Washington, D.C. – Accuracy in Media will honor Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro, WMAL talk show Chris Plante and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) with this year’s Reed Irvine journalism awards at a cocktail reception on Tuesday, April 21st at the Capitol Hill Club.
Jeanine Pirro will receive the Reed Irvine Award for Investigative Journalism for her Fox News program, “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” during which she regularly pierces the veil on issues that the mainstream media misreport or ignore, such as the vulnerability of our electrical grid to an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, and the unfolding Benghazi scandal and government cover-up.
AIM will also honor Chris Plante, a Washington, D.C. talk radio host who will receive the Reed Irvine Award for Excellence in Journalism. As host of “The Chris Plante Show” on WMAL, he serves as a one-man media watchdog powerhouse from 9 am to noon, five days a week.
Rep. Lamar Smith, founder and chairman of the Media Fairness Caucus, will receive the Reed Irvine Award for Accountability in Journalism for his tireless efforts to challenge the media’s biased reporting and raise the standards of mainstream press coverage.
WHEN: Tuesday, April 21, 2015
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
The event will begin promptly at 6:15 pm.
WHERE: Capitol Hill Club
300 First Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003
Room: Eisenhower Room (1st Floor)
The Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award was established in 2005 to honor journalists for their courageous and principled reporting in the tradition of AIM founder Reed Irvine. Previous award winners include Andrew Breitbart, Sharyl Attkisson, Michelle Malkin and the late M. Stanton Evans.
For further information, please RSVP using EventBrite or contact Spencer Irvine at [email protected] or 202-364-4401, ext.103.
With media coverage slanted in favor of gay marriage by a five-to-one ratio, it’s unlikely that the legal documents being filed before the Supreme Court in favor of a traditional one man and one woman marriage will ever be covered in an objective fashion.
Yet, some of the legal briefs carry ominous warnings about what could happen to the American system of democratic self-government and its Christian heritage if the Supreme Court unilaterally decides to impose same-sex marriage on the states. They also warn about freedom of the press and religion being threatened by a powerful pro-homosexual movement that requires obedience to its desires and demands.
The court will hear arguments on April 28 and rule in June.
A powerful brief filed by the firm of William J. Olson, P.C., Attorneys at Law, and the U.S. Justice Foundation cites the late conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans in his book The Theme of Freedom as saying that homosexuality constitutes “a reversion to pagan ways of thinking,” and that putting the United States on the road to paganism could lead to a government “with totalitarian powers.”
Examining the nature of the homosexual movement and where it is driving the nation, the legal brief notes that sexual categories once limited to heterosexual and homosexual have now been expanded to include more than 50 gender options, as defined by Facebook, and that “some consider pedophilia to be a legitimate sexual orientation, returning us to the pagan pederasty of ancient Greece.”
With the court affirming same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, the lawyers see the culture sliding further into debauchery. “Television no doubt will become even more pro-homosexual,” the attorneys argue, “making it more difficult for persons adhering to traditional values to live their lives and raise their children in an increasingly debased culture.”
“In this brave, new, homosexual-friendly world,” they go on, “every licensed professional would be required to embrace the new orthodoxy, to bow down to the idol of ‘non-discrimination,’ or be cast out of his profession. People who first claimed only to want tolerance of their behavior will allow no toleration for other views.”
The Olson brief says a Court decision in violation of America’s founding principles could directly affect the free press rights of those offering information about withdrawing from homosexual behavior. Websites offering such counseling could be outlawed as “hate speech,” the legal document says.
“In California,” the document notes, “it is already a crime” to counsel minors that homosexuals can change their sexual orientation. It says New Jersey passed a similar statute, which was recently upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. This statute was signed into law by New Jersey’s Republican Governor Chris Christie.
“Newspapers likely will be forced to publish homosexual wedding announcements, in violation of their existing editorial control over what they publish,” the attorneys assert.
A decision in favor of same-sex marriage could also result in Christians being “driven from public office” for objecting to participation in gay marriage ceremonies, the brief says.
The Olson firm and the U.S. Justice Foundation filed the brief on behalf of Public Advocate of the U.S., Joyce Meyer Ministries, U.S. Justice Foundation, The Lincoln Institute, Abraham Lincoln Foundation, Institute on the Constitution, Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Pastor Chuck Baldwin.
The brief says that a constitutional right to homosexual marriage could supersede the religious freedom of churches, ministries, Christian schools and colleges, and that these entities “would be placed in jeopardy of losing their federal tax-exempt status.” The loss of federal income tax-exempt status “could lead to loss of contribution income, and forfeiting of church properties to pro-homosexual charities,” the brief says. In addition, it goes on, “criminal penalties might be imposed on church leaders. In Idaho, two pastors recently were threatened with fines and jail time unless they performed homosexual marriages at their wedding chapel.”
In addition to the threat posed to the First Amendment rights of a free press and religious expression, the conservative public interest law firm Judicial Watch has filed a brief noting that the will of the American people through the voting process has already been subverted by liberal judges.
The group points out that “most of the States where the traditional definition of marriage has been changed has been done through judicial actions and not the will of the people. And in fact, several States including California and Virginia where the voters clearly desired to maintain the traditional definition of marriage, state administrators and federal courts denied their collective voices.”
“The right to vote is clearly defined in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution,” Judicial Watch points out. Yet, courts have declared through “judicial fiat” that “the millions of voters who democratically adopted the marriage amendments were wrong,” thereby abridging “the right to vote of each and every one of those citizens.”
The brief goes on to say that “The message sent to these citizens is that, despite engaging in the democratic process and debate regarding issues predominately within the state sphere and casting their constitutionally protected votes, when a federal court decides it knows better, their votes will mean nothing. The inevitable consequence of this type of federal interference will be voter disenfranchisement. How can we beat the patriotic drum of voter involvement when the ultimate end can be erased by a few federal judges?”
The Olson brief also takes up the theme of the American people being denied their say in these matters, noting cases of judges who “have treated challenges to traditional marriage as an opportunity to exercise raw political power…”
Inevitably, the lawyers warn, the nation could witness the legalization of multiple-partner and incestuous marriages.
“If it were not for double-standards, liberals would have no standards at all.”
Recently a hero of mine passed away: conservative warrior M. Stanton Evans (1934-2015). Mr. Evans had a sharp wit, and an even sharper mind. He was a well-respected journalist, editor and author, and a true historian in his own right, in my opinion. Although I would suspect Stan Evans would take exception to my labeling him an “historian.” He instead preferred the title of “amateur historian.” But I think he deserves the title of historian, minus the “amateur” qualifier. But that’s just the kind of man Evans was–humble and genuine.
A native of Texas, M. Stanton Evans was a leader in the conservative movement for over four decades. He wrote for National Review, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, and The Freeman, and served for 14 years as editor of the Indianapolis News. Mr. Evans was a political commentator for news organizations such as CBS and National Public Radio for over twenty years, and he founded the National Journalism Center in 1977. A former chairman of the American Conservative Union, he was also a professor of journalism at Troy University. He received numerous honorary degrees and awards.
Evans wrote nine books. And I would highly recommend any of his works. One book I read by M. Stanton Evans delved deeply into the untold story and history of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy titled Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies. I must admit, after reading it, I’ve never been the same since. As a matter of fact, it took me a long time to get through all 600-plus pages because I kept stopping to do my own research on the astonishing revelations contained in his seminal work.
M. Stanton Evans pored over some 110,000 FBI documents concerning the McCarthy hearings for some 10 years before his book Blacklisted by History was officially published in 2007. It is meticulously researched. Evan’s book on McCarthy has been called “the Rosetta Stone of liberal lies.”
Evans was close friends with the late Herbert Romerstein, who wrote the well-researched book The Venona Secrets. The Venona decrypts were encrypted communications going back and forth between Moscow and their Soviet agents operating within the United States. They reveal a breathtaking level of infiltration at the highest levels within the U.S. government, going all the way up to the White House. Evans and Romerstein collaborated on the book Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, an appropriate followup to Blacklisted by History.
Two people greatly influenced by M. Stanton Evans’ work were Ann Coulter and author Diana West, who recently wrote the compelling book American Betrayal—which is also meticulously researched, and contains a plethora of original source information and numerous citations. Ann Coulter’s book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism is largely based on Evans’ book Blacklisted by History.
In 2013, M. Stanton Evans spoke at Hillsdale College, enlightening and entertaining the audience with some little known history that, in my opinion, needs to be shouted from the rooftops. This was also Mr. Evans’ desire—that aspiring journalists, historians and writers would grab the proverbial baton and take off where he left off.
From this point on I would like to go over some of the little-known history and facts Mr. Evans brought up during his presentation at Hillsdale College.
The thesis of Evans’ speech at Hillsdale concerned comparisons between scandals like Watergate versus current scandals within the Obama Administration, such as Benghazi and the IRS targeting of conservative groups.
M. Stanton Evans was a true conservative. And he was no fan of President Richard Milhouse Nixon. As a matter of fact, Stan Evans assisted the campaign of John Ashbrook, who ran against Nixon in 1972. Naturally, this did not score any points with Richard Nixon. Evans went on to say, “I didn’t like Nixon, until Watergate.”
Some of the reasons Stan Evans was none too enamored with Nixon had to do with many of the “progressive” policies Nixon embraced and championed during his term as U.S. president.
For example, Evans points to Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s role in the “thawing out” or “un-freezing “of relations between the Soviet Union and Red China known as détente (“relaxation”). This period was marked by numerous SALT (strategic arms limitation talks) agreements and ABM (anti-ballistic missile) treaties. Nixon also implemented wage and price controls, and founded the EPA and OSHA. Nixon was also quoted as saying, “We’re all Keynesians now.”
“After all that, Watergate was a breath of fresh air,” said Evans. This explains why Evans has stated, “I never liked Nixon, until Watergate.”
One of the major thrusts of Evans’ 2013 speech at Hillsdale concerned the mobilization of government against any political dissent. Evans claims the weight of the federal government against its dissenters goes all the way back to FDR’s administration.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was opposed by a group called the America First Committee, which was founded by Charles Lindbergh. General Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Company, presided over the committee. America First was a non-interventionist group opposed to America’s entry into World War Two. Regardless of how one might feel about America First and Lindbergh’s views on staying out of the Second World War, it would be hoped that most Americans would be disturbed by the heavy-handed way the U.S. government decided to deal with the organization.
FDR brought the full weight of the government against America First and a magazine called Scribner’s Commentator, the unofficial voice of the America First Committee. FDR’s efforts eventually put Scribner’s magazine out of business.
An article appearing in the Wall Street Journalelaborates further on the use of the IRS by FDR, and other U.S. presidents, to shut down critics:
President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who were opposed to the New Deal, including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Roosevelt also dropped the IRS hammer on political rivals such as the populist firebrand Huey Long and radio agitator Father Coughlin, and prominent Republicans such as former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Perhaps Roosevelt’s most pernicious tax skulduggery occurred in 1944. He spiked an IRS audit of illegal campaign contributions made by a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson, whose career might have been derailed if Texans had learned of the scandal.
It was FDR who first employed wiretapping. The practice continued under the subsequent Truman Administration, as well as coverups like the manipulation of grand juries. The first example occurred during the Amerasia Spy Case. In 1947, there was obstruction of justice of the grand jury hearing the case of around 40 Soviet agents that were on the federal payroll. The grand jury manipulation by the Truman Administration resulted in all the agents being freed.
The culmination of all this came under the administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK), following through to Lyndon Baynes Johnson’s (LBJ) presidency. This is little known and unpopular history that many liberal historians would prefer to either gloss over, or ignore altogether.
There was extensive use of wiretapping by JFK’s administration. An all-out campaign was waged to silence political opponents by using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The so-called Fairness Doctrine was founded in its modern form under Kennedy. The list is long in measures taken to silence opponents of JFK’s New Frontier—a label for his administration’s domestic and foreign programs.
The key to all this is the Reuther Memorandum, named after socialist labor organizer Victor Reuther, brother of Walter Ruether, a leading official with the United Automobile Union (UAW). The Reuther’s were big backers of JFK and his New Frontier, and staunchly opposed to conservatives in all their modulations.
Senator Robert Kennedy, Victor Reuther and John Reuther in 1968.
The Reuther Memorandum was a December 19, 1961, letter from Victor Reuther to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, which spells out a game plan for silencing conservatives. M. Stanton Evans dedicates a chapter on the Reuther document in his book The Liberal Establishment (1965).
Another author, Fred W. Friendly (a liberal), covered the Reuther memorandum in his book The Good Guys, the Bad Guys, and the First Amendment: Free Speech vs. Fairness in Broadcasting (1976), and how it was used to crush opposition and dissent by using the IRS, FCC, and other government bureaus.
Point three of the Reuther plan states “the flow of big money to the radical right should be dammed to the extent possible”—namely, by use of IRS audits, and denying or revoking the tax-exempt status of right-of-center political education groups. The Reuther strategy was also continued under LBJ’s administration. All of this was carried out under JFK and Bobby Kennedy in the early 60s, including the personal involvement of the President of the United States himself.
Benjamin C. Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post for 25 years, until his death in 2014, was executive editor of Newsweek during JFK’s presidency, and a big player during the Watergate scandal. He also wrote the book Conversations with Kennedy.
Bradlee wrote about a conversation he had with President John F. Kennedy, claiming JFK told him he went into the tax returns of wealthy Americans, including John Paul Getty, and said they were not paying very much taxes. Kennedy allegedly told Bradlee: “I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this … it’s probably illegal.” Bradlee never mentioned a word about this conversation at the time, but included it in his book.
In response to the Reuther letter, the Ideological Organizations Project was launched by the IRS, with help from Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Another liberal author, John A. Andrew III, wrote the book Power to Destroy: The Political Uses of the IRS from Kennedy to Nixon. The first two chapters cover the Ideological Organizations Project, and lists organizations targeted by the IRS in order to shut them down. Lo and behold, they were all conservative groups.
There are uncanny similarities between the Ideological Organizations Project and the ongoing IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative groups under the Obama Administration. Obama’s IRS went so far as to question conservative groups about which books they have read, even questioning them about the nature of their “prayers.”
Of course, there are those who say the current IRS targeting is nothing but a “phony scandal,” including President Obama. In an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, the president alleged there wasn’t even a “smidgen of corruption” concerning the targeting of conservative and Christian groups seeking tax-exempt status.
Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS.
Yet former IRS head Lois Lerner pleaded the fifth when questioned about her involvement in the targeting scandal. Additionally, a second IRS staffer, Gregory Roseman, pleaded the fifth as well during the House Oversight Committee’s investigation of the IRS.
Gregory Roseman, who worked as a deputy director of acquisitions at the IRS, exercised his constitutional rights when Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) started interrogating him about panel findings that he helped a friend procure potentially $500 million worth of IRS contracts.
Senior IRS manager Gregory Roseman invokes the Fifth Amendment during the 2013 IRS targeting controversy.
As Stan Evans points out, and evidenced by the Reuther memorandum, U.S. administrations have a long history of weaponizing government agencies for use in squelching their political competition.
During the Watergate scandal, Nixon tried to mobilize the IRS against his rivals, but he didn’t get very far. IRS staffers were not interested in helping Nixon, but did help JFK during his presidency.
Furthermore, there were a series of very serious coverups that occurred on President Kennedy’s watch, that one could argue far surpassed the Watergate scandal in gravity and scope.
For example, there was the overthrow of South Vietnam’s first president Ngo Dinh Diem on November 1, 1963, just three weeks prior to the assassination of JFK. Diem was murdered the very next day. The coup against Diem was organized by the U.S. government. The action was taken on behalf of the State Department by then Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Roger Hilsman, and former Nixon running mate Henry Cabot Lodge, who was also the ambassador to Saigon.
The removal of Diem resulted in the disintegration of the anti-communist resistance in South Vietnam. Granted, Kennedy may not have known about the involvement of Lodge and Hilsman in organizing a coup d’tat against Diem. But it does all trace back to people within his administration.
President Richard Nixon with Henry Cabot Lodge
Roger Hilsman, Department of State
A second example of a major coverup during JFK’s presidency is the story of Otto Otepka, Deputy Director of the United States State Department’s Office of Security in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Otto Otepka
Otepka was focused on John Stewart Service, who was implicated in the Amerasia Spy Case. The JFK administration wiretapped Otepka, ransacked his office, and bugged his phone in the early 60s.
John Stewart Service
The coverups and machinations of JFK’s administration go far beyond the exploits of Richard M. Nixon. But this history is often overlooked, or swept under the rug by liberal authors and historians.
One very important point M. Stanton Evans made during his 2013 speech at Hillsdale College is the fact that most historians nowadays have a left-bent. Many historians are liberals. Mr. Evans encouraged conservatives to write more about history, so that important or little known history is not lost or rewritten to suit a political agenda.
M. Stanton Evans will be sorely missed. His contributions in uncovering lost historical facts, and history that has been intentionally hidden or revised, cannot be overstated, as far as I’m concerned. I hope his insightful and meticulous work does indeed inspire more people to dig deeper into our fascinating, yet, at times, disturbing past. Just be sure to remember Evans’ Law of Inadequate Paranoia:“No matter how bad you think something is, when you look into it, it is always worse.”
M. Stanton Evans joked about his “Law of Inadequate Paranoia” at the Thirty Fifth Annual The Pumpkin Papers Irregulars dinner on October 31, 2012. He said, “No matter how bad you think something is, when you look into it, it is always worse.”
The comment was a humorous look at America’s internal security problems. People laughed, but it was nervous laughter. The audience knew that Stan was talking about a real problem that he had dedicated his life to exposing.
At the same event, named after the documents hidden by Whittaker Chambers that confirmed the role of State Department official Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy, Stan said he was optimistic that things would turn around. “I see in the country a rising tide of traditional values, a belief in personal liberty, limited government, strong national defense,” he said. “In other words, an atmosphere of hate.”
Stan made jokes exposing the insidious liberal mentality and its domination of government and what passes for public debate in the media. I recorded and posted a video of the Pumpkin Papers event from a table a few rows back, but you can still get a sense of how great a speaker and how funny he was.
But Stan also wrote important books on conservative philosophy, such as The Theme is Freedom, and ran the National Journalism Center in order to correct liberal bias in the media by training young conservative journalists dedicated to objective reporting and accuracy. Hundreds went through the training process.
I came to the National Journalism Center program as I was graduating from college in journalism in 1978. My work in Stan’s program included an outside internship at Accuracy in Media, and I was then hired by AIM’s Reed Irvine. It was my first job out of college. I later went to work for Allan Ryskind at Human Events.
In short, my career has been blessed by associations with some of the great minds in journalism and the conservative movement. All were Reagan conservatives who believed in the three-legged stool of conservative philosophy—moral values, a strong national defense and economic freedom.
I had an inkling of what journalism was all about after using Curtis MacDougall’s classic textbook, Interpretative Reporting, in college. It helped me to understand that a massive shift had taken place from objective news reporting to advocacy journalism. That’s a major reason why I became a media critic as well as a journalist.
MacDougall, who taught at Northwestern University, ran for office on the Communist-controlled Progressive Party ticket. I obtained Curtis MacDougall’s 319-page FBI file, showing he was on the “security index” of the FBI and under surveillance because of his affiliation with many communist fronts.
As I have previously reported, his Interpretative Reporting textbook criticized the media for being too soft on the late Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI). It was the perfect primer for a generation of liberal journalists taught to think that anyone opposed to communism or socialism was an extremist. MacDougall advertised himself as an “expert on McCarthyism,” and praised Fidel Castro as a “world statesman” and an anti-imperialist with a “record of achievement.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that in its obituary, the liberal Washington Post took a shot at Stan for trying to “rehabilitate the reputation of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy with a sympathetic biography.”
In looking back at Stan’s career, many have noted his role in writing the 1960 Sharon Statement of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a group that got me involved in the conservative movement while still in high school. I attended a YAF conference in Sharon, Connecticut, at the estate of William F. Buckley, Jr., and heard Buckley give a powerful speech on how the desire for human freedom will never die.
I was drawn to YAF for its support of what became critical to Ronald Reagan’s conservative coalition—a belief in economic freedom, a strong national defense and traditional moral values.
While Stan had a tremendous impact on the growth and direction of the conservative movement, it’s also the case that we have seen a libertarian tendency assume prominence in recent years. Stan was always a libertarian in the limited government sense, and welcomed libertarians into the conservative movement. But what we are now seeing under the guise of “libertarianism” is something quite different.
