Let’s Bring Back HUAC

By Daniel Mallock (October 2019)

 

New Planet, Konstantin Yuon, 1921

 

 

When a government is under threat, particularly a legitimate government of freedoms such as ours that exists in the United States, it becomes an essential responsibility of that government to defend itself. When the threat is external the circumstances are clear for all who care to look and to see. When the threat is largely internal and no uniforms worn but perhaps a party pin, the situation is far more complex but the threat just as real and the stakes equally existential.

 

When Lincoln was elected in 1860 the state of South Carolina immediately seceded, others of like mind and philosophy quickly followed. The secession crisis, though couched in legalistic panoply and covered with the facade of justification by its proponents, and characterized as supported by the citizenry in each seceding state the truth of the matter, rebellion and disunion, was difficult to avoid.

 

Lincoln saw his most important purpose as president to be saving the Union and the constitution from an armed rebellion. All of his decisions including the Emancipation Proclamation released following the Confederate withdrawal after the battle of Antietam (September, 1862) were heavily influenced by what Lincoln correctly saw as his essential duty to save the government and the country. Tyrannical governments never seem hesitant at saving themselves from threats, while democracies are slow-acting in doing so and fearful of overturning the open society and rule of law and due process that makes the government both not a tyranny and certainly a thing well worthy of saving. This was true for Lincoln just as it for the current president.

 

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In speaking of the pro-South forces and sentiment in the North, Lincoln said, “the enemy behind us is more dangerous to the country than the enemy before us.” According to a New York Tribune editorial of March 25, 1863, Lincoln said this to the brother of a Democrat desiring to be the next president: “Tell your brother that he cannot be the next president of the United States unless there shall be a United States to preside over.”

 

Whittaker Chambers was one of the most impressive accusers to sit before HUAC. He wrote his memoir, Witness, of having once been a true believer communist subversive agent who had realized the evil of communism and abandoned it. In abandoning it he become one of its great quiet enemies and actively took action to bring down the secret societies and networks of traitors and spies with which he once had been so closely associated in Washington and New York. One of his associates in this secret communist world of espionage was a high American official of the State Department, one Alger Hiss. Chambers’s book is an American classic and should be required reading in every high school and college in the United States. But it isn’t—so, the great lessons of character, courage, and the disturbing truth that enemies of the state are active among us (both hidden and in full view) have been lost and are now the stuff of legend and widely dismissed by the current versions of communist subversives as merely being the ruminations of paranoids. It is a book that is now just as pertinent and powerful as the day it was published many decades ago.

 

It is said by some that history is linear because we humans are linear—we live then we don’t; all in a chronological straight line determined by the calendar and the whimsy of fate and/or plan of God (or interference by some abortionist who cynically and cruelly derails the entire thing). History is linear, but it is also circular and now we find ourselves back once again in the milieu of dark NYC and Washington, DC streets where traitors and enemies meet in secret, just as they did during Chambers’s time almost 100 hundred years ago, plotting how most effectively to undermine the nation and the government.

 

No country is not without its enemies. After decades of deconstruction and self-flagellation in the media and in the schools, and self-hate, and the denial of political and historical realities large numbers of Americans are now actively engaged in revolutionism. This neo-Jacobin movement is powered by ignorance, self-hatred, utopianism, and hatred of their fellow Americans much in the way that many Southern nationalists hated their brethren of the northern states prior to the Civil War. That the Democrat political party should be the epicenter of this present day revolutionism should come as no surprise because the Confederate Revolution of 1861 was entirely due to Democrat politicians and their adherents, opposed ironically perhaps by the first Republican president in US history, Lincoln. That the Democrat party was the party to protect slavery and go to war over it and the Republican party the anti-slavery, abolition party is a fact now lost on too many Americans.

 

It would be wrong to say that all Democrats during the Civil War were secessionists and defenders of the slave system, they weren’t, just as it would be incorrect to suggest that all Democrats today are utopian, neo-Jacobin, globalist, revolutionists; they’re not. It is true however that most of the revolutionary impetus now active in this country comes directly from the Democrat party; unimpressive Democrat presidential candidates embrace and encourage these ideas, and the radicalized base that these fringe politicians represent welcome these subversive concepts with fervor and sometimes more.

 

And what is the great crime of the leftist democrat utopian neo-Jacobin globalist communist revolutionaries? Their great crime is offering a totalitarian political ideology as a legitimate replacement for our democracy and open society because, they say, the United States has failed and always has.

