Question: Could a former member of the Ku Klux Klan turned conventional conservative Republican ever get close to becoming the vice presidential nominee of his party?
It isn’t just unlikely. It’s unthinkable.
But Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden might well pick as his running mate Representative Karen Bass (D-Calif.), who praised Fidel Castro and joined a communist front controlled by Cuban intelligence operatives.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Bass renounced her love of the Cuban tyrant, and later on Meet the Press explained away her war praise for the Scientology cult.
Explain she might. Fact remains, Biden is considering a running mate who openly supported the man responsible for mass murder.
Comandante en Jefe
As The Atlantic explained it in a piece on Friday, Bass, who represents California’s 37th district, is “something of an unusual possibility for Biden.”
Yes, she’s “reliably liberal,” the magazine reported, “but she’s also the only person on Biden’s list who spent part of the 1970s working construction in Fidel Castro’s Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, a group that has organized annual trips to Cuba for young, leftist Americans for half a century.”
But the Venceremos Brigade was a little bit more than “a group that has organized annual trips to Cuba for young, leftist Americans for half a century.”
In fact, it was and still likely is a front for the Cuban intelligence directorate, a defector confessed in 1983.
But even if that weren’t true, the group’s members were hard-core Marxist-Leninists, meaning communists.
In 1972, a House subcommittee published a report titled “The Theory and Practice of Communism in 1972 (Venceremos Brigade).” In a hearing leading up to the report, Richardson Preyer, a Democratic representative from North Carolina, said he hoped he would learn whether Brigade members were “idealistic, even though misguided, young people who wanted to go down to help with the crops with a regime which they are sympathetic for” or whether they were “interested in sharpening their revolutionary talents and perhaps exporting revolution.” During the hearing, a sheriff’s deputy from New Orleans told the subcommittee that he had infiltrated the group and been subject to extensive questioning and indoctrination sessions. “To be a member of the brigade, you had to be confirmed as a Marxist-Leninist,” he said. The New York Times wrote up his testimony under the headline “Undercover Agent Tells of Cuba Trip With Red Youth Unit.”
Unsurprisingly, when Castro died in 2016, Bass slathered on the praise: “The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba,” she said.
Comandante en Jefe (commander in chief) is the term Castro’s regime used to praise him, The Atlantic observed.
Bass might not have said that if Castro and his bloodthirsty sidekick, Che Guevara, had murdered half her family, but in any event, she backtracked in speaking with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.
“I absolutely would have not put that statement out,” Bass told him. “Lesson learned, would not do that again, for sure.”
Now in 2020 after 60 years of mass murder, she says, she understands that Castro had erected a “brutal regime.”
Scientology Friend
On Meet the Press, Bass was forced to retreat from her high praise of Scientology, a wacky pseudo-religious cult that has seduced the gullible and boasts such Hollywood stars as Tom Cruise and John Travolta as members.
“As a public servant, I try to do everything in my power to give a voice to the voiceless, and to guarantee that no one goes unheard,” Bass said at the opening of its “church” in Los Angeles in 2010. “The Church of Scientology I know has made a difference, because your Creed is a universal creed and one that speaks to all people everywhere. That is why the words are exciting of your Founder L. Ron Hubbard, in the creed of the Church of Scientology: That all people of whatever race, color or creed are created with equal rights.”
Recent revelations about Scientology leaders’ using abuse and brainwashing, Bass said, changed her mind about the cult.
And so Bass distanced herself from the comments after The Daily Caller posted them, and said she was a practicing Baptist in good standing.
How long Biden will continue considering Bass given the revelations remains to be seen.
It apparently doesn’t bother him that Senator Bernie Sanders, the man who is giving him ideas for running the country, is not only an apologist for Castro but also Red China.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor
