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.

Where to Begin?

           Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, do you recall from your understanding of history what happened 100 years ago?

AM: The Russian revolution took place in two phases.  In February of 1917, the socialist movement organized to delegitimize the political regime in power—Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. 

Two socialist groups led the charge—the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.  The Mensheviks believed in pure Marxism yet were tolerant of liberal views (i.e., individual liberty and property ownership).  The Bolsheviks were far less tolerant of liberal opposition, and classified people as friend or enemy, with Lenin’s vision for utopia facilitated by political elite as the litmus test.  Then, in October of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized political power from the provisional government and became known as the Communist Party.  Those who opposed Lenin’s vision would eventually be silenced—either sent to a Gulag or executed—in the year following the revolution, the Red Terror engaged in an estimated 1.5 million political and religious executions.  Here’s a passage from a Wikipedia account from a book[1] by George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police (pp. 197–198):

At Odessa the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Dnipropetrovsk; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Orel, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape. 

The same Wikipedia source recounts other forms of brutality as reported in a book[2] by Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev.  A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (p. 156):

Members of the clergy were subjected to particularly brutal abuse.  According to documents cited by the late  Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice.  An estimated 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.

IM:  What is critical to emphasize is that the Bolsheviks were socialists.  A well-documented history reports “communists have killed more than 100 million people. Countless more suffered and suffer still.”  I find it shocking that in America, Bernie Sanders, a known socialist who ran unsuccessfully for President, recently published his own book with the title, Our Revolution.  He does not hide the fact that, ideologically, he is a socialist—as if he is totally oblivious to the atrocities stemming from a socialistic society.  His language is consistent with Lenin and the Bolshevik movement.  He presumes a morally superior perspective, playing upon envy to pit the lower class against the upper class.  What amazes me is the large number of followers who wanted him to be President.

AM:  This is very disturbing to me—Gadfly and I spent over 34 years as a member of our national security team opposing the threat of socialism in Vietnam and during the Cold War.

           IM:  Yet, the younger generation has not been educated on our history, thanks to the John Dewey progressive educational philosophy that has shaped education in America for nearly a hundred years.

Old Gadfly:  I am glad you mentioned Dewey.  We’ll have another lengthy discussion centered on an excellent analysis by Henry T. Edmondson III in his book, John Dewey & The Decline of American Education:  How the Patron Saint of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching and Learning.  Meanwhile, are there indications of how bad history education is in America?

IM:  Absolutely.  There is a stark contrast between baby boomers and millennials in terms of attitudes toward capitalism and socialism.  A recent report indicates millennials are far more supportive of socialism and communism than baby boomers.  Yet, based on my own anecdotal data, baby boomers who have grown accustomed to generous welfare benefits also leaned toward Sanders and his socialistic utopia.  

           Old Gadfly:  Let’s get back to the Russian revolution.  The left is starting to describe the current protest movement as an equivalent to the Tea Party movement that emerged in 2009.

AM:  The Tea Party movement represented rallies, not protests.  No one was arrested, and there was never any violence or damage during these rallies.  These rallies expressed concerns about socialistic policies being forced upon us (such as Obamacare and other crushing regulations).  Compare these rallies with the left wing protests taking place. 

IM:  Even if there is some truth to allegations the Koch brothers financially supported some of the Tea Party efforts, the left ignores solid evidence that George Soros is clearly behind ongoing protests from the left.  In fact, the recent Women’s March on Washington was well organized and at least 50 of its partner groups have been funded by Soros.  The Koch brothers have earned their fortune through sound business practices.  Soros, on the other hand, is a convicted felon, and earned his fortune by betting on the demise of entire national currency systems.   

AM:  But more important, the Tea Party symbolically represented the historical Boston Tea Party that protested tyranny.  Similarly, the modern Tea Party advocated individual liberty, limited government, and a fair market economy.  Compare this with left wing protests that oppose the rule of law and American values of patriotism and individual responsibility. 

IM:  The left believes in identity politics and a manufactured oppression.  With this complex set of strawmen, they can then disparage liberal opposition (classical liberalism now more accurately represented by the conservative movement) by calling them the new set of “N” words—racist, bigot, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, Islamophobe, and so forth.  The political left champions themselves as the protectors of the oppressed.  Notice I said protector as opposed to liberator.  The left exploits modern Uncle Toms, like John C. Lewis and Elijah E. Cummings, as ideological warriors.   By the way, the real Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was a hero, unlike today’s pejorative meaning advanced by the intellectual left.  The political left exploits this notion of oppression to justify a large central government that imposes social justice, that is, equality for everyone (except the ruling elite).  Ironically, if there were no oppression, then there would be no need for the political left.  None of their ideas of good governance assumes a capacity for self-governing people, as envisioned by our Founding Fathers.  These dynamics explain why the left has gotten away with running inner city plantations for decades.

Old Gadfly:  I want to get back to the Russian revolution because this history is important in understanding the American revolution of 2017.  The Russian revolution was the beginning of Soviet communism.  The Communist International, commonly referred to as the Comintern, was founded in 1919, intended to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State” (see here).  According to Dictionary.com, the word soviet means, “(after the revolution) a local council originally elected only by manual workers, with certain powers of local administration. . . . (after the revolution) a higher council elected by a local council, being part of a hierarchy of soviets culminating in the Supreme Soviet.”  Bernie Sanders (and Obama’s) modern bourgeoisie are the top 1%.  Notice the abolition of the State means no borders, no national sovereignty.  This might explain the left’s resistance to building a wall and enforcing immigration laws.

