The St. Louis Commission
'Victims of Communism' in St. Louis
“Do urself a favor & actually research the org, Pinko.”
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOCMF) established its first and only local organization in 2019, to combat “Communist influence” “in and around the St. Louis area.” It is not exactly a coincide that Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, sparked the Black Lives Matter movement after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager.
The VOCMF tapped Kim McGrath, a former member of the St. Louis City Democratic Central Committee, to direct the Victims of Communism—St. Louis Commission (VOC-STL). McGrath is a volunteer for the “Shaw NOM,” or Neighborhood Ownership Model, which has described itself as a “citizen-led neighborhood outreach organization dedicated to crime reduction,” and “an organized group that uses the model put forth by the Circuit Attorney's office of St. Louis to promote public safety and reduce crime.” Founded in 2018, Shaw NOM coordinates with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office. Roughly two-thirds of Shaw is white.
Less than two months after Michael Brown’s death in 2014, an off-duty police officer, Jason Flanery, chased after three young black men in the Shaw neighborhood, minutes after they bought food. They ran after Flanery did a U-turn in his vehicle to “investigate” them. He killed 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers Jr., and shot him seven times, including once in the head.
The police claimed that Myers had a pistol that he fired three times before it jammed, but even Fox News, while running cover for the cops, conceded that Myers “does not appear to be carrying a gun” in surveillance video shortly before the incident, when he bought a sandwich. The Myers family has accused Flanery of planting the weapon, not for the first time in his career. A year later, prosecutors had declined to charge Flanery, but he quit the police force after crashing his patrol vehicle into a parked car, and fleeing the scene, apparently drunk and high on cocaine.
The October 2014 killing of Vonderrit Myers Jr. sparked protests in Shaw, a dozen miles southeast of Ferguson. Many protesters were convinced that Myers was unarmed. Some windows were smashed, but mostly those of two police cars, and a couple US flags were burned. According to NPR, “some Shaw residents expressed anger and disappoint that protesters had chosen to march through the neighborhood.”
Police arrested at least two dozen protesters that month in Shaw. In October 2017, almost a thousand marched through the neighborhood to remember Myers on the anniversary of his death. Shaw NOM was founded less than a year later. Dan Powell, who appears to be the VOC-STL’s second in command, formerly served as the president of Shaw NOM. With a combative Twitter account and the title of “Strategic Development Chair,” Powell became the most public face of the “Victims of Communism” in St. Louis.
A month before the VOC-STL first surveyed “all candidates for local, state, and federal office in the St. Louis, MO area” on their attitudes toward communism, in 2020, Powell claimed, “We have elected officials that support communism and have said they don’t believe victims of communism exist. Communists used Ferguson 2014 as a springboard here, they have potential to do the same in other cities.” He apparently made the following paranoid graphic “showing the plan of the St. Louis communist hierarchy to seize control of city politics.”
In 2020, there were more Black Lives Matter protests in Shaw. That summer, Powell told a St. Louis radio station that far-left hypocrites hijacked the movement. “The perfect recent example,” according to Powell, was a black cop killed by a barricaded gunman: “how come no one cares about Officer Bohannon?" Another time, Powell tried to shame local “progressives” who protested the killing of Michael Brown but said nothing about a Bosnian immigrant murdered by a diverse group of teenagers. Powell often refers to “progressives” in scare quotes, believing them to be crypto-communists. A few days before his 2020 radio interview, Powell said, “The best part of Trump is that he brought the vast amount of extremists out of the shadows and those that placate them into a position to choose,” referring to the left-wing “extremists” that he thinks have infiltrated the Democratic Party.
In November 2020, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen (BoA) virtually adopted a resolution, “Honoring Victims of Communist Regimes and the St. Louis Commission of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.” The VOCMF and VOC-STL organized a group to advocate for the motion, including the national organization's director of academic programs.
Annie Rice, apparently believed by Powell to be the crypto-communist “ward boss” of Shaw, was the first member of the BoA to speak out against the “courtesy resolution,” which she claimed was drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council. Dan Guenther echoed her concerns: “everyone that's putting their name on this is saying that yes, we are gonna go ahead and give more power to these groups that are going to continue to say, ‘Oh these communist liberals...’”
Carol Howard, who submitted the resolution, nearly lost her seat on the BoA in March 2019 to a Communist Party USA member in a Democratic primary. Her slim victory of just 52 votes apparently inspired the formation of the “St. Louis Commission.” Later that month, the VOC-STL held its “first event series.”
The following year, after the BoA voted 16-9 in favor of the VOC-STL resolution, Mayor Lyda Krewson proclaimed “Victims of Communism Memorial Day” on the anniversary of the October Revolution (November 7). In a letter to his hometown newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, historian Gerald Horne wrote, “Communism is a specter called forth when those in power feel their grip erode... Perhaps, Howards' motives are less than altruistic? Anti-communism is a tool of repression designed to stifle dissent and weaken civil liberties. Unfortunately, the tragic logic of this resolution inevitably leads to political inquisitions.”
