Randy Villegas, a socialist professor and California congressional candidate endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), placed high school students with activist organizations that promoted gender-identity programming and intersectionality, including one group whose environmental justice program received federal taxpayer funding.
Villegas, who defeated the Democratic establishment’s preferred contender, California Assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains, for the second position in the general election in California’s 22nd Congressional District, used the Central Valley Freedom Summer program, known as CVFS, to place high school students with activist organizations. He specifically frames the project as part of a “History of Resistance,” citing multiple far-left and socialist organizations and figures, including Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.
Villegas’s model, which he refers to as “trickle-up political socialization,” involves “educating” the high schoolers in a series of overtly partisan seminars before placing them in activist organizations. The goal is that by radicalizing the student, they would convert their families into his preferred socialist politics. LOUD for Tomorrow, a self-described “queer and trans BIPOC youth-led” organization, was founded by Villegas’s CVFS alums. LOUD now hosts youth drag events across the Central Valley.
Organizations involved with the CVFS program included Valley Natives for Change, the Jakara Movement, Fresno Barrios Unidos, the Youth Leadership Institute, and the Madera Coalition for Community Justice.
Valley Natives for Change has declared that “Fresno High School sits on #YokutsLand” and claimed that the land “was taken through acts of genocide, systemic racism and oppression.”
Villegas’s report also approvingly documented a 2020 campaign led by the Jakara Movement seeking the removal of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi because of what the organization described as Gandhi’s “history of anti-blackness and racism.”
Fresno Barrios Unidos and the Youth Leadership Institute (YLI) trained teenagers using an “intersectionality” curriculum intended to “help youth to understand intersectionality in social justice movements.” The teenagers were later deployed to lobby the Fresno City Council.
Employee reviews of YLI have alleged that the organization promoted an “anti-capitalism platform” while fostering organization-wide racism and an “unsafe” environment for children and women.
The Madera Coalition for Community Justice operates the Madera Rainbow Coalition, an LGBTQ identity program directed toward young people. The organization also operates an environmental justice program funded in part through federal American Rescue Plan Act and Department of Agriculture money.
Villegas has also argued against strictly neutral academic research. In discussing his approach as a professor, Villegas has said his political “biases can actually be assets” and characterized the production of neutral content as an “ethical violation.”
RNC spokesman Nick Pochétold Breitbart News, “Socialist Randy Villegas took people’s children and indoctrinated them into foot-soldiers for the far-left while taxpayers got to pay for his services. In Congress he would be a reliable anti-parent and pro-socialism vote for the radical left.”
Villegas is endorsed by the California Democratic Socialists of America, the California Working Families Party, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
The California Democratic Socialists of America highlighted his campaign in a statement on its website: “CA-22 is one of the districts restructured by Prop 50, giving Dems the best chance to flip it in decades, and after running milquetoast candidates for years Randy Villegas, a Visalia school board trustee and organizer, is a candidate who may be able to flip it not just for Democrats but for working people.”
Villegas’s campaign is run by Fight Agency and Morris Katz, political operatives who have also worked with Graham Platner, Zohran Mamdani, and Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates around the country.
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