Entryism

Some dare call it Conspiracy

What THEY don't want you to know!

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“”True revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits, and infiltrate the system from within.

—Saul Alinsky

Entryism (or entrism) is a tactic in which the members of an organised group conspire to secretly join a larger organisation en masse, with the intention of changing the targeted organisation's policies or actions.

Entryism provides a means for a small but determined group to leverage their influence onto a larger sphere, by using the entered organisation's resources (e.g. state funding, existing networks of activists, or voter goodwill). Entryism is particularly effective where there is a large but somnolent party with many inactive members who might pay their fees but not do anything else. It is most commonly associated with attempts to move a centre-left party leftwards, or a centre-right party rightwards, but it is not exclusive to political parties; entryists could target a campaigning organisation, charity, club, or society. Perhaps even a wiki.

Fantasies or fears of entryism are as common as actual cases of entryism: it appeals to the conspiracy-minded to imagine a secret organisation lies beneath each overt public body, exactly as Joseph McCarthy talked about secret communist infiltration in every American organisation. Even long-term, comparably successful entryists like Militant in Labour managed only minimal positions of power (Militant took the leadership of one already troubled and radical city, Liverpool). In most cases, claims of entryism are a way to slur rivals.

On the left

Trotskyists

Leon Trotsky in June 1934 proposed the "French Turn", that his French Marxist supporters should quit their Communist League and join the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO in French). It quickly expelled the Trotskyites. They tried the same tactic in the USA, entering the Socialist Party of America, and elsewhere. Most of the organisations they entered were small, and had little or no power, so it is unclear if the tactic achieved anything.

Since then, many allegations of entryism have focused on Trotskyite bodies, such as Militant in the UK Labour Party (see below), or claims about the Revolutionary Communist Party and Living Marxism in the UK.

The "long march through the institutions"

In the late 1960s, the West German student activist Rudi Dutschke coined the term "the long march through the institutions" (by analogy with the Long March of the Chinese communists) to describe a strategy like this. Dutschke, a devout Christian leftist, believed that embracing armed resistance, as groups like the Red Army Faction were doing, would end only in disaster and the consolidation and triumph of conservative capitalist forces renewed by an anti-communist struggle. Instead, he believed that infiltrating professional institutions to pull them in a leftward direction, all while learning the skills needed to build, organize, and run their envisioned society (programming, education, design, engineering, et cetera), was a far more effective long-term strategy, one that would allow them to take over society from within without much of the appearance of a revolution on the surface. Dutschke would later become an early leading figure in the German green movement before his death in 1979, caused by complications from injuries sustained in an assassination attempt in 1968. Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School was a fan of Dutschke's ideas, corresponding with him in 1971 and citing him favorably in his 1972 book Counterrevolution and Revolt. Often, the term is misattributed to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who, during his imprisonment under Mussolini, stated that leftists must first win the cultural "war of position" if they are ever to triumph in a "war of maneuver", though Dutschke was influenced by Gramsci.

Since then, the idea of the long march through the institutions has become a popular bogeyman on the right, used to buttress fears of cultural Marxism and claims of entryism any time a university or professional organization takes a left-wing stance.

Militant and the UK Labour Party

In the UK, the most famous case of entryism was that of the Revolutionary Socialist League, better known as the Militant Tendency or simply Militant, a hard-left Trotskyist group that infiltrated the Labour Party in the 1970s and '80s. Militant was formed in the late '60s and seems to have pursued entryist goals since the early '70s, for a while gaining control of the National Organisation of Labour Students, student wing of the Labour Party. A series of inquiries from 1975 by the press and the Labour Party found that they had violated the Labour Party constitution by running an organisation within the party and promoting their own candidates. However, they had done nothing very unusual because in practice Labour had always had a range of sub-organisations such as the right-wing Manifesto Group (later Labour Solidarity) and the leftist Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. The Labour Party leadership took no serious action against Militant for a long time until in 1983 the first Militant member was expelled, and under the leadership of Neil Kinnock they slowly rooted out subversives.

Militant were most successful in Liverpool in the 1980s, where council leader John Hamilton and deputy Derek Hatton (widely seen as the power behind the throne) pursued aggressively leftist policies, refusing to implement cuts to balance the council budget. Instead they cancelled planned redundancies, froze rents, and launched a program of housebuilding. Things got increasingly crazy when they sent out redundancy notices to every council employee; they claimed it was just a negotiation technique in their funding battle, but the image of council officers traversing the city in taxis giving people their notices became part of '80s British folklore — especially given that it happened under a hard-left Labour administration, the sort of leaders who, as Kinnock famously noted, traditionally opposed such actions on the part of Conservative governments. The Labour Party eventually took action, expelling Militant members, but the decisive action was taken by the district auditor who had the power to suspend or expel council officials who violated rules.

