Not Their First Rodeo

Abstract:  It is natural to make generalizations about what we see and hear, even if it is merely a snapshot.  Without any historical context, the news we see today can be very plausible.  For example, this week special prosecutor Mueller made heavily redacted court filings and the national press inferred, despite not knowing what was redacted, criminal behavior on the part of President Trump.  Unless there is some doubt, the Mueller affair is purely political in its exploitation of prosecutorial tools.  Whether there is any evidence of criminal activity is yet to be determined.  However, in the light of historical context, there seems to be a pattern of tactics that are useful and effective in convicting political opponents in the court of public opinion.  More disturbing is that the organizing principle for such a concerted effort seems to have remained constant over the past several decades.

            IM:  Gentlemen, this was not a good week for President Trump.

            Old Gadfly:  Why do you say that?

            IM:  The press is saying special prosecutor Mueller’s court filings indicate criminal behavior by the President.

            Old Gadfly:  How do they know?  They are inferring criminal behavior from redacted material.

            AM:  Amazingly, what we see playing out in the court of public opinion is not the left’s first rodeo.

            Old Gadfly:  You are suggesting a pattern in terms of convicting a political opponent.  What was the first rodeo?

            AM:  The Watergate scandal.  Just today,  Chuck Todd of Meet the Press used the expression “unindicted coconspirator” in association with President Trump, first familiarized with President Richard Nixon in 1974.  Geoff Shepard, who was a member of Nixon’s inner circle, recently published a book that more accurately portrays what happened during this “scandal.”  In his book, The Real Watergate Scandal:  Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot that Brought Nixon Down, Shepard pieces together previously unavailable documents (memoranda, affidavits, etc.) previously unavailable through the Freedom of Information Act and other avenues.  What he proves is that prosecutors conspired with judges, as documented via ex parte meetings (which are illegal), coordinated leaks to the press to prep the public narrative, and illegally collaborated with a Democrat-controlled Congress.  Shepard provides a synopsis of his book in this C-Span video.

IM:  Prior to Watergate, the left was victorious in mischaracterizing an effort to mitigate Soviet communist infiltration of America’s institutions.  Investigative journalist M. Stanton Evans authoritatively explains how the left thwarted Joseph McCarthy’s efforts in his book, Blacklisted by History:  The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.  Curious about what else might be available to shed light on Soviet communist infiltration of our institutions, I discovered and read potent first-person testimonials by former communists:

·         Whittaker Chambers in his book, Witness;

·         Bella Dodd in her book, School of Darkness;

·         Manning Johnson in his book, Color, Communism, and Common Sense (a copy of the book, along with his “farewell speech about the NAACP,” is available here);

·         Englishman Douglas Hyde in his book, I Believed (available through third-party sources outside of the United States);

·         William Z. Foster in his book, Toward Soviet America;

Following Foster’s ideological legacy is Bernie Sanders and his books, Our Revolution:  A Future to Believe In; Bernie Sanders Guide to Political Revolution; Where Do We Go from Here:  Two Years in the Resistance.

Bella Dodd, who rose to membership of the National Committee of America’s Communist Party (which is alive and well--see here--in close alliance with one of America's major political parties), reflects that she was seduced by Communism’s appeal to the love of humanity, a better society, and social justice.  Early in her indoctrination, she explained her role of intellectually seducing others as a teacher at Hunter College, in this excerpt:

There were other refreshingly new courses that year and new professors, among them Raymond Moley, not yet a Roosevelt brain truster.  There were courses on the press and on public opinion. We young people were intrigued by the possibilities of participation in government control and the various means of achieving this.

In our enthusiasm we passed on to our students at Hunter what we had learned.  We challenged the traditional thinking they had brought to college with them.  We sent out girls to political clubs, too.  Soon political leaders began to find out what the idea was of sending the "kids" to their clubs.

... Before long we were saying -- and not yet realizing it was merely a rather meaningless cliche -- that the radicals of today are the conservatives of tomorrow, that there could be no progress if there were no radicals.

... By using this schematic device [categorizing people as left or right] one puts the communists on the left and then regards them as advanced liberals -- after which it is easy to regard them as the enzyme necessary for progress.

Communists usurp the position of the left, but when one examines them in light of what they really stand for, one sees them as the rankest kind of reactionaries and communism as the most reactionary backward leap in the long history of social movements.  It is one which seeks to obliterate in one revolutionary wave two thousand years of man's progress.

During my thirteen years of teaching at Hunter I was to repeat this semantic falsehood many times.  I did not see the truth that people are not born "right" or "left" nor can they become "right" or "left" unless educated on the basis of a philosophy which is as carefully organized and as all-inclusive as communism.

I was among the first of a new kind of teacher who was to come in great numbers to the city colleges. . . . (pp. 39-40)

Dodd unsuccessfully tried to leave the Communist Party until she was expelled in this manner:

On June 17, 1949, my telephone rang.  "This is the Associated Press," said a voice.  "We have received a statement from the Communist Party announcing your expulsion from membership.  It says here that you are anti-Negro, anti-Puerto Rican, anti-Semitic, anti-labor, and defender of a landlord.  Have you any statement to make?"

The New York papers carried the story the following day. . . .  (p. 220).

Sound familiar?  The educational techniques and public court of opinion smear tactics Dodd describes are as present today as they were in her day.  Consider for example, books in publication today:

·         Bini Adamczak’s book, Communism for Kids, published by MIT Press;

·         Rob Sander’s book, Peaceful Fights for Equal Rights; and

·         Martha Freeman’s book, If You’re Going to March

The last two books listed target children aged 4 to 8 and are just a sampling of “social awareness” books being published on behalf of progressive (socialist) thinking.  See for example the following photograph taken at a local bookstore.

