it wasn't a collection of different minorities. It was rather a statement on behalf of the immense majority, saying, "We've carried the rich for 200 years. Let's get them off our backs! We won't fight another rich man's war!” That rally, even though it was much smaller, it carried a way bigger punch. It had a much bigger impact because it was speaking in a populist majoritarian way. We're going to get back to that.

Andy Stapp, Presente!

But this organization, the VVAW, it wasn't the only anti-war organization among veterans of the Vietnam War that existed. There was another group called the American Serviceman's Union (ASU) that was a much more working-class organization.

The VVAW allowed officers to join. Whereas the American Serviceman's Union had the rule you couldn't be an officer. It was only enlisted men who joined. The American Serviceman's Union was started by a guy named Andy Stapp who was a member of Workers World Party.

He had a newspaper called The Bond. They would go to US military bases and they distributed thousands of copies of it. He was kicked out of the army for trying to start this union of active duty GIs. They distributed thousands of copies of The Bond on military bases across the country. It created kind of a national scandal. There were congressional investigations and such. The American Serviceman's Union had a really really big impact.

I had the honor of meeting Andy Stapp a few times when I first lived in New York City. He was still living when I was first came to the city before he died in 2014. He was a very very kind man. 

I found out that after the Vietnam War was over and after the American Serviceman's Union was no longer doing their thing, he moved to North Korea. He lived in North Korea for two years, and every day, he would go to the DMZ where they had sound systems set up. He would urge the GIs on the other side to go home. He would say, "You don't belong here in Korea. The Korean people don't want you here.” Every day he would broadcast in English across the DMZ, urging the American GIS to go home.

So yeah, Andy Stapp, presente! 

After he came back to the United States, he ended up being a high school teacher in Hoboken, New Jersey. And he taught social studies and history.

At his memorial, I got to hear some of his former students talk about what he was like to have as a teacher. That was really inspiring. We have got to remember the people who sacrificed and given to this movement. 

Andy Stapp, presente!

John Kerry’s Strange History

This photo was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Who was the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War when it was founded? You know who it was? John Kerry.

John Kerry started VVAW. He served as an officer in Vietnam and when he came back he became an anti-war protester. For the first year of VVAW he was the public face of the organization. Then he moved on and they became much more radical, and this was when they were run by the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1976. 

John Kerry that is a name that pulls up a lot inside of me. John Kerry, you know, he was a US Senator from Massachusetts. He was the US presidential candidate for the Democrat party in 2004. Then he was Secretary of State during Barack Obama's second term. 

His 2004 campaign was the first election that I was intensely involved in as a young person. I couldn't vote yet, but I really hated Bush and I hated the war. And my family, we were like the only Democrats in this little town of conservatives. My town almost turned into a 24/7 military parade after 9/11. I felt very much opposed to Bush. So I paid close attention during that election. 

I look back on that election now. I didn't think this then, but I look back on that election in 2004. That whole election where John Kerry ran for president on the Democrat ticket, that whole election was some kind of weird psychological operation. It is the one of the most bizarre things if you think about it.

John Kerry had a record as an anti-war activist. Yet, the Democrats launched the campaign with a documentary about how he was a hero in Vietnam. He had been on this swift boat, they said was this amazing fighter who'd won medals and all of this. It was acknowledged that one of the medals that John Kerry had won in Vietnam was for shooting a 13-year-old boy. A 13-year-old boy!

He would go up and down the the rivers on this swift boat looking for Vietnamese resistance guerrillas. There was a 13-year-old boy who they said had a gun or was trying to fight the US or whatever. He shot and killed a 13-year-old boy. That's what he got his medal for. But the Democratic Party was showing this this documentary about John Kerry was a hero on the Swift Boat.

What was weird was that everybody who was voting for John Kerry was against the war. People were voting for John Kerry because they were opposed to Bush's attack on Iraq. But yet John Kerry’s campaign, even though he had been an anti-war activist, was all about he's a war hero. You remember at the Democratic National Convention when he accepted the nomination, he got up. He said, "John Kerry reporting for duty." 

And then what happened? He lost. Well, well, how did he lose? He lied. One thing is when he had been a VVAW activist, they'd all assembled and thrown their medals over the White House fence in protest.

And so they asked him, "Did you throw your medals over the fence?" "Oh, no. I I only threw the ribbons. I keep my medals." And so throughout the campaign, people kept saying, "Where are these medals? Where are these medals if you didn't throw them over the fence?" There's video of him throwing his medals over the fence. He lied about it. 

Then the last couple weeks of the election, they came out with the Swiftboat ads. And other guys who had served on the boat with him said he wasn't really the hero. They had lied in the documentary about him. And so he ended up losing. 

You look back on that whole thing, his platform throughout the whole campaign was to send more troops to Iraq, even though all the people voting for him were voting for him because they wanted to stop the war. I don't think John Kerry was ever intended to win. I think the whole campaign was just a psychological operation. 

And that explains what they did to Howard Dean, right? We talk about cancel culture now. This guy Howard Dean, what did he do? He didn't send a picture of himself to anybody. He didn't grope anybody. All he did is go, "Yeeawwww" and they they destroyed his political career. Howard Dean seemed to actually be a real candidate and they wanted to have a fake election to run a psyop on the American people that were opposed to the war.

The 2004 campaign was very odd. But it was the shape of things to come in so many ways. One aspect of that campaign that I will never forget is you know John Kerry and George W. Bush were the candidates. They were very, very similar, right? They both went to Yale. They were both members of the Order of Skull and Bones, the same secret society. They were both Zionists and extreme supporters of Israel. They both wanted to send more troops to Iraq and escalate the war. 

They had basically the same platform, but the campaign was done in Hollywood. There were two movies that came out that summer. Do you remember that? I think it was Pat Buchanan, he said, "This year the election is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson." And that's what it was.

That summer all the people who voted for Bush went to go see Passion of the Christ (2004). And all the people that voted for Kerry went to go see Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) by Michael Moore. And what was interesting was that both Michael Moore and Mel Gibson were anti-Israel. Michael Moore had dedicated his book to Rachel Corrie, the activist from Olympia, Washington who'd been killed by Israel. Mel Gibson has said many anti-Israel things and gotten himself in a lot of trouble. And his father is a traditionalist Catholic. 

So even though the two candidates were Zionists and had the exact same platform, the two major films to rev up the base were made by people that were anti-Israel and had talked about the power of the Israel lobby.

It's very very interesting. The power of the Israel lobby beneath the surface is a big thing that people have known about for a long time. It's an open secret and deep down people within the political establishment have been angry about it for a long time. Every so often there are just little hints that you'll hear from elected officials and from the government they'll do something to just kind of diss Israel. John Kerry as he was going out as Secretary of State, huge supporter of Israel, but you remember he refused to protect Israel from a UN resolution condemning them, and then he said “Israel can be democratic or Jewish, it can't be both,” which was very carefully worded to be offensive. Both sides Republicans and Democrats kind of resent the fact that the Israel lobby tells them what to do and that this country doesn't really have its sovereignty. It's probably much more blatantly obvious behind closed doors to them than it is to us.

Now it's very, very obvious, but even back then, people knew.

My Awakening in 2015 

The name John Kerry means something else to me as well. His name means something to me because of an experience that many people here know all about, but there are probably other people here for the first time that haven't haven't heard about this, which was my life changed in 2015.

In 2015, I was working with Ramsay Clark, the former US Attorney General. I was doing some international media work and I was invited to go on a humanitarian mission to Yemen with the Red Crescent Society of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And I got on a boat and at the time that was happening, the P5+1 nuclear talks were taking place. John Kerry was in Geneva negotiating with Javeed Zarif. It was the Iran nuclear deal negotiations.

I had gone to a conference in Iran, then I came back and then they invited me to go back and be part of this humanitarian mission. So as an activist I thought, “You know the people of Yemen are being bombed by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is being supported by the United States. I want to support Yemen.”

So I got on a boat and there were some other Americans that were supposed to go on the boat. They backed out at the last minute. They took me aside and they said “Don't do this Caleb! You're going to get arrested when you come back to the United States! They’re going to say you were helping the revolutionary guards or something like that!”

And I said, “I didn't go all the way from New York City to Tehran, and all the way from Tehran to Bandar Abbas to just go back home. I'm getting on this boat. 

I got on the boat. I was the only American. There was a French citizen on the boat, a guy of Sengalese descent. There was a guy from Germany on the boat. Everyone else was an Iranian. I was on this boat the Iran Shahed rescue ship of the humanitarian Red Crescent Society. I was on that boat for 13 days.

I didn't realize what I was getting into because as soon as our our boat departed, Israel and Saudi Arabia both announced that we were smuggling weapons to Yemen, which was not true. They said that a strike on the boat would be justified. And Reuters interviewed me from the boat and they said, "Did you know that Israel and Saudi Arabia have said they got the right to blow this boat up?" And I was thinking, "Oh boy, what have I gotten myself into?" 

I'm on this boat and I'm surrounded by Iranians, not many of whom were English speakers. But of those who were, they wanted to talk to me about religion the whole time because many of them had never met a Christian before. They asked me, "What do Christians think about Moses? What do Christians think about the end times? What do Christians think about Jesus? What do Christians think about the afterlife?" 

And we talked about religion for 13 days. And we saw planes flying overhead. I'm on this boat and I'm sitting there thinking, I'm a kid from a small town in Ohio. How in the world did I end up in New York City and now I went to Iran, and now I'm on this boat trying to deliver medical aid to Yemen risking my life. How in the world did this happen? 

I started having these eerie dreams. I would dream of the vacation Bible school I went to as a small child. My grandmother, she was a Lutheran and there was this little church that was painted white and it was surrounded entirely by corn fields. You could not see another building from it. 

As I was talking to these Iranians about religion all day long, as I was fearing for my life, watching US and Saudi war-planes fly overhead, I would then go to sleep and keep dreaming that I was inside of my grandmother's Lutheran church. I dreamed I was walking through it and it was completely empty.

And needless to say, on that ship, I reconnected with our Heavenly Parent, with God. I had a spiritual experience and my life changed. It was something I will never forget. 

When I came back, something was off. I just couldn't fit in with the communist groups. I would go to the meetings of the activist groups I was with and I would think, "God damn it, can't you take this seriously? People are dying.” I felt sick every time I went into the party office, because I could see how urgently we needed a real anti-imperialist movement, and how much these people were just fooling around and phoning it in.

