Responding to: California’s Election System Is a Disgrace — John Fund · 2026-06-07

What the Piece Argues

John Fund’s National Review piece argues that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is disqualified from office because of her long-running involvement with the Venceremos Brigade, a group Fund claims was a communist terrorist training operation, and her continued expressions of sympathy for Fidel Castro. The article cites a 1973 Los Angeles Police Department intelligence document, a 1975 communist newspaper, and a defector’s testimony to paint Bass as a lifelong Castro acolyte whose radical background, combined with her incompetence as mayor, makes her unfit to hold power. Fund argues that the Democratic establishment’s endorsement of Bass is a betrayal of voters, and that the only appropriate job for her now is a quiet retirement.

Receipts

The move is a classic red-baiting smear: recycle a half-century-old FBI-era surveillance file, strip all context, and use it to disqualify a progressive Black woman from public office by conflating humanitarian solidarity with terrorist allegiance. For the Brigade’s founding purpose as a nonviolent sugarcane-harvest effort, see Portside, “The Venceremos Brigade at 50: Challenging Empire, Uplifting Solidarity Since 1969” (2019), at portside.org.

The framing wants you to believe

  • Karen Bass was a high-ranking operative in a Castro-controlled terrorist training network, and her ideological loyalty to a communist dictatorship makes her a threat to the city.
  • The Democratic establishment’s support for her is a corrupt cover-up of a dangerous radical past that should have ended her career long ago.

What’s really going on

  • The Venceremos Brigade was a nonviolent solidarity organization formed in 1969 to oppose the U.S. blockade of Cuba and to engage in cultural exchange and agricultural work — primarily sugarcane harvesting. The “terrorist” label comes from a single LAPD intelligence document produced by the same domestic-surveillance apparatus that, in the COINTELPRO era and its aftermath, spied on the Black Panthers, anti-war activists, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The document’s claim that the Brigade trained “revolutionary-prone Americans in terrorist tactics and guerilla warfare” has never been substantiated by any other evidence, and the Brigade’s public record is one of nonviolent volunteerism.
  • The attack is a propaganda operation designed to funnel support to the insurgent candidate Spencer Pratt — who is backed by billionaire donors like Haim Saban and Lucian Grainge — by painting the incumbent as a communist stooge. The actual beneficiary of this framing is the conservative donor class and the right-wing media ecosystem that profits from delegitimizing any progressive Black politician who threatens the interests of concentrated wealth. The cost is borne by the residents of Los Angeles, who are being denied a substantive debate on homelessness, recovery, and public services in favor of a McCarthyite carnival.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: with a persuadable moderate who is genuinely troubled by the accusations but open to facts.

The family on 54th Street — three generations in a house that’s been in the family since the Great Migration — just got their first Section 8 voucher after a year on the waiting list. The grandmother, who worked for the Postal Service for thirty years, watches the news and hears that the mayor is a communist because she picked sugarcane in Cuba when she was twenty-three. She remembers the FBI spying on her own church’s food pantry in the ’70s, and she wonders: is this what we’re still doing?

The framing wants you to believe that Karen Bass’s youthful participation in the Venceremos Brigade — a volunteer program that sent Americans to Cuba to cut sugarcane, build housing, and learn about the revolution — is evidence of a lifelong allegiance to a dictatorship. The frame is a political weapon, not a historical account. The actual record of the Brigade is well-documented: it was a nonviolent, anti-blockade solidarity organization, not a terrorist training camp. The single source for the “terrorist” accusation is a 1973 LAPD intelligence document — a product of the same apparatus that, in the COINTELPRO era and its long aftermath, surveilled and smeared Black leaders. The document has never been corroborated by any independent investigation.

What we are actually being asked to believe is that a 72-year-old grandmother who has spent her entire adult life in public service — as a physician assistant, a community organizer, a state legislator, and a member of Congress — is a secret Castro operative. The moral reframing the moment demands is this: a nation that cannot distinguish a humanitarian’s cultural exchange from a terrorist’s allegiance is a nation that has lost the capacity to tell the truth about its own history. We are the ones who feed, clothe, and heal. We are the ones who keep families together. We are the ones who defend democracy — against the McCarthyite paranoia that has been revived, once again, to block a Black woman from holding power.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: with the op-ed-reading, identity-protective mixed-faith citizen who needs to hear the structural diagnosis named plainly.

