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| Clockwise from left: Lisa Callahan, Janet Wright, Emira Palacios, Laura Dungan and Wakeelah Martinez have formed a new political group called Women for Kansas. (April 28, 2014) Mike Hutmacher/ The Wichita Eagle |
The Wichita Eagle had an article in its May 4 edition about a new political group called Women for Kansas. According to the article, Women for Kansas' "initial goal is to defeat Brownback and Secretary of State Kris Kobach at the polls this fall. The group supports Democrats Paul Davis and Jean Schodorf to replace them."
The Eagle presented Women for Kansas as a bipartisan group of women who just got involved in politics because of their concerns with Brownback and Kobach. However, the reporter did not discuss exactly who these women are. It is extremely important for conservatives to look at the people involved with these groups to see who they are and what else they have done in the past. I recognized Emira Palacios name because I wrote about her in my book, Chapter 19: Defeating the Socialist Coalition and Restoring Our Constitutional Republic:
I did not realize the full extent of the Socialist Coalition’s involvement with the immigration issue until Sunflower Community Action (SCA), a Wichita-based group, bused nearly 300 people to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s home on June 15, 2013 to protest his views on illegal immigration. Fortunately, Kobach and his family, which includes four young daughters, were not home when the mob arrived.
I had never heard of SCA before, but after a quick Internet search found that the group is part of National People’s Action (NPA), a Chicago-based community organizing network with affiliates in fourteen states. In fact, Emira Palacios, a coordinator with SCA, also serves as NPA’s vice president and secretary. Palacios came to this country as an illegal immigrant more than twenty-five years ago. (SCA’s executive director, Sulma Arias, was also an illegal immigrant.)
In the past, NPA has engaged in protests similar to the one at Kobach’s home. For example, in March 2004, NPA protested outside the home of Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political advisor, to show their support for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, or the DREAM Act. “If President Bush wants our [re-election] vote, he has to give us the dream,” Palacios said. According to CNN, “Palacios said Rove agreed to meet with group leaders in his garage but then chastised them for protesting in front of his house and scaring his children.”
On May 16, 2010, Nina Easton, a Fortune magazine journalist and Fox News contributor, called police around 4:10 p.m. to report that there were at least 500 protesters on her neighbor’s property in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The neighbor, Bank of America executive Greg Baer, was not home at the time. However, his fourteen-year-old son was. Out of fear, he locked himself in a bathroom. The protest was organized by NPA and SEIU.
A month before the protest at Baer’s home, NPA and SEIU staged a similar protest at the home of JP Morgan Chase executive Peter Scher.
NPA was founded in 1972 by Shel Trapp and Gale Cincotta, Alinskyite community organizers based in Chicago. How far to the left is Palacios' SCA? According to the group’s website, in high school, Louis Goseland, SCA’s director of organizing, “threw himself at any opportunity to organize his fellow students and quickly found himself immersed in the local activist community.” “From an early age, I was exposed to the power of organized people,” Goseland writes. “My mother was a long time member of the Communications Workers of America, my grandmother is a long-time activist for the rights of women, and my father is a radical in every sense of the word.” Democratic Socialists of America has identified Goseland as a DSA member who participated in Occupy Wichita. Two of the three books Goseland recommends SCA's website are Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky and Dynamics of Organizing by Shel Trapp. In June 2013, Goseland’s groups on Facebook included Wichita Democratic Socialists, Occupy Wichita and Kansas, Socialist Party USA, and WSU College Democrats.
Did the Eagle mention Palacios' leadership roles in the radical SCA and NPA? No. The reporter merely noted that she is "a facilitator at Seed House-Casa de la Semilla in Wichita."
A visit to Women for Kansas' website also turns up some interesting information. As I noted earlier this week, Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger is an honorary chair of the group. She apparently has no problem teaming up with a woman who thought it was all right to demonstrate at the home of a fellow Republican.
Another honorary chair is a Johnson County lawyer named Judith Deedy. Deedy has been in the news lately because she is the executive director of a group called Game On for Kansas Schools. Game On portrays itself as "a nonpartisan grassroots effort." However, an inadvertent email exposes that claim as a lie. That email demonstrated that Game On is taking direction from the Davis gubernatorial campaign. Deedy is also a member of the Mainstream Coalition. Despite its name, the Mainstream Coalition is far from mainstream. I wrote a report on the group 15 years ago, which you can read here.
It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out the game plan here. Groups with innocuous-sounding names are preparing to form a coalition to defeat Brownback and Kobach this fall. These groups will all be closely aligned with the Davis and Schodorf campaigns, but will be portrayed as grass-roots efforts by those in the media who are ignorant and/or complicit. Sandy Praeger will assist these groups as a prominent Republican in the state to give the groups bipartisan cover. Note that Praeger is also part of an anti-Brownback group called Reroute the Roadmap. Two other Republican women, Rochelle Chronister and Sheila Frahm, also founded this group. Like Praeger, Chronister and Frahm, who lost to Brownback in the 1996 GOP primary election for the seat vacated by Bob Dole, are honorary chairs of Women for Kansas. Three Democrat women, Joan Wagnon, Laura Kelly, and Jill Docking, also founded Reroute the Roadmap. Docking, of course, is Paul Davis' running mate.
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