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THE BOSTON PHOENIX, SECTION ONE, FEBRUARY 26, ‘1988 The cultish ways of the New Alliance Party by Sean Flynn Continued from page 1 assault-and-battery charges against Mat- tison, who then files countercharges of assault and harassment. All charges are eventually dropped. The National Al- liance, meanwhile, runs an overblown | account of the incident, complete with a cartoon showing an enraged Mattison swinging her briefcase like a sledgeham- 4 . ye ee gay businessmeh who say they were conned into donafing to the NAP by party members canvassing for the “Alliance” — implyirtg they were sup- ported by the GBGLPA. The GBGLPA decides to make “it a point not to work with them,” says executive director Will Hutchi lutchinson. July 1987: A member of the NAP wins © an uncontested race for a seat on the national board of the New Jewish Agenda (NJA), a progressive coalition that works to unify the Jewish communi- members around the country begin calling the national headquarters, asking for information about the NAP and its members, who begin joining local NJA chapters. After researching the group, the national board votes to denounce the NAP officially, making any linking of the party with the NJA grounds for expulsion from the NJA. — Ld s ° Since the day it first kicked to life, nine years ago in New York City, the New Alliance Party, one would think, should have been welcomed by American progressives like a prayed-for messiah. The brainchild of Fred Newman, a long- time political organizer who spent the late ‘60s and early ‘70s meandering through the spectrum cf radical politics, the NAP has a written agenda that reads like the conscience of the American left: an end to racism, sexism, and anti-gay bigotry; a national health service; free education through graduate school; — all the plagues of all mankind gone for good, thanks to the righteous rise of the working class and the victorious emerg- ence of this “black-led, multi-racial, pro- gay” movement. But reviews of the party, at best, have been less than flattering, and at worst they've been downright scathing. Although nearly every group even slight- ly left of center embraces the NAP message, the party's methods and motives have cost it the support of most the seething, damning criticism of re- Despite the sincerity Newman and his followers ooze, the NAP’s muddied past and questionable present have set it up, for pointblank attacks, among them the charge that it's a cover for a totalitarian, psychopolitical cult, a sick orgy of mind games and revolution orchestrated by Newman, the white male guru who was once a follower of neo-fascist Lyndon LaRouche. Directly tied to the party are a network of “social therapy” centers where the NAP’s politics are translated into radical theories of mental health, dreamed up and mapped out by New- man and administered by party mem- bers. Add to that unsavory linkage the NAP’s tactics — including its apparently deliberate attempts to confuse itself with more-popular groups such as the Rain- bow Coalition and its members‘ confron- idl i oe ee peace, not war; people instead of profits _ mainstream progressives and earned it — a searchers who've studied it in depth. . S