http://www.traditionalvalues.org/modules.php?sid=3275
Who is David Axelrod?
David’s Mother And Radical Leftist Journalism
Myril Axelrod was formerly a writer for PM, a leftist tabloid newspaper published from 1940 to 1948 in New York City.
A feature on the leftist nature of PM was published by City Journal in the Summer of 1993.
The paper was founded by Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, a liberal who thought he could use Communists on his staff to help with the circulation of the paper. The Communists, however, used the paper for their own purposes and he lost influence over the magazine after entering the Army.
In fact, in 1946 five of the staff members of PM’s Washington, DC bureau resigned in protest over the high level of Communist influence within the newspaper. The five resigned after three other members of the staff were fired. According to the five who resigned:
Although not himself a Communist, he [Ralph Ingersoll] has continuously yielded to Communist pressure and has denounced as factionalists those staff members who have tried to keep the party line out of the paper. He has destroyed the confidence of those who believe that PM should be as realistic and critical of Russian foreign policy as in its evaluation of the foreign policy of our own government. (New York Times, June 15, 1946)
The staff was comprised of both Communists and non-Communist liberals. The paper was overtly political and the writers didn’t hide their political biases in their writings. Ingersoll refused to carry advertising because he didn’t want the paper to be influenced by advertisers. City Journal writer Roger Starr noted: “Although every member of PM’s staff was profoundly anti-Hitler, the staff was divided into two cliques: the liberals who regarded the Soviet Union as a slave state, devoid of individual rights, and the liberals who regarded the Soviet Union as a living demonstration of a truly humane society.”
For example, Leo Huberman, a Communist sympathizer, was the labor news editor. I.F. Stone was the Washington, DC correspondent for PM. In the 1980s, a KGB agent fingered Stone as a willing participant in Soviet intelligence operations in the U.S.
The paper, however, was never a financial success without advertising. It received funding from Marshall Field III, a leftist millionaire who kept the paper running for eight years. Field also funded the Industrial Areas Foundation, a training school for radical leftist organizers, which was headed by Saul Alinsky. (Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were trained by Alinsky radicals in Chicago).
Former Communist Eugene Lyons, writing in The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America, noted that PM’s staff included a former editor of the Daily Worker; another was former editor of The Communist; and a third was a leader of the Communist Youth League; a fourth was a Soviet government official; and a fifth was the former staff cartoonist for the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, USA.
We have been unable to determine if Axelrod’s mother was a liberal who considered the Soviet Union a slave state or a Marxist-leaning liberal who viewed the Soviet Union as a humane society. The fact remains, however, that her liberalism was obviously infused into the mind of David Axelrod and is what still apparently motivates him to support leftist candidates.
PM’s Radical Staff Writers – Linked To Marxist ‘Black Power’ In 1940s
One of PM’s writers was Earl Conrad, a leftist who also wrote for the Negro Story, a leftist newspaper founded by two black women, Alice C. Browning and Fern Gayden. The ideological nature of this paper was described by Bill Mullen in a historical critique of African-American literature during World War II. Writing in African American Review, Vol. 30; Issue: 1; 1996), Mullen notes:
… [the] Negro Story’s editorial stance, rather than “non-political,” was in many ways close to that of black and white Communists, socialists, and internationalists, whose wartime positions combined pro-labor, pro-black, anti-fascist sentiment in equal measure…
… the editors of Negro Story consciously continued to represent and re-form their critiques of capitalism, American race relations, and imperialism to suit the newly evolving political crises of the mid-1940s, while adding to them a black feminist awareness the magazine’s female editors could hardly avoid.
Among those writing for Negro Story was Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist Party member who became Barack Obama’s mentor when Obama was living in Hawaii in the 1970s.
Another writer for Negro Story was Jack Conroy, a Marxist who taught at the openly-Communist Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago. Four of his students at this school also wrote for the Negro Story, so the Marxist influence was significant in this magazine.
According to Mullen, the articles and ideas articulated in Negro Story influenced the political educations of Malcolm X “and a generation of Civil Rights activists.”
Connecting The Dots....
Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred: "Your little babies will get polio!" he cried to the "white devils." His creed was violence: "If ballots won't work, bullets will." Yet even before his bullet-ripped body went to its grave, Malcolm X was being sanctified. Negro leaders called him "brilliant," said he had recently "moderated" his views, blamed his assassination on "the white power structure" or, in the case of Martin Luther King, on a "society sick enough to express dissent with murder." Malcolm's death, they agreed, was a setback to the civil rights movement. Alias John Doe. In fact, Malcolm X —in life and in death—was a disaster to the civil rights movement.
I've been posting background research on this thread: