David Brock  [Back to Top]
David Brock is an openly gay author, a former conservative turned leftist, and the founder of Media Matters for America, which monitors the media for evidence of “conservative misinformation.” In 2002, Brock published the book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, a series of ad hominem attacks on his former conservative colleagues. Brock interrogated the ethics of his onetime friends and co-workers, heaping contempt on everything from their views to their wardrobe. Brock was now working as a research assistant for Democratic political operative Sidney Blumenthal, a former top advisor and confidante to President Clinton. In May 2004, Brock announced the creation of Media Matters, a political rapid-response website for the Democrats’ Shadow Party operation. George Soros and former Clinton chief-of-staff John Podesta helped Brock raise $2 million for the venture.
Sources: Discover the Network, SourceWatch.org, Wikipedia

Bernardine Dohrn [Back to Top]
Bernardine Dohrn is currently an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University, where she is also Director of the Legal Clinic's Children and Family Justice Center. Moreover, she sits on important committees and boards of the American Bar Association and the American Civil Liberties Union. In the 1960s, Dohrn was a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society's "Weatherman" faction, which in 1969 went underground to become America's first terrorist cult. At a 1969 "War Council" in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn gave her most memorable and notorious speech to her followers, saying of the bloody murders recently committed by the Manson Family in which the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and a Folgers Coffee heiress and several other inhabitants of a Benedict Canyon mansion were brutally stabbed to death: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!" The "War Council" ended with a formal declaration of war against "AmeriKKKa," always spelled with three K's to signify the United States' allegedly ineradicable white racism. Professor Dohrn has said of her Weatherman past, "We rejected terrorism. We were careful not to hurt anybody." Both assertions are false, however. Weatherman's twofold agenda was terrorism (which is why Charles Manson was Dohrn's hero) and war (the organization's very existence was launched with a formal "declaration of war"), and Dohrn periodically issued "war communiqués" to the public at large. The intention of the group was to shed their "white skin privilege" and launch a violent race war on behalf of Third World People. A Chicago district attorney named Richard Elrod was seriously injured in the Weatherman riot that erupted during the Chicago "Days of Rage" in October 1969, and he was paralyzed for life as a result. Moreover, law-enforcement authorities are still investigating a bombing in San Francisco that killed a policeman, for which Professor Dohrn is one of the suspects. Dohrn spent most of the 1970s with her accomplices running from the FBI, which had placed her on its "Ten Most Wanted List." In 1980 Dohrn surrendered to authorities, but all charges against her were subsequently dropped on the grounds that the fugitive had been illegally surveilled. Dohrn did plead guilty, however, to charges of aggravated battery and bail-jumping, for which she received probation.
Sources: Discover the Networks, Wikipedia, Answers.com

Crystal Eastman  [Back to Top]
Crystal Catherine Eastman (June 25, 1881 - July 8, 1928) was a lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She was born in Marlborough, Massachusetts and graduated from Vassar College in 1903, receiving an M.A. in sociology from Columbia University in 1904. During World War I, Eastman founded the Woman's Peace party and was president of the New York branch. Renamed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1921, it remains the oldest extant women's peace organization. Eastman also became executive director of the American Union Against Militarism, which lobbied against America's entrance into the European war and more successfully against war with Mexico in 1916, sought to remove profiteering from arms manufacturing, and campaigned against conscription and imperial adventures. When the United States entered World War I, Eastman organized with Roger Baldwin the National Civil Liberties Bureau to protect conscientious objectors, or in her words: To maintain something over here that will be worth coming back to when the weary war is over. The NCLB grew into the American Civil Liberties Union, with Baldwin at the head and Eastman functioning as attorney in charge. Eastman is credited as a founding member of the ACLU, but her role as founder of the NCLB may be largely ignored by posterity due to her personal differences with Baldwin.
Sources: Wikipedia, City University of New York

Friedrich Engels  [Back to Top]
Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820 – August 5, 1895) was born in Barmen (now Wuppertal) Germany. He came from a wealthy Protestant family. At an early age he was influenced by the works of the radical German poet Heinrich Heine and the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and in 1839 he began writing on literary and philosophical topics for a number of publications. In 1842 Engels was converted to Communist beliefs by the German Socialist Moses Hess. In the same year he met Karl Marx. He co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Marx in 1848. Engels also edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.
Sources: Wikipedia, Microsoft Encarta, Answers.com, indepthinfo.com

Gina Glantz  [Back to Top]
The longtime political operative Gina Glantz (who was born Gina Stritzler) was a founding member of America Votes, America Coming Together, and the New Politics Institute. Glantz was raised in Westfield, New Jersey. In the 1960s she enrolled as a journalism student at the Univeristy of California - Berkeley, where she took part in the Free Speech Movement demonstrations that led to the widespread politicization of American campuses, a phenomenon previously unknown in academia. In 1985 Gina Glantz and Angie Martin co-founded the national consulting firm Martin & Glantz, whose focus was grassroots organizing. The firm's client list included the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and American Express. Glantz's first big-time political job came in 1984, when she served as Democrat presidential candidate Walter Mondale's national campaign manager. During the 2004 presidential election season, Glantz was a key player in America Coming Together’s effort to "defeat President George W. Bush and elect progressive officials at every level." In 2005 Glantz, along with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and New Democratic Network president Simon Rosenberg, formed the New Politics Institute, a think thank devoted to helping leftist organizations achieve their objectives.
Sources: Discover the Network, SourceWatch.org

