Red Guards made a name for itself with provocative protests that targeted other groups on the left. A year after its implosion, ex-members say they were part of a coercive gang.
The mysterious group found its way to Austin D. while he was working a dead-end job at a Pittsburgh Starbucks.
Austin, who requested to withhold his full last name for safety, is a former member of Red Guards, a multi-city Maoist group that made headlines in 2020 for its aggressive disruptions of other leftist organizations and candidates.
“I was incredibly, incredibly swayed by Jared,” Luke, another former Red Guards member, told The Daily Beast. “I was a really well-cooked cult member.” His old blog has been taken over by ex-Red Guards members who have updated it with a long statement claiming that the group’s “opportunist leaders were cruel, callous, and vindictive. Our comrades are traumatized, demoralized, and physically ill due to their actions.”
Luke was 19 when he first came into contact with Red Guards in 2016. His politics were less radical at the time—“sort of generic liberal activism”—but his then-partner was a fan of the Red Guards, which by that point was beginning to show up at protests and “make a huge scene.” “Just for the heck of it, I’m going to do what Mao says,” he recalled telling himself. “I’m going to apply the theory to practice. Our work conditions at Starbucks really suck. I’m gonna do some of these things Mao recommends for strategy and see how that applies to Starbucks.”
Unbeknown to the woman and some of her comrades, the group was an arm of Red Guards, the former member told The Daily Beast. “It was unknown to us that it went higher,” she said, although as the summer of protest progressed, she began to have suspicions. “I tried to explain this to people the other week,” Luke told The Daily Beast in early September. “Because once pictures of Jared started circulating online, a lot of people were like, man, who would ever follow this guy?”
“All possible levels of revolutionary violence must be used to retaliate against those who dare to talk about the organization’s secrets.” Red Guards taught a version of Maoist dialectics that held that the revolutionary fight between capitalism and communism was also playing out in the worker’s mind.
Another testimonial-writer said that “I eventually reached a crisis point where my inner bourgeois self and my communist self came to the fore as an open antagonistic contradiction that demanded resolution. Through the help of my comrades here, I have since engaged in a process of thought reform to enable my communist self to overcome my bourgeois self. This means that I have started to learn how to turn Maoism inwards, instead of it being something that I only projected outward into the world.
Burnout was endemic, including in Red Guards front groups, said a Texas activist who worked for one of the organization’s publications. The event usually lasted three hours, after a back-and-forth that resulted in victims leaving with “this completely broken attitude,” Austin said, likening those people to “a kicked dog. The head would be hanging down and you could see it in their body language for weeks after that.”
When Luke’s performance appeared to lapse after Garrett Foster’s murder, he, too, was called in for a struggle session. When the session ended, leadership prescribed a “rectification” plan: a series of instructions supposedly designed to correct his behavior. “I ended up feeling guilty about that,” he said. “And so I kind of snitched on myself. Within about 24 hours, they told me I had to move across the country, basically, to a different city. I didn’t speak to him for a year and a half, until the cult ended.”Red Guards members weren’t the only parties facing the group’s wrath. Other organizations on the left were frequent targets of disruption by Red Guards—especially if Red Guards deemed those groups insufficiently revolutionary.
Red Guards did not shy away from the allegations. In a 2018 blog post, the group published a picture of a bloody pig’s head hanging on a building with a sign reading “DEM SOC OF AMERICA ARE CAPITALIST PIGS.” An experienced cook, she had volunteered to prepare food for the approximately 60 people who’d convened for the three-day gathering. But as she readied a meal, she noticed that the group didn’t have enough food for all its members. When she notified a leader about the shortages, he argued with her, telling her the group’s political work would keep it too busy for a grocery run.
When the woman’s boyfriend, Jesus Mares, got out of his car, Roark allegedly pointed a gun at his head. Members raised concerns and sentenced their interim leader to rectification. Roark’s wife, Hogan, was suggested as a replacement, but she informed Roark of growing dissent in the ranks, prompting him to write an angry jailhouse letter calling out underlings.Ultimately, in the spring of 2022, some local leaders went rogue. “The leadership in Pittsburgh basically said, ‘we’re not gonna follow their orders anymore, and just see what happens,’” Luke recalled.
But eventually he began connecting with other former members and discussing his experiences—something that Red Guards’ intense secrecy and strict hierarchy had previously made difficult. He began reading about cults, and says he recognized striking similarities to Red Guards tactics. And he reconnected with the partner from whom he’d been forcibly separated when Red Guards rescinded their dating rights and sent Luke packing to another city.
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