The Boston Trap

So that brings me back to this picture from 1976.

So I told you the reason they had to have a separate rally was that Revolutionary Union, then the Revolutionary Communist Party, they were not invited to the main leftist event. They had to have their own rally.

Why were they not invited? Well, they were not invited because in 1974, two years prior, there had been the anti-busing riots in Boston. They were trying to desegregate schools and there were a lot of racist white Bostonians who were against it and had gone out and thrown rocks at buses, etc.

At the time, the left was very confused about what to do about it because we now know school desegregation was not done because Wall Street just really cares about Black children and wants them to have an opportunity. Desegregation was done because there are certain ethnic enclaves in urban areas. If you go to any urban center, the cops tend to be Irish, you have Italian neighborhoods, Polish neighborhoods. Jobs are handed out on kind of a nepotistic basis. Public servants jobs are very much reliant on these kind of ethnic communities and networks.

To bring in austerity and privatizations, and get rid of government employees jobs with union benefits and big salaries, they needed to break apart the ethnic communities from which civil servants are drawn. This is now all admitted. You can read what the Ford Foundation, they admitted this that they wanted to break apart the kind of ethnic associations based in neighborhoods like in in Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Detroit and places like that. They were trying to bring in de-growth and cut public spending.

Who else opposed bossing? It wasn't just racist white Bostonians. It was also the Black Panthers. They said it wouldn't be fair for Black kids to have to go to school with kids who didn't look like them. they wanted Black schools for Black children that taught Black revolutionary and nationalist curriculum. Black nationalists were opposed to busing, on top of that fact that we now know that busing was being done in order to bring in austerity and break apart communities.

So the left had to decide what to do. Most of the left just went along with the idea, that well, we have to support school desegregation. Well, the RU, the RCP, they made a mistake.

They supported the anti-busing riots. They shouldn't have done that. When people are throwing rocks at Black children, you don't want to support that. But why did they make this mistake?

I will read you what they actually wrote to defend their position. They said, "Those who think the way to stand with black people and other oppressed nationalities is to attack white workers as simply a bunch of racists, who think the ruling class is a friend of the oppressed, can at best only drag of the tail of the struggle, and if they continue in this path, can only end up falling backwards completely into the camp of the ruling class." 

Very prophetic words. They were pointing to a reality that if you start aligning with the ruling class and you start lining up with the people in power; if you demonize working people who might not agree with something the people in power are doing and just dismiss them as a pack of racists; pretty soon you're going to be on the wrong side. They were right about that.

They made the mistake of their busing position, but they had that understanding busing wasn't coming from a good place and that we shouldn't be appealing to the government of the United States as if they're a champion of Black people. We shouldn't be dismissing the Bostonian working class as a pack of racists. 

Well, the RCP took that position and they were immediately castigated and banned from leftist spaces and called racist and fascist and all of that. 

This shows you that there's always been an element on the left that is really terrified of anything that looks populist. In this photo you you have Black and white together saying “We won't fight another rich man's war.” Fighting for the immense majority, against the ruling class, the imperialists.

The Communist Manifesto actually says, "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.” That's in The Communist Manifesto. The RCP had a rally speaking to the immense majority: “We’ve carried the rich for 200 years, Let’s get them off our backs!” They were saying let's have unity on the basis of class struggle against the rich. 

There's a section of the left that's always been terrified of that. To the unofficial cartel of crooks who control the Communist and Socialist groups in America, that message makes them sick. It terrifies them.

Why are they still targeting Gerry Healy?

Let me give you another example.

There's something weird that happened during the 2024 election cycle. Kamala Harris was running against Trump. The Democratic Socialist of America was doing their thing. One of these DSA professors, a guy named Aiden Beatty, who teaches at Wayne State University, an Irish American, he published a smear book against Gerry Healey. 

Now, who is Gerry Healy? He was the leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain. He's been dead for 35 years. But randomly during the 2024 election cycle, DSA decided to publish this smear book against Gerry Healy. 

I have long been fascinated by Jerry Healey because of Libya and Gaddafi. Healy was a personal friend of Gaddaffi.

He was a Troskyist. He was friends with the actress Vanessa Redgrave, who joined his organization and ran for office. Gerry Healy was a pivotal figure in the Palestine movement because at that time Palestine was still kind of a taboo subject to talk about on the left. Gerry Healy talked about it. Vanessa Redgrave, the actress, she actually got money from Gaddaffi and she mortgaged her house to make the first pro-Palestine film that was ever widely circulated, The Palestinians (1977).

The Academy Awards was threatened the year that she won the Oscar. The JDL said they were going to blow up the Academy Awards if she won, but they gave her the Oscar anyway. And so on national television, she accepted the Oscar. She said, "You should be very proud that in the last few weeks you've stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression." 

Yeah, that's is a quote. And she got booed like crazy. You don't want to say that to the Academy Awards, but she had the courage to say it. And that was because of Gerry Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party. He'd recruited this Hollywood actress. He had her make these pro-Palestine films. And Gerry Healy was the forefront of pro-Palestine activism in Britain. 