 

This self-hatred espoused by the revolutionists is both incredibly gross, and incredibly dangerous. Whittaker Chambers learned what our modern leftists have not, that Communism is an evil failure. It’s a simple matter to learn: read history, talk to any refugee from the Soviet Union, talk to anyone abused by Chinese Communist totalitarianism. Ours is a time of ignorance and bitterness, and virulently held false beliefs; it is a time that merits a reaction, just as reaction against the homicidal totalitarian Jacobins of the French Revolution finally came about. Ours is a time both caused by and then resulting in this revolutionary leftist Democrat lunacy and utopian efforts to overturn the government and constitution. It is a national crisis—and not merely a political election campaign with fringe extremist cranks for Democrat party candidates, and a large segment of the electorate uninformed, ignorant, blinkered, and hopeless.

 

Many Democrats proudly proclaim that they are socialists. Socialism is another way to say “Communist.” Communism is one of the great political lies tragically heaped upon humanity based entirely on fraudulent political analyses, and a grotesque misunderstanding of what motivates humans and makes them happy. It is fascinating to observe how readily Democrat-Communists ignore the body count of this disreputable failure, this miserable, evil, criminal political ideology. This suggestion by modern communists of the American left and Democrat political party that government will solve problems that it was never meant to nor designed to solve and that government control and loss of freedoms will somehow bring the people happiness is a bizarre confusion based on flimsy lies and ignorance. But so many have fallen for this lunacy and loudly involve themselves in the political process and do other things to bring this grotesque fantasy utopian paradise to fruition that they are a threat to the government and the constitution. They have proclaimed as much themselves.

 

How do we deploy the apparatuses of the government to protect itself and the country that it governs? How do we acknowledge the threat of this virulent contagion of communist utopian globalist fantasy thinking that views the United States as a failed state deserving replacement? How do we deploy the apparatuses of the government in such a way that revolutionists are exposed and held accountable? How do we protect the state from revolutionists, fraudulent fellow-traveler journalists, media types, and greedy hypocrite gazillionaire leftist geeks who use their platforms and technologies to undermine the country?

 

First, lying journalists should be sued for libel and slander when such suits are applicable. The recent NYT slander against Justice Kavanaugh is the perfect situation for this. One hopes that the judge will file suit. Thomas Jefferson fully understood that an out-of-control hyper-partisan press was a threat to the state and a total failure of the purposes of journalism and journalists. The press is an essential element of the structure of the state, which is why it is protected as the 4th Estate. Abuse of these privileges and abandonment of these responsibilities should be exposed and those guilty held accountable. The press is clearly incapable of policing itself and enforcing legitimate standards upon itself; a legal solution is required to rectify this public nightmare and crime against the country.

 

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• Let’s Bring Back HUAC

 

And what of HUAC? Do we need a new House Un-American Activities Committee? Can we avoid the McCarthy era abuse of the processes yet use the government to protect the government from revolutionary forces? There must be a way to do this in fairness and justice and bring before the American people those views and those cranks and those ideological enemies who hold such views that are inimical and hostile to the country. These revolutionist views must be exposed as the pathetic frauds that they are, and those who hold them prevented from doing harm.

 

Are we “there” yet? No, we are not. But we are very close, and certainly on a dark road—failure to act will mean unimaginable failure in the long run. This is an existential conflict involving the survival of the country. Such efforts should be bi-partisan because the safety of the country is the business of every legitimate party and patriot. No delay for Democrat participation should be brooked.

 

Such as it was long ago so it is, most unfortunately, now: the seeds of utopian revolution come from the Democrat party. Yet, now, as then, the Democrat party continues apace unencumbered in our free democracy in which the freedom of speech and of association remains untouched and encouraged.

 

During this election cycle where tyranny and democracy and freedom are again at war, we ought to take Mr. Lincoln’s advice. While this author would never recommend anyone voting for a democrat candidate in any local, city, county, state, or national election the following Lincoln story is provided here as a public service for any reader who might be considering such a misbegotten course:

 

When one of the military telegraph operators known to Lincoln was said to be returning to Pennsylvania, Lincoln asked him if he was returning home to vote. Declaring to the president that this would be his first time voting and that he would be voting for the Democrat ticket, Lincoln, a Republican, said, “Be sure you vote for the right kind of Democrats.”

 

Ours is a time of crisis as the waves of history recede and expand before us and over us. We have seen this all before, and likely will again. Our country is no tyranny nor fascism regardless of fringe politicians and their acolytes saying that it is. It is so that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

 

Our country is a shining light on a hill; those who want to switch off the light must be opposed and exposed. The government and the people have means to do this—if not yet the will. In times of national danger, the threats must be identified, interdicted, and de-legitimized.

 

Is it time for a new HUAC? Only you can decide.

 

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Daniel Mallock is a historian of the Founding generation and of the Civil War and is the author of The New York Times Bestseller, Agony and Eloquence: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and a World of Revolution.

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