Irony: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 149-155

The more people claim to have read and love three documents the more you know that they have not read them. The three documents are the Bible, 1984, and the Constitution. Sure, your average conservative probably knows the three parts in the Bible where God hates gay people but is blissfully unaware of the three dozen parts where that same God commands them to take care of and shelter immigrants without qualification. They are somewhat aware that surveillance was bad in 1984 but couldn't at all explain the meaning of the two minutes of hate. And I'm not even going to be charitable on the Constitution, they know it begins with We the People...but dollars to donuts they get the rest of it confused with the Declaration of Independence. When conspiracy theorists talk about the Constitution, they just mean the Bill of Rights...the part that the founders had to add later. Pabst/Cooper titles this section "Ignoring the Constitution," and that title is going to be ironic.

Pabst is still fuming that his case wasn't moved forward and he's going to compare his case with Laird v. Tatum which he writes as Tatum v. Laird. This kind of thing actually does make a difference as the first name in a case is the one bringing the charge. This case concerned a real surveillance event, and Pabst/Cooper gets the telling correct. Tatum was the head of an organization called "Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors" and he sued the Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird over a surveillance program that US Army was running. 

The background is important here: during the summers of unrest in 1967 and 1968, the US Army, which had been called in to quell riots--developed a surveillance program as a preventive measure. The idea to collect information about political groups as a way of determining when and where the next problem would be. To be clear, I'm just giving the position of the Army, I do not agree with this kind of program. The Supreme Court held that while the aspects of the citizens' 1st amendment rights were "chilled" by the program the situation was not "ripe" enough for their involvement and they dismissed the case. 

There are two terms here: "chilled" and "ripe," which I'll explain. By "chilled" the court admits that a person is not forbidden from speaking their opinions but they might be reluctant to do so. For example, while it is not illegal to wear a sign that says "Defund the Police" you might feel a reluctance to do so at the local Police Department's picnic. That's chilled freedom of speech. By "ripe" the court is saying that there is no direct harm. So while the majority in the court admits that speech may be chilled, the program has not harmed anyone directly, therefore there is no need to shut it down. 

This is bonkers. If the government "chills" speech with a surveillance program that is a harm in and of itself. Further, the US Army has no basis to conduct such a program on US citizens. As the minority writes in dissent, "There is, however, no law authorizing surveillance over civilians, which in this case the Pentagon concededly had undertaken. The question is whether such authority may be implied. One can search the Constitution in vain for any such authority." 

It's a very interesting situation and it should be upsetting to us all. The majority ruled that the program was fine because it wasn't creating direct harm, but the point is to stop programs like this before they can do so. Further, I would argue that the existence itself is a harm: When has a program that collected the political opinions of citizens ever been used for good? You get neutral out of it in the best of scenarios. 

The weird thing is that I would agree with Pabst if this case was the focus of his complaint but it's his own case that he wants to discuss. He doesn't seem to understand that the reason they dismissed his case is not because being placed in a concentration camp would not be a harm but because A) no camps exist and B) the laws he cites do not allow creating them either. None of that matters because Pabst is about to attempt the "bewilder gambit." This is a conspiracy theorist technique in which they get overly technical and acutely specific in order to confuse the audience. We just assume that all of these claims are accurate because there are so many of them. 

I'll walk us through the next few paragraphs swiftly: the first thing he says is that in 1946 the FBI collected information on potentially dangerous people. This is merely a telling of Hoover's secret files. We know this, we also know that J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI like his own personal kingdom because he had blackmail dirt on anyone who could oppose him. In this case, Hoover was asked to do so Attorney General Tom Clark, Congress did not authorize the FBI to conduct these gatherings. When presented with the list of "subversives" Truman threw the whole idea in the garbage. 

Pabst then brings us to the 1950 Emergency Detention Act, aka McCarren Internal Security Act. This act allowed the US to detain persons suspected of sabotage. It also required any group identified as "Communist" to register with the government. President Truman vetoed the bill but Congress overrode the veto. In 1965, SCOTUS struck down the anti-Communist parts of the bill and by 1972 President Nixon repealed the rest of the bill. Pabst puts some other minutiae in here as well but it's useless and tangential. 

The next three pages use the above to justify Pabst's lawsuit. The issue of course is that the 1946 activities by the FBI were not acted on by the government and the 1950 law was repealed by the time Pabst filed his lawsuit in 1976. To borrow the SCOTUS' own term, Pabst's claim is "unripe." In fact, it's not even a fruit.

More evidence that Pabst brings is the report Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans vol. II from 1976. Pabst claims that the "groups of U.S. American citizens considered to be the biggest enemy of the United States, by the federal government, at this time, is the conservative patriot, and those who assert the Constitution and individual rights." 

I found the document and, indeed, it does list the John Birch Society and other right-wing organizations. It also lists a slew of left-wing organizations as well. A simple control+F reveals 5 mentions of the John Birch Society while "Communist" earns 303 hits. "Civil Rights" earns 88, "Nazi" gets 5, "Fascist" 8, etc. 

Pabst/Cooper can complain all he wants, but only one group of people ever stormed the US Capitol building and it wasn't leftists. It was the ideological children of the John Birch Society. Right-wing terrorism in the US, from domestic sources (because it's not like Islamic terrorists Al-Qaeda could be accurately described as left-wing), is a much bigger threat than the Weatherman ever was. While I'm not advocating domestic surveillance without a lawful warrant, I think Pabst needs to pump his breaks as he openly claims that the US government is operating Dachau-like concentration camps. 

Pabst closes with a long discussion of how German citizens were apathetic to the existence of the concentration camps near their towns. He goes to the Godwin, claiming that ignoring him would be like ignoring the trains in the town near the Dachau concentration camp. This, however, is a facetious comparison because, again, no camps exist in the US. It is probably telling that he never mentions the internment of Japanese and German descendants in literal concentration camps during WWII. 

We are now done with the Pabst/Cooper chapter, and I've learned nothing. I am still suspect that this Pabst person really exists. I will say that the writing of "Pabst" remained consistent throughout. Unlike the first chapter where Cooper clearly forgot he was pretending to be someone else. 

Next week: we begin a discussion on the Drug War for some reason.