InfluenceWatch tracks yesterday’s history into today’s news

The June 2026 primaries for California governor and mayor of Los Angeles featured a pair of prominent Democrats saddled with radical-left backgrounds that would have once made their previous political success unthinkable—even in California. Former state assembly speaker Antonio Villaraigosa finished seventh in his bid to become California’s next governor; the once-powerful Democratic state lawmaker snagged an embarrassing 1.1 percent of the total votes cast. But controversial Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has fared far better in her reelection effort, pulling down first place in the primary and securing a spot on the general election ballot in November. Both are brigadistas—alumni of the Venceremos Brigade, described in its InfluenceWatch profile as “a radical-left activist group that organizes trips to communist-ruled Cuba as a way for sympathetic Americans to demonstrate their solidarity with the country’s government and their opposition to related United States government policies.”

Think of it as a Cuban propaganda camp for communist college kids. Today, the Venceremos Brigade is still sending campers to Cuba as a fiscally sponsored project of The People’s Forum, a socialist charity created in 2017. Will today’s brigadistas be running local government’s tomorrow?

While it is unlikely that Bass and Villaraigosa would have risen to such positions in most states (particularly in Florida, with its famously anti-communist Cuban diaspora), this liability hasn’t prevented previous brigadistas from occupying positions of influence. Some have become academics at major American universities, at least one—Karen Nussbaum—worked in the Clinton administration, and many have predictably become professional activists at left-wing NGOs. One of the latter, Susan Rosenberg, is a convicted former member of a left-wing domestic terrorist group who was pardoned by President Clinton on his last day in office.

The InfluenceWatch profile for the Venceremos Brigade is just one of more than two dozen covering the history of the American left. A project of the Capital Research Center, these historical reports in “IW” (as we call it internally) have in some measure relied upon materials from CRC’s strategic research archive; a library full of frequently out of print historical books, biographies, official government reports, internal organization records, left-wing publications and more. Primarily focused on the American radical left during the Cold War, the archive also contains materials regarding the Soviet Union and its allies in the communist bloc, plus espionage history and reports that tied all these themes together.

The collection was started while the Cold War was still raging by a researcher who wanted it preserved and used for future investigators. Much of the material is difficult to find in the wild, and CRC’s work benefits tremendously from the thousands upon thousands of works and other documents available to us, which we continue to add to.

One big lesson to be learned from it all is that the history of the American radical left is often as fresh as today’s headlines and the names of prominent professors at American universities.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

As the IW profile reports, the Venceremos Brigade was “Founded in 1969 by members of the radical New Left activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) . . .” Thanks in part to materials from the CRC research archive, InfluenceWatch also has thorough profiles of SDS, the Weather Underground (a domestic terrorist group that emerged from a 1969 schism that ended SDS) and other left-wing movements related to them.

The SDS profile reports the group was born in 1960 as the “student subsidiary of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID)” a democratic socialist group that was nonetheless stridently anti-communist. But SDS grew far more radical than its merely socialist parent and began admitting people aligned with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Maoist-influenced Progressive Labor Party (PL). The SDS profile explains that PL was created in 1962 from breakaway members of the then-Soviet-controlled CPUSA because the PL faction “opposed the CPUSA’s moderation and willingness to quietly assist left-leaning Democrats.”

While the PL group was never more than one-third of SDS’s total membership, it was the most disciplined and motivated faction. InfluenceWatch reports “PL members also demonstrated exceptional commitment to doing the tedious work of building and running local SDS chapters.”

Noting this ominous development soon after it began, a board member from the League of Industrial Democracy warned that SDS had drifted into an “anti-American” direction at odds with the LID’s “principled opposition to Communism and all other forms of totalitarianism.” Because of this concern, the LID parted ways with SDS in October 1965.

But with the radical left the schisms never end. And as the ice pick in the temple of Leon Trotsky demonstrates, the most ruthlessly violent camp is often the survivor.

By 1969, the PL faction was at war with the rest of SDS over whether to prioritize domestic economic and class warfare concerns (PL’s objective) or favor instead opposition to the Vietnam War and an “armed struggle” against “American imperialism” (the role favored by the group that became the Weather Underground).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly had dozens of informants within SDS as this battle was joined at the 1969 SDS annual convention. It’s hard to believe in hindsight, but at the time the FBI believed the Weather faction was the least dangerous of the two. So, the FBI had its moles vote with the Weather faction during an ultimately successful vote to expel the PL members from SDS.

This effectively ended SDS, after almost a decade of being one of the most successful left-wing movements in American history.  Contrary to the FBI’s bad bet, the supposedly less dangerous Weather faction became the violent Weather Underground bombers. Meanwhile, without the influence it had gained from working within SDS, PL failed to achieve any further historical relevance.

At its zenith in 1968, SDS reportedly had 100,000 members who animated most of the era’s left-wing protests. For a week in April 1968, an SDS anti-war demonstration at Columbia University escalated into an SDS takeover of five buildings on the campus and the brief hostage taking of a university administrator. The IW profile of SDS explains:

The insurrection was forcibly ended by police, leading to more than 700 arrests and 200 injuries, but touched off severely disruptive demonstrations at dozens of other schools over the ensuing weeks. Building takeovers occurred at colleges as large as Ohio State University.

One historical and perhaps predictable irony of these campus takeovers is that many SDS members later became professors, more than one at Columbia! Until his death in 2022, Todd Gitlin (SDS president during 1963 and 1964) was a journalism professor at Columbia.

The Weather Underground

Unlike Gitlin, who became a severe critic of the Weather Underground, some other future educators from SDS took a detour into terrorism before going back to the classroom.

The InfluenceWatch profile explains how it began:

Four hundred members of the Weatherman-SDS faction gathered in Flint, Michigan, during the interval between Christmas 1969 and New Years 1970, for what has become known as the “Flint War Council”— the final meeting of SDS. Bryan Burrough wrote that it was a “pep rally from Hell, a five-day orgy of violent rhetoric intended to set the stage for the underground revolution.”

A banner with a rifle hung over the meeting hall, with images of supposed revolutionary heroes along one wall and enemies on the other. Communists such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro adorned the “hero” wall; the “enemies” side included President Richard Nixon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and Sharon Tate—the pregnant Hollywood actress brutally murdered months earlier by the cult “family” of Charles Manson. One participant later defected and informed the FBI that Bill Ayers’ Michigan sect of SDS—hosts of the Flint event—considered Manson to be a hero.

Dohrn applauded the murder of Tate and others by the Manson cult: “Dig it, they murdered those pigs and then ate dinner at their dining table then stuck a fork in their bellies! Wild!” Afterward, Weathermen began greeting one another with a “fork” symbol—four fingers extended upward.

Bernardine Dohrn was arguably the most influential leader of the Weather Underground and landed on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list. She capped her career as the founding director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Northwestern University School of Law, where they apparently have a soft spot for staffers who celebrate the murder of innocent women and their unborn children.

During a terror campaign that lasted into 1975, the Weather Underground is credited with bombing police stations, corporate offices, the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol Building. Their desire to overthrow the United States government and establish a communist society was obviously never realized. And due to serial civil liberties violations committed by the FBI in the futile effort to catch the bombers, neither Dohrn nor any other prominent Weather Underground fugitives could be substantively prosecuted.

Bill Ayers, another Weather Underground leader, hid out with Dohrn and became her husband. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—it’s a great country,” he boasted in his 2001 memoir. After abandoning revolutionary violence against America, Ayers became a professor of education at the University of Illinois—Chicago.

Howard Machtinger, another founding member of the Weather Underground, became a teacher in public schools. So did Cathy Wilkerson and Ron Fliegelman, two of the bomb makers.

