As a website dedicated to truth, we are saddened to learn that Stanton Evans died of cancer yesterday. He was 80. America would have benefitted from another ten years of this genuine intellectual for he was still contributing to Conservative politics up to his death on March 3rd.
Texas-born Evans grew up in Tennessee and attended Harvard before embarking on a lifetime of Conservative activism and journalism. Unlike the vast majority of journalists, Evans did not take his place in, and sell his soul to, the Media Class. Instead he pursued and proclaimed the truth wherever he found employment. For certain this did not make him rich and for certain he was not on the guest list of the rich and famous of the Media World. His view, that the politics of individual liberty and the politics of Christian morality, far from being mutually exclusive are inter-dependent, is one that is under increasing attack from both the Left and the Right.
Evans repudiation of the Media Class and its Leftist allies in Academia found devastating expression in his 2007 book “Blacklisted by History”. Subtitled “The untold story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his fight against America’s enemies”, the book’s more than 600 pages represented 6 years of meticulous research. With every detail supported by documentary proof and references, Evans proved that McCarthy was the victim of an unprecedented character assassination. Almost everything about Wisconsin’s Senator that has been fed into the popular consciousness of America and the world is based on deliberate falsehoods. The result is that a war hero (McCarthy was a tail gunner in the 2nd World War) who courageously used his elected position to reveal the Soviet penetration of America’s bureaucracy has gone down in history as a drunkard, a bigot and the shorthand term for slanderous and bullying persecution.
When McCarthy first began to alarm Americans about Communist penetration, the Cold War and the external military threat from Russia presented a frightening backdrop. The Mainstream Media at the time (1950) had not yet acquired the characteristics of an emerging Class. Some parts of it remained committed to truth and patriotism. McCarthy’s warnings were reported fairly by many newspapers around the country and the public began to realize that there was an enemy within.
The New Deal Socialism of the 1930’s had provided a friendly milieu for the Left and enabled Communists to infiltrate the Washington bureaucracy up to the highest levels. (Read Whittaker Chambers’ “Witness”) When McCarthy began to reveal the depth of Soviet penetration in Government he frightened the traitors and embarrassed those they hid behind and manipulated. ‘Shoot the Messenger’ was the reaction of those who were comfortable in Government and those in Government who sympathized with Leftist ideology. Since the high-placed traitors spoke, ate and lived like the Washington upper crust, whilst McCarthy was a man of the people, the bureaucracy and its poodle politicians turned on McCarthy. It was not long before the Left mobilized to destroy him and the MSM followed suit.
McCarthy and later the HUAC stirred up the Leftist nest in Washington, Academia and Hollywood. As the Media Class developed its power, Leftist agenda and alliances, so it embarked on a campaign to ensure that never again would the American public be alerted about the existence of the Leftist strongholds where anti-Americanism and Socialism are plotted. ‘McCarthyism’ became the smear attached to anyone who identified the revolutionary communism skulking behind the new Democrat Party and the many Front organizations of the Revolutionary Left. ‘McCarthyism’ as an attack word requiring no other explanation, preceded ‘racism’ and ‘bigot’. Possessing the power to rewrite history and erase facts, the Media Class has almost succeeded in turning a war hero and patriot into a devil.
Stanton Evans’ factual revelation that McCarthy was an American hero was itself a heroic work. It revealed that Evans was a seeker after truth in an America where uttering a truth is increasingly a crime. The book was ignored by Academia and the MSM and will not be found in any school or college library. In a few more years ownership of the book may well justify sentencing to a re-education camp. ‘Blacklisted by History’ should be Evans epitaph.
Today a Free Republic extract from the Herald Sun (Melbourne) reported how PM Tony Abbott is regaining popularity among voters, despite a Media Campaign against him. The writer Andrew Bolt used the term “Leftist Media class”. Perhaps Mr. Bolt is one of our growing number of website visitors.