VOC Winter Digest
Updates on the 'Victims of Communism'
Normally this newsletter is about “connecting the dots.” But here’s some updates on the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). “The Hungarian Connection” is still coming later this week…
Board of Trustees
In December, the VOC announced an expansion and reshuffling of its board of trustees, including a new executive committee chaired by Elizabeth Spalding, the founding director of the Victims of Communism museum in Washington. We established a couple weeks ago that Spalding is the daughter of ultra-conservative VOC co-founder Lee Edwards and is married to the former executive director of Donald Trump’s nationalistic 1776 Commission. (More about Elizabeth Spalding and the museum coming soon on “VOC Info…”)
Joining the board of trustees is Tidal McCoy, a profoundly Sinophobic venture capitalist from Florida. McCoy is perhaps a perfect fit for VOC, if only because he is part of several organizations that will be highlighted in this newsletter, including the Committee on the Present Danger: China. Throughout the Ronald Reagan administration, McCoy served as an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Air Force. According to the Collegiate Water Polo Association, after graduating from West Point, where he was a member of the water polo team,
McCoy served as a field artillery officer in command and staff assignments in the United States, Europe, and Vietnam. He left the Army in 1972, and became a member of the Long-Range Planning and Net Assessment Group in the Office of the United States Secretary of Defense. From 1973 to 1977, he was Staff Assistant and later a Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. In 1977, he was the Scientific Adviser to Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Engineering and Systems David E. Mann. From 1979 to 1981, he was Assistant for National Security Affairs to Senator Jake Garn of Utah.
McCoy also chairs the Space Transportation Association, and is vice chairman of the Cyber, Space & Intelligence Association. According to him, “I was part of the behind the scenes promotion of the idea of the United States Space Force through certain people in the Congress and certain others at the [Trump] White House…”
Before starting his own venture capital firm, Tidal McCoy served as president of Thiokol Technology, which allegedly invented the automobile airbag (and he “assisted in its movement to market”). Later, he became Vice President for Government Relations of Thiokol Propulsion “where he developed an effective and comprehensive government relations program that considerably strengthened Thiokol as an aerospace company within the NASA and Defense contractor community… [and] led to a period of unprecedented growth and value-creation for the company.”
According to his bio on the VOC website, McCoy “recently co-founded, as Chairman, the venture capital fund IronGate Capital Advisors to invest in vital, advanced high technology for the U.S. national security community.” IronGate Capital Advisors describes itself as a group of “former officers from the United States military and intelligence community with real-world operational experience deploying technologies to help keep America safe.” According to McCoy, when it comes to Silicon Valley, “many of the firms out there are somewhat anti-military, [and] some of them have been easily infiltrated by Chinese technology spies.”
VOC’s newest trustee said this in a June 2020 interview with a podcast hosted by a managing partner of IronGate Capital Advisors. At the time, McCoy speculated that “some very nationalist crazy lab people in China” leaked COVID-19 “accidentally on purpose,” in other words, they “let it get out, and then it was covered up, and then they saw, well, it’s pretty bad, but let’s make the best of this crisis…” He claimed that Chinatowns are 5th columns for the Communist Party of China, and that as many as 100 million people died in the Cultural Revolution. As for the Belt and Road Initiative, “I call it the one belt around your neck and the one road to perdition initiative for the countries that are foolish enough to participate in it.”
‘Evil Empire’
As many reading this will already know, last month the House of Representatives voted 328-86 in favor of a resolution “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.” It might surprise readers that the VOC has been mostly silent on this bill sponsored by “Victims of Communism” ally Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL).
In December 2021, VOC held a press conference with Salazar to introduce the Crucial Communism Teaching (CCT) Act, which “would make educational materials available through the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to help educate high school students about the dangers of communism and totalitarianism.” The bill was explicitly “inspired by the Never Again Education Act… which created an analogous program to educate American students about the Holocaust through the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.”
A month after introducing the “horrors of socialism” bill, Maria Elvira Salazar joined Fox & Friends from the VOC museum in Washington for a special event marking the 40th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech. One of the key speakers was Elliott Abrams, the notorious neocon of Iran-Contra infamy that Donald Trump appointed as his Special Representative for Venezuela and Iran.
Earlier this year, a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives formed a Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, otherwise known as the “Select Committee on the CCP.” The VOC hosted, at its museum of course, an event to inaugurate the committee on the eve of its first hearing.
“Thank you to the Victims of Communism for everything that you do,” said committee chairman Mike Gallagher (R-WI), “and we hope to continue to highlight your great work going forward.” The following day, Gallagher declared, “The CCP has found friends on Wall Street, in Fortune 500 C-suites, and on K Street who are ready and willing to oppose efforts to push back. This strategy has worked well in the past and the CCP is confident it will work again. Our task is to ensure that it does not.”
Anatol Klass, a PhD candidate in Chinese history, reminded readers of Foreign Policy that “the hearings on Capitol Hill that followed then-leader Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory in the Chinese civil war… quickly devolved into a witch hunt for corrupt officials in the United States,” paving the way for Senator Joe McCarthy, going on 41 years old, to usher in the Red Scare of the 1950s. Gallagher, 39, also from Wisconsin, apparently has McCarthyist ambitions of his own. “His rhetoric toward Wall Street and K Street suggests that Gallagher wants to use the committee to investigate so-called friends of the Chinese Communist Party in and from the United States,” observed Klass.
Since the Chinese “spy balloon” incident in January, calls have been growing for the U.S. to ban TikTok as a national security threat. Last November, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Mike Gallagher co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post, making their case for Congress “to act against the TikTok threat before it’s too late.” Rubio and Gallagher introduced the “ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act” to accomplish this.
In the past week, VOC China Studies director Adrian Zenz testified to the “Select Committee on the CCP,” and the CEO of TikTok appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee for hours of ignorant questions. After the CEO refused to say whether or not he personally thinks Uyghurs are persecuted in China—only that “we allow our users to freely express their views on this issue”—Zenz concluded, “the one person he must please is Xi Jinping.”
Staffing Up
Since the government of Romania announced a three million euro donation to the VOC museum in January, its hours have expanded from 24 to 30 hours a week. The VOC has also added at least a couple more people to its team.
Simon Molina Herrera, an enthusiastic Ron DeSantis supporter born and raised in Venezuela, joined the VOC as a Government Relations Intern in January. Since then, he has denounced Barnes and Nobles because it “promotes Communist terrorism.” During the 2021-22 school year, Herrera served as the campus coordinator for Turning Point USA at the University of Maryland. In that capacity he worked with Young Americans for Freedom, PragerU, and the Heritage Foundation, which is probably how got linked with VOC.
Last week, “Victims of Communism” announced that it hired Karina Lipsman as its new Associate Director of Communications. VOC is excited about her “14-year background in the defense and intelligence industry.” For the most part Lipsman was a senior strategist at Northrop Grumman, one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the world.
Last year, after a failed congressional bid, Lipsman became a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), an anti-trans, anti-feminist organization that originated in “Women for Judge [Clarence] Thomas” in 1991. According to The Intercept, more recently, “IWF came up with a memo, used by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on how to support Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court confirmation without alienating the #MeToo movement.”
Karina Lipsman was born in Odessa but moved to the United States as a child in the 1990s. For this, the VOC ludicrously declared her a “Survivor of Soviet Ukraine.” Incidentally, this happened a couple days after the Cambridge Journal of Economics published a new study that found “around seven million” souls perished that decade in Eastern Europe’s “post-socialist mortality crisis.” Oh well, better dead than red! (That is what the VOC people think…)
