By DAVID GRANN At
first no one seemed to notice her, sitting in the second row with
her short, '70s-style Afro and big hoop earrings. It was moments
before Pat Buchanan's arrival, and she was obscured by his brigades,
men with soft, spongy faces and balding heads, pink with excitement,
chanting, "Go, Pat, go!" in the conference room of the Doubletree
Hotel in Falls Church, Virginia, at ten o'clock in the morning. As
Buchanan finally stepped onto the stage to announce, in front of
a wall of American flags, that he was ending his lifelong membership
in the GOP and running for the Reform Party's presidential nomination,
she began to take notes. Periodically she would glance up and then
look back down at her pad. It was in the midst of this scribbling
that Buchanan suddenly looked right at her. "[O]f all the needs of
this nation, none is greater for our peace and happiness than racial
reconciliation," he said. "Let us abandon the sterile and futile
politics of victims and villains and rediscover what brings us all
together as one nation and one people." Almost everyone in the room--the
scores of Reform Party delegates in the front rows, the dozens of
reporters and cameramen packed along the walls--turned toward her.
For a second, everyone seemed to watch Buchanan watching her. And
then something remarkable happened: The man who once waxed nostalgic
about segregation winked, or so it seemed, at the only visible African
American in the room. "I saw it," says Donna Donovan, a Reform Party
spokeswoman. Afterward, the black woman leapt to her feet and thrust
her fist in the air, hollering with the rising chorus of white males, "Go
Pat Go!"
It
is one of the strangest couplings in the history of American politics:
Lenora Fulani, a black, Marxist, pro-gay, two-time fringe presidential
candidate, and Buchanan, a politician renowned for his antagonism
toward ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities. Only weeks before his
announcement, Buchanan journeyed to New York to seek Fulani's support
and, perhaps more importantly, the support of the man many claim
can deliver the votes necessary to win the Reform Party's nomination:
Fred Newman, whom Fulani calls her "theoretician and tactician." When
word of their meeting first leaked, commentators greeted it as simply
another spectacle, another act in a vaudeville election that has
featured a movie star, a professional wrestler, and a billionaire
developer. "Pat Buchanan gets jiggy with a former socialist," enthused
Tony Snow of Fox News Channel, after Fulani officially endorsed Buchanan.
But,
in fact, Newman and Fulani's presence in the Reform Party is something
entirely different. It is the culmination of a 30-year crusade by
a group the FBI once considered
armed and dangerous to infiltrate the political system. Now, after
years of absorbing little-known organizations on the left, Newman
and his followers are on the verge of controlling the third-largest
party in America and doing what once seemed unthinkable: influencing
the race for president of the United States.
Even
by the standards of the 1960s, Fred Newman's collective on New York
City's Upper West Side was odd. Its handful of members, most of them
college-student anarchists and hippies, wandered the streets, trying
to provoke confrontations. Determined to jar the bourgeoisie out
of its passivity, they handed out, in their own words, "the most
obscene brochures and pamphlets in the whole city--filthy--incredibly
offensive."
A
large, highly intelligent, highly charismatic man with long, stringy
hair and a beard, Newman served as the group's inspiration--its "benevolent
despot," as his own literature described him. A veteran of the Korean
War, he had spent the early and mid-'60s exploring the logic of belief
structures, first as a doctoral student in philosophy at Stanford
University and then as a professor at the City College of New York.
By 1969, he had quit his teaching job--"Rational intellectual dialogue
was not where it was at"--and begun to experiment with his own ideology,
a blend of left-wing politics and Soviet psychology. Holed up in
a communal apartment with a dozen or so recruits, he opened the Center
for Change, "a collective of liberation centers" that included
a school, a dental clinic, a newspaper, and Newman's first therapy
institute. In contrast to traditional psychology, in which Newman
had no formal training and which he decried as a myth, the Center
for Change assumed that there were no crazy people, only a crazy
society. Drawing loosely on the theories of Soviet psychologist Lev
Vygotsky, Newman saw the patient as a revolutionary who could cure
himself only by overthrowing "his bourgeois ego." In its first year,
the clinic attracted some 80 patients, with so many spilling into
the collective that they were soon sleeping in the hallways.
It
was around that time that the Jewish New Yorker fell under the spell
of another, more powerful ideologue working at the intersection of
psychology and politics: Lyndon
LaRouche. Though once a figure respected on the left, by the
early '70s LaRouche had descended into a gothic world of conspiracy
theories, a place where the CIA was brainwashing his security guards
to kill him and where only he had the power to end "your political--and
sexual--impotence." To maintain total command over the hundreds of
disciples he sent out onto the streets to assault rival
political parties with lead pipes and brass knuckles, he forced them
into psychological therapy sessions, called "deprogramming."
In
1974, when most of the left was quite literally running from LaRouche,
Newman led nearly 40 of his followers into an official alliance with
LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees. For several weeks,
the two groups held joint forums and political meetings. It is unclear
how much the Newmanites participated in the LaRoucheans' more militant
activities. But, according to Chip Berlet of Political
Research Associates, which has tracked both groups, Newman used
the interaction as an apprenticeship, away to learn how to control
a mass organization. It was then, Berlet says,
that Newman mastered "ego-stripping group-therapy sessions" to discipline
his rank and file. He also developed his ideology, a crude form of
Marxism, which contended that the United States was ruled by a handful
of moneyed elites--most notably, the Jews, whom Newman decried, despite
his upbringing, as "dirty," "self-righteous dehumanlzer[s]" and "the
storm troopers of decadent capitalism."
It
didn't take long, however, before apprentice and mentor fell into
a fierce rivalry--"There was room for only one charismatic leader," says Berlet.
And, after just a few months, Newman walked out with most of his
original followers, forming his own breakaway faction: the International
Workers Party (IWP).
Operating
through Leninist-style cadres and explicitly committed to a workers'
revolution, the IWP adopted LaRouchean elements such as a cult of
personality. But at its core was Newman's evolving theory of "social
therapy," which many say encourages the patient to reject almost
everything he has been taught by society and cede to the therapist
enormous power over every facet of his life: his job, his friends,
his family, even his sexual partners. Though many participants speak
effusively of its success--"Fred saved my life," enthused one-early
on there were reports of abuse. Several former IWP members said that,
as part of their salvation, they were persuaded to hand over all
their assets. IWP members told a local New York reporter, Dennis
King, that Newman broke up at least two marriages because the
relationships were too "bourgeois"--an allegation Newman denies. Others
have said Newman encouraged them to participate in what he called "friendosexuality," a
practice that Newman cheerfully recommends in his book Let's Develop.
Ironically,
it was the LaRoucheans who first circulated documents stating that
the Newmanites were too bizarre. One 30-cent leaflet complained indignantly
of the IWP's "totally destructive social relations" and "methods
of brainwashing" Newman, in turn, charged that LaRouche's members
were even worse--"mind-fucked not brainwashed." ("[A]n organization
based on . mind-fucking cannot lead the class," he wrote. "It will
destroy itself.")
By
the end of the '70s, while LaRouche's party seemed to sputter, Newman's
clinics popped up throughout New York City. It was at one of these
clinics, around 1979, that Lenora Fulani, a graduate student who
had recently separated from her husband, met Newman. "In the beginning
it was as if Fred was in the background," she wrote in her autobiography, The
Making of a Fringe Candidate--1992. "Over the year my sense of
who he was--in the group and in the world--became sharper and sharper." Like
all of his followers, Fulani began to rely deeply on Newman, whose
image appeared everywhere inside the collective, on books and pamphlets
and other literature. "Fred was teaching me who I was and who I could
be," she wrote. Newman agreed. "I organized her," he once boasted. "She
is one of my life's proudest accomplishments."