AM:  The cultural Marxism (this expression has been adeptly diminished through demagoguery by members of the left as in this presentation) that has infected the left is succeeding because our younger generations have been deprived of a proper “liberal education” that includes an accurate portrayal of history and the real meaning of the “liberal democracy” that defeated 20^th Century totalitarianism in the form of its socialist siblings:  communism and fascism.

Old Gadfly:  Let’s unpack what you just said.

AM:  Marxism is essentially about liberating the oppressed.  Thus, there must be evidence of oppression, even if it is imagined or manufactured, to justify liberating, via social justice, those classified as oppressed.  Perhaps the most blatant examples of the oppressed are women afflicted with unwanted pregnancies (and who want the freedom to kill the life in their womb) and nontraditional sexual orientations.  Both are contrary to Judeo-Christian traditions.  To take on the mantle of a liberating force, members of the left must consider those who subscribe to the Judeo-Christian tradition as the oppressors in order to take on the moral superiority of atheistic secular humanism, where man, represented by political elite, is supreme.  Hayek saw this development in the 1940s in his book, The Road to Serfdom.  He astutely observed:

The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends.  To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends.  It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.  Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants” (Chapter on “The End of Truth,” p. 171).

It was just this week that Kevin Hart experienced what Hayek wrote about when he was forced to step down as the Oscar’s host.  We have an entire community of sexual orientations, contrary to the Judeo-Christian tradition, that have been elevated to sacred status.  Voices to the contrary are being censored and even punished (like Hart), such as the explosive investigative treatise by Enrique Rueda published in 1986 as The Homosexual Network:  Private Lives and Public Policy.  His conclusion was that homosexuality was a concerted political movement (to include pedophilia advocates such as the Howard Nichols Society in Austin, Tex., the North American Man Boy Love Association in New York and Boston, and the Rene Guyon Society in Los Angeles [see also this article published during the same period]), and even documented to what extent homosexuality had infiltrated the Catholic Church.  Father Robert Altier, of the Church of St. Raphael in Minnesota, attended seminary studies during this time and has a personal accounting (presented in a homily on August 19, 2018) of what Rueda documented.  Try finding a copy of Rueda’s book.  Amazon indicates used copies can be purchased through third-party sellers starting at $700 per copy.  Rueda assures the reader that the intent of his research was not to denigrate individuals (entitled to privacy), but to understand the nature of what he considered to be a "political movement" to impose through public policy certain beliefs (and behaviors) on others.

            Old Gadfly:  How about “liberal education” and “liberal democracy”?

            AM:  The word “liberal” is key to properly understanding these concepts.  The original meaning relates to classical liberalism, stemming from the Enlightenment era, which emphasized individual liberty, property rights, limited government, and a free market, yet still being grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition as the basis for moral reasoning.  Correspondingly, a liberal education included an appreciation for truth and justice within this framework.  Modern liberalism coopted the term liberalism and emphasized the social dimension, which is totally congruent with cultural Marxism and its social justice tactics.  Correspondingly, a modern liberal education is oriented toward a Utopian future that can only be manufactured and achieved by political elite (social planners).  Therefore, the Judeo-Christian tradition must be diminished for atheistic secular humanism to become the basis for moral reasoning.

This distinction between classical and modern liberalism is critical to understanding liberal democracy and the left’s passion and commitment to destroying President Trump.  The liberal democracy that was instrumental in destroying (at least temporarily as America’s left is actively pursuing the ideology that we fought against) socialist totalitarianism.  Our Founders/Framers knew the dangers of democracy and even wrote about it in The Federalist Papers (see numbers 10, 14, and 26).  Based on the principles of classical liberalism, our Framers, established a Constitutional Republic (the only one among the hundreds of nations), where the Constitution balanced classical liberal principles with the natural tendency toward democracy.  This balance becomes tenuous without a disciplined adherence to the Constitution, where updates in its meaning are through Article V amendments.  The left wants a living Constitution, where it is far more expedient for men and women in black robes to update the meaning of the Constitution through court rulings.  This approach is consistent with political elite behavior as described by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.

            Old Gadfly:    Political scientist George Friedman argues that nationalism is an essential condition for liberal democracy.  It reflects a common culture, language, and set of values that unite society.  Contrary to this, the left pushes multiculturalism that destroys nationalism and tragically divides society.  Even The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall has realized to what extent America’s left has further shifted to the left.  Ironically, they tend to be “better educated” (which means they have graduated from universities that are predominately leftist among faculty and administrations) and far less religious.

            IM:  I found it quite ironic that on the same day President Trump gave a speech at an American World War I military cemetery on the outskirts of Paris, France’s President Macron publicly chastised and lectured President Trump on his notion that patriotism is the opposite of nationalism.

            AM:  This folly by Macron patently demonstrates the dangers of progressivism, because its patriotism is to an imagined Utopian future and thus would be opposite to the inherent patriotism of nationalism, which is focused on the inherited wisdom of tradition.  Therefore, progressives cannot teach younger generations the truth about socialism and the millions of casualties in its wake.  Yet, America’s nationalism is what inspired thousands of Americans to liberate others oppressed by the tyranny of totalitarianism.

            Old Gadfly:  Obscured by the left’s concerted effort to destroy President Trump is the contest between socialism (mollified by using the term progressivism, unless you are Bernie Sanders or newly elected “socialists”) and liberal democracy.  Trump represents the original meaning of liberal democracy.  Unfortunately, many Americans (too many) cannot penetrate the political noise to recognize that the fundamental essence of what made America the beacon of liberty, peace, and prosperity throughout the world is vulnerable to the power-seekers of the left.  You, are correct AM.  The Mueller affair is not the left’s first rodeo.