So what happened? Well, a couple years later, the press in Britain accused the Workers Revolutionary Party of being a cult, practicing mind control, and they they accused Gerry Healy of all kinds of stuff which never amounted to anything. There were never any criminal charges, etc. They destroyed the organization. 

This all happened in 1985. This is a really long time ago. So why in the world did DSA decide to publish a book about it in the year of 2024? Well, I read the book. The book is full of a lot of deception and misunderstandings.

I will say the folks at the World Socialist website, because some of their people actually knew Gerry Healy, have done a really good job showing that it's just full of lies. It starts out by saying Gerry Healy claimed that his father had been murdered by the Black and Tans, by the British military and and that never happened. Gerry Healey never claimed that. There's not one place that it's ever documented Gerry Healey ever even made this claim.

But it starts out by saying, "Oh, he lied about how his father died." 

But why in the world did they publish it in the middle of the 2024 elections? Well, go to the acknowledgements in the book. Who paid for it? Program on Jewish Studies. A pro-Israel outlet funded the book. Aiden Beatty, the author of it, a DSA author, says in the book’s acknowledgements that the Program on Jewish Studies “were generous enough to see the Jewish, Israeli–Palestinian and global connections of this project.”

What is that about? Well, if you read the book, Gerry Healy is Hitler. When he says that the media is biased against the pro-Palestine movement, he's saying Jews secretly control the media. He's building a cult of personality. He’s a fascist, he’s Hitler.

What Aiden Beatty is subtly doing with the book is he's warning leftists about the danger that amid these pro-Palestine protests and demonstrations, somebody like Gerry Healy might emerge once again. Gerry Healy, just like RU or the RCP was cancelled and smeared and isolated, Gerry Healy's group was subject to a similar defamation. And it's very, very interesting. 

I wrote my book Trotsky and the Neoconservatives: The Whole Story talking about the question of “How in the world is it that the followers of this Russian revolutionary, a lot of them ended up being Pentagon strategists?”

Crypto-Zionism among leftists

What was this really about? I wrote my book about that and the conclusion that I came to was it really gets down to something that Vladimir Lenin wrote about called "the spirit of the ghetto.” 

There was a group of Jewish folks in Russia that refused to join the Bolsheviks. They were called The Bund. They said we have to have our own party because Jews are just so special and so different that we can never be in the same organization as non-Jews and we have to have our own party. And Lenin, who was himself of Jewish descent, condemned that. He called it “the spirit of the ghetto.” The idea that Jews should be isolated.

He said that Zionism is the ultimate expression of the spirit of the ghetto. If you want to understand Zionism, go watch a Sasha Baron Cohen movie. I'm serious. 

Take that movie Borat (2006). So, who is Borat? Borat is basically a caricature. He's an attack on Muslims, and he's an attack on the former Soviet Union. They found like the perfect medium. They could attack both the former Soviet Union and the Islamic world. And he's this dumb guy who walks around saying, "Jew, Jew, Jew, I am a dumb anti-semite. Jew have horns." 

He's a caricature. But what's the point of the Borat movie? Sasha Baron Cohen dresses in his costume and goes around pretending to be this ignorant anti-semite from Kazakhstan, “Oh, I hate the Jew. I kill Jew.” 

But what is he saying? What is he doing? He's drawing out America. He goes to a rodeo and he gets one of the cowboy guys. He says, "Oh, in my country if you're gay, they kill you." And he says, "That's what we want to do here." He gets on a bus with a group of drunken frat boys and gets them to tell a bunch of racist jokes. 

What's the message of the film? The message of the film is that deep down Americans are just like Borat. That's the message of the film. Deep down Americans are no better than the than the former Soviet people and the Muslims of the world. And that deep down, all of us are just a bunch of bloodthirsty anti-semites who want to kill the Jews. And we're ignorant and we're stupid. And that's why you need Israel, the special place that they can go to get away from us inferior rabble, us human cattle that are not part of the chosen people. 

That's what the spirit of the ghetto is. And that's Zionism. 

Lenin wasn't just calling out Zionism. He was calling out the Bund. They weren't Zionists, but they still held on to that idea that we must be separate. What “the spirit of the ghetto” really incarnates is anti-populism. The idea that the majority of the American people are the problem. That any mass movement on behalf of the majority of the people is somehow fascist or Nazi.

That is “the spirit of the ghetto” and that's what Trotsky believed. That’s why Trosky refused to organize the peasantry. That’s why Trotsky condemned Stalin as “Asiatic.” If you read his biography of Stalin, in the opening pages he calls Stalin “Asiatic,” ie. not one of us sophisticated western people. That's what Trotsky believed. He did not love the Russian people.

Trotsky was loyal to an agenda of chaos and instability because it would break apart an establishment and an order he was threatened by. He did not want to help the Russian people. Stalin believed in “socialism in one country.” He did the five-year economic plans and he turned the Soviet Union into an industrial powerhouse and he built up a strong country.

Stalin and Trotsky had a divergent perspective. Trostky was very much putting forward that “spirit of the ghetto mindset” and a group of his followers who broke with him when he refused to completely throw the Russian Revolution under the bus. They were in the United States, the New York Intellectuals. They ended up working for the CIA. They used that kind of anti-populist destructive mindset first to create the New Left with the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom program, that was chaired by Irving Kristol. Then, later with Neoconservatism in the 1970s and 80s as they went into the Republican Party. The message is always the same. 

