Our last 1955 delegate to the Constitutional Convention just died. Vic Fisher was a born-and-bred Leftist, even as his parentage escaped Stalinist Russia. Like Ted Stevens, yet another lauded “great” Alaskan, men of their educational pedigrees could not help but be noticed by the Deep State for grooming and assignment.

Let’s take a look at some of these men.

Ernest Gruening: An editor of the Leftist The Nation, Gruening somehow went offside with the Democratic Party and was “kicked upstairs” by being banished to Alaska as governor by FDR in the late 30s. His tenure during the war, with very little to work with, proved his resourcefulness and ability to improvise with the military commanders. That and his efforts toward statehood were unquestionably patriotic, but his much-praised speech before the ’55 convention might be analyzed in a different light.

True, it laid out Alaska’s legitimate grievances with federal control. Borrowing from the style of the Declaration of Independence, it listed them: from the Jones Act, which escalated the cost of living for Alaskans, to the unregulated squandering of our fisheries by Outside corporations, to federal control over our resources, it fully ensconced the idea that statehood would be the panacea for all our troubles.

The problem is nothing has changed. The Jones Act has never been repealed, Alaska still cannot control its resources and while fisheries were unlinked from Outside plundering, we are still contending against DC lobbyists of the fishery industries, ineffective patrolling of our waters from fish piracy – and squabbling amongst ourselves from contentious commercial, sport and subsistence priorities.

So, the unanswered question is: Was Gruening merely playing the role of champion, only to lead us into a Dead End?

Willie Hensley: A Kotzebue native, was sent to a posh boarding school in Tennessee, and subsequent collegiate career at George Washington University in DC. He was groomed to bring us the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), coached village voters where to cast their ballots and make them permanent dependencies of the Native [read: Federally subsidized] corporations. Thus, the falsely praised departure from the Indian Reservation system has kept rural Alaska in Third World poverty.

Ted Stevens: An army pilot who flew over the dangerous Himalayan “Hump” in World War II, Stevens then attended Harvard Law School. When unable to get the Interior Dept job he wanted, he worked for a Beltway law firm with ties to Usibelli Coal in Alaska. He moved to Fairbanks and in just six months received the appointment as district attorney over longer-tenured Alaskan lawyers. Returning to DC with the job he wanted at Interior, he illegally wrote much of the statehood act … which gave Alaska the veneer of statehood without changing our status as an American colony. He cemented its trajectory by accepting the tyrannical Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act [ANILCA], then “rescued” our straight-jacketed economy temporarily with gigantic influxes of federal monies.

Vic Fisher: Fisher’s role in the 1955 constitutional convention was to play the Leftist gadfly. However, he nailed down something quite important, likely for the wrong reasons.

Many citizens have no idea why almost all state constitutions clone the federal Bill of Rights. This is because they don’t realize that the Bill of Rights is completely misnamed. They ought to be called, “The Bill of Limitations on Federal Power.” A reading of the Preamble to the Bill of Rights (not the same as the Preamble to the Constitution) will explain that. We do not get our rights from the government. We get them from God.

The First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law …” It does not say, “Congress and the states, counties, municipalities and school districts”. Thus, the amendment should apply only to federal laws. But it does not, because citizen ignorance allows the Supreme Court and also the insidious 14^th amendment to make us think otherwise.

So, to limit tyranny by each individual state, the people of yesteryear demanded that the states copy, at least roughly, the promise of the first 10 amendments to not interfere with pre-existing rights. For the later-arriving states, this was also done merely from the habit of imitating earlier generations – generations that were more savvy about the nature of government.

Our state’s history, its relationship with the federal government and our constitution is a story that is still being built.

So, let’s look at Article 1, Section 5 of the Alaska state constitution:

Every person may freely speak, write, and publish on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right.

Vic Fisher noted that the wording guaranteeing Freedom of Speech was quite different from the other guarantees, which begin with “No law shall be made …” or “No person shall be deprived …” This recognizes that the rights were not given by the state, but were instead a promise not to interfere – a big difference.

So, Sec. 5 actually makes freedom of speech and the press a government created right. And the ominous clause about abuses of that right need never have entered the constitution. Laws against libel and slander were already on the books and in common law. We can see that “misinformation,” a term wielded very promiscuously during Covid, could easily fall under the tyranny of Section 5.

Fisher was a Leftist, living in the era of the Red Scare, and he was well versed in the Hollywood blacklisting of major stars and writers. He saw a threat to the performing arts as well as to political speech. Fisher was perceptive enough to notice that the wording was novel and open for abuse.

But he was alone. The convention transcripts show that he was told, “Idaho has already done it this way,” or words to that effect. It is still there in Idaho’s Art. 1, Sec. 9 – word for word.

Our state’s history, its relationship with the federal government and our constitution is a story that is still being built.

And much of it needs to be unraveled, and re-done.

With regret, the Soros-bought propaganda campaign against a constitutional convention succeeded. Freedom of speech was just one area that needed to be fixed.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

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