The ReEducating of Valerie Bradford: DEI’s Marxist Origins Exposed
Part 1 – Unmasking the Marxist Ideology and Maoist Playbook That Drive Bradford’s DEI Push in Santa Clarita’s Political Landscape
As the Santa Clarita 2026 City Council election cycle begins to take shape, it has come to our attention that Valerie Bradford has thrown her hat into the ring for City Council and launched her campaign committee. If you’re unfamiliar with Bradford, she’s the annoited local race grifter who swoops in, Al Sharpton-style, whenever she finds the tiniest scrap of evidence to confirm her belief that Santa Clarita is a hotbed of racial injustice. A tipster recently pointed me to her March 2025 Signal column, “DEI: Embracing Diversity,” where Bradford writes, “With the growing narrative that diversity, equity, and inclusion are somehow dirty words, I implore you to educate yourselves and learn why these programs are essential to an inclusive and productive society.” Well, if DEI has become a “dirty word,” as Bradford claims, there’s a reason for it—and it’s not the one she wants you to believe. Let’s unpack why DEI has fallen out of favor and how leftists like Bradford disguise their divisive ideas while pushing a radical agenda and educate ourselves, or rather ReEducate Mrs. Bradford.
Anyone paying attention has likely heard the terms “Woke,” Critical Race Theory (CRT), Anti-Racism, Intersectionality, and, more recently, DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. If you prefer to cut to the chase, these buzzwords all boil down to the same thing—an even dirtier term: Cultural Marxism. Bradford’s defense of DEI in her column is a textbook example of this ideology in action, cloaked in the language of inclusion but rooted in division. When most people hear “Marxism,” they think of the Bolsheviks, the Cuban Revolution, or the Cold War era, conjuring images of violent coups and brutal dictatorships—and they’d be mostly correct; those are often the results when Marxist doctrine takes hold in an unstable society. But Marxism typically moves slowly, rotting a government or organization from the inside out through subversion. A former KGB agent named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, who defected to Canada in 1970, revealed in a 1984 interview with G. Edward Griffin that the Soviets had a long-term plan to undermine the U.S.—not on the battlefield, but in the psyche of the American public. Bezmenov described a chilling strategy of psychological warfare, focusing on “demoralization” as the first stage of a decades-long process to destabilize and eventually normalize a Marxist takeover, using “ideological subversion” through active measures and psychological warfare—tactics that echo in the divisive rhetoric of leftists like Valerie Bradford and coup fan girl Christy Smith today.
While Karl Marx himself saw a real problem in his time—the Industrial Revolution’s abuses of the working class, where serfdom merely swapped one set of overlords for another—his ideas have since morphed into a more insidious form that figures like Bradford wield to sow discord under the guise of progress. This evolution owes much to Critical Theory. This philosophical framework emerged in the early 20th century with the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals including Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. After Hitler’s rise, the Frankfurt School fled to the U.S., affiliating with Columbia University and embedding themselves into academia, where they remained through the 1930s and WWII, producing works that would shape leftist thought for decades. Rooted in Marxist principles, Critical Theory shifts the focus from economic revolution to critiquing society, culture, and power structures, spawning offshoots like CRT and Intersectionality that divide society by assigning “oppression points” based on identity markers. Leftists like Bradford often attempt to conflate or downplay the Marxist roots of CRT, arguing that it is “just a law school class” or "just teaching all of history."—both of which are patently false. In reality, Critical Theory operates more like a religious philosophy, seeping into every aspect of an organization it infects, a tactic Bradford honed over decades working in Human Resources, ground zero for implementing DEI and Intersectionality initiatives. As she reveals in her column: “The nationwide effort to undermine DEI reveals the current administration’s blatant disregard for anyone who doesn’t fit neatly within the intersections of being white, male, Christian, heterosexual, and wealthy.” Notice her use of the term “intersections”—in her worldview, a white, male, Christian, heterosexual person is viewed as an oppressor born with original sin and deserving nothing, perhaps not even life itself; a mindset that cultivates hateful division and resentment. She knows exactly what she is doing.
Antonio Gramsci, often hailed as the father of Cultural Marxism, laid the groundwork for this ideology as an Italian communist imprisoned by Mussolini from 1926 until he died in 1937. During his incarceration, Gramsci penned his influential Prison Notebooks, arguing that capitalism’s dominance isn’t solely upheld by economic wealth or political power but by a more insidious force: ideas. He posited that the ruling class maintains control not just through money or governance but by embedding their worldview into society’s cultural fabric, convincing the masses that their way of thinking—about everything from gender roles to economic systems—is legitimate and considered “common sense”. To dismantle this hegemony, Gramsci urged the working class to wage a cultural war, crafting and spreading new ideas to challenge the old ones, such as redefining fundamental concepts like say “what is a woman?” His theories found their way to America through Joseph Buttigieg, a scholar who translated Gramsci’s works into English and promoted them widely—incidentally, the father of Pete Buttigieg, the former presidential candidate and U.S. Secretary of Transportation under the Biden administration, who famously pushed the narrative that even infrastructure, like roads are racist because what isn’t racist at this point?