Leo Strauss was a professor who was very influential on the neocons. He was never a Trotskyist, but he was a philosophy professor. His message was that all the great philosophers of the world have always had to write in code because if the average people knew what they really believed, they would persecute them. 

He saw Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the same thing. And he saw them as expressions of democracy, extreme democracy. If ordinary people get together, we're buffoons and we're fools and we're going to persecute the great intellectuals. And what make makes America great is that they're not able to do that. And that we have a society where the smart ones can rise to the top and the other people are controlled. Leo Strauss's favorite TV show was Gunsmoke, the old cowboy western where the good guy wears a white hat and is all good. The bad guy wears a black hat has no redeeming quality. And he said that's how average people need to understand the world and foreign policy. They can't understand the nuances. 

The noble lie was a big point in his work. The idea that it's okay to lie to people because the average people are just so stupid. So if we have to tell them that Saddam Hussein's got weapons of mass destruction and he's going to kill us all or that Iran is building a nuclear bomb, it's okay to lie to them because they're too stupid. They can't understand it like us smart people are. And we're on a crusade to spread freedom and individualism to protect the intellectuals all over the world. That is the neocon ideology.

Please don't think I'm blaming this on the Jews. I'm not because it comes from Friedrich Nietzsche. He was not Jewish. He was quite anti-semitic. But his worldview was this same view. It's called philosophical irrationalism. It is the belief that there is no real truth and that the great individual defines their own truth by imposing it onto the world. That any attempt to give a grand narrative to explain human history is simply totalitarian or propaganda or group think. It's the philosophy of the ubermenschen who defines reality for himself. 

That is what is behind the neoconservative ideology and the Trotskyite Synthetic Left. It is that belief, that rejection of the need to build a mass movement, that contempt for the masses of people; That’s what I wanted to talk about here today.

After I came back from my trip to Iran and the humanitarian mission, I was pretty badly cancelled. And that was an interesting experience. 

And as as I've investigated what happened to the RU and as I've what I've seen what they've still done to Gerry Healy decades after his death, I understand it. The cynical cartel that runs “socialism” in America, this clique of elderly Trotskyites and crypto-Zionists hates the American people. It sees them as a mob of bloodthirsty anti-semites. Its always looking for some minority group to latch on to, to hold up as proof of how evil the population overall is, to make the case that humanity is inherently bad and restrictions need to be put on us, so they can stay at the top forever.

They are always pushing Malthusian theories about overpopulation. They aren’t interested in centralizing the means of production and raising society toward abundance. Its all just vengeance, chaos, resentment, and instability, an appeal to peoples libidinal and oedipal impulses to create unrest and destruction. And nothing triggers them more than a real populist movement, or a strong leader.

The Brilliance of Roger Waters

I opened the speech by talking about pattern, patterns as something that human beings draw their stability and their security from. When I talked about that, it bring me to an understanding of psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalysis teaches that mental illness is rooted in how we interpret patterns with our mind.

There are two types of mental illness. There is what is called neurosis. That cliche attributed to Albert Einstein about insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. 

Neurosis means there are patterns going on in your life that you're not picking up on. There are patterns that you just are unaware of and so you keep getting yourself into unhappy situations. And everyone is at least a little bit neurotic. What Sigmund Freud tried to do with his clients was to help them see the patterns they weren't seeing and become less and less neurotic.

The more deadly form of mental illness, the more extreme form of mental illness is called psychosis. And psychosis is not when there's patterns that you're not recognizing. It's the opposite. It when it's when you start inventing patterns that are not there. When you start creating a narrative in your mind and and hearing voices that are not there. Creating a story in your head that's to protect yourself from extreme pain. 

That's what psychosis is. It's a defense mechanism. When people are so afraid, so upset, feeling so much anxiety, their mind just starts inventing a false world. They kind of withdraw from the world into their own delusions.

With this understanding mental illness being rooted in how we interpret patterns,  I want to talk about someone that I really really admire. I had the honor of of meeting him. I've met him a couple times, but once I actually got to interview him. I am referring to the great Roger Waters. What a hero Roger Waters is.

The Wall, the concept album that they made into a movie, is about psychosis. It's about a guy who's had a lot of trauma and pain in his life and a lot of hardship. And he goes into a hotel room and he becomes psychotic. He isolates himself from the world.

That song, Comfortably Numb, that's really what that's about, withdrawing. It talks about “lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying” because the person have withdrawn into his own world.

And how does The Wall end? It ends with the wall tearing down. The way to cure himself is to connect with other people. 

That the triumph is that he connects with his peers. The Wall is the isolation of psychosis. It's connecting with other people that enables him to get beyond it. It's a very beautiful piece. It's a really powerful powerful piece that he made. There's some crass cartoons in there and genitals marching around and stuff like that I'm not not too fond of. But its just really emotionally potent. It's very very loaded. Says a lot about human psychology.

I want to talk about another piece by Roger Waters that I really like because he did Shine on You Crazy Diamond.

Do you know Shine on You Crazy Diamond? That's a beautiful song. And if you listen to it, that's what CPI is about. He wrote it for Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd, his best friend, who blew his mind with drugs.

