Where do leftist networks go when they die?

In 2010, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known by the acronym ACORN, declared bankruptcy and dissolved. It was a moment of triumph for conservative activists who had implicated the left-wing network in controversial voter registration practices and who had caught network employees appearing to condone illegal activities on surreptitiously recorded videos.

But bankruptcy does not mean the underlying assets cease to exist, and dissolving the network does not mean that the local organizers will sit idle forever. In the case of ACORN, those local organizers ensured the network continued its work supporting left-wing politicians, labor union organizing campaigns, and radical low-income housing policies.

The stiff

Despite the election of ACORN ally Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008, the organization had an unhappy time from around then through its official dissolution in 2010. Conservatives had long suspected ACORN of engaging in voter registration fraud, and numerous ACORN-affiliated activists faced charges for their work with the group. ACORN had relied on federal funds for a substantial amount of its network operations, and faced Congressional action to strip future funds.

And then two right-wing undercover activists with a hidden camera started showing up at ACORN regional office to make ACORN’s life even worse. The series of undercover stings conducted by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles showed ACORN staff appearing to aid the two in creating a prostitution ring, and increased the public pressure on ACORN as an organization. By the end of 2010, its position had become untenable, and ACORN filed for bankruptcy and ceased to exist.

The afterlife

But that was not the end of the ACORN network. The national structure may have dissolved, but the local roots were well established and lived on after ACORN died. Local-level constituent parts of the network continued operating much as they had been, with funding from institutional leftist donors like the Service Employees International Union to conduct union organizing campaigns. This is not disputed: By the mid-2010s, liberal outlets were enthusiastic about how the “successors” were continuing ACORN’s work despite right-wing efforts to shut it down.

Striking with SEIU

The successor groups rose to national prominence as the grunts in the Service Employees International Union’s “Fast Food Strikes” in the “Fight for $15” campaign. The SEIU has long sought to organize quick-service restaurants like McDonald’s, seeking a foothold toward a potential billion-dollar windfall in dues revenues.

In late 2012, the union adopted an aggressive public relations strategy to pressure the company to agree to a “card check” unionization, to encourage the Obama administration to make regulatory changes favorable to union organizing, and to persuade left-wing local governments to enact substantial increases to minimum wages. Under the management of liberal political public relations firm BerlinRosen, the SEIU would stage-manage what it called “fast food strikes” for “$15 and a union.”

But workplace-level organizing is hard. Drawing on existing activist allies is easy, and if the media is on one’s side (and for Big Labor, it almost always is) activists in different shirts can be portrayed not as ‘filling out the bodies’ but as ‘a broad-based grassroots coalition of community groups.’ So the SEIU shoveled millions of dollars out the door to ACORN successor groups, among them New York Communities for Change (NYCC), Chicago’s Action Now, Missourians Organized for Reform and Empowerment, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, and the Black Institute, run by former ACORN head Bertha Lewis, to ensure that the ACORN successors were ready to support a multi-year national campaign.

In Heaven with Bill: When ACORN’s successors ruled New York

In 2013, the New York City-based ACORN successors like NYCC and the Black Institute (alongside the campaign consultants at BerlinRosen) helped put a very good friend in that city’s mayoral office: then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. The “Mayor from ACORN” invited former ACORN head Lewis to his victory stage to celebrate his securing the Democratic nomination, and reporting noted that de Blasio had worked closely with ACORN as a city and federal housing official.

De Blasio was also closely allied with labor unions, especially the 1199SEIU division of the SEIU. Not surprisingly, the union-tied mayor was intimately involved with the union-tied formerly-ACORN activist network.

Lessons

The ACORN successors continue their work, and continue morphing into the street-level grunts of whatever campaigns the radical left are conducting at any given time. They participated in the “summer of love” in 2020; through the ACORN-linked (but not lineally descended) Working Families Party, they helped bring socialist New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (D) to power.

As Arabella Advisors goes to meet its reward and breaks into the Sunflower Services and Vital Impact networks, the lessons of ACORN are clear. The end of a network does not mean the end of its work—and Capital Research Center’s work watching these networks does not end with their deaths.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/where-do-leftist-networks-go-when-they-die/