Photo: Breitbart.
Time and again, the left is shocked when the freedom and prosperity-hating personalities that they idolize and the statist systems that they dream up descend into chaos, madness, and violence. As shown in the Stephen K. Bannon film Occupy Unmasked, the peace and love movement of the 1960s supported the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, while Occupy Wall Street invariably became the Black Bloc rioters running though city streets and breaking windows.
Given the documented trajectory of “well-meaning” leftist movements and their leaders, it should come as no surprise that the ugly truth about Cesar Chavez is just starting to seep into the public consciousness twenty years after his death.
In Barack Obama’s decidedly secular universe, Cesar Chavez is a saint. While many were stunned that tech giant Google would honor Chavez on Easter Sunday, the move makes perfect sense given Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s ties to the President. Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan “Yes, we can!” was adapted from Chavez’s “Si se puede!” and Obama even traveled to central California last year to dedicate Chavez’s home “La Paz” as a national monument.
La Paz is a strange location to honor, however. It’s part of Cesar Chavez’s dark, weird history–a place where a paranoid Chavez ruled a United Farm Workers communal living arrangement through the use of bizarre, 1970s pop-psych intimidation that he learned from a violent cult leader who was his long-time friend.
The reality is a far cry from the smiling, benevolent depictions of Chavez presented by Google and Chavez’s community organizing heirs like Obama, but it’s all true and a lot stranger than most fictional stories you’ll read.
Chavez: Organizing For Feel-Good Liberals
Cesar Chavez and the mythology surrounding him didn’t rise mystically out of the fertile fields around Bakersfield. Chavez was created with the help of none other than Saul Alinsky, the father of modern community organizing and Obama’s spiritual mentor.
Specifically, Chavez’s mentor was Alinsky employee Fred Ross, founder of the Community Service Organization (CSO). Chavez would eventually go on to become the head of CSO nationally. Fred Ross also mentored longtime United Farm Worker activist Dolores Huerta, who President Barack Obama honored last year with the Medal Of Freedom. Former Democrat Secretaries of Labor Robert Reich and Hilda Solis recently sent the President a letter suggesting a Medal of Freedom for Ross, as well.
This review of a book about Chavez by Marty Manley, former US Assistant Secretary of Labor, sums ups how his well-publicized boycotts affected American society in his time of influence: “Farmworker boycotts were the Occupy movement of the 70s and 80s – a way for college students, community activists, and middle class young people to participate directly in the tough work of social change.”
For these hip liberal elites in the 70s, the “tough work of social change” meant boycotting grapes from the San Joaquin Valley. Over seventeen million Americans are said to have joined in at some point in the five-year action.
The official bio on the Chavez Foundation website says, “Cesar made everyone, especially the farm workers, feel the jobs they were doing in the movement were very important.”
But the real Cesar Chavez treated his volunteers horribly: “Those of us who worked boycott operations worked 14-16 hour days, often 7 days a week. We were paid $5/week and had to beg for donated food to eat. Once we were burned out, the UFW happily replaced us in a process Chavez once compared with pumping water,” writes Manley.
Chavez’s Legacy
One Cesar Chavez holdover in the modern labor movement is Eliseo Medina, currently theInternational Secretary-Treasurer of the SEIU. Radical union advocate Yates is scathing in his assessment of Medina and the SEIU generally, seeing them as descendants of Chavez’s cultish obsessions:
Medina is a senior vice-president of SEIU, a union that has used somewhat similar tactics, but in a situation where the union is loaded with money. The SEIU hires scads of young nonmember organizers, puts them though a cult-like training… works them to death, gives them no power inside the union, brooks no criticism…
Obviously, the biggest impact of Chavez has been on the presidency of Barack Obama. Onthe Huffington Post, Chavez biographer Randy Shaw said that the Chavez organizing and fundraising tactics “are an integral part of the Obama campaign.”
Three states celebrate Cesar Chavez Day as an official holiday. In 2011, President Barack Obama issued a proclamation declaring March 31st “Cesar Chavez Day.” Let’s hope that people begin to learn the truth about Cesar Chavez, the false god that Google chose to celebrate on Easter Sunday.
The Conservatives at Breitbart have the full article, which is extensive