And as Pink Floyd was becoming more popular and famous, he couldn't be there. And so the album was Wish You Were Here, wishing that his friend could be there. Then the song Shine on You Crazy Diamond is he's like shaking his friend: Can you just show the world your brilliance? I know you have something beautiful to offer the world, but you you you're not able to do it, you know, and he's saying, "Wake up and show the world your brilliance!” That's what CPI is all about. We're saying shine on you crazy diamonds. Wake up. Show the brilliance! Learn to think!

We're trying to awaken people. That's what we're doing! That’s what Jesus was saying on the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16)

Roger Waters, Got to give a tribute to him!

People of the Land Fighting Back!

I’m here in Chicago. I love being in Chicago. Next year we're going to do our convention Los Angeles. So, that'll that'll be good for some of our LA members. We have set a tentative date of August 7th, 2027 in the Los Angeles area.

Chicago was one of my favorite places when I was a kid because my uncle. He died when I was 11 years old. But before he died, he lived here in this city. He was a professor at DePaul University. He taught acting. He lived in Evanston.

He was just such a great person and he was my hero. I lived in a small town, but coming to Chicago where he had his actor friends, he was in Hollywood movies, he was talking about different ideas, always made me feel so excited and alive. He was my hero. He had Marfan syndrome and he tragically died at the age of 45 in 1999.

I really looked up to him. I was at my uncle's funeral when I was 11 years old here in Chicago. My uncle was a Scotch-Irishman, Protestant-Irish like my family.

I remember being there with my mom and my grandparents. We're we're sitting there in the theater with like 300 of his friends, all the people he'd touched throughout his life were there mourning his passing. And then a bag piper comes out. What were they playing? They were playing the skyboat song. That was the first time I ever heard the Skye Boat Song. That's a very very traditional Scottish ballad.

It's mourning the loss of Bonnie Prince Charlie, Charles Edward Stuart. As capitalism was emerging in Britain, you had London and then you had Glasgow, these port cities were emerging to be centers of capitalism. And then you had the people in the Scottish Highlands that were still feudal. As the Glasgow capitalist economy was expanding, they wanted to stop it and they took up arms to try and put a Catholic king on the throne to to defeat the Protestants. It was called the Jacobite uprising. They were not fighting for Scottish independence. They wanted a Catholic king. And they rallied around a French guy, Bonnie Prince Charlie.

And they were defeated. Bonnie Prince Charlie fled to the isle of Skye to get away. And after that, if you read what was done in the Scottish Highlands, it was the model for a lot of the genocides that later happened to native people and to other colonial projects because the people in the Scottish Highlands, they didn't speak English. They spoke Gaelic and they spoke other other languages.

So they took kids away from their parents and beat the language out of them. And they forcibly cleared and removed people from the lands that they lived on for thousands of years. And the Scottish people were being murdered and genocided. The reason that in Appalachia you'll hear a lot of old Appalachian bluegrass songs.

Over the river to feed my sheep, Over the river Charlie… 

Well, who's it's because those were Scottish folks who fled because they'd been driven off their land when they were clearing the Scottish Highlands. What they did to the Native Americans a century later. What they did to other people, just destroying a people, wiping out a people is what the Glasgow-English capitalist economy was doing as they cleared the commons to create the market. It was a process Marx called “The primitive accumulation of capital.”

Adam Smith was living in Glasgow and he was writing excessively about “the civilizing influence of commerce.” He was talking about his own people. He was ashamed to be a Scotsman and he saw his own people as a bunch of savages and he was saying, "We need commerce. Capitalism will civilize these people. They're backward." 

Even though Bonnie Prince Charlie was not fighting for Scottish independence, he was still an icon that later. The Skye Boat Song was used by the Scottish independence movement. He became an icon that people rallied around. You listen to the Skyboat song:

Burned are our homes, exile and death

Scatter the loyal men;

Yet, ere the sword cool in the sheath,

Charlie will come again.

There are other song many of us knew from childhood:

My Bonnie lies over the ocean, My Bonnie lies over the sea,

My Bonnie lies over the ocean, Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me!

That's about Bonnie Prince Charlie. The Scots who are being exterminated and having their culture wiped out are saying, "One day our king, our Bonnie Prince is going to come back and save us and we will get justice." And Bonnie Prince Charlie becomes this figure that's associated with Scottish nationalism.

It's a historical law, this is what I've learned from Alexander Dugin and the philosophy of Eurasianism, that there are Empires of the sea and Civilizations of the Land. Empires of the sea are based on controlling trade routes and building up mighty militaries, mighty navies. But Civilizations of the Land have a different relationship because to connect land masses, you have to build roads.

Empires of the land are much more collective in how they operate and they're much less individualist. They focus more on development. Even though we can talk about different economic systems, if you look at the empires that existed in Russia for thousands of years, the empires that existed in China, the dynasties, they have a different relationship with the peoples and areas they conquered than the Roman Empire or the or the British Empire or American imperialism today. 