In
1979, after one of his first patients was elected to the school board,
Newman decided to try to capture power the old-fashioned way: at
the ballot box. Claiming he had disbanded the increasingly controversial
IWP, Newman announced the formation of a new, open political organization,
the New Alliance Party (NAP). Overnight, NAPers appeared on street
corners, selling copies of the party newspaper and pins that read
DUMP KOCH. "We essentially dropped the vanguards and the pretentiousness
of left grandiosity" Newman told The Village
Voice at the time.
Indeed,
Newman and Fulani now sounded like members of the League of Women
Voters or Ralph Nader's Public Citizen. They campaigned for affirmative
action and universal health care-causes that would attract support
and donations from mainstream progressives. Under the rubric "two
roads are better than one," they nominated their own candidates--including
Fulani for lieutenant governor, governor, and mayor--while endorsing
sympathetic Democrats. And, because so many NAP members were in therapy,
NAP volunteers treated their political work as part of their "recovery." They
were known to work 18-hour days for almost no pay, and in a short
time they became some of the best petitioners and fundraisers in
the country. By 1984, they even had their own presidential candidate, Dennis
Serrette, a genial black socialist, who was on the ballot in
33 states and captured 35,000 votes.
But,
while the NAP appeared to be open and democratic, myriad former members
say it was secretly controlled by the IWP. One day, Serrette says,
two of Newman and Fulani's emissaries approached him in the NAP offices
and asked him to join the underground organization. Another member
of the NAP says that in 1996 he was brought to a restaurant in Boston
with three NAP activists. After they sat down, one unfolded a piece
of paper and began to read a statement saying they were part of "a
revolutionary organization which supported the overthrow of the government" and
wanted him to join them.
According
to former members, the NAP served, in large part, as an entry point
into the IWP, whose numbers quickly grew into the hundreds. "Every
two weeks we'd go to a cell meeting and give over an envelope with
our dues and receive a note with instructions," says Kellie
Gasink, who joined the NAP as a college student in the 1980s
and then joined the IWP. "After everyone read the note, the cell
leader would burn it." Members say they met in separate cells of
six to ten people at restaurants around different cities to avoid FBI detection.
They never knew exactly who else was in the organization, so no single
person could betray the group. "They were a very secretive, thorough,
and disciplined organization that bordered on a military operation," says Serrette.
"We
kept semiautomatic rifles," states William
Pleasant, an ex-IWP member. "The position was at some point we'd
have to defend the offices." They trained, Pleasant says,
on a farm in Pennsylvania. One day, he was told, people started "shooting
everything up--hogs and deer, everything in the countryside." Another
former IWP member insists there were 15 semiautomatic assault rifles
and pistols stockpiled and a roving 20-person security squad prepared
to use them. Newman says he doesn't know whether the IWP actually
had guns or not: "I don't really know, because part of the security
was not to let people know things who didn't need to know and I didn't
need to know."
At
the same time the IWP was allegedly hoarding guns, the NAP was openly
aligning itself with people the U.S. government considered to be
national-security threats, particularly Muammar Qaddafi. In 1987,
Fulani headed an NAP delegation to Tripoli to "commemorate the
genocidal U.S. bombing of the Libyan coast." According to the partially
blacked-out pages of an FBI file
from March 1988, authorities deemed that "members of the New Alliance
Party should be considered armed and dangerous as they are known
to possess weapons." Fulani
and Newman, meanwhile, were becoming experts in that lost Communist
art: infiltrating and taking over unsuspecting organizations. In
the mid-'80s, for example, the NAP set its sights on the New Jewish
Agenda (NJA), a nationwide peace coalition headquartered in New York
City. According to Nan Rubin, then head of the Manhattan chapter,
and Bruce Shapiro, of The
Nation, NAP activists started trying to recruit NJA members
into their therapy clinics, even asking them out on dates--a tactic
that harkened back to the '70s, when therapists at the Center
for Change offered sex as a recruiting tool. NAP activists also
overran the group's meetings, creating chaos with endless denunciations
of Zionism. In another, more devastating operation, the NAP allegedly "stole" the
presidential nomination of the leftist Peace and Freedom Party by
infiltrating its ranks just hours before the party's convention and
handing the nomination to Fulani. "They weren't registered Peace
and Freedom Party members," recalls 85-year-old Herbert G. Lewin,
who ran for the nomination. "They were coming in there and trying
to take over."
