Assembly Dems propose 1950’s style Subversive Activities Control Board
/By Rubashov
On behalf of her party and Governor Phil Murphy, Democrat Assemblywoman Angela McKnight (D-Hudson) has proposed bill number A-5790 which “requires the Attorney General to establish and maintain a domestic extremist organization database.” McKnight’s legislation could be used as a vehicle to suppress political activity – including voter suppression – and would severely compromise protected freedoms under the Bill of Rights.
Americans have very short memories. Perhaps it is because what is taught as history in our schools is such thin gruel, but we seem to have forgotten all those nasty things that have happened in the past, to the point that our leaders both in Washington and in Trenton appear determined to relearn them again.
Some have said we are in the early days of a Third Red Scare. If we are, are legislators like Angela McKnight the new Joe McCarthy?
Historically, a Red Scare occurred when the government, with the cooperation of the media and other establishment interests, promoted widespread fear of a potential rise of ideologies they found threatening. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in American history.
The First Red Scare occurred after World War I and was brought about by a perceived threat from the organized working class labor movement within the United States, political anarchism, and the Marxist defeat of various establishment regimes in Europe. The creation of the Soviet Union out of the former Russian Empire was a major focus of the fear stoked by the media during this period.
The Second Red Scare occurred after World War II and was preoccupied with the perception that the American establishment had been infiltrated by national or foreign communists and that communist ideas were subverting American society. This period coincided with a rise in global political tensions, with the United States and the western democracies (and their empires, dependencies, and allies) on one side, and the Soviet Union and various Communist-controlled nations on the other. The fear generated and the ostracization was so effective that even an established enterprise like the Cincinnati Reds baseball team, temporarily renamed themselves the “Cincinnati Redlegs” to avoid losing money.
The “red” in Red Scare referred to the red flag of the Communist Party. As late as the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the American media referred to conservative, generally Republican-dominated states as “blue states”. During the Reagan years, the media adopted the term “red states” for what were formerly “blue states” although this designation has not moved beyond the United States. In Great Britain, for example, red continues to be the color of the Labour Party and blue the Conservative Party. Likewise in Canada, red stands for the Liberals and blue the Conservatives. Today “Red” suggests the “fly-over” hinterlands of the non-metropolitan United States.
So, this Third “Red” Scare is occurring after the Great Pandemic and in the context of the loss of faith in global capitalism and its institutions by the working class since the Global Economic Crash of 2008. This has led to tensions throughout the Western world and to the rise of populist movements on both the left and right.
(N.B. Some have suggested that the failure by America’s Military-Security Establishment to win a lasting peaceful hegemony over Islam has made future accommodation paramount and that this would necessitate the end to a “purist” interpretation of the First Amendment. Anyone who remembers the Islamic backlash in 2005 to the publication of cartoons in a Danish newspaper understands the problem America’s First Amendment poses for Islamic “feelings”.)
Enter Democrat Assemblywoman Angela McKnight. Her bill, A-5790, is of a 1950’s vintage and mirrors key provisions of the federal Internal Security Act of 1950. Wikipedia explains:
“The Internal Security Act of 1950, 64 Stat. 987 (Public Law 81-831), also known as the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, the McCarran Act after its principal sponsor Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), or the Concentration Camp Law, is a United States federal law. Congress enacted it over President Harry Truman's veto.”
President Harry S. Truman, Democrat, called the Internal Security Act “the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly since the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798,” a “mockery of the Bill of Rights” and a “long step toward totalitarianism”. The House overrode his veto, 286 to 48 the same day. The Senate overrode it the next day by a vote of 57 to 10. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey led the fight to uphold President Truman’s veto. Yes, boys and girls, once upon a time, long, long ago, Democrats actually gave a damn about the Bill of Rights.
The Internal Security Act required the United States Attorney General to maintain a database of all organizations suspected of engaging in “subversive activities” or otherwise promoting the establishment of a “totalitarian dictatorship”, either fascist or communist. The Act specifically uses the term “insurrection” and poses this law as a necessary, preventative measure against “insurrection”.
The Act established the Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate persons suspected of engaging in subversive activities. Suspects could be prevented from entering or leaving the country. Legal immigrants found in violation of the Act within five years of being naturalized could have their citizenship revoked.
Under the Act, the Attorney General required all suspect organizations to provide a list of their members, as well as “reveal its financial details”. In turning over their lists, some organizations made their members subject to being barred from federal employment. Once registered, members were liable for prosecution solely based on membership under the Smith Act due to the expressed and alleged intent of the organization.
The Act also contained an emergency detention statute, giving the President the authority to apprehend and detain “each person as to whom there is a reasonable ground to believe that such person probably will engage in, or probably will conspire with others to engage in, acts of espionage or sabotage.”
The Act made picketing a federal courthouse a felony, if intended to obstruct the court system or influence jurors or other trial participants.
That’s right, under an Act passed by the United States Congress in 1950, you could be picked up by the police and placed in a camp if they thought that you might do something. Based on the language of the Act itself, the 1971 Peter Watkins film Punishment Park captured the possibilities of what the country might look like if acted upon by a chief executive.
Set in a detention camp in an America of the possible, Punishment Park's pseudo-documentary style places a British film crew among a group of minor dissidents in “Bear Mountain Punishment Park”. The detainees in Group 637 are pursued by a squad of heavily armed police and National Guardsmen, while those in Group 638 face a corrupt quasi-judicial tribunal. Here is the film’s official trailer:
Will a similar film be produced about the Assembly Democrats' bill?
The emergency detention provision of the Internal Security Act of 1950 was repealed when the Non-Detention Act of 1971 was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. The Bill of Rights won.
Under Democrat Assemblywoman McKnight’s bill, A-5790, you don’t need to be convicted of a crime to become a target of her legislation. Under McKnight’s bill, merely the accusation that you might “commit or plan” a crime “motivated by a political or ideological viewpoint” is enough.
And like the 1950 Subversive Activities Control Board, the McKnight bill creates a two-tier approach abolishing the Bill of Rights for some citizens. A-5790 not only covers members of groups formed for a purpose that might be interpreted as “domestic extremism”, but it also includes individuals within other groups (political organizations, perhaps?) who have “associated” for a purpose that might be interpreted as “domestic extremism”. The 1950 law also allowed the Attorney General to determine if individuals not included on membership lists were to be made to register.
Assemblywoman McKnight’s bill specifically targets two groups of individuals by employment – police officers and military service members/veterans. The same Assembly Democrats who wrote legislation that blocked employers from requiring the details of a potential employee’s criminal record, now specifically target police and military/veterans as “suspects” for some unspecified future criminal activity.
A-5790 reads: “The database shall include, but not be limited to, the following information concerning each domestic extremist organization: any name or nickname associated with the organization; a description of the organization’s purpose and objectives; information concerning membership and recruiting tactics of the organization, including whether the organization is known to recruit current or former members of a law enforcement agency or the military”.
The message from the Assembly Democrats is clear: Convicted criminals are okay employees but you need to watch out for former police officers and military veterans. Hire the Con, screw the Vet. Real dirtbag behavior on the part of the Dems.
Why is this happening? Well, the first two Red Scares wiped out the honest Left in America, so that we were alone among the democracies in not having a true working class party – like the Labour Party once was in Great Britain. Instead, we muddled along with two (and only two) parties of the corporate establishment. In 2016, a most unlikely candidate harnessed the votes of enough of the politically dispossessed working class to win the White House and capture one of those two parties.
Perhaps the old communist writer Murray B. Levin explained it best when he wrote that the (first) Red Scare was “a nationwide anti-radical hysteria provoked by a mounting fear and anxiety that a revolution in America was imminent -- a revolution that would change Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life”. Except that in our case today, the revolution has already passed. “Church, home, marriage, civility, and the American way of Life” have all been altered. Only too many Americans, particularly among the politically dispossessed working class, are uncomfortable with the alterations.
Each Red Scare preached conformity of a kind. A version of America was under threat and the cudgel was needed to ensure compliance. Perhaps this Third Red Scare is about conformity as well.
“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
Noam Chomsky
