Carl Davidson

This page was last updated on October 3, 2012.

In early 2008 I noticed a person using the screen name Carl Davidson began contributing a lot of comments to the Beaver County Times (BCT) website. As I do with most people who appear to use their real name to post comments, I did a quick Google search. I do this because I believe it’s good to know something about a person attempting to shape opinion. I was especially intrigued because, unlike many leftists who post comments, Mr. Davidson referred to himself as “a home-grown Beaver County lefty, who’s studied Marx at some length and likes what he learned” [comment of Mar 18, 2008; 2:59 PM in the thread for the article entitled “Feeling blue? Obama energizes Democrats” (Bob Bauder; March 18, 2008)] and didn’t try to hide behind descriptions like “centrist,” “moderate,” et cetera. That said, as of this writing Mr. Davidson’s profile (presumably written by him) on the BCT website is pretty vanilla and doesn’t hint at what you’ll read below. A native of the area, Mr. Davidson now lives in Raccoon Township after living many years in Chicago.

Mr. Davidson is not a casual reader expressing his opinion. Go to his home website, Facebook page, and his blog, and you find his profile describes Mr. Davidson as a “Public Speaker, Writer, Political Activist, Solidarity Economy Field Organizer, 3rd Wave Study Group Founder.” You’ll also find Mr. Davidson considers Karl Marx to be a role model. On his Facebook wall (July 8, 2010), Mr. Davidson wrote, “In political economy and history, I’m a Marxist. In personal morality, I’m an existentialist. In philosophy, a pragmatist--Dewey and George Herbert Mead especially, and in matters spiritual, a student of Zen. Somehow, it all works well for me … part of my youthful rebellion against my Catholic upbringing was a rejection of the idea of one coherent system containing all truth! More Smörgåsbords!” Mr. Davidson founded Online University of the Left (on Facebook), described by Mr. Davidson as a “Marxist school.” The following comment Mr. Davidson made on his Facebook wall (August 22, 2010) is another indication of how far left he is: “Obama’s never been a lefty.” More recently Mr. Davidson wrote, “I’m a Gramscian and a Leninist, not the anarcho-syndicalist I was from age 18 to 26.”

Mr. Davidson tells us he was “elected a national leader of SDS in the years 1966-68. Next I was a journalist at the Guardian in New York, and travelled to Cuba and China. Later I worked with several groups trying to create a new communist party.” This last effort was likely when Mr. Davidson was a leader of the now-defunct Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). Mr. Davidson also tells readers he “is a peace and justice activist, a ‘Solidarity Economy’ organizer, and webmaster for ‘Progressives for Obama’ at http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com.” Mr. Davidson is webmaster for Progressive Democrats of America - PA 12th (old 4th) CD Chapter (aka Beaver County Blue, aka Beaver County Reds), Beaver County Peace Links, and Can We Afford It? These last three groups appear to share the same leadership, either completely or partially. (Interlocking directorates are a hallmark of leftist organizing. The idea is to set up groups catering to every lefty grievance. The combination of boutique groups and interlocking directorates provides concentrated control while giving the illusion of independent, grassroots organizations. An analogy would be building a bunch of different and seemingly independent storefronts all connected to the same “big box” store in back.) Mr. Davidson is a co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) [originally a splinter group of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)].

Perhaps not a surprise once you learn some background about him, you find Mr. Davidson refers to the 1960s as the “Glory Days.” I often joke that many of today’s leftists seem to be stuck in the 1960s. It appears I may be more correct than I thought. In keeping with that theme, Mr. Davidson named his blog mentioned above “Keep on Keepin’ on …; Political-Social-Spiritual Commentary, Musings and Items of Interest by Cyber-Radical, Carl Davidson” and a blog “Keep On Keepin’ On” that describes him as “Truthseeker, Changemaker, Pilgrim on the Road, Student of The Way.” I believe Mr. Davidson was being playful when he called himself “Radical.” Read Mr. Davidson’s opinions and you find there’s nothing radical about them. They are the same leftist positions we’ve heard for the last 100 years or so.

The Beaver County Times profiled Mr. Davidson in an article entitled “Freedom Bus: From Hopewell to Alabama White Man Worked to Help Blacks Get Rights” (Bob Bauder; August 25, 2002).

Here’s an excerpt from Mr. Davidson’s blog. “As for state-sponsored terrorism, if we are honest, we have to say that the U.S. government, at least over the past 50 years, has been the chief terrorist and sponsor of terrorism in the world. We can never forget that our government has the blood of a million Vietnamese on its hands. Most Americans do not even know that ours is the only country actually convicted of terrorism in a world court, for the atrocities of the U.S. sponsored Contras in Nicaragua.”

Mr. Davidson was also a fan of Pol Pot for awhile. During a March 2010 Facebook exchange with Glenn Beck’s “bald communist” (Jed Brandt), Mr. Davidson wrote, “Yes, our CPML [Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)] backed Pol Pot’s ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ for a time. At the suggestion of our Chinese comrades--Stalin 70 percent good, 30 percent bad--we got the Potemkin village tour, publishing a book of smiling Kampuchean peasants and kids, I even dug around for something Pol Pot had written in English to put in our ‘anti-revisionist’ theoretical journal.” Here is the entire exchange.

In another Facebook posting, Mr. Davidson tells us “Thich Nhat Hahn [sic] talks about capitalism as a disease that has now spread throughout the world, carried on the winds of globalisation” and then tells us “Yes, he’s [Hanh] one of my spiritual leaders, for sure…”

A straw man Mr. Davidson likes to set up is that those who believe in free markets also believe there’s no role for government action. At least a couple of times Mr. Davidson cited Brodhead Road as an example of where the market couldn’t/didn’t get the job done. Here’s what Mr. Davidson said in “Battleground Report: Politics at the Raccoon Township Fair.” “I finally stump him [a person visiting Mr. Davidson’s booth] on the Brodhead Road, the first vital overland route through our part of the county, and still very significant for the markets here, built by the troops of General Brodhead and General George Washington in the 1700s. I say: ‘How’s that for state intervention where the market can’t do the job; in fact, it creates the market? Why is using our taxes to prime the pump of getting these mills up and running with green jobs making wind turbines any different in principle?’ That one he had to ponder a bit.”

The implication of Mr. Davidson’s comment is Brodhead Road was built for the settlers. In fact, the military built Brodhead Road to supply Fort McIntosh from Fort Pitt. Built in 1778 at the mouth of the Beaver River, Fort McIntosh along with other new outposts was considered necessary to help defend the frontier from local Indians (British allies) and British outposts to the west.

In any case, Mr. Davidson’s intent was to discredit the belief in free markets by showing they aren’t appropriate in every situation. Who said they were? I don’t know why Mr. Davidson had to go back to 1778 for an example. We should also throw in water systems, sewer systems, natural gas infrastructure (not the gas itself), electricity infrastructure (not the electricity), and telephone (land line) infrastructure. Does Mr. Davidson really not see the difference between providing a road system and selling widgets, even “green” widgets? Of course he does.

As a result of comments President Obama made at a 2012 campaign event, I would not be surprised if Mr. Davidson updates his Brodhead Road story by substituting the Internet for Brodhead Road. Mr. Obama said, “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” Not true. Mr. Obama was “close enough for government work” up to “so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” In the 1960s, ~~Al Gore~~ <g> the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) began to fund development of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), the central piece of what would eventually become the Internet. The purpose of ARPANET was to facilitate communication among organizations (colleges, private labs, etc.) working on DoD research projects. The development of ARPANET had nothing to do with commercial activity. In fact, commercial use of the Internet was not allowed until 1995, after the government-run ARPANET (1990) and NSFNET (1995) were decommissioned.

You can learn more about Mr. Davidson at DiscoverTheNetworks.org. While I can’t vouch for the accuracy of everything in the article, facts presented of which I had previous knowledge were consistent with my own research.