And,
when the NAP couldn't colonize organizations, it did the next best
thing: it duplicated them. Most infamously, the group founded the
Rainbow Alliance and the Rainbow Lobby, which appeared to have the
same name and agenda as Jesse Jackson's influential Rainbow Coalition.
Trying to siphon off Asian American support in California's East
Bay, the NAP also put out a publication called Breaking the Silence,
deliberately shadowing an established Asian American newspaper called Break
the Silence.
Combining
these clandestine efforts with intense grassroots organization, Newman
and Fulani finally began to build a mass movement. In 1988, with
the NAP'S ranks swelling into the thousands and offices reaching
from SoHo to San Francisco, they pulled off a remarkable feat. Breaking
through endless election laws and regulations, NAP organizers successfully
put Fulani on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, a historic
first for either a woman or an African American. Fulani received
more than 200,000 votes. Four years later, she ran again, raising
more than $4 million and becoming a kind of quixotic celebrity. Just
before 1992's first primaries, USA Today gushed: "Lenora B.
Fulani looks just like a major Democratic candidate . She dashes
about the state in rented cars surrounded by frantic aides. She even
earned a standing ovation from the New Hampshire Junior Women's Club."
And
then it all started to fall apart. Horror stories began to surface-stories
of people giving up their children to relocate for the party; stories
of psychiatric patients being recruited into politics as part of
their treatment; stories of people being cut off from their families
and isolated in NAP communes. One woman, Marina
Ortiz, who was an IWP member and whom Newman once hailed for
her "uncompromising honesty," called the NAP a "cult." Another woman
said she gave up all her possessions and worked for Fulani 16 to
20 hours a day, seven days a week, until she was on the brink of
suicide. Judith Miller, a bestselling author of children's books
and a manic-depressive, says she fled the NAP after its therapists
convinced her to stop taking her medication and she landed in a hospital.
Finally, in the summer of 1993, Gasink,
who had been a member of Newman's inner cadre and an aide during
the 1992 presidential campaign, typed a five-page, single-spaced
letter to federal authorities that included this statement: "I have
reason to believe that Fulani's campaign manager, Fred Newman, embezzled
money from the campaign."
Gasink's
complaint described an elaborate scheme to defraud U.S. taxpayers
by exploiting the federal matching-fund system, which requires the
government to match, dollar for dollar, each contribution of up to
$250 to eligible candidates. Newman and Fulani quickly tapped into
this potential gold mine, often encouraging contributors to give
as part of their psychic healing. "The more you give, the more you
grow," Fulani said at a rally in Brooklyn. "Take it out of your rent.
It feels very, very good."
So
many agreed that in early 1992 Fulani raised more in matching funds
than former California Governor Jerry Brown or retired Senator Paul
Tsongas. But, unlike most campaigns, which spend their money on outside
vendors (political consultants, TV ads, etc.), nearly $1 million
of the NAP's funds appears to have been recycled within the Newman
empire: on a law firm, PR firm, newspaper, and accounting office
connected to the charismatic leader. Moreover, according to Gasink,
most of these organizations existed "only on paper as bank accounts
and legal fictions" to "funnel committee funds" to Newman. The Washington,
D.C. City Paper reported
that six of the businesses, including Fred Newman Productions and
Newman & Braun, were not listed in the 1992-1993 Manhattan White
Pages. To maintain the fiction that the campaign was actually spending
this money, Gasink alleged
that bookkeepers wrote checks to campaign volunteers as if paying
them for their free labor, then forged their signatures on the back
and cashed them for their own purposes.
