Beneath the Ninth Station: May 2018

I am Ephrem Hugh Bensusan, and I am running for reelection to the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party.

A little about myself: I am 49, married with grown children. I work for Apple, Inc. as a Technical Advisor in the Enterprise Creativity Software division. I have a long background in political activity, and my views are particularly formed by Liberation Theology, as well as the thought of the American Civil Rights leaders of the 20th Century. I am technically a Melkite Greek Catholic, but I attend the Roman Cathedral of Christ the King in Lexington, Kentucky, under Bishop John Stowe, a Bishop notable for his Social Justice activism.

Currently, I am the Director of Social Media and Marketing for the National Committee. I oversee our Internet presence and Social Media accounts. I am also the Chairman of the American Solidarity Party of Kentucky, and I have led our state party through a period of fairly rapid growth, established us as an officially affiliated chapter, and worked to establish relationships with other political and social justice groups locally, most notably the Lexington NAACP and BUILD - Building a United Interfaith Lexington through Direct-action, and we continue working to establish relations with the various refugee and immigrant advocacy groups in the commonwealth, as well as with pro-life groups that seek to implement whole-life solutions rather than simply focus on issues of legal status. The Kentucky ASP is also very serious about racial justice, and we have contributed to the movement to remove specific Confederate monuments both in Frankfort and Lexington. In Lexington, this movement, coordinated by Take Back Cheapside, an African American led organization, was successful in getting statues of John C. Breckinridge and John Hunt Morgan removed from the Old Fayette County Courthouse, and having the plaque marking the South’s largest slave marketplace restored, thus dispelling the celebration of those who fought for slavery, and returning to truth-telling about the atrocities of our past. We of the ASP-KY are both grateful and honored to have played even the smallest role in helping bring this to pass.

I am deeply committed to the 4 core principles of our party:

The sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.
The necessity of social justice.
Conservation of the environment.
The promotion of a more peaceful world.

Guided by these principles and values, we seek to promote the material and spiritual welfare of all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, gender, or orientation, in a political framework that emphasizes unity over fragmentation, community over individualism, liberation over oppression, solidarity over division.

These have been my emphases both in Kentucky and on the National Committee. It is my hope that your vote will return me to this position, that I may continue the work we have undertaken.

My priorities for the National Committee are these:

Grow the party at the state and local levels, encouraging networks with other groups of like mind.
Encourage state chapters to affiliate with the national party in order to create a national organization with strong chapters in all states.
Field candidates to run at all levels of government, with a focused emphasis on local and state elections.
Ensure that all of our policies and actions as a party arise from a preferential option for the poor and the marginalized, rather than serving to enrich the already wealthy and the dominant.
Emphasize our particular distinctives - the 4 core principles - in platform and policy development, and in spreading our ideas in the various media.

Lastly, promotion of principled resistance to both the current Administration and to the threats to the common good that come from both sides of the conventional political spectrum.

In 1904, in the original edition of his novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair described the American two-party system as “‘two wings of the same bird of prey!’ The people were allowed to choose between their candidates, and both of them were controlled, and all their nominations were dictated, by the same power. The people attended political meetings of either party, and the hall was paid for, and the speakers were hired, out of the same purse.”   More than a century later, that reality has not changed. In fact, the inequality of wealth between the top 1% and the rest of humanity is greater now than ever before. For all their superficial “differences,” Democrats and Republicans alike are united in the neoliberalism that feeds the ruling elite.

We need people on the National Committee that take a stand of Principled Resistance against this existing order, and particularly against its assault on those who it has targeted for oppression: immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQ people, and the unborn.

I can guarantee that I will remain in the vanguard of those who stand and fight, and not among those who compromise and acquiesce as the country slides further under the boots and high heels of its monied master class.

I thank you for your consideration. I would deeply appreciate your support and your vote at the upcoming convention.

May God bless our endeavours and our nation.

Imago Dei Politics (formerly the Dorothy Day Caucus) is a neo-integralist† association of American Solidarity Party members that are dissatisfied with what they perceive to be the party’s drift away from “social conservatism”, by which they mean outspoken opposition to Same Sex Marriage, the adoption of children by same sex couples, and no-fault divorce. They are a sectarian organization, enunciating what they call “a Christ-centered witness in the public square” as their political vision. They are also very localist, espousing a view of the principle of subsidiarity that would easily pass muster in the American South of the 1960s, and have a tendency to, at the very least, provide shelter to defenders of the Confederacy and other racists, misogynists, and homophobes.

The origins of IDP lie in the tumult surrounding the revision of the ASP platform during the second quarter of 2017. There had been widespread sentiment that the 2016 platform needed revision, with input from a party membership that was more than 10 times the size of the membership at the time of the 2016 convention. After considerable deliberation, the National Committee decided to revise the platform through an 11-member committee, 6 of which would be elected by the full party membership, and 5 of which were appointed by the NC. Thirty members applied to be on the Platform Committee, and hundreds of members voted to select the top 6. An extensive survey regarding agreement with and importance of each part of the platform was sent to members, and again, hundreds responded. Then the 11 members of the Platform Committee went to work revising, and submitted interim drafts for yet another round of surveying. The Platform Committee finally consolidated different versions down to the Committee’s preferred language on each topic, and over 500 members of the party voted to ratify each bullet point. Ratification required a 2/3rds vote, which was far exceeded in almost every case (decriminalization of marijuana was the only point that failed ratification, with about 60% support).

Supporters of the old platform plank “We support the legal recognition of marriage as a union of one man to one woman for life,” were unsatisfied with the outcome of this highly democratic process. The surveys had shown a wide variety of opinions about same-sex marriage among the membership. Because none of several possible formulations about this subject garnered supermajority support in the surveys, the Platform Committee did not propose language on this issue, meaning that the ASP no longer takes any position against Same Sex Marriage (or no-fault divorce, for that matter). A handful of members tried to organize a campaign to vote down the entire platform in protest of its silence on a contentious issue, but the final convention results revealed they had been entirely unsuccessful in persuading others to follow them (only 7 votes).

This very important change in position was received bitterly by those who would become the founders of the dissident group styled the “Dorothy Day Caucus.”

Other issues had arisen in the time around the 2017 Convention. One member of the NC, James Lomuscio, ostensibly for personal reasons, had pulled back from involvement, but at the request of the then-Chair Matthew Bartko had not actually resigned. Dane Garrett, one of the malcontents, began spreading disinformation around the party regarding this situation, which ended up revealing, at least at the NC level, the whole set of circumstances surrounding this semi-resignation to be a patchwork of deceptions woven together to whip up animosity against Lillian Vogl by a small circle including Lomuscio, Dane Garrett, Tara Ann Thieke, and Brian Lester.

After the Convention, this circle regrouped, and in a social media blitz on August 6, 2017, the Dorothy Day Caucus announced itself with great fanfare on all available ASP venues. Led by Tara Ann Thieke and Dane Garrett (withdrawn/unsuccessful candidates for NC), Stephen Beall and Brian Lester (two members of the Platform Committee who fought tooth and nail to prevent the SSM language and distributist economic language from being removed), and Jeffrey Stuart (the chief offender in holding himself out as representing the views of the party, particularly in a racist, sexist and homophobic manner) the DDC presented its Affirmation Statement, and ultimately ended signing up 77 people willing to put their name to it.

The Dorothy Day Caucus is an independent association of members of the American Solidarity Party. We seek a radical transformation of American politics in the spirit of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement.
1. We recognize the irreplaceable value of a Christian vision and are committed to providing a Christ-centered witness in the public square.
2. We support the traditional family of mother, father, and child as the foundation of society and the surest guarantee of health and security for children.
3. We call for the greatest possible autonomy for local governments and mediating institutions.
4. We advocate an economy in accord with the dignity of human work and human nature, ordered toward the widespread distribution of property, ownership, and opportunity.
5. We oppose military aggression, economic coercion, and treaties and institutions that promote corporate hegemony.
We affirm the core values of the ASP, and we work with the national and state committees to elect candidates, develop policies, and educate the public in accord with our principles.

It is Items 1-3 that really merit our attention.

Item 1 is a dog-whistle to theocrats and other sectarians who wish to impose the tenets of their own religio-political beliefs as law upon the greater society, and serves notice that it is the values of Christianity (interpreted, of course, in a distinct manner) that forms the basis for DDC/IDP political interaction.

Item 2 is a dog-whistle to those who oppose SSM on religious grounds and wish the party to go back to taking a vigorously quixotic stand against it. It is also designed to exclude other familial arrangements, particularly those that involve adoption by LGBT persons and couples.

Item 3 is a subtle call for what the DDC/IDP terms “Subsidiarity,” but is really a kind of localism - the kind that had to be put down in the 1960s as men like George Wallace and Jim Clark took a stand for local “rights.”

Of course, the end design has, from inception, been to “take back the ASP” from those who have set a new course away from religious radicalism and towards being a force living up to our core principles of sanctity of life, necessity of social justice, conservation of the environment, and the hope of a more peaceful world. They aim to take over the ASP National Committee in our June 2018 Convention. The hashtag they customarily use, in fact, is #SeeYouInJune.

To that end, the DDC/IDP has used a two-pronged social media strategy. The first prong thereof has been to (1) misappropriate our name and trademarks to deceive people into thinking they actually represent the party, (2) produce material that upholds their distinctive positions and, again, deceive people into thinking that they represent the mainstream of the party, and (3) create false-front groups to spread their disinformation.

The second prong of their social media strategy has been that of alt-right- style trolling. They use their false-front sites to troll, feeling confident that party members, even if they don’t participate, are watching for the drama. There they make wild accusations about the tyranny of the NC, and present themselves as victims of wrongdoing. They make loud claims of being victimized and persecuted, and disseminate these claims in videos, open letters, and social media posts in their false front groups. Then they also use small coordinated gangs to appear as a troll-mob on social media posts to provoke a negative response and then play victim when the response comes.

This strategy has been in effect since August, and took another step forward as two of their own, Tai-Chi Kuo (who has suggested that members of non-Christian religions go form their own parties) and Carlo Razzeto (an outspoken foe of SSM), have announced their candidacies for NC. Other members or allies of IDP who have announced their candidacies include, as of May 31, 2018, Christopher Hunt, Zebulon Baccelli, Eric Anton, Patrick Harris, Jose Carlos Moreno, Amar Patel, and Monica Tully.

In March 2018 the DDC changed its name to Imago Dei Politics, and restructured its leadership as follows:

Board of Trustees:

Tara Ann Thieke, President

Dane Garrett

Patrick Harris

Charlie Jenkins

Tai-Chi Kuo

Jeremy Miller

Lucy Moye

Monica Tully

Executive Committee:

Jeffrey Stuart - Chair

Eric Anton, Vice-Chair

Jeremy Miller, Secretary-Treasurer

Zebulon Baccelli, Political Action

Skylar Covich, Political Action

Brendan Illis, Communications

Dane Garrett, at-large

Charlie Jenkins, at-large

It is worthy of note that Skylar Covich, Vice-Chair of the ASP National Committee, also serves as a member of the IDP Executive Committee, cementing an alliance that has existed since the DDC launch, and which has constituted the root of the factionalism in the party, as he has actively worked against the rest of the NC to promote DDC/IDP aims.

I reiterate: the DDC/IDP strategy since its inception has been to take over the NC at the Convention this June. All of their efforts have been a movement toward this goal. Their current activity is the execution of a plan to sign on new voting members for the purpose of this hostile takeover, and it is using both its official venues and its false-flag troll groups effectively to make that happen.

If the DDC/IDP succeeds in this hostile takeover, the ASP will no longer stand for social justice, but rather for taking civil rights away from LGBT people, and for the toleration of misogyny, racism, and homophobia. It is of paramount importance that those of us who do value social justice do not let this happen if we want to keep the ASP from devolving into a hate group. The only way we can rest assured that this isn’t going to occur is by becoming voting members* of the ASP ourselves and outnumbering their votes.

† "Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power." [Definition from Integralist website The Josias.]
† The Coming Neo-Integralism - John Ehrett

* Full Membership is available for anyone who contributes at least $10 a year to the party. Full members have voting privileges in state and national conventions.
* Supporting Membership is for those who are making regular contributions of at least $10 a month. A key perk of Supporting Membership is that all members of your household who are 18 and older and make the affirmation statement will also have voting privileges.
* Patron status recognizes anyone who contributes at least $300 per year ($25 a month), and also affords household voting membership.

Appendix 1

A number of people have asked for additional documentation regarding the IDP toleration of and participation in misogyny, racism, and homophobia. Here is a representative sample of discussions from some of their public venues: