Rachel Maddow is too young and too inexperienced to know much about the matters she referenced in her December 2009 burst of political correctness aimed at The John Birch Society. So, she relied on erroneous popular notions and misleading researchers for her faulty ammunition.
Samples of what she offered and especially, what she didn’t offer, follow.
Nelson Mandela No Hero to Lovers of Freedom
MSNBC’s commentator led off her criticism of JBS for its characterization of Nelson Mandela as “a communist terrorist thug.” Evidently, no one ever informed her that at Mandela’s trial for treason in 1964, prosecutors produced a document in his own handwriting containing his claim, “We communist party members are the most advanced revolutionaries in modern history.”
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At the trial that led to his conviction and incarceration for plotting destruction of the government of South Africa, prosecutors also provided incriminating evidence gathered during a raid on the joint headquarters of the Mandela-allied African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party. At that time, authorities uncovered a plan for a communist-led uprising in South Africa that would use 48,000 land mines, 210,000 hand grenades, 1,500 time fuses to make bombs, and other military equipment.
As far back as 1944, Mandela had co-authored the manifesto for the Youth League of the ANC. Of the 22 key ANC leaders, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism noted in November 1982 that 11 were communist party members and 13 were members of “Spear of the Nation,” the ANC’s military wing that had been co-founded by Mandela and South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo (both of whom are in the photo, along with Winnie Mandela).
In 1988, an official U.S. government publication entitled Terrorist Group Profiles listed Mandela’s friends in the ANC as members of a terrorist organization. After intense international pressure forced the South African government to release the self-proclaimed revolutionary in 1990, he proudly proclaimed “I salute the South African Communist Party,” and then announced that “armed struggle” that had already taken the lives of thousands of Black South Africans would “continue.”
No one, of course, will find any of these facts about Mandela in the film Invictus currently being offered in theaters throughout our nation. Maddow and many like her will learn their skewed history about Mandela and what really transpired in South Africa, not from facts supplied by official Senate reports that were publicized by The John Birch Society, but by Hollywood leftists who hardly ever depict a communist or a key communist ally as the terrorist thugs they truly are.
Impeach Earl Warren
After showing a photo of a billboard depicting the Society’s 1960’s slogan “Impeach Earl Warren,” Maddow insisted that the Society targeted the Supreme Court Chief Justice because of his leadership role in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision regarding segregation of the nation’s public schools.
The Society did openly contend that the decision amounted to a usurpation of power by the Court and that the federal government had absolutely no authorization to meddle in education at any level. But the Warren Court blew numerous other holes in the Constitution that were condemned by constitutionalists throughout the nation. One of its decisions effectively outlawed prayer and Bible reading in the public schools.
After several of the Warren Court’s June 17, 1957 decisions that glaringly favored communists, a West Coast communist newspaper declared, “This is the greatest victory the Communist Party ever had.” And in September 1957, communists held a rally in New York City in order to “To pay honor to the U.S. Supreme Court and its recent decisions.”
By 1966, constitutional expert L. Brent Bozell issued The Warren Revolution, his scholarly book full of charges against the Chief Justice and his left-leaning colleagues. The brother-in-law of William F. Buckley (who, incidentally, was cited by Maddow to support her attack on the Society), Bozell and his wife, Buckley’s younger sister, later denounced their famous relative. There are plenty of others who condemned what Earl Warren did as the nation’s Chief Justice.
A more able television journalist might have pointed out that Justice Hugo Black, one of Warren’s reliable compatriots on the Court, had a history of membership in the odious Ku Klux Klan. If Maddow wanted to condemn racial segregation, she could have targeted Black for his early years of KKK affiliation. Instead, she wrongly attacked The John Birch Society that has always condemned the KKK and its hateful policies.
To insist that The John Birch Society opposed Warren because of his role in desegregating the nation’s schools (the Society has always opposed both forced segregation and forced integration) is the kind of misrepresentation that can be expected of someone who relies on sloppy research or is a captive of mind-numbing political correctness. As in many other instances where the Society led in alerting the nation to problems, the organization’s campaign to Impeach Earl Warren sounded an alarm about judicial activism that many in America now recognize as a very serious problem.
Fluoridation of Water Supplies
Maddow then claimed that the Society considered the addition of fluoride to the drinking water “a communist mind-control plot.” She produced a page from a 1960 JBS publication that never said what she claimed while it recommended that citizens oppose the practice “if communists have been able to beguile a sufficiently large enough” portion of the population to want this questionable form of mass medication.
The chief reason why the Society opposed adding that substance to the water supplies was always that doing so is indicative of totalitarian control. Fluoride in the water treats the people whereas chloride added to reservoirs treats the water. The totalitarian mindset behind such a practice was referenced in an August 10, 1968 Boston Globe article. Tufts University School of Medicine Professor Dr. Melvin Ketchel approvingly stated in the article that authorities could add birth control substances to the water supply in order to control population growth.
In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich commented: "Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size."
Adding fluoride to water supplies wasn’t a “communist mind-control plot,” as Maddow erroneously claimed was the position of The John Birch Society. But the practice provides evidence of the kind of totalitarianism characteristic of communists and those who have been captured by their style of thinking.
What About Dwight Eisenhower?
Displaying “gotcha” mentality in full bloom, Maddow made reference to the contention by JBS Founder Robert Welch that Dwight Eisenhower was an “agent” of the communist conspiracy. Note that Welch did not say that the former President was himself a communist. Is the agent of a movie star or an athlete the screen idol or the ballplayer? Of course not.
Was Eisenhower an agent for communism when he betrayed millions who resisted repatriation to Russia at the end of World War II? Many of those unfortunate individuals committed suicide as an alternative to being forced into cattle cars for transportation to Soviet gulags.
Did Eisenhower then betray the brave Hungarian Freedom Fighters who revolted against Soviet tyranny at the urging of the U.S. government in 1956? Did his administration even block the plans of other nations to aid the Freedom Fighters?
Did Eisenhower and his State Department aid Castro in his takeover of Cuba in 1959 when the bearded revolutionary was known by some, including Robert Welch, to be a communist?
The answer to these questions, and many more similar in nature, is an emphatic yes. Of course, it can’t be expected that Rachel Maddow and her handlers would have read the 300 pages of damning evidence showing that Dwight Eisenhower helped communists to take control of and then maintain their domination over nation after nation. (See Robert Welch’s 1963 book, The Politician for the evidence.)
Communist Plan To Create a Negro Soviet Republic
The MSNBC commentator joyously ridiculed the Society for claiming the existence of a “secret communist plot to create a Negro Soviet Republic” in America’s Southeast. Way out on a limb again because of her inexperience, lack of historical knowledge, politically correct nastiness, and deficient research, she obviously has no knowledge of a 48-page booklet produced by the communist-controlled Workers Library Publishers in 1935.
Authored by self-proclaimed communists James W. Ford and James S. Allen, the booklet carries the title "The Negroes in a Soviet America.” On page 39 one can read “The Negro Soviet Republic,” followed by details about what they hoped to accomplish.
Maddow scoffed at the notion that communists had ever sought such a fracturing of the United States. She even laughingly quoted a JBS claim that this breakup would include communist domination in such cities as “Richmond, Virginia, New Orleans and Memphis.”
What did the communist publication say? It said that the new Republic sought by the communists “would be certain to include such cities as Richmond and Norfolk, Va., Columbia and Charleston, S.C., Atlanta, Augusta, Savannah and Macon, Georgia, Montgomery, Alabama, New Orleans and Shreveport, La., Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee. In the actual determination and boundaries of the new Republic, other industrial cities may be included.” Once again, The John Birch Society, not Rachel Maddow, was correct.
The communists didn’t succeed in creating their Soviet Republic in our nation’s Southeast. Maddow could have congratulated The John Birch Society for its efforts over many years in thwarting this communist plan by reproducing and distributing many thousands of copies of this communist booklet to alert fellow Americans. Instead, she exposed her own deficiencies by condemning the organization for pointing out what is easily shown to have been a major communist project during the mid-1900s.
Is There a Conspiracy?
Maddow led off her supposed “correction” of The John Birch Society’s contentions with vocally emphasized ridicule of the idea that any such thing as a “communist conspiracy” ever existed. Had she relied on competent researchers or if she knew any history unclouded by her need to be politically correct, she would never have embarrassed herself so gravely. Here is some of what she either ignored or has always been totally unaware of the many who know of the conspiracy’s existence:
1. In 1949, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson labeled the Communist Party in America “a conspiratorial and revolutionary junta” while upholding congressional moves that outlawed the Communist Party in the United States.
2. Among 12 major conclusions published at the close of its comprehensive July 30, 1953 report, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee stated: 1) “The Soviet international organization has carried on a successful and important penetration of the United States government and this penetration has not been fully exposed.” 12) “Policies and programs laid down by members of this Soviet conspiracy are still in effect within our Government and constitute a continuing hazard to our national security.”
3. In the August 1956 issue The Elks Magazine, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover expressed his deep concerns about the communist conspiracy: “We must face the harsh truth that the objectives of communism are being steadily advanced…. No one who truly understands what it really is can be taken in by it. Yet the individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.”
4. At the 1958 meeting launching The John Birch Society, founder Robert Welch stressed the need to combat conspiracy and marshaled a great deal of evidence to back up his conclusion that communism “is not a political party, nor a military organization, nor an ideological crusade….” It is, he contended, “wholly a conspiracy….”
5. In his 1962 book Why Not Victory, Senator Barry Goldwater arrived at the very same conclusion when he stated, “Communism is an international criminal conspiracy.”
6. While there are numerous others who agreed about the existence of a conspiracy aiming to seize control of the planet, let us end this listing with comments made by journalist Carl Bernstein in his 1989 book Loyalties. Growing up with parents who were communists, he included this relationship in his early manuscript and then shared it with his father. He wrote about the reaction his parents gave to possible publication of that bit of history. Calling what his son had written “dangerous,” the elder Bernstein said, “You’re going to prove McCarthy right, because all he was saying was that the system was loaded with communists. And he was right.” Carl Bernstein courageously included those statements in his published work.
To deny the existence of a communist conspiracy and to ridicule anyone who has made such a claim, as Maddow did on her television program, is absurd.
Our Conclusion
Correcting Rachel Maddow and her attack on The John Birch Society is hardly a daunting task. Never accusing her of “lying” as she claimed, the Society certainly does accuse her of being grossly and frequently incorrect.
We trust that anyone who now understands how incredibly wrong she is about her numerous claims in this instance will find other sources for their perspective about current events. Let us offer all the alternative of The John Birch Society. Its books, magazines and DVD productions will not mislead anyone and will prove to be very worthwhile alternatives to MSNBC’s factually incorrect, but definitely politically correct, evening commentator.
And let us close this report about how wrong this one TV commentator is about The John Birch Society by repeating an offer already made. Maddow has been informed that a spokesman for The John Birch Society would promptly appear on her program to discuss the Society and its 50+ years of calling the shots and slowing down the plan to lead our nation into a communist-style New World Order.
Fairness would dictate that the offer be accepted but it has been ignored.
Fairness does not seem to be in vogue at MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow program.
John F. McManus is president of The John Birch Society and publisher of The New American. This article originally appeared at JBS.org.