At its peak, Militant had 8,000 members in Labour, and 3 MPs: Pat Wall, Terry Fields, and Dave Nellist. Militant split from Labour in 1991 and continued as a separate organisation, later changing its name to the Socialist Party in England and Wales, now part of the Trades Union and Socialist Coalition, while Scottish Militant Labour eventually joined the Scottish Socialist Party (whose leader Tommy Sheridan was ex-Militant).

Jeremy Corbyn

Supporters of UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn were accused of entryism with the suspicion that he was an evil far-leftist being pushed into the Labour leadership by external forces such as the Trades Union and Socialist Coalition or the Green Party. Corbyn was elected through a primary in which anyone who paid a modest supporters' fee could vote, an arrangement which makes it easy for non-Labour supporters to influence the vote. The Labour Party's vetting process found 100 former Green Party candidates had tried to sign up. Michael Crick estimated at most 5000-10000 entryists from the Left (probably mostly Greens), and 5000 right-wing disruptors in an electorate of 400,000, which is a sizeable number but far too little to affect the result.

There are similar claims about entryists infecting Momentum, the grassroots organisation formed to support Corbyn, although Momentum took action in early 2016 to prevent far-left entryists.

TERFs vs. transgender feminists

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, have been known to accuse trans women of entryism when they get involved in the feminist movement, arguing that they are invading women's spaces by "pretending" to be female.

Paedophile Information Exchange

Shortly after its founding in 1974, the Paedophile Information Exchange, a British paedophile advocacy group that campaigned for "children's sexuality", infiltrated the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL, now known as Liberty), one of the UK's leading human rights organizations, and pushed it to adopt a stance in favor of legalizing child pornography and lowering the age of consent to ten. The PIE was granted official affiliate status with the NCCL in 1975, and in 1977 PIE founder Tom O'Carroll gave a speech at the NCCL's spring conference condemning anti-paedophilia "smears" from the press. The rights of the PIE became a cause celebre for British free speech activists in the '70s, as PIE leaders butted heads with university officials over the right to give speeches on campus. In 1983, following the arrest of multiple PIE members on charges of child sexual abuse, the NCCL expelled all open paedophiles from its ranks, and in 2013 Shami Chakrabarti, the head of Liberty, issued a formal apology on behalf of the organization for defending paedophilia. The PIE also attempted to infiltrate the burgeoning British gay rights movement in the '70s, associating itself with the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and claiming that the causes of gay rights and paedophile rights were linked by the greater cause of sexual liberation.

This association between civil libertarians and paedophile rights groups can be understood in the context of British and European culture in the '70s. The sexual revolution had broken down many taboos pertaining to sexuality, new research was exposing the unfounded and often hysterical assumptions underlying those taboos, and same-sex relations had just been decriminalized in the UK in 1967 and still had double standards associated with them (namely, the age of consent for gay sex was 21 vs. 16 for straight sex). In this environment, paedophiles had room to openly challenge the narrative asserting that sexual relations between adults and children were intrinsically harmful and abusive; after all, if the moralists and censors were wrong about gay sex, then what else were they wrong about? During this time, Wilhelm Reich's 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, claiming that repressive sexual morality (in particular suppressing the "natural sexuality in the child") led to the rise of the Nazis in Germany, was also rediscovered by the postwar generation in Western Europe and gave a sense of moral urgency to sexual liberation, including pedophilia, connecting it with the fight against tyranny. Later research into and scandals involving paedophilia and child sexual abuse, of course, would lay bare the inherently unequal power dynamics between adults and children, particularly children's lack of mental development and the fact that most predatory paedophiles either abuse their own sons and daughters or otherwise target children under their care (such as with abuse committed by teachers and priests). As a result, many sexuality researchers now believe that children cannot properly consent to sex, and that sexual relations between adults and children are inherently coercive and thus should be considered sexual assault.

Chinese Communist Party

During China's Warlord Era, the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang government created the First United Front against the warlords running amok across the nation. On the CCP's end, a key motivation was the hope that they would be able to infiltrate and influence the Kuomintang. In 1927, the Kuomintang got wise to what was happening and expelled all communists from the government, a move that started the Chinese Civil War.