Antonio Gramsci  [Back to Top]
Antonio Gramsci (Jan. 23, 1891 -- April 27, 1937) was born in  Ales, Sardinia. He was an Italian intellectual and politician. After entering the University of Turin, he joined the Italian Socialist Party in 1914. In 1921 he left the Socialists to found the Italian Communist Party, and he spent two years in the Soviet Union. In 1924 he became head of the party and was elected to the national legislature. The party was outlawed by the fascist government of Benito Mussolini in 1926, and Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned for 11 years; in poor health, he was released to die at 46. His influential Letters from Prison (1947) and other writings outline a version of communism less dogmatic than Soviet communism. His work has influenced sociology, political theory, and international relations.
Sources: Wikipedia, Microsoft Encarta, Answers.com, Highbeam Encyclopedia

Harold M. Ickes  [Back to Top]
Born September 4, 1939 in Washington, DC, Harold McEwan Ickes is a longtime Democrat operative widely recognized as the chief organizer of the so-called Shadow Party, a nationwide network of more than five-dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, and which are engaged in campaigning for the Democrats. During the 2004 presidential race, Democrat strategist Howard Wolfson told New York magazine that -- outside of the John Kerry campaign -- Ickes was "the most important person in the Democratic Party today." Ickes hails from a prominent political family. His father Harold LeClair Ickes served as Secretary of the Interior from 1933 to 1946, under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. In 1961 Ickes enrolled at Stanford University, where he fell under the influence of Professor Allard Kenneth Lowenstein, known as the "Pied Piper" for his ability to seduce idealistic young students into the New Left. Ickes met Bill Clinton while both were working on Operation Pursestrings, a grassroots lobbying effort aimed at pushing through the 1970 Hatfield-McGovern Amendment to cut off all military aid to South Vietnam. Ickes joined the Clinton White House on January 4, 1994, and would serve for three years as Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Political Affairs and Policy. Ickes would later surface at the center of the so-called "Teamstergate" scandal -- a complex money-laundering scheme in which several high-level Democrat leaders and union bosses who were directly implicated in the case mysteriously escaped prosecution. Ickes played a central role in creating the Democrat Shadow Party. After passage of the McCain-Feingold Act of March 27, 2002, Ickes helped put Shadow Party architect George Soros together with activists Andrew Stern, Ellen R. Malcolm, Steven Rosenthal, Gina Glantz, Cecile Richards, and other leftwing Democrats who were seeking ways to circumvent McCain-Feingold's soft-money ban. Working closely with Soros, Ickes personally helped launch six of the seven organizations that formed the Shadow Party’s core during the 2004 election, including America Coming Together, America Votes, the Center for American Progress, Joint Victory Campaign 2004, the Media Fund, and the Thunder Road Group.
Sources: Discover the Network, Wikipedia, Answers.com

Vladimir I. Lenin  [Back to Top]
Vladimir I. Lenin was a driving force behind the Russian Revolution of 1917 and became the first great dictator of the Soviet Union. After his brother was executed in 1887 (for plotting to kill the Czar), Lenin gave up studying law and became a full-time revolutionary. He studied Karl Marx and formed workers' groups, but was arrested and exiled to Siberia in 1895. In 1900 he went to Europe, and in 1903 he led the Bolsheviks in the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' party. When revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, he led the Bolsheviks to control the government. Lenin had complete political control over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) until his death, and is remembered as the man who put Marx's ideas to practical use.
Sources: Wikipedia, Microsoft Encarta, Answers.com, BBC

Georg Lukacs  [Back to Top]
György Lukács (April 13, 1885 – June 4, 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. Most scholars consider him to be the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the ideas of reification and class consciousness to Marxist philosophy and theory, and his literary criticism was influential in thinking about realism and about the novel as a literary genre. He served briefly as Hungary's Minister of Culture following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
Sources: Wikipedia

Karl Marx  [Back to Top]
Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a 19th century philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. Often called the father of communism, Marx was both a scholar and a political activist. He addressed a wide range of political as well as social issues, and is known for, amongst other things, his analysis of history. His approach is indicated by the opening line of the Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Marx believed that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, will produce internal tensions which will lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, capitalism itself will be displaced by communism, a classless society which emerges after a transitional period in which the state would be nothing else but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. On the one hand, Marx argued for a systemic understanding of socioeconomic change. On this model, it is the structural contradictions within capitalism which necessitate its end, giving way to communism. On the other hand, Marx argued that socioeconomic change occurred through organized revolutionary action. On this model, capitalism will end through the organized actions of an international working class. While Marx was a relatively obscure figure in his own lifetime, his ideas began to exert a major influence on workers' movements shortly after his death. This influence was given added impetus by the victory of the Marxist Bolsheviks in the Russian October Revolution, and there are few parts of the world which were not significantly touched by Marxian ideas in the course of the twentieth century. The relation of Marx to "Marxism" is a point of controversy. Marxism remains influential and controversial in academic and political circles.
Sources: Wikipedia, Microsoft Encarta, Stanford University, Answers.com

Cecile Richards
Cecile Richards is the president of America Votes, a nonprofit political activist organization that promotes environmental extremism, unregulated immigration (Open Borders), and the leftwing agendas of the teachers' unions. America Votes opposes the Patriot Act and gun ownership rights. The group's most pressing current objective is to defeat President Bush in the November 2004 elections. Richards is a veteran labor and political organizer who previously worked as the deputy chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the U.S. House Minority Leader. Richards, the daughter of former Texas Governor Ann Richards (D), founded the Texas Freedom Network in 1995 to combat the "Religious Right," which she considers racist and irrational and blames for her mother's failed re-election campaign. Cecile Richards also once worked with the Service Employees International Union. Richards is also the President of Planned Parenthood.
Sources: Discover the Network, SourceWatch.org, Wikipedia
 

Margaret Sanger  [Back to Top]
A feminist and founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Margaret Higgins Sanger battled the government and the Roman Catholic Church to establish the legitimacy of birth control. Sanger was born in Corning, New York, one of eleven children of Irish-American parents. Her mother was Catholic, her father a radical follower of freethinker Robert Ingersoll and single-taxer Henry George. Sanger later attributed the family's lack of prosperity and her mother's death at forty-nine to her parents' having had so many children. The inequality she observed between them stimulated her lifelong social activism. In 1960, Sanger vowed that she would leave the United States forever if that well-known defender of reactionary conservatism, John F. Kennedy, were ever elected to the presidency. Sanger was a fervent Marxist, a radical feminist, and, despite comical denials posted on Planned Parenthood's website, a rabid eugenicist. According to her New York Times obituary, dated September 7, 1966, Sanger specifically recommended the practice of birth control to prevent procreation among those of the poor prone to producing heritably 'subnormal' children, and, in the early years of the 20th Century, the masthead of her Feminist-Socialist magazine, The Woman Rebel, defiantly proclaimed "No Gods! No Masters!" to its readership.
Sources: Wikipedia, Discover the Network, Answers.com, Microsoft Encarta, Reference.com

George Soros  [Back to Top]
George Soros is a Hungarian immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1956, at age 26, and made his fortune as an international financier. His father, who was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros in 1936 - a move that enabled the Soros family to conceal its Jewish identity and thus survive the Nazi Holocaust. In 1947 the family emigrated from Hungary to England, where an event occurred that greatly influenced the development of George's personality and worldview. He broke his leg and was cared for by England's National Health Service, free of charge, while the Jewish relief agencies of that era did not offer him the help he believed they owed him. In that convergence of events was born Soros' favorable opinion of Democratic Socialism, and his negative view of many Jewish groups.
Sources: Discover the Network, Wikipedia, Answers.com

Josef Stalin  [Back to Top]
Ruthless and ambitious, Joseph Stalin grabbed control of the Soviet Union after the death of V.I. Lenin in 1924. As a member of the Bolshevik party, Stalin (his adopted name meaning "Man of Steel") had an active role in Russia's October Revolution in 1917. He maneuvered his way up the communist party hierarchy, and in 1922 was named General Secretary of the Central Committee. By the end of the 1920s Stalin had expelled his rival Leon Trotsky, consolidated power, and was the de facto dictator of the Soviet Union. In the 1930s Stalin summarily executed his political enemies and started aggressive industrial and agricultural programs that left untold thousands of peasants dead. During World War II Stalin was the commander of the Soviet military, and attended the postwar conferences at Yalta, Teheran and Potsdam. After Stalin's death he was denounced by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and "Stalinism" was officially condemned.
Sources: Answers.com, Wikipedia, Microsoft Encarta, Colombia Encyclopedia

Leon Trotsky  [Back to Top]
A key figure in the creation of the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky was later unseated and expelled by the ruthless Joseph Stalin. As a young man Trotsky became a disciple of Karl Marx and a friend of future Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. A powerful writer and political thinker, Trotsky used his pen to oppose the rule of Czar Nicholas II and so spent much of his adult life in prison or in foreign exile, writing for communist newspapers and journals. He was Lenin's right-hand man in the Russian Revolution of 1917; Trotsky became commissar of war (1918-25) and organized the victorious Red Army in the civil war that followed. After the formation of the Soviet Union and then Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky lost out in a power struggle with Stalin; he was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1927 and expelled to Turkey in 1929. In 1937 Trotsky settled in Mexico at the behest of artist Diego Rivera. He was assassinated at his villa in 1940 by a probable agent of Stalin, Ramon Mercader, who posed as a friend of Trotsky's and then killed him with the blow of an ice axe to his head.
Sources: Answers.com, Wikipedia, Microsoft Encarta, Colombia Encyclopedia