That the Atlanticist model of controlling global trade, Henry Charles Carey called it the English system. Lenin called it “Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism," extracting value from all over the world to enrich mighty cities; verses the Eurasian model of great land masses, great civilizations and civilization states and empires on the land. They can manifest themselves a little differently; but there's a law of history that you can look at which is that when a civilization of the land and the people of the land are besieged by the empire of the sea, among them will emerge some kind of messianic figure; some kind of savior who becomes the expression of their desire to break free, the desire of people of the land to fight back!

That's what Bonnie Prince Charlie was. That's what Stalin was. That's what Mao Zedong was. The revolutions that have happened in the 20th century, you can't understand them if you just talk about communism versus capitalism. These were people of the land that had been kept impoverished, fighting back, fighting back and asserting their right to grow and have growth and not be part of the Atlanticist global system that was keeping them in poverty with its mighty militaries.

And that's what's going on in the world today. The BRICS economy and the rising new economy in the east; that economy represents people of the land fighting back. 

Before I did this talk, I dug up some of the obituaries for my uncle who died in 1999 and I found out, and it made me smile, brought tears to my eyes, My uncle before he died, he taught classes in Burkina Faso!

Burkina Faso. That's right. Where a person of the land, a land savior, one of these messianic figures, Ibrahim Traoré, is leading the people of the land to fight back and assert themselves and build!

The African people have been besieged by colonialism in the empires of the sea. So the people of the land are expressing themselves! This is so much deeper than just Marxism. Read all the Marxism you want, but dig even deeper.

Leo Tolstoy, when Russia was being invaded by the French, he wrote in his great novel War and Peace “a people defending its land cannot be conquered by any army that has no roots in it. The invader depends on the land for supply, order and obedience. The defender depends on it for life itself and life is stronger than any army. 

He wrote: “The French soldiers stood on Russian soil as something alien, something hostile, something lifeless. The Russian stood upon it as his own body. Every step forward weakened the invader and strengthened those who belonged to the land.”

The people of the land all over the world are fighting back. The book we distributed Who are the Houthis? What are they fighting for? One of the chapters is called “People of the land fighting back." Ansarallah, these are people that have lived in the mountains for over a thousand years, practiced their particular Zaidi Shia Islam, and they have guns. They love their Second Amendment. It's part of their religion that you must have a gun.

They are fighting back against Zionism and imperialism, blocking ships and stopping that sea-based global economy, to stand with the Palestinians. The poorest people in the world! The poorest people in the world are stopping the world economy! These people of the land fighting back are heroes!

And you know who else was one of these land saviors? One of these land messiahs was Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln represented the small farmers, the labor unions, the free-soilers against the slaveocracy, which wanted to make money selling cheap cotton to the British Empire. The British wanted to send their navy to break the blockade and send weapons to the south. And who sent their navy to New York City, to warn the British not get involved? The Russians. The Russians stopped the British from intervening in our civil war to protect the slaveholders. The people of the land stood up against the British Empire!

And even back when Russia was being ruled by Czars, there was still a connection between the people of the land that pushed them to fight against the British Empire, the Atlanticist pathology. 

I believe we Americans have it within us to be people of the land!

The total breakdown of imperialism

Economics is central to what we're talking about. You know, Marxism is a philosophy. I'm at the point where I say I don't agree with dialectical materialism. There are things about the Marxist philosophy that I don't accept. 

But Marx spent his entire life talking about the problem of overprouction, the value crisis. Never before in history have we had a situation where people are hungry, not because there's a shortage of food, but because there's too much food; where people are homeless because there are too many houses.

That's what Marx spent his career explaining. As capitalism develops technology, the economy becomes less and less stable. And it's pretty important in the age of AI. Marx proved and helped the world to understand this that as technology advances, it's easier and easier to produce products, and when you have an irrational economy based on profits, the result is going to be more and more poverty. 

And that is the understanding we have of the economic crisis that we're in, rooted in the computer revolution and rooted in the natural instability of capitalism, rooted in the fact that we have an economy where profits are in command. The anarchy of production prevents human beings from fulfilling their full potential.

The productive capacity and the creativity of human beings is no longer able to fit within the constraints of the irrationality of the market. The struggle that we are waging is a struggle to break out of the irrationality of the market and to enable human productivity to go to an even higher place. That's what we're struggling to do. We're struggling to liberate the economy from the irrationality of the anarchy of production in order to create vast abundance.

Marx himself said that the only way the higher stage of communism could ever be achieved was with vast abundance: “When labor becomes life's prime want." When work is something people do because they feel like it, they don't have to. “When the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly,” we're struggling to create abundance. 

Our enemies, the ruling elite of this western world, they've determined that the only way they can stay at the top is de-growth, is destroying the productive forces. They are Malthusians. They think there are too many people in the world. They think there's too much stuff being produced and that in order to save their system, they want to grind people into poverty and destroy.

That's the struggle of today. The ruling class needs de-growth in order to keep their system intact. But humanity doesn't accept it. They don't accept it in China. They don't accept it on the African continent. They don’t accept it in South America. They don't accept it across the world. People are rising up. They don't want to be de-grown. They want more than they already have.

The American people want more than they already have. And they're not going to be de-grown. And we're going to build an anti- monopoly coalition against the big monopolies that want de-growth. And we're going to fight for a government that invests in people and builds a strong economy. And that's what it's about. 

If you want to call that socialism or communism, if you want to call that whatever you want, that's what we're about. We need to liberate the productive forces, the means of production from the irrationality of the market. 

The only hope for America

And that brings me to good old Marco Rubio. I don't know if Marco Rubio is watching this right now. I kind of doubt he's watching it, but it's possible some low-level person is is watching this.

And the reason is that two of us here have actually spoken with Russian President Putin. And I've had a face-to-face interview with Ebrahim Raissi, the Iranian president. The work that we do is watched very, very, very closely around the world. Let's be real. We represent America at international gatherings. We distribute books on the Houthis in bulk. 

Our book Who are the Houthis? What are they fighting for? is in its 3rd printing in Farsi. As Iranians have been in the streets for six months supporting the Islamic Republic against the US attacks, a book written and distributed by a group of Americans, telling the story of the Yemeni resistance forces is in their hands.

Our rally that we did yesterday with the Gaddaffi thing is already being viewed all over the planet. The work that we do has a very, very, big impact. There were people that I knew who were from Mali that said that they saw the images of our rallies honoring Ibrahim Traoré rallies in chat groups that had nothing to do with us. People all over Africa and all over the world are impressed by this group of Americans who holds him up as an example of a real government of action.

We're being watched very very closely. And I got to say is, Marco Rubio, if you persecute CPI, if you go after us, you're acting like a complete fool because we're the only hope you've got. The only future America is going to have is with the rising new economy in the East. There's no other future.

And if you really love America, you're going to want an America that can trade with Russia and trade with China and trade with Cuba and trade with North Korea. No one's done more than CPI to stand with North Korea. And now they're running articles in the Wall Street Journal about how North Korea is booming. 

Marco Rubio needs us. If America is going to prosper, if America is going to exist in 50 years, it's going to have to be because of people like us. The only future America has is with the rising new economy. And we're the only ones who understand it. The people talking about worker cooperatives or whatever the latest woke-splaining or whatever; they're not going to get it.

We get it. We've been there. We've seen it. And we don't want to destroy America. We want to save America. We want to save America from the nightmare of this system of profits in command. And we want the economy to be rationally organized. 

So, Marco Rubio, don't be a fool! We're the best chance you ever got. If you love America, you should love the Center for Political Innovation. 

Two years ago, three years ago now, we had a conference and at that conference I said that I can see the day when Air Force One is loading up and President Tulsi Gabbard is on the plane and there's CPI organizers flying to Pyongyang to establish diplomatic relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. 

Juche scholars are coming to America to tour the universities to teach the ideology of Kim Il Sung and we are touring the universities of North Korea to talk about John Brown and the abolitionists; to talk about William Z. Foster to talk and Gus Hall.

I can see that day. I envision it. I think about it and I want you to keep envisioning it. We haven't given up on that! Are you going to be on that plane with me? Are you going to be on that plane with me? We are going to do it.

Hope & Vision

Wallace Wattles, he's got another quote, but I've read it to you all before, but you just can't remind people of this enough: “The more you talk and think about hard times, the more you will be inclined to seek some mental narcotic, to dull the keen edge of your suffering, and the longer that you will suffer. There's no surer way to keep the masses poor than to continually talk and write about their poverty. Talk about the good time coming because the good time is coming, and the rapidity of its coming is in exact proportion to the number of people who think and talk about it. Instead of going about showing horrible pictures of the conditions of those who live in tenements, go about showing the beautiful pictures of the conditions of the people who will live in the coming city. If you can inspire one person to go work for the coming city, you have done more good than you can by sending ten people out with salves and plasters to relieve existing distress. Instead of crusading against child labor and bad factory conditions, tell working people what splendid conditions they will have when they wake up and begin to operate the industries for themselves. The masses are not in bondage to anything but ignorance and intellectual laziness. And they can have what they have when they begin to think.”

We're trying to get people to think. That's what we're doing. 

Yesterday when we were out with our Ibrahim Traoré banner, there were people giving us the fist salute. And I think it was Mike and a couple other people, Dan and others were talking about, well, you know, this this is not a threat, right? It's a symbol of power. Do folks know where that comes from?

The fist salute come comes from the Paris Commune of 1871. The first working-class revolutionary movement, seizure of power, the Paris Commune.

What happened was France was at war with Prussia. The Prussians invaded and they were winning the war and the French government surrendered. The people in Paris didn't want to be conquered by the Prussians. So they formed a working-class government to fight against the Prussian invaders. They called it the Paris Commune of 1871. 

And then the French who had just surrendered, the French leaders were so terrified of that working-class government, they teamed up with the Prussians to brutally crush the Paris Commune of 1871. After the Paris Commune and the uprising, the Communards, the leaders of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot.

And there were thousands of executions as they were executing the Paris Communards. And as they lined up, one of them, we don't know who, had the idea that when they were being shot, they would clench their fists next to their heads. This did this because of something called rigorous mortima. 

After they shot them and they were doing this, they would then throw their body into a shallow grave and throw dirt over them. And then their executioners would look on in horror as the fist came up out of the ground. The fist was a symbol of immortality.

It's a symbol that even in death, we have a legacy and we have an impact and we will not be defeated. That's what the fist is. And it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing.

So, I just wanted to end with that. So, thanks everybody. Let's go have lunch.

[Applause]