This rebrand of Cultural Marxism, so it is something more palatable, is a classic leftist tactic, as seen in 2022 when Elon Musk, after buying Twitter, discovered a closet full of abandoned T-shirts emblazoned with their former tagline #StayWoke. Terms like “Woke” and “AntiRacism” were deliberate word games designed to exploit people’s ignorance and good intentions. If leftists called it Cultural Marxism outright, most decent people would recoil at the memory of Marxist atrocities, but label it “Woke,” and it passes as a progressive movement to help the marginalized. The term became too toxic after massive financial losses in entertainment—coupled with successful corporate boycotts against brands like Bud Light, Target, and Disney for their “Woke” pandering—and revelations that financial firms like BlackRock threatened companies to shift focus to their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and DEI priorities or face the consequences. BlackRock has since reversed course, at least on the surface, as it likely scrambles to rebrand yet again. Leftist lightning rods like AOC quickly abandoned the burnt term “Woke,” claiming in 2023 that only old farts like “former Clinton consultants like James Carville and Fox News pundits” use the term—a blatant lie meant to obscure their history with it, part of their endless “three-card monte” word games to confuse while pushing the same divisive agenda. To them, this isn’t just a political theory—it’s a religious doctrine for the leftist globalist cabal, with their eyes fixed on a so-called global utopia, a goal they’ll stop at nothing to achieve.
This brings us to Mao Zedong, who referred to his revolution as “Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics.” His “Thought Reform” indoctrinated millions, and the Cultural Revolution acted as his wrecking ball—destroying what Mao called the “Four Olds” (old ideas, culture, customs, habits) to impose a socialist utopia. He mobilized the masses, obliterated tradition, and categorized people like livestock. No racial diversity to exploit? No problem. Villagers wore colored strips: the “Red Class”—loyal Maoists, the revolutionary elite—boasted red, while the “Black Class”—landlords, pre-Communist relics, or anyone he didn’t favor—were labeled as enemies. You might say, “Cool history lesson, but that’s China—can’t happen here.” Wrong. Marxism adapts like a virus, latching onto a culture and mutating. This is why Elon Musk referred to it as the Woke Mind Virus. In China, it manifests as feudal totalitarianism; in America, it’s Freud and liberalism that have morphed into identity ideology, transgender nonsense, and woke-ism—this is Marxism with American characteristics. It’s evident in diversity, equity, and inclusion training at work. The social-emotional learning in schools and the restorative justice concept in our legal system. This is already happening here, which is why Trump won so decisively and why his administration is doing everything possible to eliminate the Marxist decay to help bring back the country from the brink of collapse.
Xi Van Fleet’s Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning exposes this sinister thread, and it’s a wake-up call. A Cultural Revolution survivor who went viral after roasting a Virginia school board in 2021, Xi, who fled China to live in the US, couldn’t believe her eyes watching the exact same policies she fled decades before being pushed by leftists like Bradford, whose NAACP held a so-called “Anti-Racism Coalition” last year, the concept of Anti-racism was coined by Ibram X. Kendi who describes this concept as “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” And then there is Black Lives Matter (BLM), whose leaders boasted about being trained Marxists and whose website called for the dismantling of the nuclear family. The anti-racism and DEI that Bradford champions are another of cultural Marxism’s Trojan horses. These policies don’t unite; they carve society into race-and-identity shrapnel. Don’t believe me? Bradford was one of the people at the Soros-backed Indivisible’s “Tesla Takedown” protest last month; here are the organizers literally saying they are copying Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 300,000 to 550,000 people—primarily intellectuals, professionals, and critics of the CCP—who were labeled as "rightists."
These people are mimicking Mao Zedong, a monster whose “Marxism with Chinese characteristics” killed 40 to 80 million through starvation, persecution, prison camps, and executions. Bradford’s hooked on Mao’s “Little Red Book," which has been reimagined as antiracism and DEI. In the leftist realm of 2025, you don’t think; thinking could lead to dissenting opinions, which is a sin for the modern left. Nope, you must turn off your brain and accept the dogma—just “Read The F—ing Manual (RTFM).” It’s like the Japanese proverb: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” Christy Smith echoed this sentiment by stating, “Right now, it’s crucial that everyone receives a daily ‘talking points memo’ and sings loudly and often from the same hymn book.” Thus, the talking points memo informed the leftist zombies that they should now hate Elon Musk; they must sing from the same hymn book lying about Musk, cutting social security, and Medicaid. Musk: once a darling of the left, now somehow a super-secret Nazi, a cartoon villain in their fevered narrative. Why? He’s a free thinker who transformed Tesla into a powerhouse, defying their control-freak gospel. Bradford’s crew demands obedience—DEI is sacred; critics like Elon are labeled heretics. It’s even darker: they support division while turning a blind eye to Tesla’s domestic terrorists—arson, sabotage, protests—because “inclusion” means destroying what won’t kneel. Xi witnessed firsthand Mao gutting Chinese culture, dividing its people, and murdering her neighbors. She won’t remain silent as leftists like Bradford perpetuate their Antiracist/DEI scam, repackaged as virtue. That’s Indivisible’s Tesla agenda: Maoist chaos disguised in American guise. Framing Musk isn’t merely a side hustle—it’s the mission. They seek your applause while striking the match, attempting to burn your country down.
Bradford’s actions in Santa Clarita follow a pattern of division and control, exploiting local incidents to advance her agenda while masquerading as a social justice advocate. In the next column, we’ll explore her hypocrisy, from contradictions in her activism to her selective outrage in local controversies, alongside concerns about the transparency of her NAACP branch. Stay tuned for these revelations and more by subscribing to Accountable SCV. Consider supporting us through a paid subscription to help us continue holding candidates like Bradford accountable.