The VOC-STL had recently held a small anticommunist rally outside an antique store that was harassed by a self-proclaimed Maoist two years earlier because the owner displayed a pro-police (“thin blue line”) flag. It was St. Louis’ contribution to a “Global Day of Action” called by the Free Tibet Committee, the VOCMF, and their allies. In the coming weeks, Cherri Elder, the once-victimized business owner of Elder’s Antiques, traveled to Washington to protest the 2020 election, that is, “Stop the Steal.”
On January 5, 2021, Dan Powell testified to the city's Public Safety Committee in support of St. Louis police getting a spy plane: “we need to bring justice to victims.” The next day, he blamed the Democrats for the Capitol riot. “Extremism begets extremism,” he explained. “What did they think was going to happen after allowing riots all year long, denying the existence of antifa, calling 50% of the population fascist and racist, and dismissing people that openly supported repubs & Trump? #ShareTheBlame #LearnCompromise.”
Annie Rice, a liberal Alderwoman who represents Shaw, denounced the VOC-STL’s “racist and red-baiting nonsense” a couple months later, and called on her colleagues to join her. “I’m thinking about becoming a communist just to troll @DanPoSTL [Dan Powell],” tweeted Mike Gras, a Democratic Committeeman and future Alderman. In response, Powell declared that Gras “probably denies the Holocaust too. Do urself [sic] a favor & actually research the org, Pinko. Stop mocking victims.” Later that year, Powell explained the Holocaust as he understood it: “Assembly line mass murder came after they [Germans] were ‘overwhelmed’ by Jews thru WW2 invasions.”
“Dan doesn't care about the victims of anything,” says Gras. “He just wants to use them as props to score points against liberals. He appropriates stories of real suffering for political propaganda. It's shameful.” On September 11, 2021, Powell accused Rice and another Alderwoman of being “noticeably silent today on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. They, along with other local progressives could care less #Shallow #AntiAmerican.”
A week later, the VOC-STL held a “Marxism in the World Workshop” at a private Christian K-12 school in Springfield, Missouri. The event featured two “witnesses of communism” — a pro-Trump Cuban exile, plus a Falun Gong practitioner (and former promoter of Shen Yun). On November 7, they spoke at a “Victims of Communism Memorial Day” event in St. Louis. So did another Falun Gong practitioner. “The section on China was particularly moving,” said one of the attendants. “At my job, people say these things that I know are fueled by the new-Marxist cultural revolution, but they don’t know the history of those ideas.”
In early 2022, a slimeball Democratic state senator, Steven Roberts Jr., announced that he was challenging progressive Congresswoman Cori Bush, a former Ferguson activist, to represent Missouri’s 1st Congressional District. “She made a comment that she wanted to defund the Pentagon,” he told reporters after filing his candidacy. “The NGA (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency) is a multimillion-dollar project that's in my Senate seat, in the 1st Congressional [District], those folks don't have a voice.” As told by The Intercept,
Bush riled St. Louis’s old guard two years ago by unseating longtime Rep. William Lacy Clay, the scion of a political family. This year, in her first primary challenge as an incumbent, that old guard came gunning for Bush in the form of state senator and minority caucus whip Steven Roberts Jr.
Roberts allegedly raped a fellow candidate for the Missouri House of Representatives in 2016, who mysteriously died less than three weeks before he filed to run against Bush. About a week later, Roberts introduced legislation to annually designate November 7 as Victims of Communism Memorial Day in Missouri. The initiative stalled, but not in Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis established the “Memorial Day” a month later. According to PEN America, “Missouri had the most [classroom] gagging bills in 2022, but Florida has had more success in passing legislation.”
Steven Roberts Jr. has attended several VOC-STL events, plausibly more than any other Missouri politician. In May 2022, Roberts appears to have been the only political figure to speak at a rally held at the Missouri State Capitol to celebrate World Falun Dafa Day. “Members of the Falun Dafa [a.k.a. Falun Gong] practice have been historically persecuted by Communist regimes,” Roberts said. “It’s part of the reason why I presented Senate Concurrent Resolution 24, which is a resolution that designates every November 7 as Victims of Communism Memorial Day.” More about the cultish Falun Gong next week…
The Intercept published the following articles on Steven Roberts Jr. in 2022: “SEXUAL ASSAULT ALLEGATIONS VANISHED FROM POTENTIAL CORI BUSH CHALLENGER’S WIKIPEDIA PAGE” (March 21), “MISSOURI’S STEVEN ROBERTS SETTLED GROPING ALLEGATION SUIT FOR $100,000” (April 19), and “FIRM FUNDING WILLIAM LACY CLAY-BACKED PAC IS TIED TO CORI BUSH OPPONENT’S FATHER” (July 21). In August, Bush crushed Roberts, who received less than 30% of the vote.
According to Dan Powell of the “Victims of Communism—St. Louis Commission,” Cori Bush is “100% racist” and “hates our country.” Powell has at various times described the Congresswoman as “a proven incapable oddball” with a “fuhrer like mentality,” who “forgets her constituents aren't all black,” but is “fighting for the white ‘progressives’ that got her elected.” Once, she tweeted in solidarity with water protectors in Minnesota, “To save Black and Indigenous lives. Solidarity is an act of joy and love.” Powell was appalled: “More blatant racism from my US Rep. Damn the white lives, damn the Asian lives...as far as she's concerned...”