Vermont, the hippies, and the New Left

The mass migration of thousands of hippies and New Left activists to the state of Vermont from the 1970s onward is one of the most well-documented political/cultural migrations in American history. During the '70s, as it became clear that their dream of remaking society in their image was facing the reality of public backlash in the wake of incidents like the riots of 1968, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Manson Family murders, and the Altamont riot, an estimated 40,000 people motivated by left-wing countercultural politics and the "back to the land" movement moved to Vermont, ballooning the population of a state that had been fairly stagnant demographically since the mid-19th century. Land was cheap, the scenery was beautiful, the low population (less than 400,000 in 1960) meant that the arrival of any significant number of outsiders would profoundly alter its culture, it had a history of utopian experiments, and while the state leaned to the right, its politics were of a very Rockefeller Republican sort that was skeptical of the emerging conservative movement of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan; as far as they were concerned, the hippies didn't scare their horses, and that was all that mattered. As more followed in the years after, these "flatlanders" succeeded in Vermont where they failed in the rest of the country, turning the state into one of the strongest bastions of left-wing politics in the US. The ice cream company Ben & Jerry's, the jam band Phish, and the leftist politician Bernie Sanders are just the most famous symbols that emerged from this countercultural milieu.

A similar migration happened throughout the rural areas of New England and upstate New York, such as the Berkshires, the Taconics, the Catskills, Ithaca, New York, and Keene, New Hampshire. However, since those states had much larger populations, and in many cases the migrants were coming from cities within those states, the effect on politics and culture in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire was comparatively muted.

Students for a Democratic Society

One of the largest leftist organizations in the United States in the 1960s, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was targeted starting in 1966 by the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), a far-left Maoist splinter from the Communist Party of the United States. The PLP, through a front organization called the Worker Student Alliance (WSA), seized control of parts of the SDS' organizational apparatus and pushed it to reject electoral politics, the counterculture, and the emerging feminist movement (who it dismissed as women who only wanted to "discuss their personal problems about their boyfriends") in favor of focusing on a purely revolutionary "Old Left" socialist agenda. Other members who dissented from the PLP's vision responded by forming a rival faction called the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) that was more attuned to New Left concerns, including the Black Power movement, decolonization struggles, and Third Worldist views. Tensions between the PLP and the RYM plunged the SDS into factionalism that, by 1974, ultimately destroyed the organization.

On the right

David Orchard

One example of claimed entryism in the right is of David Orchard, a protectionist conservative who allegedly infiltrated the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada with the intention of changing its free trade policies. Anti-abortion activists are alleged to have infiltrated the centrist Liberal Party of Canada in the past. However, evidence for organised entryism in either of these cases is scant (an unsourced section on a Wikipedia page, to be precise).

Libertarians and New Hampshire

See the main article on this topic: Free State Project

The state of New Hampshire, with its small population, rural environment, low taxes, small-government political culture, countercultural tendencies, and "Live Free or Die" motto, has long attracted libertarians. The Free State Project is an effort by such to have 20,000 libertarians move to New Hampshire and, by virtue of being very politically active, influence the state's politics. (A rival group of libertarians, fearing that suburban spillover from Boston would bring pernicious big-government influence, instead chose Wyoming for their own version of the project.) They have left a small mark on the state government, reaching their high-water mark in 2014 when eighteen members of the state's 400-member legislature were part of the Free State Project.

A smaller-scale version of the Free State Project, called the Free Town Project, was undertaken in the small town of Grafton, New Hampshire, selected in 2004 by a group of about two hundred libertarian activists to turn into their utopia. One of the leaders of the Free Town Project, Larry Pendarvis, was the owner of a mail-order bride business who expressed a heartfelt desire to legalize dueling, organ harvesting, bum fights, and the "victimless crime" of "voluntary cannibalism". What happened next was something straight out of Lord of the Flies as trash went uncollected, local roads fell apart, crime rates skyrocketed, a large number of sex offenders moved in, and eventually, bears started raiding the town. (Yes, bears.) Even the locals who initially welcomed the Free Town Project to Grafton, volunteer firefighter and perennial candidate John Babiarz and his wife Rosalie, eventually distanced themselves from it.

Christian Exodus

See the main article on this topic: Christian Exodus

Similarly, Christian Exodus was an attempt to influence the politics of a US state, in this case turning South Carolina into a religious right paradise. They seem to have mostly given up on their plan, though; their web page is all but dead and little more than a collection of photo galleries of various sites they own, only one of which is located in South Carolina. Possibly they just realized that their plan was redundant, since South Carolina politics is already dominated by the religious right.

