The Community Service Organization of Orange County – better known by its acronym CSO-OC – is a fixture at Santa Ana City Council meetings and at any protest, demonstration or public hearing where they can air their ideological contempt for law enforcement.
Most recently, several CSO-OC members filmed themselves stalking and harassing an off-duty Santa Ana police officer they accuse of “murdering” a man named Noe Rodriguez.
READ: Unedited Video Shows Anti-Cop Radicals Stalking, Harassing Off-Duty Santa Ana Police Officer
But what is CSO-OC? Despite their relentless presence at Santa Ana council meetings and anti-police protests, local media exhibit zero interest in reporting on them.
So, OC Independent has done a deep dive.
CSO-OC presents as home grown activists dedicating to fighting police brutality. However, it’s clear from our investigation that CSO-OC is a front group for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), a Maoist-Stalinist communist party.
Understanding CSO-OC’s tactics and goals requires understanding the FRSO.
CSO-OC AIN’T YOUR GRANDPA’S CSO.
The current iteration of CSO – be it chapters in OC, LA or elsewhere – is a classic example of Marxists capturing an organization in order to leverage a positive brand while camouflaging their ideological goals.
The original Community Service Organization was established in 1947 by pioneer Latino activists Edward Roybal, Fred Ross and Antonio Rios. It was a grassroots civil rights group focused on voter registration and social services. Roybal used it as a springboard to become the first Hispanic elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and subsequently member of Congress.
According to Wikipedia, “one of the CSO’s most significant contributions was recruiting and training future labor leader Cesar Chavez. In 1952, Fred Ross met Cesar Chavez, a young farmworker in San Jose, and persuaded him to join the organization.”
However, the CSO of Ed Roybal bears little resemblance to the Marxist CSO-OC that is dedicated to bringing the Santa Ana Police department under “community control” (more about that later in the article).
CSO-OC’s “About Us” page refers vaguely to being “re-founded,” without saying why, when and by whom.
It’s clear from our research that CSO-OC was captured by cadres from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and serves as a front organization bearing a less threatening label. Even the Wikipedia entry on CSO – despite a passing mention of CSO Centro – talks about the original organization in the past tense.
CSO-OC & Freedom Road Socialist Organization: Same Communists, Different Names
CSO-OC’s leader is David Pulido, the nephew of former long-time Santa Ana mayor and councilman Miguel Pulido. He supports his revolutionary activism by working as a substitute teacher for the Santa Ana Unified School District.
Pulido is a “proud member of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization,” which he joined when he realized “revolutionary struggle” is the only answer to “police killings and other forms of oppression.” He “thinks socialism is the solution to the oppression we face as Chicanos.”
Those are Pulido’s words, taken from his “speaker spotlight’ bio for the Chicano Moratorium that CSO-OC, FRSO and other radical groups organized in August 2025.
Those are words you never hear Pulido say at Santa Ana City Council meetings.
Here is Pulido last year at the aforementioned CSO-OC rally, proudly wearing his FRSO t-shirt:
And here is Pulido, again in FRSO mode, tabling at a “No Kings” rally last October.
In the post, Pulido openly states that FRSO/CSO-OC is intent on “building a Communist Party to achieve revolution in the United States.”
The post is from the FRSO Orange County Instagram account (from which the writer has since been blocked) where Pulido and other CSO-OC members can be seen in their FRSO identities.
Diana Terreros was a speaker at CSO-OC’s “International Women’s Day” event in March 8 (judging from their social media presence, CSO-OC puts a great deal of effort into organizing sparsely attended rallies).
Terreros also describes herself as a “proud member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization.”
KeyWiki identifies Terreros is a founder of CSO-OC, adding further confirmation that the resurrected CSO-OC is merely a bland-sounding front for the communist FRSO. In media articles, she is variously identified as a member of FRSO or CSO-OC – because the two groups are interchangeable.
In order to understand where Pulido and his CSO-OC comrades are coming from, the goals animating their claims, it is necessary to understand the FRSO – the communist hive from which the CSO-OC bees come buzzing.
Fans of Mass Murderers Mao and Joseph Stalin
The socialism that Pulido and FRSO see as a social panacea isn’t the milquetoasty socialism of the British Labour Party. It is explicit, self-consciously revolutionary Marxism-Leninism of the Bolshevik variety.
To give you an idea: the FRSO views the brutal Tiananmen Square massacre not as indictment of the brutality of totalitarian Chinese Communism – but as a consequence of allowing “revisionism” to soften Maoist totalitarianism. Indeed, for the FRSO, the Chinese Communist Party’s bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrators should be celebrated as the “defeat of counter-revolution in China.”
As if that were not bad enough, the FRSO celebrates Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers in human history, responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. In November 2024, an FRSO officer presented a paper entitled “The Contributions of Stalin and The Struggle for Socialism Today” to an international meeting of Communist parties – including the Communist Party of Cuba.
