Sutherland: Useful Idiots – KC Edition – Mainstream Coalition Meets BLM

I first met Russell “Rusty” Leffel 40 plus years ago… 

A fellow Kansas City lawyer, he had graduated from KU Law four years before me.  We were both active in Johnson County Republican politics and I supported him when he ran for Congress in 1984.  I liked Rusty but he had an irksome trait of naiveté combined with self-righteousness that surfaced during the campaign.

For example, Rusty seemed inordinately impressed with himself for leading a group at KU his senior year that had some juvenile name like “The Phantom Five” or “The Secret Seven.”

This group was started by Leffel to initiate a “dialogue” between the leftist radicals-who burned down the Student Union that year, 1970-and the other students, in order to “find common ground.”  Another friend of mine also tried to “reach out,” to begin a “conversation” with militant black students and ended up being so badly beaten up for his efforts that he was hospitalized.

Rusty was unfazed by the fact that such attempts were abject failures and that any sentient human should have known that they were doomed to fail at a time when the different factions on campus were engaged in a literal shooting war.  (Yet another acquaintance was killed as a result of this gun violence.)

In fact, Rusty was convinced that this fatuous exercise was a sterling credential qualifying him for high office.  (I thought of him when I saw “Coexist” bumper stickers on Priuses in the wake of 9-11.)

Later on I had the misfortune to have a lawsuit in which Rusty “represented” someone I was suing.  I use the term loosely because Leffel got in and out of the case three different times.  He would show up at court hearings where the judge required his client (“Mr. Jones”) to have an attorney present and then would withdraw as soon as the hearing was over.

In the meantime, Leffel’s client acted “pro se”, i.e. he acted as his own lawyer. 

This meant that Mr. Jones was free to engage in every kind of unethical conduct imaginable, against both me and my client, in order to get us to drop the claim against him. 

These include calling my boss at my law firm (“Do you know you have a paranoid schizophrenic working for you?”), threatening to bring criminal charges against my client’s brother, verbally abusing me and my office staff, threatening to file an ethical complaint against me with the Kansas Bar Disciplinary Administrator’s Office, and physically assaulting me at a deposition.  (Later, several years after the case was over, I was at a high school basketball game where my son was playing.  During the halftime I was outside the gym, talking to another parent, when I felt someone punch me in the small of the back.  I turned around in surprise, only to see Jones, Leffel’s client, standing there smirking.  He said, “I saw where your old law firm went out of business.  I shouldn’t be surprised when it had terrible lawyers like you working for it.”)

Since Jones was not a lawyer none of the legal ethics rules prohibiting this kind of abuse applied.  Leffel had the best of both worlds, getting paid but having no responsibility for what went on, especially if these scorched earth tactics worked and got us to give up and go away.

I tried complaining to Rusty about what his intermittent client was doing, some of which he witnessed, but he simply wrung his hands and said he was helpless to stop this bully. 

Matters got to the point after one hearing where I told Jones that I would take him outside the courthouse and further disfigure his already repulsive face, fit only for scaring small children.  Rusty stood there and whined ineffectually while I delivered this verbal beat down, “Please, Dwight, please!  This is cruel and uncalled for!”  My comments must have worked because Jones never said another discouraging word to me again, at least until after the case was over and he paid what he owed.

In the end, I concluded that Rusty Leffel was weak willed and devious, i.e. he enabled a dishonest and bullying client, by going along with his abusive behavior.  As long as he got paid ($150.00? $200.00?) per court appearance he tolerated his erstwhile client engaging in unethical and even criminal activities. 

The case went on for three years and generated hundreds and hundreds of pages of pleadings, document production, and deposition transcripts.  By allowing his client to drag the matter out for so long, with no valid defense to our modest claim, Leffel cost both sides in fees a sum representing two or three times the actual amount in controversy.  By thinking he could manipulate the legal process in this manner to his benefit, Leffel also squandered a large part of people’s lives, not least of it his own.

Fast forward 30 years and Rusty is back in my headlights. 

He owns a vacant lot in Mission Hills, which he is apparently unable or unwilling to sell.  

Paraphrasing Robert Louis Stephenson’s classic volume of children’s poetry, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Leffel has created A Child’s Garden of Clichés, Leftist Variety. 

To wit: he has caused the vacant lot to be adorned with “installations”, sculptures/signs which look like they were done by my grandchildren’s pre-school art class.

The first piece I saw was “Reunite Families”, which I took as a heartfelt call for opening the Southern Border to illegal immigrants, especially if they had children with them when they crossed the Rio Grande.  As Jay Leno once said, “Undocumented immigrants is code for unregistered Democrats.” 

Next, we have a pro-impeachment montage, first with a black swathed Lady Liberty, then with two signs with quotes from the Presidential Oath of Office. This pompous, pat-on-your-own-back symbolic message was from people who tried to block a duly elected president from taking office and to destroy his presidency before he was even sworn in.

Next, we had the Green New Deal mantra, which has now even been repudiated by noted right wing corporate shill Michael Moore and former climate change activist and Obama administration official Michael Shellenberger.  This was followed by anti-gun messages, which ring a little hollow now that we’re going to defund the police and when calling 911 is an act of white privilege, i.e. you’re on your own as far as defending yourself.

After that came the COVID attack, which places the blame on President Trump for not preparing the nation for a disease which had never been encountered before.  After all, no other country has “Failed to prevent its spread.”

Most recently we got the obligatory tribute to Black Lives Matter. 

Here we have the apotheosis of radical chic, espousing fashionably left-wing beliefs among the affluent and educated as a badge of one’s intellect and sophistication.  In doing this Rusty embraces a group sworn to the erasure of our sick racist history as a nation, our repressive Judeo-Christian religious heritage, the traditional family structure that perpetuates patriarchy, and exploitative, imperialistic capitalism. 

That this gets near universal approval by Leffel’s Mission Hills neighbors recalls a phrase from Tom Wolfe’s essay, “Radical Chic & Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers” in which he describes the mental acuity of rich liberals.  “Even in that room of upholstered skulls…..”

As further gloss, in the last month Leffel has attacked on Twitter the Trump administration for dispatching Federal law enforcement to protect the U.S. Courthouse under siege in Portland. 

In short, Leffel is the perfect example of a phenomenon often attributed to Vladimir Lenin, i.e. “the useful idiot”. 

The term was applied to gullible Western liberals who join in pushing Marxist agendas, thus are “useful”, without realizing that they are complicit in their own destruction as members of the bourgeois, hence “idiots”. 

Leffel’s a mere beginner, though, compared to the all-time Johnson County Champion, the Right Reverend Robert Meneilly, the blow-dried Elmer Gantry formerly pastor of the Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village.

Although he retired a number of years ago, Dr. Bob’s name came up recently in a Letter to The Editor of the Kansas City Star.  The author of the letter applauded the decision by the Kansas City Missouri City Council to take local developer J.C. Nichols’s name off the fountain given by his family in his memory on the Country Club Plaza.  The author recalled his mother, a parishioner of Meneilly’s, in the early 1960’s circulating a petition to Johnson County homeowners, committing them to selling their homes to black purchasers, at Meneilly’s urging.

It’s important to remember that racially restrictive covenants in deeds employed by developers like J.C. Nichols had been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948. 

This meant that the letter writer’s mother was circulating a petition meant to discourage a practice that had been prohibited by law 15 years earlier.  He personally told me that Meneilly nonetheless had his heartfelt admiration for being a brave advocate for “fair” housing, both for encouraging the petition circulated by his mother and for condemning racial discrimination in housing in a sermon he gave at his Village Presbyterian Church in February of 1965.  (“How can you be a good neighbor to someone if you won’t let him be your neighbor?”)

Did I disagree with this position? No, of course not, but virtually no one at the time did either, in this community at least.

Notwithstanding all the talk about the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy,”the 1965 Civil Rights Act passed only because of GOP support.  Everett Dirksen in the Senate and Gerald Ford in the House as the Republican leadership pledged their support and delivered the Republican rank and file to vote for the bill.

This was also at a time when later Democratic icons from the Vietnam and Watergate eras, like J. William Fulbright, Sam Ervin and Robert Byrd, were Southern Democratic senators best known for filibustering all civil rights legislation including anti-lynching laws. (!)

Meanwhile, Republicans like Spiro Agnew and George H.W. Bush were embracing civil rights, both of them winning election and reelection to offices which seldom if ever elected Republicans by standing up for Fair Housing.

My point is that it was not a particularly brave act on Robert Meneilly’s part to support the 1965 Civil Rights Act in his February 14, 1965 sermon.  If our Congressional delegation is any indication, Kansans were strongly in favor of ending racial discrimination in home sales, whatever J.C. Nichols had done decades before as the premier local home builder.

The flaw is that this kind of revisionist history not only gave Meneilly a profile in courage he didn’t deserve but also served to inoculate him against any future criticism, however warranted.

In fact, in years to come, Meneilly engaged in all sorts of political posturing, living off the moral capital derived from a single sermon, which was very much part of the political consensus, both locally and nationally, at the time, and not a brave act at all.

Meneilly played the civil rights card again in June of 1971. 

He gave a sermon defending the National Presbyterian Church’s decision to give money to Angela Davis’s legal defense fund.  Davis was an academic turned revolutionary, active in both the Communist Party U.S.A. and the Black Panthers.  She had been arrested after being on the lam when sought for questioning over the use of three guns registered to her in the murder of a California judge.

The judge was taken at gun point from his courtroom while hearing murder charges against the Soledad Brothers, black inmates who had been radicalized in prison and killed a guard.  The Black Panthers who carried out the crime were closely linked to Davis.

Davis was later acquitted in the political equivalent of the O.J. Trial, when the local prosecutors were overwhelmed by the high priced legal talent paid for by bleeding heart liberals like Meneilly and the other gullible Presbyterian divines who fronted the money.

At the time of Meneilly’s sermon, however, all that was known was that three people had been killed in an incident involving guns owned by Davis and that she had fled and refused to answer the charges against her. 

At the very least, such an overtly political sermon was premature and ill conceived. 

Apparently, however, Meneilly’s cute gimmick of organizing buses to take his flock to Chiefs’ games directly from the Village Church parking lot as soon as Sunday services let out covered a multitude of sins.  You have to wonder, though, about anyone who was taken with his preaching style, which was so smarmy and so pharisaical in its deviousness that he resembled nothing so much as a clerical version of Dickens’s villain Uriah Heep.  The latter was always saying he was “humble, most humble”.   Dr. Bob’s mantra was “Be of good cheer!” or “Shirley and I…..” 

He makes Joel Osteen look like C.S. Lewis.

Throughout the next two decades Meneilly was content to play the stereotypical liberal suburban clergyman, calling for social and racial justice from the security of the wealthiest, whitest, and best protected neighborhood in the city.

In 1993 Meneilly, in response to prompting from the Democratic Party, which was concerned-correctly-about its setbacks in the first Clinton administration (Hillarycare, etc.), started a political group called The Mainstream Coalition.  Taking a leaf from an organizing manual put out by the National Jewish Democratic Council (imagine the outcry if there was a National Christian Republican Council!), Meneilly gave a sermon in July of that year, harshly condemning the Religious Right.  This was soon expanded to be “The Radical Religious Right”, conflating two bugaboos of the liberal world, preachers and Birchers.

The “Radical Religious Right” is a wonderfully amorphous concept. 

It allows you to appeal to Jewish voters by telling them their children will be forced to recite Christian prayers in schools.  You can tell rich WASP women that fundamentalist Protestants (“Bible thumpers”) and pro-life Roman Catholics will take away not just the right to an abortion but birth control.  (“The Religious Right wants to impose the Roman Catholic view of sexuality!” Mainstream Coalition speaker, April 1996, St. James Lutheran Church.)

Not only did Meneilly and his followers fail to notice the contradiction of a liberal clergyman denouncing the use of religion for partisan political purposes in a sermon from the pulpit of his church, they also missed the incongruity of announcing the formation of an organization with its own political action committee in a press conference in the church hall the next morning, a P.A.C. dedicated to promoting the separation of church and state.  (The sermon was obligingly reprinted as an Op-Ed piece on the New York Times editorial page.  Nothing remotely political there!)

The other obvious paradox about Meneilly’s Mainstream Coalition was its fetish about calling themselves “moderate.”   In a campaign flyer in which the Mainstream sent out endorsements Meneilly intoned:

“Thinking people who care about the community, state and nation must consider each candidate on their individual merits.  Political extremism on either the right or left must be rejected.”

This was at a time when the term “liberal” fell out of fashion and every liberal became a “moderate” overnight.  That tactic had the added advantage of letting you claim the middle of the road for yourself while defining your opponents as extremists.

The disconnect is that Meneilly and the Mainstream Coalition have never criticized any form of left-wing extremism.  In fact, Meneilly and Company have been associated with people who are on the furthest fringes of the extreme left.

He used as the Mainstream’s spokesman on its signature issue-separation of church and state-a professor at the former St. Paul School of Theology when it was located on Truman Road.  Dr. John Swomley had a long history of left-wing activism, including counseling draft resisters during the Korean War.  He even testified to Congress, opposing U.S. intervention to stop South Korea’s invasion by the Communist North.  In 1994 he founded a group, The American Korean Society, promoting better relations between the U.S. and Kim Il Sung’s Communist dictatorship. 

I saw Swomley speak at the Lutheran church I alluded to earlier, in which he also claimed that  “The Radical Religious Right” had its origin in a “secret conclave in the Vatican in 1979.”  (I love the image of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson bending down to kiss the Pope’s ring!) Swomley also said the Lutherans should oppose school vouchers since there was no Lutheran high school north of the River and thus they wouldn’t benefit.

The final disconnect in Meneilly’s world view was his statement that “The Mainstream Coalition stands for civility among all citizens and political campaigns.” 

I recalled these words a year later at a mass meeting called by the Mainstream after 9-11 at the Johnson County Community College.  Meneilly spoke at the meeting but said little about the attacks on the U.S. or the threat posed by Radical Islam except to say that we should not blame Muslims for what happened.  His focus was instead on attacking the Religious Right generally and Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in particular as the “real religious terrorists.”

Three years after that Meneilly launched a campaign of harassment against me and a friend of mine for a political robo call we organized, making fun of the Mainstream. 

Its supporters also contacted our employers, trying to get us fired.  Another time several members of the Mainstream Board who were Jewish wrote a letter to five hundred of their co-religionists, warning them about allowing a conservative Christian to win the Republican nomination to Congress.  Meneilly and the Mainstream also sent dozens of informants/spies to conservative churches to report them for politicking to the I.R.S. so their tax-exempt status would be revoked.  I don’t see much civility in these actions.

This really is George Orwell’s 1984. 

Meneilly and his minions have deliberately tried to play off Protestants versus Catholics, Christians versus Jews, and Black versus Whites.  Yet he and his political allies have received every local brotherhood, tolerance, and harmony-in-a-world-of-difference award for years. (Always at a banquet held at the late Ritzcharles!)

Now his little buddy Rusty Leffel and the movement they represent have embraced BLM, and, by extension, Marxism and the destruction of Christianity, capitalism, and the traditional family.

Clearly some powerful emotional forces are at work to overcome logic and reason on the part of otherwise intelligent, articulate people.

Richard Posner is a judge of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.  He is probably the only such judge to have written a treatise on the origins of Romantic Love and is an expert on a whole host of subjects; legal, cultural, and political.  

Judge Posner once suggested that for many in this country the decision on how to vote is aspirational.  In other words, they vote based on how they think those higher up the social ladder than they are will vote. i.e. the way the people they aspire to be like will vote.

“Especially in a conformist environment, the appearance of intelligence can be simulated by adherence to orthodoxies in political belief and how one lives, and the adoption of mandated styles of speaking and argumentation.” Mark Helprin, Claremont Review of Books, Autumn 2019.

This is why the early fundraisers for the Mainstream were held at the homes of Hallmark executives.  This is why the Mainstream Board boasted the Mayors of Leawood, Prairie Village, and Mission Hills.  This is why they were proud to list the J.C. Nichols scion Clyde Nichols and his wife Marty as directors.  (Not that it did the Nichols family any good a few years later when the P.C. crowd came to wipe out their family’s heritage. 

Jay Nichols, their son, was interviewed by the Star and tried to defend his grandfather.  He thought he could curry favor with the interviewer by prefacing his remarks by saying how much he despised Donald Trump, apropos of nothing.  Guess what, it didn’t work!  The Star intensified its campaign to erase J.C. Nichols’s name from his memorial.)

This is why the Mainstream newsletter, the Messenger, admonished its readers: “Be sure to reach out to less educated and lower income voters.” i.e. you’re already part of the elite by belonging to Mainstream.

Conversely, by spouting the trite sayings favored by Leffel (Science is Real, Love is Love, No Human is Illegal), it shows that you are not only enlightened and evolved but superior intellectually, socially, and economically.  Superior, that is, to the crude and unsophisticated working-class bigots who are your political adversaries.  Those are the people who Obama described as those who “are antagonistic to people who don’t look like them,” who “cling bitterly to their guns and their religion,” and who Hillary Clinton called “the deplorables” and “the irredeemables.” 

This appeal to social snobbery and upward mobility (aping the politics of the social class you aspire to join and despising the politics of the social class you like to feel superior to) explains something else that was puzzling.  Why did useful idiots like Leffel and Meneilly both claim to be loyal Republicans for so long? 

It’s because when Meneilly was an up and coming minister here in the ‘50’s, an Eisenhower Republican was the only thing to be.  By the same token, when Leffel was an up and coming lawyer/politician here in the 80’s, a Reagan Republican was the only thing to be.  When the elites they identify with and aspire to join changed their politics from conservative to progressive, so did Leffel and Meneilly. 

It’s as simple as that.

You might argue that Leffel and Meneilly are figures of the past.  True enough but they were the harbingers of today’s political correctness, pushing the same ideas and mouthing the same slogans seen on those black yard signs with multi-colored lettering in all the suburban yards. 

Kansas City is a huge city geographically, sprawling over 7,952 square miles. 

I realize that it is no accident that our two useful idiots, Leffel and Meneilly, erected their shrines to Wokeness (the Church Militant formerly known as the Village Pres and the Child’s Garden of Cliches) within one mile of each other. 

This is the heart of the most exclusive residential neighborhood in the eight thousand square mile area that compromises the Kansas City Metro. This is the area, in other words, that is the least likely to be affected by their own left-wing nihilist politics.  (The Mission Hills Police Department is not likely to be defunded any time soon.)  I’ve always known that being liberal meant being careless with other people’s money.  I didn’t know until now how much it means being careless with other people’s lives.