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ne SES PP National Caucus of Labor Com- mittees (NCLC) as early as No- vember 1973 and continued to debate points of shared ideology with LaRouche after the split and after the rest of the left had writ- ten LaRouche off as a proto- Nazi. But Newman followers to- day insist that the relationship lasted only two months, and Newman himself, quoted in a National Alliance interview, says his CFC got involved with the NCLC only because the CFC. was “blissfully ignorant” about the left and LaRouche in 1974 — an odd claim coming from a man who boasts a doctorate from Stanford University and who was a serious political organizer by 1968. As Berlet wrote in a De- cember 1987 report on the New Alliance Party, “The question is not how long the Newmanites worked under the political lead- ership of Lyndon LaRouche, but how they can explain what at- tracted Newman and his follow- ers to LaRouche in the first place ...an organization which at best was a collection of paranoid sex- ist homophobic thugs and at worst @ nascent fascist political movement.” Actually, NAP members say, it was LaRouche’s economic analyses that attracted Newman and his followers — that and naiveté. But even if the LaRouche con- nection could be wiped from Fred Newman’s past, his New Al- liance Party still wouldn't win much favor from other activists. With creepy regularity, people who have come into contact with the NAP-remember its members - and methods as confrontational, disruptive, and exploitative. When the party's Rainbow Slate candidates descended on ward caucuses in 1986 — including Wards 11 and 19, considered among the most progressive in the area — they read hardline speeches from index cards attack- ing the ward committees and tho “#”* vacict, sexist, and homophobic. — i “The .coaed absurd,” recalls Sandy Story, editor of the Jamai- ca Plain Citizen, who was at the Ward 11 caucus, “reading from those cards saying, ‘There's no blacks here, there’s no gays and lesbians,’ when the room was probably three-quarters full of those two groups.” Adds Dick Jones, a member of the Ward 11 committee: “The people who were really upset were the people of color, the gays and lesbians, who were treated as if they were white males in the back smokin cigars. They [NAP members were humorless, driven, focused people who didn’ see any per- spective. It seemed almost like a movie about Nazi youth.” At the Ward 19 caucus, observers re- member a similar scene. Georgia Mattison, a Ward 19 committee member and the alleged briefcase basher, says the caucuses that year “were very strange, very ugly. The way they act it seems clear that they want more mem- bers or to destroy other groups, particularly minority and_lib- eral/progressive groups. That's how they act — not what they say, but how they act.” And though the NAP prides itself on being “black led and multi-racial,” minority leaders question whether that’s out of honest concern and a sense of solidarity or if the party is merely trying to establish “hegemony.” “They're too ering — let's use that word — when they want to work for a candidate, even when that candidate hasn‘t asked for their support,” says Felix Arroyo, whose campaigns NAP members tried to “control” in 1981 and 1983. “And they do that especially with minorities.” Mel King, the popular black leader who ran for mayor in 1983 and accepted NAP support, also says the NAP tries to “ingratiate” itself to “those people who are nonpreferred in our society” by exploiting appropriate issues. Even party members themselves begin to sound a bit desperate for black acceptance when they de- fend the NAP’s ties to the con- con, eaipiiegiis, troversial,,.minister Louis _Far-. Bs ae Semitic and anti-gay. “We re- spect him because the black Continued on page 16 a ”