by Matt Kibbe
THEM VERSUS US
ON AUGUST 28, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the speech of his life.
“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation,”1 he began. MLK was, of course, addressing some 250,000 people who had joined together for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” he told the crowd, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
It had been a long journey to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and many black Americans had suffered, and died, along the road to that moment. But King eloquently rejected calls to meet the police dogs, fire hoses, billy clubs, and tear gas in kind. “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence,” he implored.
King, who was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a nonprofit organizer of the march, eventually put aside his prepared remarks and proceeded to deliver the most eloquent call for equal treatment under the law ever spoken: “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he told the crowd. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The next day, William Sullivan, the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s domestic intelligence division, penned an internal memo: “Personally, I believe in the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation.”2
It was the eloquence of the speech. MLK had connected with a fundamental American value, that everyone should be treated equally under the laws of the land. Because he spoke out, he became “dangerous.” He was deemed a threat, so he would not be treated equally under the law by agents of the U.S. government. He would be singled out, targeted by government bureaucrats. He had to be stopped.
The FBI’s obsession with MLK’s rising star started at the top of the FBI, with Director J. Edgar Hoover. In a clandestine campaign against King—against an American citizen attempting to practice his First Amendment rights to petition the government for a redress of grievances, to peaceably assemble, and to speak freely—a cabal of powerful federal government bureaucrats with extraordinary discretionary power proceeded to stalk, persecute, and smear a man they viewed as an enemy to their interests. “FBI officials viewed the speech as significantly increasing King’s national stature,” says MLK historian David J. Garrow. After August 28, he became “measurably more ‘dangerous’ in the FBI’s view than he’d been prior.”3
On October 10, Hoover convinced the attorney general of the United States to authorize wiretaps on MLK’s phone as well as the office phones of the SCLC. The official rationale was their suspicion that MLK was collaborating with communist sympathizers. The attorney general at the time, the top law enforcement officer in the nation, was Robert F. Kennedy, brother and close confidant to President John F. Kennedy. Wiretapping King’s phone was perhaps one of RFK’s most ignominious acts.
Of course, by December 1963, Hoover went well beyond what the Kennedy administration had authorized, and began installing microphones in the hotel rooms where King was staying. One conversation, taped in May 1965 and released in 2002, captured a conversation between King and Bayard Rustin regarding a dispute between the SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee over a proposed statement of coalition unity.
“There are things I wanted to say renouncing communism in theory but they would not go along with it,” complains King. “We wanted to say that it was an alien philosophy contrary to us but they wouldn’t go along with it.”
The FBI failed to disclose this information to the White House, instead using its illicit snooping to intimidate, threaten, and blackmail King.4 Information that the FBI gathered about MLK’s personal behavior was used in vicious attempts to control him, to silence him, to break up the coalition he was struggling to hold together, to stop him. By any means necessary.
FREEDOM, OR POWER?
Does it ever make sense to give so much unchecked power and authority to government agents? Can we trust them to be better than the rest of us? Can we trust them to know better?
I say no. This book argues for more individual freedom and for limiting the discretionary power of government. Too much power corrupts. Absolutely.
And J. Edgar Hoover’s iniquitous behavior proves my point. The treatment of MLK certainly meets my definition of government tyranny.
I believe that there is a growing awareness among people in America, and all over the world, that governments have too much power, and that power is abused. Individual freedom, choice, upward mobility, and voluntary cooperation among free people is the better approach. In a world that is rapidly decentralizing access to information, lowering barriers to entry, barriers to knowing, freedom works even better today than it did in 1776.
Others argue the opposite, that the fear of runaway government power is outdated, that America has outgrown the old model based on liberty. It is time to reject an abiding skepticism of too much central control, they say, and let the benevolent redesigners work their magic.
They say: More government involvement in our lives is essential to offset concentrated market power and corrupt businessmen and anyone else who might take advantage. People can’t be trusted with freedom. Besides, freedom is messy and chaotic, and we won’t always make the right choices. We won’t always like the way things turn out, the way wealth and resources are allocated. Government can fix these problems. We just need to make sure that the power rests in the hands of the right people. There are good guys and bad guys. The right public servants can be trusted to rein in the greedy hordes.
This was the pipe dream of “progressives” going back to the late 1800s. Well-paid civil servants, with all the right pedigrees, from all the right families, and protected from political judgment and the push and pull of democracy, would be given the power and the resources to better manage things from the top down.
The architects of this country were pretty clear on these questions. The author of that “promissory note” that Dr. King referred to in 1963 while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Thomas Jefferson, wholly embraced the genetically ingrained American skepticism of government power and an idealistic belief in dispersing authority across society, from the bottom up. The power should be with individuals, Jefferson believed, with “We the People.”
The founders were very much a product of, as well as advocates for, “the Spirit of ’76.” “Government is not reason,” warned our first president, George Washington. Government “is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
That was then, says the progressive historian Joseph J. Ellis. Today, the really sophisticated thinkers, the ones with the right academic pedigrees, are shedding their fear of big government. The divide is clear, says the Mount Holyoke professor, between those who view the government as “them” and those who view government as “us.” Them versus Us. On this question there is little doubt where he stands: “The expanding role of government in protecting and assuring our ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ has become utterly essential.”
There it is again. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” For Jefferson, this immortal phrase held up the freedom of the individual and self-determination, the opportunity to be whatever you can make of yourself. Respecting your liberty was the first duty of government, and in 1776 it was a radical concept. These were “u
nalienable rights,” rights that we Americans were free to pursue unbound by government roadblocks. MLK invoked the phrase in 1963 to redeem “a promissory note”: freedom from unequal treatment under the law, from government-imposed discrimination, and the promise of a “color-blind society.”
Now the real promise is a guaranteed “right” to bigger government? Ellis was reacting to what he describes as the “libertarian” distrust bubbling up from the grass roots circa 2009. Tea party activists were expressing, in no uncertain terms, that government had gotten too big, that it was too involved in everything from big bank bailouts to redesigning our access to health-care services. In 2009, this protest movement, just like the original Boston Tea Party in 1773, seemed to be taking on a life of its own, and progressive advocates for more government oversight of your life didn’t like it. Not one bit.
This was the same meme of the times coming from Democrats (and many establishment Republicans as well): There was something slightly dangerous about the new surge of liberty-mindedness emerging through the grass roots. And it wasn’t just academics who were expressing concern. Right after Tax Day in 2009, Senior White House Advisor David Axelrod told CBS’s Face the Nation that the tea party represented “an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy.”5
Message received.
This is the “progressive” mind-set: Freedom, as a governing philosophy, is just old-fashioned, past its use-by date. Anachronistic. Today, we know better. The right people, the smart, good people, can be trusted to get government right. They just need our trust, our money, and more power. Old superstitions and a libertarian skepticism of centralized power are getting in the way of progress.
AWESOME AUTHORITY
This “shut up and trust us” narrative was picked up by Barack Obama again in a speech on May 5, 2013. His commencement address to the graduating students of Ohio State University scolds those of us who would question his grand vision:
Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices are also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.
Few dispute the president’s way with words. But sometimes you have to break things down to get at their meaning. As a rule, you always know to pitch all of the words that come before the inevitable “but.” Just disregard them. Erase the qualifying words from your mind to get at his point: “We have never been a people who place all of our faith in government to solve our problems; we shouldn’t want to. But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either.”
We don’t think the government is the source of all our problems.
If government is not the problem, it must be part of the solution, right? I am reminded of the famous command from Captain James T. Kirk to the starship Enterprise’s chief engineer: “Scotty, I need more power.”
It’s all part of a better, bigger plan.
“The founders trusted us with this awesome authority,” continues the most powerful man in the world in his commencement address at Ohio State. “We should trust ourselves with it, too.”
Did the founders entrust us with awesome authority? Do we trust one man, any man, in this case a man named Barack Obama, with awesome authority? Should we? Would we have wanted to trust that man if his name was George W. Bush? Or Ronald Reagan?
I think the founders entrusted us with awesome responsibility, the responsibility of freedom, not awesome authority in someone else’s hands. I think people should live their own lives and pursue their own happiness free from too much government meddling.
Since 2009, I have been part of a rapidly growing community of folks who agree with me that freedom works; they have been stepping out from across the ideological spectrum. They are worried that the federal government is out of control. That it is becoming all about them, not us.
And it took Lois Lerner to prove us right, and “Them” wrong. Again.
YOU ARE THE TARGET
Lerner, of course, was the Internal Revenue Service director in charge of tax-exempt organizations, who would infamously plead the Fifth during her testimony before the House Oversight Committee on May 22, 2013.
On May 10, just five days after Obama’s “awesome authority” speech, Lerner dropped the bombshell admission that put her in the hot seat before Congress. Speaking at an American Bar Association conference, she used an audience question to “apologize” for the inappropriate targeting of conservative and libertarian activist groups prior to the presidential election of 2012. Innocent mistakes were made, she concedes. But it wasn’t her fault. She threw “our line people in Cincinnati” under the bus for their “not so fine” targeting of tea partiers. “Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list,” she said. “They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.”
It was later discovered that the question from the ABA audience was actually planted, virtually word for word, by Lerner.6 The confession was an extraordinarily clumsy attempt at damage control. She wanted to get ahead of the news cycle before the inspector general released a scathing report on the IRS’s extraordinary practice of singling out and targeting tea party groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax status in the two years leading up to the 2012 elections.
Activist bureaucrats in an agency of the federal government singling out citizens, based on their political ideology, and effectively impinging upon their political speech. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
“The other thing that happened was they also, in some cases, sat around for a while,” Lerner continued to her ABA audience of tax professionals. “They also sent some letters out that were far too broad, asking questions of these organizations that weren’t really necessary for the type of application. In some cases you probably read that they asked for contributor names. That’s not appropriate, not usual. . . .”
It was always “they” who were in the wrong. Not “we,” or “I.”
America would soon discover that nonprofit organization applications that contained the phrases “tea party,” “government spending,” “government debt,” “taxes,” “patriots,” and “9/12” were isolated from other applications and subjected to extra paperwork and inquiries, delaying some approvals by as much as 1,138 days.7 Your citizen group’s application would have been flagged if you had stated in the IRS application your desire to “make America a better place to live.” Targeted groups were instructed to disclose hundreds of pages of private information, including the names of volunteers, donors, and even relatives of volunteers; résumés for each governing group member; printouts of websites and social media contents; and book reports of the clubs’ suggested reading materials. Even the content of members’ prayers were scrutinized.8
According to National Public Radio, of the conservative and libertarian groups requesting tax exempt status in 2012–2013, only 46 percent were approved, with many more never receiving a response from the IRS. In contrast, 100 percent of progressive groups were approved. Additionally, the IRS asked conservative groups an average of 14.9 questions about their applications, but progressive groups were asked only 4.7 questions.9
Karen Kenney of the San Fernando Valley (CA) Patriots testified before the House Ways and Means Committee about her experience being targeted by the IRS, that her application for 501(c)(4) status was ignored for two years. Suddenly the IRS demanded an enormous amount of information, including personal information about employees and donors and transcriptions of meetings and candidate forums, allowing them only twenty days to comply.10
Dianne Belsom of the Laurens County (SC) Tea Party testified that she was told that she would receive information on her application
for 501(c)(4) status within ninety days. More than a year later, she had still heard nothing. Once an election year rolled around, they started bombarding her with requests for information similar to the kinds listed above. After filing all requested information, the IRS asked for more, including repetition of previous requests. At the time of her testimony, her application had been pending for more than three years with no sign of resolution.11
Toby Marie Walker of the Waco (TX) Tea Party said that the total number of documents requested from their group by the IRS would have filled “a U-Haul truck of about 20 feet.”12
POLITICAL SUPPRESSION?
Why so many questions, so many forms? One clue might come from an unrelated article regarding the tax treatment of certain nonprofit university activities. The IRS was cracking down. How? According to a Bloomberg article from November 2011:
Lois Lerner, the IRS’s director of tax-exempt organizations who is overseeing the investigation, says many schools are rethinking how and what they report to the government. Receiving a thick questionnaire from the IRS, she says, is a “behavior changer.”13
What behavior was the IRS trying to change with regards to citizen groups wanting to make America a better place to live? Maybe the thick questionnaires and intrusive inquiries served a particular purpose? Maybe the IRS intended to change behavior? Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the IRS effectively suppressed “get-out-the-vote” activity by tea partiers in 2012:
The Tea Party movement’s huge success [in 2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise. The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that, had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5–8.5 million votes, compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.14
