Her pro-Castro past is also disqualifying, Spencer Pratt says.
Her pro-Castro past is also disqualifying, Spencer Pratt says.
I nsurgent candidate Spencer Pratt has built a broad-based coalition to back him in Tuesday’s primary for Los Angeles mayor. About half of independents support him, according to polls, and he’s been surprisingly successful at attracting Democrats who are fed up with the city’s decline.
He’s gotten donations from prominent liberal donors such as billionaire Haim Saban and Universal Music Group chairman Lucian Grainge. Nicole Avant, the Southern California finance co-chairwoman for Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and the wife of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, has become a supporter, as has Jeanie Buss, the minority owner of the L.A. Lakers. Pratt also says that leftist A-list celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx have privately pledged their support.
But while Pratt has been careful to emphasize consensus issues such as pushing the homeless into treatment, speeding up recovery from the Pacific Palisades fires, cleaning up filthy streets, and fixing potholes, he has kept a hard edge on some issues. One is his insistence that his major opponent, Mayor Karen Bass, 72, is not only obviously incompetent but also beholden to the city’s leftist statist quo, given her dangerously radical-activist background. Since her youth, she has been captivated with Cuba’s communist dictatorship, which has been guided by either Fidel Castro or his brother Raul for nearly 70 years.
In a five-minute Instagram post produced by his campaign, Pratt has called Bass out for her involvement in the 1970s with a revolutionary group called the Venceremos Brigade, which was a joint project set up by the Castro dictatorship and the radical Students for a Democratic Society to have Americans visit Cuba for six-week tours to participate in public-works projects but mostly to be indoctrinated into communist ideology.
Pratt shared a story from 1983 edition of the Los Angeles Times about a legal suit:
Plaintiff Karen Bass, according to a 1973 [Los Angeles police] intelligence document provided to The Times, “traveled to Cuba with the 6th Contingent of the Venceremos Brigade. The brigade trains revolutionary-prone Americans in terrorist tactics and guerilla warfare while claiming to harvest sugar cane.”
Bass, characterized as a brigade leader, “returned from Cuba to the USA bringing back propaganda literature.”
Tablet magazine confirmed that Bass was no mere foot soldier. It reported that an October 1975 edition of the communist Daily World newspaper described Bass as the “leader of the Venceremos Brigade in southern California.” Tablet noted that in 1983, a former captain of Cuba’s main intelligence agency who defected to the U.S. told the FBI that Cuban intelligence officers controlled the brigades and selected their participants.
Bass told the Los Angeles Times in 2020 that her eight Venceremos trips to Cuba “were educational and had nothing to do with terrorism.” She said she had since realized the Castro regime does not allow the freedoms granted to Americans.
What’s clear is that her ardor for Cuba’s revolution, which she developed during her multiple trips to Cuba, lasted far longer than her years of youthful indiscretion. When Fidel Castro died in 2016, she offered her heartfelt condolences: “The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba,” she said, using the Spanish term of endearment that Cuban communists long used to praise him.
In 2020, when Bass appeared on the short list of people who might be selected as Joe Biden’s vice presidential running mate, Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen found her continued attachment to the dictator astonishing, given that “she was a 63-year-old woman who had already been speaker of the California Assembly and was in her third congressional term.” In 2020, she admitted that she had made at least eight more trips to Cuba since her youthful Venceremos days.
Olsen noted that it had taken her four years, and only after relentless questioning from the media about the chance she would be tapped by Biden, to retreat from her 2016 comments about “Comandante en Jefe” and issue a vague non-apology: “If I had to make that statement over again, I wouldn’t use those words.”
Today, 35 years after the collapse of Soviet communism, the passage of time has dulled concerns about the “useful idiots” for communism — as they used to be called — who were in high-ranking positions in the U.S. government. But it wasn’t always so.
In 1992, being labeled a “peace activist” with the Venceremos Brigade was enough to prevent Johnnetta Cole, the then-president of Spelman College who ran education policy for Bill Clinton’s transition team, from being nominated to serve as his secretary of education.
As late as 2020, rumors that Bass and California Senator Kamala Harris were equally likely to be picked as Joe Biden’s running mate were enough to stir up opposition. “I don’t believe in the last six decades there’s ever been someone considered for the vice presidency . . . with this level of sympathy towards a Marxist regime,” Marco Rubio, then a senator and now secretary of state, said. If Bass were to be elected vice president, Rubio added, “she’ll be the highest ranking Castro sympathizer in the history of the U.S. government.”
When Bass dropped out of the Biden selection basket and the job went to Harris, moderate Democrats breathed a sigh of relief. Fernand Amandi, a Florida-based Democratic consultant of Cuban heritage who had worked for the Obama-Biden campaigns, told The Atlantic: “Fairly or unfairly, Karen Bass’s history on this subject makes Bernie Sanders look like Ronald Reagan.”
Bass recovered her footing after the Biden rejection. In 2022, she was elected mayor of overwhelmingly Democratic Los Angeles after being endorsed by the entire Democratic Party establishment and winning the support of the influential Los Angeles Times. But as soon she got into office, it was clear to the general public that she was in over her head. Her approval rating is in the low 30s, an absolutely terrible showing for an incumbent mayor in a city where only 15 percent of registered voters are Republicans.
In 2020, the Democratic establishment quietly realized that Bass’s ties to communist Cuba were too distracting to put her on the ticket and were ultimately disqualifying. Sadly, this year that same establishment — from Governor Gavin Newsom to Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi — has decided that the egregiously bad record in office doesn’t disqualify her for another term, and its members have lined up to endorse her.
Thank goodness, the voters of Los Angeles have the final decision on Karen Bass. For most objective observers of urban politics, the only job she is currently qualified for is a quiet retirement that will provide her with a comfortable government pension.