The piece is a propaganda artifact, and its institutional authorship is unmistakable. As laid out in the Receipts, John Fund’s National Review column doesn’t move a single fact that hasn’t been marinating in right-wing oppo-research for decades: a single intelligence file from a police department that collaborated with COINTELPRO’s legacy surveillance network, a defector’s hearsay, and a 50-year-old quote stripped of its solidarity context. The aim is to make Karen Bass unelectable by resurrecting the oldest, laziest American fear — the Black radical in league with foreign communists — so that a billionaire-funded challenger can slip past without a serious debate about who actually runs Los Angeles.

This is not journalism. It’s enforcement. The people who backed Spencer Pratt — Haim Saban, Lucian Grainge, the dark-money machinery behind the Democratic establishment’s about-face — are not afraid of communism. They’re afraid of a mayor who might actually tax them to fix the sidewalks their children never walk on. The red-baiting is a cost-free way to keep the donor class insulated while the city’s working poor choke on ash from the next wildfire.

You don’t have to agree with Bass’s politics to see what’s being done to her. The LAPD intelligence document that Fund treats like scripture is the same kind of surveillance artifact that labeled Martin Luther King a “dangerous radical.” The Venceremos Brigade was a sugarcane harvest, not a cell. If you believe the former, you’ve been recruited into a lie.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: A Twitter thread, a Substack reply, or a political audience where the bystander audience is the real reader.

So let me get this straight. Spencer Pratt — whose campaign is bankrolled by a billionaire media mogul, a record-label chairman, the wife of a streaming co-CEO, a sports-team owner, and a circle of Hollywood celebrities — is the candidate who cares about “the city’s decline,” and he is going to save Los Angeles by pointing at a mayor whose most disqualifying credential is that when she was nineteen years old, she went on a student trip and cut sugar cane. The Venceremos Brigade was not a training cell. It was not a guerrilla-warfare academy. It was a student-organizing trip where idealistic Americans went to see an island, to see what the revolution looked like, to harvest what was there to harvest. Bass went. The donor class that is telling you she’s unfit has spent the last twenty years building empires that have forced the working class to pay the price. The absurdity is the point. You are being asked to believe that a mayor who inherited a city in crisis is disqualified by a fifty-year-old trip to an island, while the billionaire coalition funding her replacement is entirely above scrutiny. The inversion is simple: the real radical-activist background is not Bass’s youth. It is the radical-activist background of a donor class that treats a political process as a vehicle for its own agenda. We face truth: we examine the present record, not the youth of a Black woman who cut sugar cane before most of her donors were born.

DEFCON 2 — Sharp, Confrontational

When to use: when the person across from you is condescendingly playing the “both sides” card and you need to break through the patronizing calm.

Spare me the “reasonable person might wonder” routine. A reasonable person would look at a 1973 intelligence file produced by a police department that was actively surveilling Black churches and ask: why should I believe a single word of it? A reasonable person would notice that the same people funding Spencer Pratt’s campaign also fund the media outlets that are pumping this red-baiting garbage. And a reasonable person would ask the obvious question: cui bono?

The answer is not complicated. The people who benefit are the coastal money men who want a mayor who’ll keep property taxes low while the streets flood with sewage, and the right-wing media that gets another cycle of Democratic self-immolation to feed its audience. The people who lose are the tenants waiting on a housing voucher, the families living in fire zones, the immigrants who clean the hotels and the offices of the very people financing this smear. You’re not being “fair” by treating Fund’s piece as a legitimate argument. You’re laundering a propaganda operation through your own credibility.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: A mass audience or a catharsis-seeking readership where the register is scorched-earth, grotesque metaphor is deployed against institutions and named apex-of-power figures.