Eleanor (Raskin) Stein participated in the Columbia University takeover by SDS, went into hiding as one of the Weather Underground leaders, and later emerged to become a law professor at the University of Albany.

Kathy Boudin obtained a PhD from Columbia University Teachers College and became an instructor at the Columbia University Center for Justice.

But between that and her work as a Weather Underground bomber, Boudin detoured into greater violence with the Black Liberation Army (BLA) by participating in a deadly 1981 Brinks truck robbery. Two police officers and an armored car driver were murdered in the incident. Boudin and her future husband, David Gilbert, were captured and pleaded guilty to murder charges. She received a 20-year-to-life sentence; he got 75-to-life.

Yesterday’s news . . . today’s headlines

Chesa Boudin, Boudin and Gilbert’s one-year-old son at the time of their armed robbery in 1981, was raised by Dohrn and Ayers. Chesa became the district attorney of San Francisco in 2019, promising to be soft on crime. He lived up to the promise, and the ensuing chaos in San Francisco led to his recall in 2022. “It’s my perception that Chesa lacks a desire to actually and effectively prosecute crime, in any fashion,” reported homicide prosecutor Brooke Jenkins, who resigned from Boudin’s office and was later elected to replace him.

Chesa, of course, moved from this failure to . . . academia! He is now the executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at the University of California—Berkeley.

In addition to the Brinks truck murders that sent Boudin’s parents to prison, the Black Liberation Army (a breakaway cell from the Black Panther Party) was responsible for multiple other violent felonies. These included the hijacking of an airliner, the assassination of two New York City police officers, and organizing a 1979 prison escape for BLA member and convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur.

Like the Weather Underground, the BLA’s notorious acts continue to reverberate into today’s headlines. As one example, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation co-founder Alicia Garza has quoted and praised Shakur as an inspiration:

When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what it’s [sic] political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context. When you adopt Black Lives Matter and transform it into something else [. . .] it’s appropriate politically to credit the lineage from which your adapted work derived.

Shakur went into hiding and in 1984 resurfaced in Cuba, with asylum from the Castro government, where she remained until her death last year. According to a PBS obituary: “Her writings became a rallying cry during the Black Lives Matter movement in recent years, even as opponents criticized her words as being influenced by Marxist and communist ideology.”

Cuba’s lawyers

As with Shakur and the Venceremos Brigade’s brigadistas, a lot of the New Left’s history passes through Cuba and continues to write today’s news.

Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman, P.C. (RBSKL) is the newest InfluenceWatch profile inspired by the contents of our strategic archive. The hard left law firm became the American representative of the Cuban government after Fidel Castro’s communist revolution. RBSKL continues to hold the account today, often representing Cuba in claims made against it by American citizens and corporations. Iran (briefly, after the 1979 Islamic revolution), Chile (until its socialist government was overthrown), the communist government of Nicaragua, and the Palestine Liberation Organization have been some of RBSKL’s other controversial accounts.

The “Boudin” in the RBSKL name refers to the late Leonard Boudin, father of Kathy Boudin and grandfather of Chesa Boudin. In addition to securing a very good lawyer to keep his daughter from going to prison for the rest of her life, Leonard represented several famous clients, such as Pentagon Papers thief and (not coincidentally) First Amendment champion Daniel Ellsberg.

More so than Boudin, RBSKL firm co-founder Victor Rabinowitz was a hard core communist and for at least two decades through the early 1960s a card-carrying member of the CPUSA. Citing Soviet and American intelligence reports that were declassified after the fall of the Soviet Empire, the InfluenceWatch profile of the Communist Party USA demonstrates that the CPUSA had been operating throughout its history as a treasonous espionage front for the Soviet Union.

Even if Rabinowitz had been aware of this during his membership, it’s hard to imagine how it would have bothered him. The RBSKL profile quotes him on the matter:

Rabinowitz was a strong supporter of the Soviet Union, writing that even “with all of its imperfections the U.S.S.R. represented, to me and all those I worked with, Socialism Triumphant. Its proclaimed goals were our goals; its hopes were our hopes.” He later recalled that “the Trotskyist trials of the mid-thirties gave me pause, but not much,” and even though at the time he was unaware of the true extent of the Stalinist purges, “it wouldn’t have made any difference. One does not renounce a cause in which one believes because crimes are committed in its name.”

Rabinowitz, Boudin and Castro have all passed away, but the RBSKL law firm they created continues to make news.  The IW profile notes that “As of 2026, Michael Krinsky was a principal at RBSKL and led the firm’s representation of foreign governments, particularly Cuba.” This work included Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Corporación Cimex, S.A, a 2026 U.S. Supreme Court case involving a Cuban state-owned enterprise.

Ramparts

The early days of the New Left, its fights and schisms involving the “old” left, and a disproportionate share of the muckraking journalism of the era was covered in the glossy magazine Ramparts. Published from 1962-1975, Ramparts was a general defender of the far left, yet sometimes a thoughtful critic of specific factions.

The CRC strategic research library has a hard copy of nearly every issue of Ramparts, which were used to create the extensive InfluenceWatch profile of its history. According to the summary:

A 1970 first-person commentary from a member of the first Venceremos Brigade wrote that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was “totally fantastic—completely overwhelming.” In 1968, David Horowitz [. . .] wrote that North Korea had become “one of the most successful and independent countries of the Sino-Soviet bloc.” In 1966 and 1973 issues Ramparts promoted the work of journalists who proclaimed the innocence of Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

But at other times, Ramparts was committing real journalism and even engaging in honest criticisms of the Soviet Union and the American far left:

In 1972 Ramparts produced the first comprehensive exposé of the work of the National Security Agency. In 1967 the magazine broke the news that the Central Intelligence Agency had been covertly funding the National Student Association (previously considered an independent, left-leaning student group) since the 1950s. Despite the animosity of the some of the publication’s left-of-center readers, Ramparts also produced favorable reviews of the work of Soviet dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and criticisms of the Weather Underground . . .

By 1967, the influence of Ramparts had already grown to the point where Time magazine accused it of placing a “bomb in every issue.” But as the Weather Underground began lighting off actual bombs, Ramparts was quick to criticize. Writing in March 1971, editor David Horowitz wrote:

Groups like the Weatherman and the revolutionary hucksters and hipsters who have followed in its wake have done nothing else, they have helped to create a climate in which members of the Movement—let alone potential allies—no longer feel confident of their vanguards, but in fact feel threatened by them, morally if not physically.

Horowitz also continued to make news up until almost the present day. A fellow traveler with the The Black Panther Party until 1974, he broke with the group after a close friend was murdered, likely on the order of Panther leader Huey Newton. In the 1980s Horowitz migrated his honest leftism instincts over to the right side of American politics, becoming a severe and prominent critic of the entire radical left until his passing in April 2025.

Perhaps Horowitz’s ideological journey is what is in store for some of today’s radical leftists, even the modern brigaditas. The wiser ones will surely grow out of their attraction to the 20^th century’s most murderous creed. Helping them along on that voyage is part of the reason CRC curates the strategic library and produces important historical profiles from it for InfluenceWatch.

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The text that is bolded in this essay refers to historical left-wing movements and people for which historical profiles exist in InfluenceWatch. Other examples of similar profiles include the following:

Angela Davis

Bob Avakian

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

Howard Zinn

Institute for Policy Studies

International Union of Electrical Workers

Jesse Jackson

Jesse Jackson 1988 Presidential Campaign

Margaret Sanger

Michael Harrington

Michel Foucault

National Lawyers Guild  

Revolutionary Communist Party USA (RCP)

Saul Alinsky

Stokely Carmichael

Taft-Hartley Act

Tom Hayden

Transnational Institute

Workers World Party

Young Communist League USA (YCL USA)

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/influencewatch-tracks-yesterdays-history-into-todays-news/