AM:  The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was very active in the early part of the 20^th Century, and it was totally loyal to the Comintern. 

Old Gadfly:  The Comintern went away after WWII in the 1940s.  Yet, American support of Soviet Communism did not stop.  Thus, like al Qaeda, the socialist/communist ideology remains the organizing principle.  Since our progressive educators will not educate our children on history, we must find a way to fill this gap.  For example, till the day he died in 1996, Alger Hiss claimed he was innocent of being a Communist and Soviet spy.  To this day many, mostly those on the left, believe he was innocent.  Today, Jonathan Brent serves as the Visiting Alger Hiss Professor of History and Literature at Bard College.  Yet, Brent is not a left-wing ideologue.  See this interesting article by John Miller.  The body of evidence of Soviet Communist sympathies and actual spying is voluminous.  See for example,

Whittaker Chambers, Witness, (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery History, 1952).

J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit:  The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It, (New York, NY:  Pocket Books, Inc., 1958).

G. Edward White, Alger Hiss’s Looking Glass Wars:  The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy, (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 2004).

Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood, (New York, NY:  The Modern Library, 2000).

Allen Weinstein, Perjury:  The Hiss-Chambers Case (Stanford, CA:  Hoover Institution Press, 2013).

Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets:  The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America, (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery History, 2000).

John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies:  The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2009).

IM:  Is there a major take-away from these books?

Old Gadfly:  To my amazement, the Soviet Communist spying efforts penetrated the highest levels of our government, academia, Hollywood, and the media. 

AM:  The Flynn political assassination episode is a classic example.  On January 12, 2017, Charlie Savage reported in The New York Times, “In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power (Executive Order 12333) of the National Security Agency (NSA) to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.”  This is how the NSA was legally allowed to “share” with another agency the intercepted conversation between Flynn and the Russian Ambassador.  This classified information was then leaked to David Ignatius of The Washington Post who claimed on January 12, 2017:  “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.” 

IM:  Combine this soft coup attempt with evidence that the Obama Administration went to great lengths to (a) stack the federal appellate court system—70% are left of center, and (b) absorb political appointees ahead of veterans as career federal employees into the unelected bureaucracy, a strong argument can be made that the federal government is being infiltrated by leftist ideology.

Old Gadfly:   Stacking the appellate system seems to be working in the left’s favor, given recent actions to thwart Trumps temporary travel restriction from seven countries that lack robust vetting systems.  The left has accumulated a lot of political street smarts over the years, to include the Watergate episode in our history.  Geoff Shepard recently revealed formerly undisclosed evidence of left-wing corruption in his book, The Real Watergate Scandal:  Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot that Brought Nixon Down.   Here are some key points from the evidence:

First, Nixon, as a junior U.S. Representative, was the lead investigator in the Alger Hiss case.  Although Hiss was only convicted of perjury, Nixon was uniformly despised for his role because Hiss was highly respected among the left.

Second, special prosecutors Cox and Jaworski had political agendas, and illegally colluded with Sirica, the presiding judge, and Bazelon , the chief appellate judge to orchestrate Nixon’s prosecution.

Third, public releases of judicial action were deliberately timed for maximum effect in the media.

AM:  Do you think the left-wing effort is orchestrated?

Old Gadfly:  Again, the organizing principle is the ideology, socialism (today’s socialists prefer the label progressive).  In terms of marshaling resources, let’s look at some more evidence:

First, since 1989, according to Open Secrets.org, of the top 10 donors, six are labor unions, with the Service Employees International Union, being the largest.

Second, in the heyday of the CPUSA, front groups were critical in advancing the cause.  The protests taking place across the nation (and international system) are far from spontaneous.  See for example, the work being advanced by Indivisible.

Third, just like the role Lenin played in serving as a visible symbol for the socialist movement, Barack Obama plays that role today.  He is the leader of the Organizing for America (OFA) initiative.  Check out the OFA website.  This website, www.ofa.us, was originally called Organizing for Obama prior to the year 2009).  Here is a quote from the website:

With more than 250 local chapters around the country, OFA volunteers are building this organization from the ground up, community by community, one conversation at a time—whether that’s on a front porch or on Facebook.  We’re committed to finding and training the next generation of great progressive organizers, because at the end of the day, we aren’t the first to fight for progressive change, and we won’t be the last.

IM:  These developments seem to fit the pattern of the soviet councils following the Russian revolution.  The Bolsheviks fought for progressive change.  Millions died.  So far, fortunately, we have not seen the same brutal conditions.

Old Gadfly:   Mostly because there are a sufficient number of responsible, hard-working Americans who do not subscribe to socialism . . . for now.  But, let there be no doubt, there is a contest for the soul of America. 

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[1] George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police. (Cambridge, MA:  Oxford University Press), pp. 197–198.

[2] Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev. A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia.  (New Haven, CT:. Yale University Press, 2002), p. 156.