Additional examples of Rep. Karen Bass’s “long history of speaking at socialist events” have emerged, according to the New York Post.
The paper found several examples of Bass cavorting with leftists as she attempts to downplay her radical history to be a palatable option as Joe Biden’s vice presidential running mate.
Bass was a featured speaker at the West Coast Socialist Scholars Conference in 1993, an event sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The veep prospect was also a speaker at a 1988 forum sponsored by DSA that focused on gang violence. Bass was billed as a “community activist” and “organizer,” the Post reported:
The event, “Mean Streets: the Gang Crisis in LA’s Black Community,” came at the height of the city’s gangland warfare where hundreds of people were killed each year in gang-related shootings in Los Angeles County.
Bass, who was then an ER physician’s assistant, was disturbed by the violence and crack cocaine epidemic and founded Community Coalition, an organization which still exists today and seeks to combat crime, addiction, violence and poverty in southern LA.
A Bass spokesperson attempted to downplay the connection to the socialist organizations and told the paper Bass spoke at “hundreds of events focused on combating gang violence, police brutality and substance abuse in her community.”
Rebecca Mansour, senior editor-at-large of Breitbart News, recently told The Kyle Olson Show that Bass has a long history in socialist and communist circles.
Mansour said Bass is “a dedicated Marxist-Leninist, at least she was at one time and she hasn’t really disavowed that,” until Bass began the vetting process to be Biden’s running mate.
But Bass’s participation in Venceremos Brigade, a communist front group founded by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and controlled by the Cuban intelligence service, and her eight trips to communist Cuba in the 1970s “paints a much more complicated picture,” Mansour said.
Mansour noted Bass was identified by contemporaneous accounts as being the leader of the Los Angeles contingent of the Venceremos Brigade, and cited congressional hearings and FBI reports about the Brigade based on testimony from high-ranking Cuban intelligence officials who defected to the United States. These officials testified that Cuba’s General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI), the country’s equivalent of the CIA, carefully selected and vetted the members of the Venceremos Brigade, particularly the leaders.
“The intelligence officers of the Cuban regime were very careful in picking their leaders and members of this because they saw them as assets,” she said.
Mansour’s detailed investigation into Bass’s communist roots can be found here.
Kyle Olson is a reporter for Breitbart News. He is also host of “The Kyle Olson Show,” syndicated on Michigan radio stations on weekends. Listen to segments on YouTube or download full episodes at iHeartRADIO. Follow him on Twitter, like him on Facebook, and follow him on Parler.