One would have thought that when the IRS (and the Obama administration) got their tail feathers burned in the scandal over targeting conservative groups (through harassment and denial of tax exempt status) the IRS would use a little more caution or at least subtlety in promoting the liberal agenda. Rather, they have taken their cue from President Obama who ignores the constitutional separation of powers in favor of illegal executive orders, bureaucratic bullying, and legitimization of incompetence. And now the IRS need not worry about little things like criminal charges. According to the Wall Street Journal as reported by the Chicago Tribune, the FBI investigation of the IRS “…did not uncover the type of political bias or ‘enemy hunting’ that would constitute a criminal violation. The evidence showed a mismanaged agency enforcing rules it did not understand on applications for tax exemptions…” [Reuters] So behind this shield the administration and the IRS have doubled-down on their attack on conservatives.
But subtlety is not the liberals’ strong suit in their rush to change society into the image of a humanistic worldview. Given recent cover granted by FBI investigators, the IRS continues its storm-trooper tactics when dealing with conservative organizations. Another example surfaced in recent weeks. Friends of Abe is a relatively small conservative-leaning organization of 1,500 people in the entertainment industry who hold conservative values within the enormous and blatantly liberal industry. To be conservative in Hollywood is to risk marginalization, loss of work, and eventual banishment. Therefore Friends of Abe tends to be a secretive organization except for a few who have chosen to come out of the conservative closet. Quoting the New York Times, Friends of Abe “…keeps a low profile and fiercely protects its membership list, to avoid what it presumes would result in a sort of 21st-century blacklist, albeit on the other side of the partisan spectrum.” [New York Times]
For two years Friends of Abe has sought tax-exempt status under IRS 503(c)(3) regulations. Last week the IRS requested detailed information about meetings with conservative-leaning politicians such as Paul D. Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter and Herman Cain, as well as other matters. Previous demands by the IRS included access to the organization’s security-protected website that included all members’ names, but the organization refused the IRS’s request. Tax experts said that giving the IRS enhanced access to the secured portions of its website would have meant access to the group’s members list. The experts stated that the IRS already had access to the site’s basic level which is usually all that is required. To demand access to Friends of Abe’s security-protected site and by default the names of its members was unusual. [New York Times]
Jeremy Boreing, executive director of Friends of Abe, said, “Friends of Abe has absolutely no political agenda. It exists to create fellowship among like-minded individuals.” But for every conservative organization like Friends of Abe, there are a multitude of liberal organizations in the entertainment industry such as People for the American Way that spend millions of dollars a year directly or through affiliates on issue advocacy in Washington and elsewhere. [New York Times]
Few Americans know the history of the late 1940s and early 1950s with regard to the extent of communist infiltration of American government and the rise of anticommunism. The political and cultural fallout of these events came to define the liberal-conservative riff in American life and foreshadowed the culture wars that began in the 1960s. One of the side-stories of that era was the investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of the influence of the Communist Party within the movie industry.
During the 1930s, the political preferences of people in the movie industry covered the entire spectrum, but there was a strong tendency to lean to the liberal and left. Within this liberal-left community was a strong and active Communist presence that contained several dozen screenwriters who were Communist Party members. Large amounts of money were raised by Hollywood Communists for Party approved political and social causes. Communist influence spread into various unions associated within the entertainment industry and Popular Front causes approved by the Communist Party. Numerous actors, screenwriters, and others in the movie industry were subpoenaed and called to testify before HUAC. Some were friendly and testified as to their observations and knowledge of Communist efforts in the industry. Others, upon advice of the Communist Party, were unfriendly and took a defiant stance toward HUAC. The hostile witnesses charged HUAC with preparing America for fascism and Nazi-styled concentration camps and claimed they had a First Amendment free-speech right to refuse to answer HUAC’s questions. However, federal courts later upheld the right of Congress to subpoena witnesses and compel testimony. [Haynes, pp. 70-73.]
Following the hearings, Congress cited ten of the witnesses with contempt of Congress because of their refusal to answer questions (nine were members of the Communist Party USA and one a close ally). The ten could have avoided prosecution by invoking the Fifth Amendment and thereby refuse to give testimony that might be used against them in a criminal case. [Haynes, pp. 72-73.] The cited screenwriters became known as the Hollywood Ten and a cause célèbre for liberals to the present day.
As a result of the revelations about Communist infiltration and spying within the government and the emerging Communist threat worldwide, Americans were concerned. Mindful of public opinion and its effects on the box office, the major movie studios pledged to not employ Communists. Both Communist and non-Communist witnesses before HUAC who invoked the Fifth Amendment (estimated at 200 to 300) were swept up in the national backlash against Communism. Most of those witnesses who invoked the Fifth Amendment were or had been members of the Communist Party. However, others invoking the Fifth Amendment for whatever reasons became unwitting victims of the movie studios’ blacklist that lasted until the late 1950s. [Haynes, p. 73-74.]
Today, a great majority of the entertainment industry is fervently liberal but denies there is an informal but effective unwritten blacklist of conservatives in their industry just as the hierarchy of American universities will deny there is an omnipresent liberal bias that effectively operates as a blacklist of conservatives in academia.
However, we must not assume moral equivalence between the blacklist of Communists and fellow travelers in the entertainment industry of the 1940s and 1950s and the implicit blacklist of known entertainment industry conservatives of today. Nine of the Hollywood Ten were members of the Communist Party USA which was under the direct and dominating influence of the Comintern (Communist Party International) that trained and guided a network of Communist agents, party members, and spies bent on the overthrow of the American system of government. These were not heroes but traitors. Communism operating in America during the first half of the twentieth century was of the same political and social philosophy that was ultimately responsible for the enslavement of a third of humanity for three-fourths of the twentieth century, the consequences of which were the deaths of millions and misery unparalleled in the history of mankind. And of what are the Friends of Abe and other conservatives guilty? Their sin is to support traditional American values—those values prized by the Founders and woven into the Constitution. Liberals’ targeting of conservatives for their beliefs exposes their pervasive hypocrisy.
Liberalism dominates American culture and the leadership and institutions of American life. But, the end result of liberalism stands in stark contrast to the beliefs of a majority of Americans and the principles upon which the nation was founded. And it is in the end result of liberalism that we find the humanistic worldview and its undeniable linkage to totalitarianism.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
Reuters, “FBI doesn’t plan charges over IRS scrutiny of Tea Party: WSJ,” Chicago Tribune, January 13, 2014. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-01-13/news/sns-rt-us-usa-tax-teaparty-20140113_1_fbi-director-james-comey-irs-cincinnati-irs-scrutiny (accessed January 28, 2014).
Michael Cipley and Nicholas Confessore, “Leaning Right in Hollywood, Under a Lens,” New York Times, January 22, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/politics/leaning-right-in-hollywood-under-a-lens.html?_r=0 (accessed January 28, 2014).
John E. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era, (Chicago, Illinois: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), pp. 70-74.
