Look who was behind the Flake confrontation:
Opinion | Look who was behind the Jeff Flake elevator setup
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Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher were the two women who confronted Flake inside the elevator. Perhaps because they expressed such raw emotion, few media outlets dug into their political activism. Archila is an executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy; she had spent the previous week in Washington engaged in protests against Kavanaugh. Gallagher is a 23-year-old activist with the group. The center is a left-wing group heavily funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Indeed, as of 2014, Open Society was one of the three largest donors to the group.
Make no mistake. The Center for Popular Democracy is at the heart of the effort to stop Kavanaugh. A source forwarded to me an email sent from the organization: “Last week, you saw protestors interrupting the Kavanaugh hearings, trying to slow it down and show the Judiciary Committee how much they/we care. Those protests were organized by the Women’s March and the Center for Popular Democracy and other groups.”
Archila has another role beyond her duties as co–executive director of the center. She is also a member of the national committee of the New York-based Working Families Party. The WFP was founded in 1998 by the leaders of ACORN, the now-disbanded and disgraced group of community organizers.
In 2009, ACORN finally ran off the rails. Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe secretly recorded employees in its offices in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington and San Bernardino, Calif. O’Keefe and a colleague posed as a prostitute and a pimp and said they were planning to import underage women from El Salvador for the sex trade. They asked for and received advice on getting a housing loan and evading federal taxes.
The US Senate quickly voted 83-7 to strip ACORN of more than $1.6 million in federal housing money meant to help low-income people obtain loans and prepare tax forms. Within weeks, ACORN’s donors fled the group and it was forced to close its doors, with many of its affiliates reforming under new mismanagement and new names — such as the WFP.
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