“…spreading the thinking and contributions of Stalin help to illuminate the path to revolution and socialism,” gushes the author, stating that “Communists have a positive summation of Stalin’s thinking and practice.”
“Stalin led the process of socialist construction, transforming a country that had a backward, rural-centered economy into a land that was truly modern in the best sense of the word. The five-year plans developed industry at a pace that was until then unknown. In the vast rural areas, production relations were revolutionized – the old property relations which bore the marks of serfdom were swept away by the movement to collective agriculture,” the author says – unbelievably – brushing aside the liquidation of the Kulaks and man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.
Historically, communist revolutionary groups have a tendency to fracture into opposing factions (think Bolsheviks and Mensheviks). FRSO is no different: it split in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, with the “Fight Back” faction retaining the name and a hardline Marxist-Leninist world view.
It is this “Fight Back” faction that captured the CSO and turned it into a front.
FRSO/CSO-OC members advocate for revolution, not peaceful change. They literally want to overturn our system of government and way of life and impose revolutionary communism:
“We are organizing the united front against monopoly capitalism — with the strategic alliance of the multinational working class and oppressed nationality movements at its core. This is our general strategy for revolution in the U.S.“
“FRSO is recruiting and building towards the creation of a new Communist Party based on Marxism-Leninism. This is necessary to lead the way to socialism and liberation.”
Why CSO-OC’s focus on Santa Ana police? Because in their view, “as revolutionaries,” the interaction of police – which they contend are a tool of oppression – and the public is one of those “point in society where the oppressed are coming in conflict with the enemy – or in some cases the enemy’s policies and plans”:
“The units that function the best are those that are leading a specific area of work among a specific group of people. Members can apply Marxism to the situation we face, develop program and plans, and collectively develop political line for the work.”
“So for us what is key about social being is the identification of where people are experiencing exploitation and oppression, and as a result are likely to engage in struggle. Based on this we can build the mass movements, create/or develop existing mass organizations, and bring forward new communists.”
“As Mao noted, correct ideas come into being in the course of the class struggle, the struggle for production, and scientific experiment. They do not fall out of heaven.”
So for CSO-OC, their anti-SAPD activism, including their campaign of “justice for Noe Rodriguez,” is for them a wedge, a fulcrum for fomenting revolution.
Yeah – it does sound nuts. It is nuts. But that is how they think, what they believe.
CSO-OC also tries to brand itself as a protector of the Santa Ana Police Oversight Commission – and there is some truth to that, as far as it goes. The group does oppose any changes in the commission’s structure or organization.
But it is also misleading because the goal of domestic communist groups like CSO-OC is “community control of the police.” Normal people see police oversight commissions as a useful tool for…well, oversight.
For communist groups like CSO-OC, such commissions are mere starting points – vehicles for achieving control of the police. That’s what communist groups like CSO-OC, FRSO and Dare To Struggle mean by “community control”: they want to give oversight commissions to usurp the authority of elected city councils and empower them to set police policy, and hire and fire and investigate sworn officers from the police chief n down too the lowliest patrolman.
They aren’t shy about saying so. But local media have no interest in reporting that.
Funding Through Obscure Communist “Research” Institute In Minneapolis
The funding mechanism for FRSO is a 501(c)3 is Minneapolis-based Lucy Parsons Institute for Social Research (what is it about Minneapolis and left-wing radicals?).
Parsons was an anarcho-communist and a founder of the Communist-aligned Industrial Workers of the World.
The phone number listed on the Lucy Parsons Institute’s Form 990 is the contact phone number of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. The filing identifies its principal officer as Richard Berg of Chicago. Berg is an FRSO member, a paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union and host of FRSO’s “Fight Back Radio!” podcast. Last year he was the recipient of FRSO’s “Lifetime Achievement Award.“
Among its other activities, the Lucy Parsons Institute in 2023 published “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism Leninism” and distributed copies across the country for discussion groups.
The Lucy Parsons Institute had its tax exempt status revoked on August 8, 2022.
At this point, in the interests of full disclosure, the CSO-OC ought to consider re-naming itself the Communist Service Organization of Orange County.
It is tempting to simply dismiss David Pulido and other CSO-OC’s members as nothing more than lunatic fringers and go about our business. But that would be a mistake. The radical leftist groups that dominate the anti-police movement, they are organized, funded and fanatical. They are literally communists, and earnestly believe in the fantasy that America is oppressed by “racist monopoly capitalism” and that revolution is necessary to transform our way of life into something else entirely.
A couple of years ago, no one would have thought an anti-Semitic, bona fide socialist who called for dismantling the police would be elected mayor of New York City. And yet, it happened.
