Marxist agitators mug Paul Ryan, attacking freedom of speech at Iowa event.

Verne Strickland Blogmaster / August 15, 2012

SO MANY LEFTISTS RADICALS, SO LITTLE TIME TO PUT THE RUFFIANS IN JAIL.

Posted by Matthew Vadum on Aug 15th, 2012
FrontPage Magazine

The same Marxist agitators who tried to silence Mitt Romney in the Hawkeye State a year ago tried to shut down his new running mate Monday.

Two days after the presumptive GOP presidential nominee named Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) as his vice presidential pick, Ryan was aggressively heckled by the agrarian socialists and union goons of the ACORN-like Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI) throughout a stump speech at the Iowa State Fair.

At last year’s Iowa State Fair members of Iowa CCI badgered and berated Romney, shrieking and interrupting him as he attempted to share his views on reforming entitlement programs like Social Security. They baited Romney into making his arguably impolitic admission that “corporations are people.”

Left-wing activists call this “accountability,” an Orwellian euphemism. Accountability, as the term is used by leftists, is not about transparency or good government. Perhaps partly inspired by the father of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, who was in favor of silencing non-leftists, accountability actions focus on harassing and intimidating political enemies, disrupting them and forcing them to waste their campaign resources dealing with activists’ provocations.

After Iowa CCI activists loudly demanded Ryan halt the “war on the poor” they perennially accuse Republicans of waging, these broken records of the Left bragged about the trouble they caused as they “challenge[d] Ryan on vitally important issues to everyday Iowans.”

They claimed victory over the congressman, declaring they shaved 30 percent off his speaking time. “Ryan spoke for only twelve minutes, well under his allotment of twenty.”

Several protesters were removed from the event by police. One Iowa CCI activist even reportedly punched a Romney-Ryan volunteer during the speech. Of course the use of physical violence on opponents is an important tactic for the community organizer, as Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky admitted to his protégé Nicholas von Hoffman.

True to form, the left-wing Talking Points Memo website got a key detail of the attempted squelching of Ryan’s speech wrong. TPM’s Igor Bobic fell for Iowa CCI’s spin, referring to the nonprofit as an innocuous-sounding “nonpartisan progressive group.”

Although friendly reporters use the adjectives progressive and liberal to describe Iowa CCI, Marxist or neo-communist are more appropriate descriptors.

Iowa CCI has been praised by Bill Moyers and labeled the “Most Valuable Grassroots Advocacy Group” of 2009 by John Nichols of The Nation magazine. Nichols approves of the group’s “in-your-face activism.”
Iowa CCI’s anti-capitalist, anti-American activism guarantees it generous support from hard-left philanthropies.

The group has taken in funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation ($600,000 since 2001), Ford Foundation ($575,000 since 2003), McKnight Foundation ($415,000 since 1999), Annie E. Casey Foundation ($260,000 since 2001), Rockefeller Family Fund Inc. ($225,000 since 2000), Needmor Fund ($140,000 since 1999), the George Soros-funded Tides Foundation ($40,000 since 2000), Ben & Jerry’s Foundation ($30,000 since 2007), and Threshold Foundation ($25,000 since 2008).

Iowa CCI has also received grants from the Unitarian Universalist Church’s Veatch Foundation. Grants from that charity were used to found the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) in 1986. Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the ACORN-loving former community organizer, was previously president of the IATP. Ritchie orchestrated Al Franken’s theft of incumbent Republican Norm Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat in the 2008 election cycle.

Iowa CCI is part of a larger Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA). NPA makes no bones about its desire to overthrow what remains of America’s free enterprise system.