Consider the fact that the Charles Koch Institute and the National Review Institute are co-sponsoring an event to promote the book, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future, with the author Charles C.W. Cooke. It is described as a call to arms for the growing movement of members of the right “who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal.” The book strikes me as an attempt to fundamentally transform the conservative movement into an ally of the “progressives” on such matters as gay rights, abortion rights, and drug legalization.
This is not what drove Stan Evans and the candidate he promoted for the presidency, Ronald Reagan.
There is also a foreign policy dimension to this unfolding debacle. Young Americans for Freedom itself seems to have been eclipsed by Students for Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty, libertarian groups which have declared NSA defector Edward Snowden a hero, and sponsor speeches by such left-wing figures as filmmaker Oliver Stone and Snowden mouthpiece Glenn Greenwald.
Based on these curious connections, as well as the adoption of a libertarian foreign policy that quite clearly would permit the Iranians to develop nuclear weapons, I get the definite sense that a traditional conservative belief in a strong national defense is in peril if these libertarians take control of the movement.
One cannot read the Sharon Statement without concluding that Stan Evans and the founders of YAF and the conservative movement were devoted to the national security of the United States. The Sharon Statement referred to the importance of national sovereignty and called for victory over the forces of international communism.
The Sharon Statement is still relevant today.
As we witness a former KGB spy preside over Russia’s re-emergence, in alliance with Communist China, as well as Marxism taking control of country after country in Latin America, we can now understand that declarations of victory over communism were premature. But the goal of the Sharon Statement then and now is still legitimate.
In this context, Stan’s book on Stalin’s Secret Agents, co-authored with Herbert Romerstein in 2012, is required reading. The book demonstrates that we are still coming to grips with the full story of how enemy agents operated on American soil in the highest levels of government. Trevor Loudon’s book, The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists, and Progressives in the U.S. Congress, brings this terrible story up to date.
Stan Evans showed that we can laugh at the ridiculousness of the liberals while taking seriously the threat they pose to the American way of life.
But with progressives taking aim at, and even infiltrating the conservative movement, we should only laugh long enough to catch our breath and take action to preserve the legacy Stan and so many others left behind for us. Stan’s “Law of Inadequate Paranoia” may not be so funny after all.
Stan Evans speaks at Hillsdale College – Youtube Screengrab
M. Stanton Evans, a legend in the conservative movement, has died at the age of 80. Stan was my kind of conservative, a strong anti-communist, a firm constitutionalist and free-market proponent. He founded the National Journalism Center to help develop a bench of young, conservative writers. He has written numerous books. His last, Stalin’s Secret Agents, co-written with veteran anti-communist investigator Herb Romerstein, should be required reading for all students of history. For example, the book exposes the Soviet role in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that launched America’s entry into WW II. The Soviets cynically exploited America, helping to lure her into the war to save the USSR’s bacon. He also contributed to one of the best documentaries of the Left ever made: Agenda: Grinding America Down–a documentary I had the privilege to participate in as well, though I never got to meet Stan. Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation has written a great tribute to the man today.
In 1960 he penned the Sharon Statement, which remains to this day one of the best articulations of conservatism and is just as relevant as it was in 1960. Perhaps even more so, as we watch a compulsively despotic regime steal power by violating daily the limits placed on it by the Constitution. Here it is in full. Note that a statement need not be strong to be powerful:
The Sharon Statement
Adopted in conference at Sharon, Connecticut, September 11, 1960
In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths.
We, as young conservatives, believe:
That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;
That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;
That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;
That when government ventures beyond these rightful functions, it accumulates power, which tends to diminish order and liberty;
That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;
That the genius of the Constitution—the division of powers—is summed up in the clause that reserves primacy to the several states, or to the people, in those spheres not specifically delegated to the Federal government;
That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government, and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;
That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both;
That we will be free only so long as the national sovereignty of the United States is secure; that history shows periods of freedom are rare, and can exist only when free citizens concertedly defend their rights against all enemies;
That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties;
That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace; and
That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?
Here’s to a life well-lived. Rest in peace, Stan Evans.
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