When
the Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigated these allegations,
Newman and the campaign treasurer refused to cooperate. They failed
to properly respond to repeated subpoenas and threatened to take
the Fifth Amendment. Finally, under court order, NAP leaders filed
a blizzard of receipts and affidavits insisting the businesses existed
and the work had been done. The FEC accepted the affidavits at face
value and significantly reduced the sum it had originally demanded
that the campaign reimburse the government. But it still found $73,750
in untraceable expenditures, as well as $18,768 in non-qualified
campaign expenses. Yet, by the time the FEC reached its decision,
it appeared to be irrelevant. The NAP--under mounting allegations--had
long since vanished from the political landscape. Or so it seemed.
"I
was stunned when I saw Newman and Fulani sitting there," says Micah
Sifry, then the editor of The
Nation, and the founder of The Perot Periodical.
He was one of the few journalists who had come to witness the formation
of the forerunner to the Reform Party. After Ross Perot ran for president
in 1992, many of his activists vowed to launch a national party,
even though Perot himself resisted the idea. Now, at their 1994 founding
convention in Virginia, Sifry had expected to find traditional Perot
supporters--white, middle-class retirees. Instead, he saw NAPers everywhere:
on the dais, sitting at the delegate tables, handing out leaflets
in the corridors. Of
the roughly 110 participants who attended the convention, close to
half had ties to Newman and Fulani. When the floor opened for nominations,
Fulani supporters relentlessly nominated one another. By the time
the process was over, they had captured at least half of the elected
positions. "They simply applied NAP tactics to a soft target," says
former IWP member Pleasant.
While the group christened itself the Patriot Party, Newman rose
to the podium and declared in his slight Bronx accent: "I proudly
call myself a patriot." The crowd rose to its feet. The
Zelig of the fringe had popped up again, this time ostensibly submerging
all ideology in the name of process--easier voter registration and
campaign finance reform. In less than a year, Newman and Fulani had
quietly created a new base within the nascent party with a disciplined
inner core of 30 or so members, some of whom had been with Newman
since his LaRouche days.
In 1995, when Perot finally created the Reform Party, built upon
the Patriot Party's edifice, he turned to Fulani and Newman for help
in getting him on the ballot in all 50 states as a presidential candidate. "The
job couldn't have been done without [them]," acknowledges Russell
Verney, the national chairman of the Reform Party. After the 1996
election, Newman and Fulani found themselves in a familiar position:
inside yet another party and positioned to take it over. Only this
time it was the most important American third party of the late twentieth
century. Late
one night Jack Essenberg, a small businessman who had been the head
of the Reform Party's New York affiliate since 1996, found himself
under siege. Throughout the state, party members were calling him
to say their petitions had been invalidated, disqualifying them from
becoming delegates to Reform Party meetings. At the same time county
chairmen from Brooklyn to Broom County were complaining that outside
organizers from Manhattan were coming into their communities with
their own candidates. "It's like a hostile takeover," Mike
Niebauer from Queens told him grimly. "They move their members
around, they shadow me at events; they try to intimidate me. I've
asked them to stay out of our county, and they won't." Soon
afterward, strangers began to show up at state party meetings--busloads
of them, it seemed, voting and working in tandem, as if in an elaborately
choreographed production. It didn't take long, Essenberg says, before
he traced the incursion to a tiny office on the twentieth floor of
a building in lower Manhattan. Protected by a series of thick metal
locks, it housed the Reform Party's Manhattan chapter (in New York
called the Independence Party). And inside the office was the office
of another organization, which Essenberg had never heard of: the
Committee for a Unified Independent Party (CUIP). While CUIP described
itself as "part think tank, part training institute, part media and
communication center for the Independent movement," it appeared to
be a successor of sorts to the IWP. And at its core--inside its layers
of staff and volunteers--was Lenora Fulani and her brigade of Newman
followers. In
its newest incarnation, the Fulani-Newman organization resembles
less a revolutionary collective than an old-style political machine.
Social Therapy, the old method of winning and controlling activists,
is largely out. Fulani and Newman have found something better: an
arcane rule in the state party's bylaws that gives them permission
to vote by proxy on behalf of non-attending party delegates. As part
of this massive operation, the Manhattan chapter of the Reform Party,
already controlled by Fulani, approached people like George Prindle
with blind telephone calls. As Prindle tells it, a Fulani aide doing
a voter survey called him to ask about his political beliefs. "I'm
pro-life," he told them, "I don't believe in gun control and I think
government is too big." The caller said the Reform Party's views
were similar. Knowing nothing of Fulani or her associates' pro-choice,
Marxist beliefs, Prindle said he was open to their efforts. Within
several months, Cathy Stewart, who has been part of Fulani and Newman's
inner circle for years, encouraged Prindle to become a state Reform
Party delegate, even though he was largely immobile due to recent
surgery. "I haven't been to any votes or conventions," he says. "I
have to sign a proxy." Lee
Veinot, a 22-year-old student at Mohawk Valley Community College
in Utica, New York, got a different kind of call from Manhattan.
Instead of a survey, the caller offered him $12 per hour to go around
his neighborhood getting people to sign petitions for Fulani's efforts
to run for governor. Then he received another offer: Why not pass
around his own petition to become a delegate at the same time? And
so, for $12 per hour, he cheerfully did both, earning several hundred
dollars to be a delegate, even though, as he told the Manhattan office,
he'd probably be too busy to attend any meetings. "They send me forms
to sign on the back," he says, referring to the proxies. "I'll sign
whatever they have for me to sign." Prindle and Veinot were not alone. "The
whole operation is a proxy operation," says William
Struhs, the deputy county chairman in Queens. "The actual people
don't come." Fulani
and Newman haven't changed their operating style. There are still
public, mass organizations--like the Manhattan branch of the Independence
Party--and others, like CUIP, that are shrouded in secrecy. Because
CUIP has been unincorporated, it is safely shielded from in-depth
disclosure laws. "No one knows what the hell it even is," says Essenberg.
What money is traceable seems equally mysterious. According to New
York State's Board of Elections filings, Friends of Lenora B. Fulani,
which is housed in the same office as CUIP, has distributed thousands
of dollars to delegate candidates, though many ran unopposed and
needed anywhere from 15 to 75 signatures on a petition to qualify.
When I asked Prindle if he had received the $2,745.34 purportedly
spent on his campaign to become a delegate, he said "God, no. I
think we had a few brochures [and] a paper ad; it wasn't very much." Veinot,
whose delegate campaign purportedly received $1,173.68, is more precise. "They
never spent anything for me to get elected," he says. "I ran unopposed.
I just had to hand in my petition, and I did my petition work myself." Asked
about Veinot's story, Jacqueline Salit--a Fulani spokeswoman--snaps, "There
is nothing wrong with that." If
the methods are murky, the results are not. The Fulani-Newman takeover
of the Reform Party is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Connecticut
and New Jersey Reform Party leaders also report infiltrations. "They
move in with their machinery," says Struhs. "Slowly but surely, they
get bigger and bigger. It reminds me of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet
Union." At
the New York Reform Party convention in Long Island this spring,
Essenberg finally watched the party he had spent five years building
disintegrate. For hours Fulani's forces--swollen with proxies--paralyzed
the organization, claiming that Essenberg had violated the rules,
that he was corrupt, that he had usurped power unlawfully. When he
tried to close the meeting, they simply kept going, forming a "removal" committee
headed by Harry Kresky, Fulani and Newman's longtime lawyer. As Essenberg
walked out, people he had never seen before cursed and spat at him. "I'm
watching a Marxist takeover," he says, "and we don't have the means
to stop it." They
met at a round table in the back corner of New York's Essex House
Hotel. Newman wore a sports coat, his long, silvery hair falling
over his shoulders. Fulani sat nearby, staring at Pat Buchanan. They
had shouted at each other across the table on "Crossfire" but had
never really spoken, and they had each brought their entourages for
support: a Newman aide who had been in the collective since the '70s;
Buchanan's wife, Shelley; and his sister, Bay, who manages his campaigns. Mediating
was Pat Choate, the burly former Reform Party vice presidential candidate
who had spent weeks arranging the meeting, traveling to and from
New York, speaking on the phone for hours to both camps. He had already
explained to Buchanan why, if he decided to bolt the GOP, he needed
to court Fulani. She controlled one-third of the Reform Party's national
delegates and, along with Newman, understood better than anyone how to
get on the ballot in all 50 states. Now, as they ate crab cakes and
sipped iced tea, Choate opened one of Buchanan's books, The Great
Betrayal, and read a line about the need to move beyond ideology.
