[Excerpt]
VOC’s newest trustee said this in a June 2020 interview with a podcast hosted by a managing partner of IronGate Capital Advisors. At the time, McCoy speculated that “some very nationalist crazy lab people in China” leaked COVID-19 “accidentally on purpose,” in other words, they “let it get out, and then it was covered up, and then they saw, well, it’s pretty bad, but let’s make the best of this crisis…” He claimed that Chinatowns are 5th columns for the Communist Party of China, and that as many as 100 million people died in the Cultural Revolution. As for the Belt and Road Initiative, “I call it the one belt around your neck and the one road to perdition initiative for the countries that are foolish enough to participate in it.”
[…]
Simon Molina Herrera, an enthusiastic Ron DeSantis supporter born and raised in Venezuela, joined the VOC as a Government Relations Intern in January. Since then, he has denounced Barnes and Nobles because it “promotes Communist terrorism.” During the 2021-22 school year, Herrera served as the campus coordinator for Turning Point USA at the University of Maryland. In that capacity he worked with Young Americans for Freedom, PragerU, and the Heritage Foundation, which is probably how got linked with VOC.
Last week, “Victims of Communism” announced that it hired Karina Lipsman as its new Associate Director of Communications. VOC is excited about her “14-year background in the defense and intelligence industry.” For the most part Lipsman was a senior strategist at Northrop Grumman, one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the world.
Last year, after a failed congressional bid, Lipsman became a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), an anti-trans, anti-feminist organization that originated in “Women for Judge [Clarence] Thomas” in 1991. According to The Intercept, more recently, “IWF came up with a memo, used by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on how to support Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court confirmation without alienating the #MeToo movement.”
What I found most disturbing, though, was the organization’s attempt to equate Communism with the Shoah:
“this grand holocaust that so many people didn’t know about, and America had been so good about educating about the Holocaust during World War II, of the Jews and others, but people didn’t understand that there was this similar holocaust…”
This is tangential to your point, but reading your excellent replies reminded me of this English paper that I found describing how pre‐1939 Poland knowingly accepted films from the Third Reich. I was already planning on sharing it nearly two weeks from now, but if you want I can schedule it for later today.
Yeah if not for outright hostility from nazis, Poland would jumped into the bed with Hitler pretty fast. And of course it’s pretty popular topic post-1989, recently some pseudohistorians even suggested it would be cool and good. Note that this hostility only really escalated in 1939 when nazis started to openly make claims at Poland, but before Poland participated in destruction of Czechoslovakia and even proposed partition of Lithuania. Nazi antisemitism was also evoking rather sympathy than condemnation in political circles in Poland.