Hillary Clinton’s California state director, Buffy Wicks, once stage-managed mass rallies for Marxists.
A hardcore left-wing activist, Wicks has a long history of participating in the left’s most radical causes.
As a college senior at the University of Washington, Wicks sued to keep an underprivileged woman out of law school because she was white. She and 12 other students attempted to join an ACLU lawsuit against Katuria Smith, a financially poor woman, to ask the court to overturn a voter-approved state initiative striking down Affirmative Action. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied their motion, and eventually Smith would graduate from another law school and marry Senator Al D’Amato.
Later, Wicks studied for UNESCO’s graduate degree in Peace Studies in Spain, where the radical curriculum immersed her in Marxism, population control, extremist feminism, racial power dynamics, and the views of revolutionary leader Frantz Fanon.
While there, she was mentored by Cynthia Boaz, a coordinator for Code Pink. The Marxist-led group would proudly announce it took $650,000 of cash and supplies to “the other side” in Fallujah in 2004.
Wicks left – apparently without graduating – to organize Marxist rallies against the Iraq war in San Francisco. She told Obama volunteers in 2007: “I was the person stage managing a lot of those [rallies], you know, getting Joan Baez to go out and do some songs.”
Baez participated in two rallies in January and February 2003 – under the auspices of International ANSWER, a front for the Workers World Party’s International Action Center. Founded by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark in 1992, ANSWER supports or has supported North Korea — which it calls “People’s Korea” — Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein.
The February 2003 rally that Wicks “stage managed” did not allow Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun to speak because, although he is a liberal, he believes in Israel’s right to exist. However, it did feature messages the Anti-Defamation League deemed “anti-Israel” and “anti-Semitic.”
As the war raged, Buffy moved on. After stints in the unsuccessful Howard Dean presidential campaign and Democratic Colorado U.S. Senate hopeful Jay Fetcher, she ran the United Food and Commercial Workers’ “Wake Up Walmart” campaign.
She lobbied aggressively to join Barack Obama’s campaign in 2007, training volunteers and leading his primary campaign in the Western states. After the election, Obama named her deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement, which is run by one of his closest advisers, Valerie Jarrett.
In the White House, she met with Jodie Evans, an Obama bundler and Code Pink leader who helped deliver the supplies in Fallujah.
While at OPE, Buffy was part of a “cultural policy summit” where Obama officials asked conspiracy theorists who believe the CIA sells crack in minority neighborhoods, representatives of the SEIU, and the “former International Spokeswoman for the Universal Zulu Nation” to spread their message – and “to advise” the administration.
However, the influence worked both ways. In 2009, an audio recording leaked of a conference call she co-hosted with dozens of National Endowment for the Arts grant recipients, asking them to promote Obamacare.
“I was working on the [Affordable Care Act]. I was working to help get all the advocacy organizations to support that legislation,” Wicks recalled on a recent episode of her podcast, The Riveters.
In the call, she told NEA artists, “We’re going to come at you with some specific asks here.”
“We’re actually running the government. We need your guys’s help to promote this.” Wicks asked her audience to “focus on the four main areas: One is health care.”
After leaving OPE, she worked for David Axelrod before running Obama’s get-out-the-vote drive in 2012.
She then led Priorities USA – the Obama-aligned super PAC that accused Mitt Romney of killing a cancer victim – and served at the Center for American Progress.
While leading Obama’s 2007 campaign efforts, she brought in Marshall Ganz, a United Farm Workers organizer and later a Harvard professor, to teach Saul Alinsky’s tactics to campaign workers.
“We’re trying to create community organizers out of our activists,” Wicks said.
Hillary Clinton wrote adulatory letters to Alinsky and wrote her master’s thesis about the man’s community organizing theories.