Bay jumped in, and soon they were all discussing a Buchanan run:
what he would have to do to get on the ballot, to win over the delegates,
to navigate the election laws. "This," says Newman now, "was really
a culmination of what we had been doing all along." Indeed,
to a much greater extent than is publicly recognized, Newman and
Fulani have become the Reform Party. At the national convention in
Dearborn, Michigan, last July, Fulani received 45 percent of the
vote for vice chair, while longtime. NAPer Jim Mangia won the race
for national secretary, the party's third-highest office. And it
was the Fulanites who, at the last minute, threw their support behind
Jack Gargan and elected him chairman of the party. "We have serious
on-the-ground forces in California, Texas, Georgia, D.C., Washington
state, and Illinois," says Newman. He and Fulani control as many
delegates as either Ross Perot or Jesse Ventura do. Add Buchanan's
supporters to the mix, and together they probably have enough votes
to control the party. There is already serious talk of Fulani becoming
Buchanan's running mate. And if the Buchanan-Fulani alliance claims
the nomination, the Newmanites may gain access to $12.6 million in
government matching funds--enough to build their empire of interlocking
organizations far beyond what it is today. For
Lenora Fulani and Fred Newman, the long, underground struggle is
ending. Since the '60s, they have searched for ways to penetrate
the political establishment, and, with the Reform Party, they now
have. They have succeeded because they have become much more politically
savvy. The guns are gone, as is the Marxist rhetoric--replaced with
anodyne talk of cleaning up the political process. "We start whatever
we have to do to accomplish our tasks," says Newman. "Capitalists
do that all the time." But
it is not just their packaging that has changed. They have succeeded
because the U.S. elite itself has changed, too. America's political
and media establishment once excluded people like Fulani and Newman
without a second thought. Today almost no one has the courage to.
The establishment, which Newman and Fulani once assailed, has embraced
the notion that everyone has something to say, including Donald Trump,
Warren Beatty and Cybil Shepherd. But the danger of our new love
of inclusion is not that it opens its doors to celebrities who dumb
down the political process. It is that it throws open the gates to
people who do not believe in democracy. A healthy political system
allows such people to speak and assemble freely, but it does not
invest them with its trappings of legitimacy and it does not offer
them its megaphones. And yet that is exactly what has taken place. After
years of sharing her views mostly on "Fulani!"--a weekly public-access
talk show that opens with footage of her screaming, "Let's kick some!"--Lenora
Fulani, like any other politician or pundit, has spent the past few
months shuffling from CNBC to CNN to Fox News Channel. One day not
long ago she appeared on CNN with a former U.S. congresswoman and
a retired secretary of labor to talk about the presidential race
and other issues of the day. At one point the anchorwoman turned
to Fulani, a leader of a movement the FBI once called "armed and
dangerous." "Let's talk about the test-ban treaty, if we can switch
gears here a little bit," the anchorwoman said. She paused for an,
instant; the congresswoman and the secretary of labor waited. "Lenora,
what do you see happening in the Senate?"
--------------------------------------------------
Click HERE to visit the giant 'ex-iwp.org' archive on the history of the Newman cult.Fred
Newman and Lenora Fulani once led an alleged cult. Now they're
power brokers in the race for president.
What
You Don't Know About Lenora Fulani Could Hurt You
The New Republic, December 13, 1999 (cover title, "The Infiltrators")