American Redoubt

The American Redoubt is a concept created by the survivalist blogger James Wesley Rawles that calls on right-wing Americans of a "Christian Patriot" bent to move to the inland northwestern states of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and eastern Washington and Oregon. Sparsely populated, far from major cities, geographically rugged, politically conservative, and economically blue-collar, Rawles saw the region as place where, in the event of the collapse of the United States that he and many other survivalists obsess over, liberty and tradition could be preserved while the rest of the country falls into anarchy and tyranny, describing it as "Galt's Gulch on a grand scale." While Rawles only codified the concept in 2011, it had roots going back decades. Since the '80s, the northwestern US had been attractive to white supremacists and neo-Nazis on account of its nearly all-white population, as well as the various reasons Rawles listed. Furthermore, political migration by anti-government right-wingers was already going on. North Idaho had been a popular destination for Southern California conservatives (from LAPD officers to Orange County evangelicals) since the '90s, Rawles himself cited the 2010 move of fundamentalist pastor Chuck Baldwin and his family from Pensacola, Florida to the Flathead Valley in Montana, and Baldwin in turn gave his endorsement to Rawles' Redoubt upon hearing about it.

Rawles' call to move to the mountains has been far more successful than the Free State Project or Christian Exodus ever were, with the inland northwestern US becoming a hotbed of the far right over the course of the 2010s. In North Idaho, the Republican Party, long the dominant political force in the region, has been taken over by radicals, with moderate legislators facing right-wing primary challenges and militia groups organizing more or less openly.

The far-right and the Libertarian Party

See the main article on this topic: Augustus Sol Invictus

In 2015-16, an Orlando attorney, Thelemite, and unhinged neo-fascist named Augustus Sol Invictus (yes, he actually changed his legal name in 2013 to a Latin phrase meaning "majestic unconquered sun") waged an entryist campaign against the Libertarian Party of Florida in order to claim their ballot line for the 2016 US Senate race. (Because when you need your political stories to be just a bit wackier, you turn to Florida.) Recruiting neo-fascists and white nationalists into the party to support his campaign, he prompted the state party chairman to resign in protest when the executive committee refused to disavow him and deny him their ballot line. In the end, Libertarian Party members who opposed Invictus' candidacy (i.e. just about all of them other than Invictus and his recruits) found some random nobody to run against him in the primary — and that nobody, a 31-year-old computer programmer and Iraq War veteran named Paul Stanton who barely even campaigned, wound up winning the primary with 73.5% of the vote simply on account of him being "not the raving lunatic who admitted to drinking a goat's blood". Invictus' reaction was to whine on Facebook.

In 2022, the Libertarian Party as a whole succumbed to an entryist campaign led by a group called the Mises Caucus, which sought to pull the party away from its historic image as the wacky, pro-gay, pro-weed, civil libertarian segment of American conservatism towards paleolibertarianism. The party's old-fashioned internal structure made it uniquely vulnerable to a takeover. Since the party's candidates are selected at state conventions rather than in primaries or caucuses, a small clique of devoted activists could flood those conventions and override the will of the party's leaders and members by nominating candidates more in line with their views, which is what the Mises Caucus did. Backlash against the party's 2020 Presidential ticket of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld, who were seen as too moderate and "establishment" and insufficiently libertarian by many, also gave the Mises Caucus a cudgel to use against the party's leadership that they used to, if not rally party members to their side, at least convince them to sit out the takeover, while years of tolerance towards the party's paleolibertarian wing in the name of presenting a "united front" against the statist establishment also allowed it to fester within the party for years.

Sierra Club

In the late 20th century, nativist activists waged a long, and ultimately failed, attempt to get the Sierra Club, one of the US' leading environmental organizations, to adopt a strong anti-immigration stance. It started in 1968 when the Sierra Club published Paul R. Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb, arguing that overpopulation was a looming threat to the environment and that the United States, in order to prevent the degradation of its natural resources, needed to take steps to limit its population, including sharp restrictions on immigration. This book led a number of anti-immigrant activists to start aligning with the Sierra Club, most notably John Tanton, who chaired the organization's National Population Committee from 1971 to '75 and would go on to become one of the leading figures in the US' anti-immigration movement. Efforts to effect policy kicked off in earnest in the '80s, when activists led by Ehrlich's wife Anne (an uncredited co-author of The Population Bomb) led a push to get the Sierra Club to support "population stabilization", and in 1988 the organization's Population Committee and Conservation Coordinating Committee made a statement calling for the restriction of immigration to the US. The effort ended in 1996 when a firm majority of the Sierra Club's membership voted to take a neutral position on immigration, though pressure groups continued to exist until 2004, when a far more overt entryist campaign led by the Federation for American Immigration Reform attracted the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center and was defeated by an even more decisive vote. Today, the Sierra Club supports a generally pro-immigrant policy, including a legal pathway to citizenship and various environmental justice projects.

