The Strange Life of the Late Fred Newman
Yesterday, an obituary appeared in the pages of The New York Times, announcing the passing of a man who, by any standard, was a lunatic crazed leftist — a would-be psychotherapist who started what most people would call a cult. Albeit, it was a cult that blended the founder’s own therapy system with Marxism-Leninism. His name was Fred Newman, and he received a respectable obit. Judging by the length of the story, the Times indicated to its readers that he was important.
But if you read between the lines, the obituary shows that something is truly rotten in New York City’s politics, and in particular, the political party structure that exists in that state. As the obit reports, Newman:
[F]ounded a Marxist-Leninist party, fostered a sexually charged brand of psychotherapy, wrote controversial plays about race and managed the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, who was both the first woman and the first black candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states. He helped the Rev. Al Sharpton get on his feet as a public figure and gave Michael R. Bloomberg the support of his Independence Party in three mayoral elections, arguably providing Mr. Bloomberg’s margin of victory in 2001 and 2009.
Let’s put it another way. A crazed self-proclaimed communist revolutionary, who adhered to both Marxism-Leninism and the doctrine of smashing monogamy, was responsible for making billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg the mayor of New York! His personal ethic was so crazed that it might serve to replace the epithet “San Francisco Democrat” to that of “New York Democrat.” Newman, as the article noted, urged his collective to sleep with one another, a concept he termed “friendosexuality.” As a therapist, he also advocated that the therapist should sleep with his patients.
First aligning himself with the more successful cult figure of the time Lyndon H. LaRouche, the contest of wills between two egotistical leaders forced them to split, and Newman created “The International Workers Party,” a form of LaRouchism without LaRouche. At the time, I lived on the Upper Left (West) Side of New York, the area Tom Hayden proclaimed one of America’s “liberated zones,” and from which Newman plied his wares. A few blocks from my apartment, I often passed a large building with a plaque in front, stating that it was the possession of “the working-class room.” It was, in fact, a building bought by Newman for his school and his headquarters.
Newman’s success, if we can call it that, says a great deal about the willingness of mainstream political figures to seek the support and backing of far left cult figures, who want to use their influence to gain support for their own revolutionary agenda. In this case, Newman also supported and at times worked with Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, and the isolationist far-right Republican Pat Buchanan.
The Times’ obit only gives a glimpse of the craziness and yet the effectiveness of Fred Newman. A simple Google search turns up scores of articles that provide more data about how this megalomaniac built up his political machine and extended his influence. One of the most detailed is called “Lenin as Therapist,” and the authors start by exploring the incredible alliance of the Marxist black lesbian Lenora Fulani and Pat Buchanan, an alliance that existed despite Fulani’s leftism, her support of abortion, and her relationship with both Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton. What they had in common, however, was opposition to Israel and a not so veiled anti-Semitism.
The two authors make the following observation about how Newman built his cadre organization:
We believe Fred Newman concluded from his brief experience attempting to build the IWP that he had no need for an open vanguard formation. He recruited new members through therapy and gained political influence by working within other groups or creating broad front organizations. However, he did have need for a clandestine vanguard formation, based on the Leninist model and made up of core therapy patients. As we will see, there is considerable evidence that the IWP continues to exist up to the present time.
The 1977 period of activism on the Upper West Side was a learning experience for Newman and his followers. They became skilled at operating within politically ill-defined front organizations and raising funds from guilt-ridden middle-class liberals. Most of all Newman got a taste for electoral activity. This would shape the rest of his political life.
Newman became what the authors call a “New Age Leninist,” who decided it was more effective to use his small group of one hundred cadre to move into other groups, work to take them over, and then support any candidate — right, left or center — that would do their bidding. Christopher Hitchens once called Newman’s organization a “fascistic zombie cult outfit,” a description which might be the most accurate one of all.
You have an analogue in terms of bigotry as promotion in the form of the hate speech and racial advocacy from the black American intelligentsia.
This is not only unchallenged but shown everyday by Dr. Boyce Watkins at Syracuse University, the Huffington Post and the NBC owned TheGrio.com. There is Cornel West at Princeton, Melissa Harris-Perry, formally of Princeton and now moving to Tulane who is featured on Rachel Maddow and other shows at MSNBC. There is Al Sharpton and his constant race-baiting as well as Jesse Jackson and his affection for “Hymietown.” There is the Washington Post owned The Root with Henry Gates as editor-in-chief which has anti-white sentiment displayed everyday on what is provisionally a black “current events” site.
There is much, much more. This hate speech has to be called out and marginalized as it calls straight out for more lenient sentences by skin color and has a basic philosophy that white people are simply racist. Were these types of people and sites directed at blacks they would be hounded out of existence; why are whites considered fair game for hate speech – why is such a thing the exclusive province of gays and people of color?
This is Obama’s support group and base – they expect him to be the Black President of the United States and make no bones about it; imagine if white folks did such a thing. Enough is enough.
It’s time to go after the financial base of these universities and TV shows and completely marginalize these voices as has been done with the odious neo-Nazis and KKK – they deserve each other out on the margins of flakey American life, not on The Ed Show and Rachel Maddow and the Huff Po.
In the Times obit, Newman is called a “brilliant charlatan,” described as a loony therapist and condemned for anti-Semitism. But all this isn’t enough for RR. Maybe he ought to put on a Fred Phelps hat (he can borrow it from Kimball) and picket the funeral.
Phelps is a Democrat.
And raised money for Al Gore so successfully his son managed to be a end up a Gore delegate.
One of Newman’s clients, are ya’, boy?
The NYSlimes obit of Mao, today, would say he was a brilliant but over-exuberant political leader.
There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’…
I hate that marx word..
I agree and have long been bothered by people who should know better, using that word.
Considering that Jim Jones (of Jonestown infamy) was a darling of San Franciso liberals, I figure that there is nothing so evil that they will not embrace it.
I just recently found out that Jim Jones was a Communist. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but I had always just thought he was a “religious” nut. Not paying attention has gotten us where we are today.
The left has done a wonderful job casting Jones as a “religious nut” and letting his politics be buried. Truly amazing, considering the amount of attention his politics got — up until that final moment.
Jones was no more “religious” than Marx or Lenin. He used the cover of religion to gain entrance into the (at the time) very religious black community. It was a con game, nothing else.
The black religious community, being poorly educated and, practically speaking, Biblically illiterate, fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
Just as they do today with the Jeremiah Wrights and Al Sharptons of the world.
“Jones was no more “religious” than Marx or Lenin. He used the cover of religion to gain entrance into the (at the time) very religious black community. It was a con game, nothing else.”
And for some strange reason the “religious” receiving govt checks, be they welfare or social security, were the most acceptable. They weren’t exactly living on berries & coconuts in “Jonestown.”
Strange bedfellows indeed. At this stage, it’s not necessarily about the money; it’s about the statism and Bloomberg is full-on about controlling everyone else’s lives. To Newman and the left, this is the illustration of the phrase “by any means necessary.”
In the early 1980s I visited an Germna-Jewish woman through Project Dorot, which assists elderly Jews. She lived in a building on West 102nd Street in New York, where Newman’s group then had its headquarters. His acolytes usually had a table in the lobby passing out copies of their newspaper, which was always a wonder to read, with its long screeds on psycho-sexuality, New York politics and the latest racial outrages. It made “The Workers Vanguard” sound like a William F. Buckley publication.
Thanks, Ron, for correcting and elaborating on the record about Fred Newman. He started his “career” in the age of the guru. At least in NYC there were a number of gurus who gathered middle-class lostniks around them – I was one of those losers. A number of them (the gurus) chose to have sex with their patients, some of whom later sued them or brought them before the parent org – i.e. American Psychiatric Association (whose lawyer in those days was interestingly enough, Joel Klein who wrote a good article recently on his reign as NYC’s educational leader)- and some, perhaps, wrote books. There is at least one book on Newman & Fulani. Newman, a self-hating Jew if there ever was one, and Fulani a hater of Jews & capitalism (same thing to her) really ran the show. They had an attorney, Harry Kresky – but don’t know what happened to him. It is to Mayor Bloomberg’s eternal dishonor that he made an alliance with them.
Guru-cults are probably still going on in some places in the world – the majority of them are very damaging to those who join and in Newman’s and Fulani’s case, destructive of the body politic. Thanks again for casting a light on these negative and evil people.
Shalom, Cantor Bob Cohen
Good points, Ron, but what you left out was the exploitation of children and teens. Newman has tried to indoctrinate them with his friendosexual belief system–as I thoroughly documented at http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/devloan.htm The friendosexual destroy-the-family ideology of the Newmanites was also expressed by support for NAMBLA and aggressive legal and public relations defense of some of the most notorious child molesters in New York and nationwide, including Tony Alamo (now serving a life sentence for raping underage girls) and David Koresh.
Mayor Bloomberg really saw nothing wrong with this; he stuffed the pockets of the Newmanites with cash as well as arranging for them to get more than $20 million in municipal bonds for their youth program, the All Stars Project. He also gave $50,000 to Newman’s Castillo Cultural Center in 2002. This center, named after a Central American guerrilla leader, had sponsored a rally in 1989 to declare unconditional support for the Libyan regime after it blew up Pan Am Flight 103 in Dec. 1988. After the receipt of over $8.5 million in city bonds from the Bloomberg administration in 2002, All Stars (of which Castillo had become the theater program) would put on a play blaming the Crown Heights pogrom on Jewish thugs as well as a play glorifying patient-therapist sex (this, at a theater where All Stars children and teens hang out, mingling with social therapists who work as volunteers there).
During the following years, the billionaire Republican mayor’s Marxoid allies were able to get their foot in the door of the public school system, running a teacher training program that would involve classroom supervision by social therapy ideologues. And the Michael Bloomberg School of Public Health at John Hopkins University steered federal funding to a Newmanite indocrination program in South Africa (this happened under Bush, not Obama).
You make it seem that the support for the Newmanites was mostly coming from the left. Now, I agree that Democrats who helped boost Newman should be pilloried. For instance, there’s Congressional dimwit Carolyn Maloney who kept accepting their ballot line when she had no need of it; U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, who also gave the cult a boost; and Eliot Spitzer who, as AG, quashed two investigations of All Stars. I went down to the AG’s office during the first investigation and examined the actual filings that his staffers were supposedly scrutinizing–it took me a half hour to identify the accounting black hole through which millions of dollars had been siphoned off from phony “talent shows.” But Spitzer’s minions never pursued any serious investigation. (Spitzer should have recused himself from this investigation and turned it over to a special prosecutor, since he himself had accepted an anti-corruption award from and made a donation to the Newmanites’ electoral front WHILE he was supposedly investigating them–I leave the possible extent of Mr. Knee Socks’ dealings with Newman’s friendosexual women to the reader’s imagination.)
But it was Republican crook Joe Bruno who first set up the electoral alliance between Newman and Bloomberg in 2001, while Governor Pataki eagerly sought their support in 2002 (their Independence party electoral front endorsed him for reelection that year only to be foiled by the IP primary victory of Tom Golisano). Pataki’s team helped to arrange the 2002 bond issue for Newman’s All Stars and Pataki himself showed up at an All Stars Benefit Gala at Lincoln Center.
After the Newmanites supported Bloomberg in 2005 (read the Village Voice’s excellent coverage at http://www.rickross.com/reference/new_alliance/new_alliance42.html ), the mayor’s office arranged for an even bigger bond issue for All Stars the following year. Also, Bloomberg aide Ester Fuchs unsuccessfully tried to ram through city funding for All Stars to run after-school programs, showing no concern for the documentation of the Newmanites’ sordid history with teens and children that was being investigated by the Department of Youth Services and Development’s general counsel. Most politicians in New York City either failed to speak out or failed to take any effective action when All Stars got its second round of municipal bonds (over $12 million). The issue of anti-Semitism was raised, half-heartedly, but no one except the Village Voice dared to take even a cursory look at what was really going on in the Newmanite “youth programs.”
During the 2009 mayoral race, politicians on both the left and the right were almost entirely mum about the mayor’s cult alliance. Once again, Newman’s followers, with their control of the third ballot line in New York City, were able to deliver the margin of victory for Bloomberg. (Bill Thompson would be mayor today if he had shown an ounce of backbone and courage on this issue.)
Ron, your New York Post friends remained silent–like the liberals at the Times–about Bloomberg’s relationship with the Newmanites in 2009, but focussed their fire solely on the far less toxic (and far less radical) Working Families Party. And the Murdoch media along with Republicans in general remained as quiet as the Democrats about Sonia Sotomayor’s longtime relationship with All Stars programs and with Newman aide Lenora (“Jews are mass murderers of people of color”) Fulani. During Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing, there was not a single Republican Senator with the courage to speak up about this.
The New York Times bears heavy responsibility for the Newmanites’ officially sanctioned access to the kids of New York as well as the cult’s development of a network of friends in high places, including the largest Wall Street investment firms. In 2005, a mayoral election year, the Times had an opportunity to put an end to all this. However, under pressure from the mayor’s office, the Slackman article was gutted in order to protect Mayor Bloomberg from a scandal of the first order. Ex-members of the cult who had told Slackman devastating things about the underground revolutionary party, about patient-therapist sex, about child abuse, about financial exploitation and corruption, and about totalitarian control of members’ lives opened the Times on a Saturday (a day chosen for minimum damage to the mayor) to find that their comments had been selectively edited to produce bland platitudes that did not represent their true experiences and beliefs. (I know–I interviewed these people myself, both before and after Slackman did.) It is one of the most dishonest and cynical pieces I have ever seen in the Times, worthy of the heirs of Walter Duranty.
As to the recent Newman obituary, the Newspaper of Record blatantly presented as factual (with no substantiation whatsoever) one of the central lies of Newman and his followers–that their self-styled communist organization, the IWP, had been disbanded in the 1970s. The Newmanites have been claiming this since 1976, but plenty of ex-Newmanites have come forward who were members in the 1980s and 1990s when the IWP often used a cover name, the “Tendency.” The New Republic wrote about this in 1999, quoting former cadre. http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/infiltrators.htm There was a website, ex-iwp.org, where the equivalent of thousands of pages was posted on the discussion board in the early and mid-2000s by former members talking about life in the IWP subsequent to the 1970s. I have reposted some of their stuff on my website along with an internal document of the IWP from 1983 where Fred talks about making money off the party’s therapy racket and alludes to money laundering. http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/iwp-finances.htm At an anti-cult conference in Atlanta in 2004, I interviewed ex-social therapy patients who said they had been told by Newmanite activists as recently as the early 2000s about the revolutionary party, which supposedly was kept a secret from most people out of fear of the FBI. The New York Post (2002) obtained one of the party’s secret documents outlining a Gramscian Marxist strategy that fits seamlessly with the cult’s political tactics in recent years. Even the Slackman article, flawed as it was, affirmed the existence of the IWP long after its purported disbandment, quoting the well-know defense attorney Michael Hardy who had been a member during most of the 1980s.
So why did the the Times obituary lie about the ongoing existence of the IWP? And why did it avoid making the connection between the friendosex therapy cult, on the one hand, and the youth programs (which the Times suggests are legit), on the other? And why did it not mention the cult’s history of offering therapy to teens? Or the cult’s support for child abusers and child molesters? All this is part of Newman’s legacy–it should have been included.
It seems clear that the Times places its relationship to Mayor Bloomberg above its oligation to protect the children and teenagers of New York from the deeply disturbed pseudotherapists and political recruiters of Newman’s IWP cult. Unfortunately, the always cash-hungry cult, buoyed by the respectability bestowed on its network by Bloomberg and Sotomayor, is now zeroing in on one of the city’s most vulnerable populations–autistic children and their desperate parents, gathering the parents into social therapy groups. This is sick! But what does Bloomberg care?
It is high time for the mayor to pay a political price for his 10-year (or perhaps longer) relationship with the Newmanites–a group to which he has bowed down in the most craven way, almost as if he were one of Newman’s patients, whenever they publicly chastize him or do something that humiliates him (like putting on an anti-Semitic play as soon as they got their municipal bonds in 2002). This disturbed relationship and the unanswered questions about why Bloomberg seems unable to stand up to these Jews haters and why he doesn’t give a damn about how many young lives they destroy through cult recruitment, suggests–as does his fleeing the city when Ahmadinejad the Iranian Hitler came to town in 2007–that Bloomberg is not fit for office on the federal level: not for the U.S. Senate, not for any Cabinet position, and certainly not (regardless of his money) as a candidate for President or Vice President.
As to Justice Sonia Sotomayor (recommended to Obama by Bloomberg) it is time for her to repudiate the Newmanites’ bizarre radical politics, their quack-therapy racket and especially their All Stars Project, which continues to use her name–the name of a Supreme Court justice–for recruitment purposes on their websites which are designed to entice more teens (and adult volunteers and college-age summer interns) into the cult. http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/sotomayor.htm and other files at http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/fulani-newest.htm
I urge all readers of my blog to carefully read Dennis King’s thorough comprehensive report on the Newman cult and its effect on New York City politics. He knows more about Newman than perhaps anyone else, and offers a comprehensive account of the ill effects of his cadre in the city.
It’s not that the old gray lady, the would-be paper of record, cannot see to tell the full truth about the strange politics of Fred Newman, it’s that they refuse to tell that truth. I had to suppress a laugh when reading Jill Abrahamson’s quickly suppressed quote upon being named to the top editorial position of The New York Times, “growing up. . .if we read it in The Times, it was the Truth.” Today, if you read it in The Times you can be pretty sure it falls somewhere between a half-truth and a lie.”
When it comes to Newman’s organizations (Social Therapy, AllStars, Independence Party) mainstream politicians and cultural bigwigs rarely see beyond their short-term interests. In part this is their failing, in part the media’s (as this article observes), and in part it is due to Newman’s organizations’ aggressive and sophisticated ambitions.
Even in-depth condemnations – as those by journalist Dennis King (1977-present), The Nation (1992), The New Republic (1999), and Vanity Fair (Chris Hitchens) (2004) – never bring these organizations to heel.
The New Media, and PJM in particular, deserve praise for taking a stand.
As a former damaged and now healing ex-Social Therapy client of the 2000′s, TimeOut New York magazine (both online and in print) did have an article on June 15, 2006 called “Follow the Leader” ( http://newyork.timeout.com/things-to-do/this-week-in-new-york/10823/follow-the-leader ) that was published only months after my “escape”. In this article TimeOut named & ranked various cults in in New York by a “Kool-Aid Potential” with one the lowest and four the highest. Fred Newman’s cult, which TimeOut referred to as the New Alliance Party (NAP), was the only one that got four whole glasses of Kool-aid. The article is still online if you go to their website and search either the title, or simply “Fred Newman cults”.
Oh, and Ron Radosh is correct in that Dennis King does know every thing there is to know about Newman et al. In fact, Dennis was a huge help to me personally to get out, gain strength and fight back in my own private way. Thanks, Dennis, and keep it up!!!
In my hasty reply above I may have given the false impression that Ron Radosh was trying to blame the Newman problem solely on the Democrats. Actually he was talking about the rotten New York political structure in general. I had this confused with his comments about Newman as an example of out-of-control ultraleft ideology. I agree with Radosh about the ultraleft influence: it’s as if Newman were a parody of leftwing vanguardism, left-liberal Columbia Teachers College glop and progressive psychobabble–with undercurrents of Jewish leftwing “self-hate” and black nationalist “rage” kept under control by the need to entice money from wealthy charity donors. It’s all a perfect topic for a novel or at least a short story by satirist David Evanier.
Radosh compares the Newmanite phenomenon in New York electoral politics to the American Labor Party in the 1940s, and its nemesis, the Liberal Party. Both of these entities practiced third-party cross endorsement of major party candidates (a form of electoral fusion, in which a candidate can be the nominee of multiple parties and aggregate the votes received on all the different ballot lines). Radosh notes that the Liberal Party was set up to foil the Communist Party, which was very influential in the ALP. It all came to a head when Democrats, Republicans and Liberals put up one candidate together to edge out Rep. Vito Marcantonio, the leading figure in the ALP.
