The National Lawyers Guild claimed to protect 1A but they were communists all along: State Dept report

The first major protest I attended was the action against the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000. I wasn't part of it, but I looked on as protesters linked their arms together inside PVC pipes. Dotted throughout the crowd were neon green ball caps emblazoned with the logo for the National Lawyers Guild.

They were there at the protest for gay marriage and when I was part of the big New York City march against the Iraq war in March 2003, they were there too. They told us to leave our cell phones home—I didn't have one—and to write necessary phone numbers in permanent marker on our arms so that were we arrested, we'd have what we needed for our one phone call.

The NLG were there whenever police interacted with protesters, which included the Transit Workers Union and even salacious talk show host Jerry Springer.


Jerry Springer protesting against the Iraq war in NYC, March 2003.

We stuck to the sidewalks but when the crowd got big enough, Transit took the street, stepping off the sidewalk with a big sign reading "Transit Workers Against the War." 


Transit workers take the street while protesting against the Iraq war in NYC, March 2003.

There was a pervasive idea that dissent was patriotic, and protesters waved the American flag as well as the Gadsden flag. There was no political disconnect between holding a message of peace and believing in America and American liberty.


Patriotism on display in NYC at the protest against the Iraq war, March 2003. 

There were other flags, too, the red and the black, which I didn't recognize and didn't think much of, but was being carried by a man in a balaclava. Now I know that's Antifa and their anti-American alliance.


Antifa's red and black flag during a protest against the Iraq war in NYC, March 2003.

The march shut down 2nd Avenue and even traffic on the 59th Street Bridge. By the time the march was blocking traffic, police got more involved and turned the crowd back toward Times Square where we were met by police on horseback rounding all the protesters up behind waist-high metal fences. We didn't like being kettled, so we took that as our cue to leave. We met another kid on the march and he came back downtown with us.


NYPD on horseback policing a protest against the Iraq war in NYC, March 2003.

I attended other protests here and there, often as an onlooker and not as a marcher, just to see what was going on. The legal observers were always there. They had a special status, people thought they were objective observers, like the name said—on the side of the protesters, but only in so much as they wanted to protect and defend 1A. I also saw a protest in Buenos Aires that year on the 21st of December. Leftist workers groups, piqueteros, marched on the Plaza de Mayo marking the financial crash and the devaluation of their currency.

The National Lawyers Guild, which has chapters across America and in law schools, runs national committees, provides legal aid to immigrants including "working to advance the right of noncitizens," and serves as Legal Observers during protests. They also run the National Police Accountability Project. It turns out that far from being protectors of our Bill of Rights, of our 1A rights, they were communists from the start. 

A report released by the State Department on Monday reveals the underpinnings of communist activity in the United States with a specific focus on how identified groups have been trained by the Cuban communist regime. The State Department and Marco Rubio allege that 60 groups have been used for "espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself." Among them is the National Lawyers Guild. 

Perhaps I was naive. I never questioned it. I never questioned their role, which I understood as making sure that free speech rights, the right to petition our government with a redress of grievances, were respected by police and authorities. But it turns out that was not their only mission. And the State Department believes it was and is much more insidious, that those ubiquitous green ball caps were serving another duty entirely. 

The State Department lists the NGL among those groups that have worked with Cuba to infiltrate the United States not with bombs or warfare but with ideology. The groups listed are affiliated with the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, and also include the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), CodePink, Communist Party USA, and others. Those groups are listed as member orgs of the National Network on Cuba along with so many others.

Those groups and others have worked to make commitment to a communist Cuba "the de facto policy orthodoxy on the American far left," the report states.

Of the DSA, that group of American socialists who have infiltrated the Democrat Party and seek to replace democracy with government control of healthcare, property, housing, groceries and resources, the State Department says "it was born in 1982 as a fusion of socialist organizations and movements from both the Old Left and New Left Factions... Today, it remains a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime—not because the group is controlled by Cuban agents, per se, but because that commitment is now simply the de facto orthodoxy on the American far left."

The State Department says the NLG operates and has operated since its founding as "a de facto communist front group designed to organize and agitate for revolution in the United States. The group was founded in 1937 and was spoken about as an ally by the general secretary of the Communist Party before Congress in 1939, calling the NLG "one of several 'transmission belts' for communist penetration of American institutions."

While the group came under fire during the McCarthy era, the 1960s saw a wave of fresh support and the NLG became a "player in the emerging revolutionary milieu" along with the Black Panthers, SDS, and Weather Underground. Rubio spoke about leftist terrorist groups at the opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.

"We remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas," Rubio said. "We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department, and bombed the Capitol. We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public-school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets. In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left."

I find it a wonder to be in this place: To know for sure that I opposed the Iraq war along with so many, to know that the basis of that war, the yellow cake uranium the Bush administration said was the basis for the allegation that Iraq was harboring weapons of mass destruction, was a lie. And then to know that the groups that protested along with me, the red and the black of Antifa, the National Lawyers Guild, the far-left anarchists who sought chaos over all else, were factions intent on sowing destruction of my country. 

At every turn, that which we believed was true becomes a question. It becomes even more essential to know your own mind, to base your decisions on true values. Everything must be questioned always, but one's own underpinnings, one's foundations, need to be questioned most of all, not to knock them down, but to vouchsafe their strength. Political reality fractures, but that which is true stays forever.