In the new issue of Harper’s magazine, a small article appears that claims Alger Hiss was innocent.

Hiss, who died in 1996, was a high-ranking State Department official in the 1930s and ’40s. Hiss was also a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. This was proven not only when Hiss was identified as a spy by a man named Whittaker Chambers in 1948, but in the Venona transcripts, secret Soviet cables that were made public by the United States in 1995.

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Yet 30 years after Venona, Harper’s magazine and the American Left continue to lie about Alger Hiss. For those discouraged by the media lying about Russiagate, or lying about Joe Biden’s mental health, or lying about crime in America’s cities, or lying about Brett Kavanaugh, the Harper’s item will not bring hope. Decades after the fact, the media can’t even admit that a communist spy was a communist spy.

In 1995, the National Security Agency released translations of Soviet cables decrypted back in the 1940s by the Venona Project. Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union. One of them was Alger Hiss.

The excerpt in Harper’s is from a recently published book, Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss by Jeff Kisseloff. As David Chambers, the grandson of Whittaker Chambers, wrote in the Washington Examiner, “A quarter-century in the writing, a half-century in the making, and three-quarters of a century after the events, what does Kisseloff have to tell us that’s new about the Hiss Case? Very little, unfortunately. It offers old details, scores of them, a biblical exegesis on Hiss’s innocence by a pro-Hiss partisan, not a historian. Kisseloff treats minor issues as highly salient while holding fast to a preconceived big picture. Too often, Rewriting Hisstory sifts the ashes of old, overburnt minutiae, some of which date back to Hiss’s initial testimony in 1948.”

Chambers adds that “even most pro-Hiss scholars agree that Hiss’s guilt was settled between Allen Weinstein’s book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case in 1978 and the release of Soviet documents in the Venona project in 1995.”

Liberals are still bent on depicting the “Red Scare” of the 1950s as a “witch hunt” that had no basis in reality. In his recent book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, New York Times journalist Clay Risen glosses over Venona quickly in order to get to the real issue: how the Red Scare was about American authoritarianism, which has its modern version in President Donald Trump.

“Around the time I graduated high school,” Risen writes, “the federal government revealed the Venona program, which had captured secret Soviet communications and which, once decoded, offered compelling proof that figures like Hiss and the Rosenbergs and the leadership of the American Communist Party had, in fact, worked for the Soviet Union and against the United States. There was substance to concerns about Soviet infiltration. But it remained clear that the response, in the form of blacklists and congressional investigations and book bans and loyalty tests, went so far beyond what was necessary that something else was in the mix. Explaining that ‘something else’ became a driving force for this book.”

No, “something else” was not in the mix. Americans reasonably came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was out to destroy us, and that their spies and sympathizers were evil and needed to be confronted and defeated.

AMERICANS HAVE LEARNED NOT TO TRUST THE MEDIA AND GOVERNMENT

In their book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Annals of Communism), John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr detail just how extensive the spying was during the Cold War, and how damaging it was to America. The media didn’t help. “Communists were depicted as innocent victims of an irrational and oppressive American government,” Hayne and Klehr note. “In this sinister but widely accepted portrait of America in the 1940s and 1950s, an idealistic New Dealer (Alger Hiss) was thrown into prison on the perjured testimony of a mentally sick anti-Communist fanatic (Whittaker Chambers), innocent progressives (the Rosenbergs) were sent to the electric chair on trumped-up charges of espionage laced with anti-Semitism, and dozens of blameless civil servants had their careers ruined by the smears of a professional anti-Communist (Elizabeth Bentley). According to this version of events, one government official (Harry White) was killed by a heart attack brought on by Bentley’s lies, and another (Laurence Duggan, a senior diplomat) was driven to suicide by more of Chambers’s psychiatric problems.”

If you think the modern Left is going to tell the truth about crime, Kavanaugh, Russiagate, or Biden, forget it. It’s like changing the course of a river.