White nationalists and the Republican Party

In a manner not unlike that of the Militant Tendency in the UK Labour Party in the 1970s, activists in the white nationalist movement have attempted to launch an entryist campaign into the Republican Party of the United States. In 2019, Unicorn Riot leaked chat logs taken from the Discord servers of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa (IE) showing that, after the disastrous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 (which degenerated into a riot that ended with one person dead and many more injured), IE members embraced entryism as an alternative strategy, infiltrating the youth and college wings of the GOP in order to steer them towards the alt-right while covering up their overtly bigoted beliefs, presenting themselves as merely "nationalist" and "pro-white", and avoiding affiliations with other white supremacist groups for the sake of PR. James Allsup, an alt-right podcaster and IE member, has also encouraged his fellow white nationalists to join and infiltrate local GOP county chapters, citing how he leveraged his leadership of Washington State University's College Republican chapter to become a Precinct Committee Officer in Whitman County, Washington in an uncontested election (at least until 2019, when the party voted to expel him). The fallout from the leaks caused IE head Patrick Casey to disband the group and create a new one called the "American Identity Movement", a shift that amounted to putting up new signs over the doors.

Another set of leaked emails acquired by Splinter News in 2019 shows a multi-year effort by white nationalists to infiltrate conservative media outlets, particularly The Daily Caller. Jonah Bennett, who had written for a number of alt-right sites under various pseudonyms, used his job at The Daily Caller to grant favorable coverage to white nationalist figures like Kevin MacDonald and give a platform to others, while using a private email server to coordinate with others to do the same.

From both sides

Reform Party

The Reform Party of the United States of America, created in 1995 by Ross Perot as a vehicle for his second Presidential run in 1996, took no stances on cultural issues or much of anything beyond Perot's producerist economic platform and cleaning up Washington. In theory, this would allow it to create as big a tent of voters as possible, but in practice, it allowed assorted cranks and fringe figures who saw Perot and the Reform Party as a vessel for their own worldview to try and pull the party their way. On the left, Social Therapy creator Fred Newman and New Alliance Party founder Lenora Fulani joined forces to take over the Reform Party's New York chapter, while on the right, Pat Buchanan tried to pull the national Reform Party in a Christian nationalist direction by encouraging his base of religious conservatives and "America First" types to join. New Age kook John Hagelin also entered the fray once the "old guard" of Perot loyalists, seeing both Newman and Buchanan as flatly unacceptable and their efforts as hostile takeovers, sought a third option given that neither Perot nor Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura (the Reform Party's greatest political success story) were interested in running for President in 2000. The Reform Party convention in 2000, split between two mutually hostile entryist factions and those who wanted nothing to do with either of them, was a disaster that effectively destroyed the Reform Party as any sort of organized political force.

In religion

Islam in Europe

There are claims by those on the islamophobic right that Muslims are infiltrating British institutions to promote their religious ideas. Former Conservative minister Sayeeda Warsi has been accused of filling positions on Government bodies with radicals, although even her critics seem to stop short of accusing her of being an agent of the Global Islamic Conspiracy. Asian and Islamic media has been quick to pick holes in the story.

Communists in Judaism

On the other hand, there are fringe claims of left-wing peace activists infiltrating the main organised body of British Judaism, the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

Jews into... everything, really

See the main article on this topic: International Jewish Conspiracy

According to some people, Jews have been secretly (and collectively) plotting to infiltrate almost every single position of power in the world for over 200 years.

The Order of Nine Angles

The Order of Nine Angles is a British Nazi Satanist group founded in the late 1960s that frequently engages in entryism into other far-right groups. Their theology sees fascism as a means to an end, one that will help them push aside the "Magian/Nazarene distortion" (their term, roughly analogous to "ZOG", for the Christian and Jewish religions and the philosophies, societal structures, and taboos that are underpinned by such), allowing them to build their envisioned Satanic utopia in which the Übermenschen establish a galactic imperium. Most researchers of far-right and occult movements believe that the British neo-Nazi David Myatt, under the pseudonym "Anton Long", was a key figure in the O9A in the '70s, helping to establish its fascist direction once he took over its leadership.

In the 2010s, the O9A has undergone a spurt of growth, mainly through infiltration of far-right groups and underground music scenes. In 2018, the Atomwaffen Division, an avowedly violent neo-Nazi group linked to various murders, was accused by other alt-rightists of being a front for the O9A, the group having promoted the O9A's literature on its websites.