RUTHFULLY YOURS

An activist now charged with assaulting two U.S. Marines as part of an Antifa mob has ties to Heather Booth, a senior Democrat and chief DNC trainer who founded a training academy devoted to the teachings of the late pro-violence community organizing guru Saul Alinsky.

This is yet more proof that Antifa, the anti-fascist coalition that uses heavy-handed fascist tactics, is becoming closely integrated with the Democratic Party, many of whose activists support its goal of overthrowing the government of the United States by force. (I executive-produced a three-part documentary series, America Under Siege, about Antifa and other political actors.)

Joseph Alcoff, 37, is facing charges in Philadelphia including aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation for allegedly attacking two Marines of Latino ancestry, Alejandro Godinez and Luis Torres, Fred Lucas reports at Fox News. Alcoff and two others charged in the melee have entered not guilty pleas. The beatings took place during a Proud Boys rally that was protested by Antifa. The victims, who say the perpetrators screamed racial slurs during the attack, say they were not aware of the rally.

It has been reported that Alcoff worked as the anti-payday lending campaign manager for the labor-backed leftist coalition group, Americans for Financial Reform, even while he participated in violent Antifa actions. Americans for Financial Reform, by the way, advocates an economy-crushing “financial speculation tax” on all Wall Street trading activity involving financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, derivatives, futures, options, and credit default swaps.

Fox reports: “Alcoff participated in congressional Democratic press conferences, was a guest on a House Democratic podcast and met with senior officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2016 through 2018.”

House and Senate Democrats co-sponsoring the proposed Stopping Abuse and Fraud in Electronic (SAFE) Lending Act, sent out press releases in February 2018 which included a quotation from Alcoff.

“The Consumer Bureau and Congress have in the past understood the way that payday lenders structure loans to catch Americans in a cycle of debt with exorbitant interest rates,” Alcoff said in the statements. “It is unfortunate that some in Washington would rather open the loan shark gates than continue to think about sensible borrower protections. The SAFE Lending Act would put Washington back on track to stop the debt trap.”

Alcoff also posed for photos with now-House Financial Services Committee Chairman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and ranking member on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). The Washington Free Beacon previously reported that Alcoff met with then-Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray and senior CFPB officials three times in 2016 and 2017, while he was reportedly an Antifa leader in the nation’s capital.

But what has not been reported is that Americans for Financial Reform was founded by Heather Booth, a longtime socialist-feminist agitator and contemporary of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn whose involvement in radical, anti-American causes stretches back to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s. She later went on to become training director for the DNC.

In 1973 Booth co-founded the Chicago-based Midwest Academy, a training institute for community organizers. “Alinsky is to community organizing as Freud is to psychoanalysis,” she has said.

The Midwest Academy describes itself as “a national training institute committed to advancing the struggle for social, economic, and racial justice. From local neighborhood groups to statewide and national organizations, Midwest Academy has trained over twenty-five thousand grassroots activists from hundreds of organizations and coalitions.”

“Truly reaching socialism or feminism will likely take a revolution that is in fact violent, a rupture with the old ways in which the current ruling class and elites are wiped out,” she said in the 1970s.

Booth’s inspiration, Alinsky, also had warm feelings about political violence.

Alinsky’s writing bursts with violent imagery.

In his 1946 book, Reveille for Radicals, he wrote that the radical “hits, he hurts, he is dangerous.” Radicals, he proclaimed, “are most adept at breaking the necks of conservatives.” Alinsky acknowledges that violence is inevitable in the revolutionary struggle. “The radical may resort to the sword but when he does he is not filled with hatred against those individuals whom he attacks,” he wrote. “He hates these individuals not as persons but as symbols representing ideas or interests which he believes to be inimical to the welfare of the people.”

Alinsky, who learned at the feet of Al Capone gang heavy Frank Nitti, didn’t reject violence –far from it— he simply believed it wasn’t always the best course of action. The nonviolent civil disobedience practiced by the civil rights movement is one means to an end, but it’s not always the best means, Alinsky wrote. “The future does not argue for making a special religion of nonviolence,” he writes. “It will be remembered for what it was, the best tactic for its time and place.”

Alinsky protégé Nicholas von Hoffman didn’t even try to hide his former boss’s enthusiasm for violence. In a memoir he wrote that in public Alinsky shied away from praising violence but in private “he would say that violence has its uses.” The community organizing guru approved of, for example, “conking” picket line crossers on the head, von Hoffman admitted.

Given the violent inclinations of its founder, Heather Booth, it’s not all that surprising that Joseph Alcoff, found his way to employment at Booth’s group.

A spokesman for Americans for Financial Reform told Fox that “as of December,” Alcoff no longer worked at the group.

Fox also reports that:

Alcoff was reportedly also an organizer for Smash Racism DC, the group responsible for gathering and shouting threats outside the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson in November and for heckling Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and his wife Heidi at a Washington restaurant in September. Reports have not said Alcoff was directly involved in either incident; only that he was associated with the group.

According to the media outlet, Democrats are running away from Alcoff:

Democrats are hardly eager to be associated with Alcoff now. Most spokespersons for Democratic members of Congress did not respond to inquiries from Fox News, or distanced themselves from Alcoff.

In one appearance, Alcoff dressed up as “Lenny the Loan Shark” at an event last March held outside the CFPB headquarters, which featured Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va.

“The congressman has never interacted with him nor has he taken any financial policy advice from him. Their names have appeared on the same piece of paper,” Beyer spokesman Aaron Fritschner told Fox News.

Anybody who follows the Left knows that these people are only running away from Alcoff because he got caught.