Let’s be precise about what is happening. A billionaire-backed insurgency is telling you that a seventy-two-year-old Black woman who served as California Assembly Speaker, U.S. Congresswoman, and Los Angeles Mayor is a “radical activist” because when she was nineteen she went to an island, harvested a crop, and called a dictator by the name the island called him. She walked the phrasing back four years later under pressure. That is the disqualifying credential. Meanwhile, the candidate telling you she is unfit has taken money from the entertainment-industry oligarchs who have spent the last twenty years lobbying to pay their workers less, to avoid taxes on their private jets, and to build monopolies in streaming and real estate that have priced the very people you say you care about out of the city. But yes — a sugar-cane trip in 1973 is the thing to focus on. The cui bono trace lands: the donors profit. The voters pay. And the entire apparatus — the Fund piece, the Tablet magazine receipts, the Post columnist’s coverage, the Rubio quote — runs like a well-oiled messaging machine to do exactly that: make you look backward fifty years so that you don’t look forward fifty years and see who will be picking up the tab when the donor-class mayor gets done. The inversion is complete. The real radical-activist background belongs to a coalition of entertainment and finance magnates who have built wealth through systems of concentrated power, and they point to a nineteen-year-old’s trip to an island while hiding their own. We name the operation: the Venceremos Brigade was a student trip. The real brigade is the donor class, marching on the city with their money, their badge is patriotism, their weapon is the smear, and their target is the working-class electorate that thinks it has a choice. We are Christians — we feed, clothe, heal. We defend democracy.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic, Restrained Profanity

When to use: when the civility masking the destruction has finally snapped your last nerve — righteous fury, barely leashed.

This is the same goddamn playbook that got Black leaders murdered. You know how this works: take a Black woman’s youthful idealism, run it through a police file composed during the era when the FBI was literally writing scripts to get Panthers killed, and then feed it to a conservative columnist who knows exactly what he’s doing. The result is a city trapped in a propaganda loop while billionaires install their preferred administrator.

I am not going to sit here and pretend this is a “difference of opinion.” Karen Bass is not a fucking terrorist. She is a grandmother who once believed that solidarity with the global South was a moral calling, and the only thing the National Review has proved is that it’s still 1955 — and they’re still calling any Black woman who steps out of line a communist. The donors funding Spencer Pratt are not patriots; they’re cowards who pay other people to do their dirty work. And the journalists who launder this rot are professional character assassins. Goddamn them all.

DEFCON 1++ — Maximal-Expletive Apex

When to use: when you are past words, past diplomacy, and the only fitting response is the full-throated, unvarnished, holy-shit fury of a people who have been lied to for fifty years.

Karen Bass is not a fucking terrorist. She is a Black grandmother who dared to love a revolution that gave dignity to the descendants of slaves, and you — you miserable McCarthyite bastards — are smearing her with the same fucking lie that got Fred Hampton murdered in his bed. Fuck your “intelligence document.” Fuck the billionaire cowards who funded Spencer Pratt to avoid a real debate about who burned down Los Angeles. And fuck every journalist, every editor, every “opinion writer” who launders this shit-coated nostalgia for the days when you could call a Black woman a communist and the state would dispatch a squad to her doorstep.

This is not about Cuba. This is about who gets to hold power in a city where 85% of registered voters aren’t Republicans. The answer, in your world, is anyone a handful of billionaires have vetted and approved. And when someone — a Black woman, a progressive, a woman who once had the audacity to cut sugarcane — threatens that arrangement, you dig up the old COINTELPRO files, you dust off the word “communist,” and you do the thing your grandfathers did. I see you. We all see you. And we are not going to let you do it again.

The Deeper Breakdown

The entire National Review argument rests on a single, profoundly corrupt transaction: trading Spencer Pratt’s billionaire backers a defamatory campaign narrative in exchange for a mayor who will not disturb their interests. The piece’s emotional payload — Bass as Castro’s American acolyte — is built from a 1973 LAPD surveillance document that is a direct descendent of the COINTELPRO-era machinery designed to discredit Black activists. The document’s “terrorist training” allegation has never been verified; as the Portside citation in the Receipts confirms, the Venceremos Brigade was founded to harvest sugarcane and express solidarity with a nation under U.S. blockade.

The beneficiary of this red-baiting is not “democracy.” It is a donor class that includes Haim Saban, Lucian Grainge, and other figures who have nothing to fear from communism and everything to fear from a mayor who might redirect their taxes into street repair, housing, and wildfire preparedness. By recasting Bass’s history as a national-security threat, the right-wing media machine does the candidate vetting that the Democratic establishment’s endorsements cannot openly perform — discarding a sitting mayor without ever litigating her record on its actual merits. The cost falls on the people of Los Angeles: an election stolen not by ballot fraud but by a propaganda campaign that substitutes Cold War panic for a serious debate about how to keep a city alive.