This same fusion tactic would be used judo-style by Newman and his followers a half century later, when they seized control of the New York Independence Party and used it to gain important political clout for their own brand of Marxism. Ironically, the process involved bumping the Liberal party, which had degenerated into a corrupt clique under Ray Harding that peddled its ballot line but had few troops to get out the vote.
However, the Newmanite tour de force couldn’t last–it was based on the ability of these bizarre ideologues to retain control of the IP statewide (the Manhattan-based Newmanites, who had only a handful of troops outside the city, lost this control to fed-up Apple Knockers and Long Island suburbanites in 2005-2006) and on the party as a whole retaining the third column on the ballot, which goes to the minority party that achieves the highest vote total in the most recent gubernatorial election. In 2010, Andrew Cuomo obtained the nomination of the state IP (on the executive board of which the Newmanite NYC IP was no longer represented) and also of the Working Families Party. Other minority parties also campaigned vigorously for the candidates of their choice. The upshot was that the Conservative Party captured the third ballot line, the WFP surged ahead of the IP to get the fourth line, and the IP dropped to fifth place.
The New York City IP will probably continue to have clout within the city; first, because it can still determine the IP nominations for mayor and city comptroller under the courts’ most recent interpretation of Wilson-Pakula, an arcane component of NY’s electoral laws; second, because Social Therapy patients and their therapists (“cadre” of the secret vanguard org) work hard for major party candidates that the Newmanite leadership has made deals with; and third, because there is a sub rosa (but not inherently illegal) practice by which the IP state leadership grants an endorsement in NYC (under Wilson-Pakula) and takes a donation from the candidate, and then the NYC IP steps in with the volunteer workers and gets its own donation or some other form of help from the candidate.
Throw political friendosex (and a potential for threatening to expose embarrassing secrets of elected officials) into the mix. Then factor in the likelihood that longtime Newman aide Jacqueline Salit–a formidable political strategist–is going to be the cult’s new leader. And finally add the fact that the media in New York (with a few honorable exceptions) has shown extraordinary timidity and dishonesty in its coverage of the Newmanites. The result is that we can expect more machinations in New York City politics by this cult–and more cash flowing into its youth charities to help it brainwash more young people.
Ex-IWP Central Commitee
Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead!
Newman did more to disorganize and demoralize genuine leftist
activists than any FBI stooge.
He was no Marxist. He was no Leninist.
Lenora Fulani couldn’t find her anus with GPS!
Newman was just an unpaid cop who managed to dupe a significant
number of listless liberals (mainly Jewish women)into slaving or whoring for
him.
Newman’s Flying Monkeys are still loose. But now they are mainly
occupied with chewing the last few dollars from “sexier-than-a-clenched-fist’s”
rotting carcass–Castillo Center/All-Stars. Frankly, too much credit is given here to the Patrick Henry of Bank ST. His only legacy is a crew of aging vultures. The Newmanoids are dead and gone, my friends.
I worked with NAP (when it existed) and volunteered for Fulani, did registration, and cultural work. I got a valuable education. Yes, Newman was megalomaniacal but the group tried to do some things I thought were good. Unfortunately, I saw the organization warping into something I no longer cared to work with. The “friendosexuality” bit is not all that crazy: why not look to friends for creation of deeper intimacy than most people do? BUT, I believe that Fred used it to destroy power centers. Any time he perceived that a groups challenged his hegemony, he destroyed it. And his
re-structuring efforts became more and more radical. They were also designed to shake out those who were conflicted by the group’s behaviors. Fred-worship had to be the order of the day. Well, he built something, got hold of something, and created something: the NY City Independence Party, the Castillo Theater, the All Stars Project, a Marxist view of therapy, a Gramscian application of cultural work, and a loyal group that will carry on but without the power of Fred. I don’t trust them any longer but I don’t hate them either.
From someone who was in Social Therapy for 10 years & was in the Social Therapy training program, GOOD RIDENCE!!