In a society that values free speech and a marketplace of opinions, reading or viewing any source of information shouldn’t be scandalous or controversial. But thanks to Deep State, mainstream media and Congressional attacks on alternative media, those who enjoy alternative media sources are often socially ridiculed, scored and shunned.
Even if the US Congress moves on from Russiagate, the mainstream media have invested so much time and human resources into a perennially anti-Russian spin on news stories, it remains unlikely that they’ll give up on their investment any time soon.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was in office between 1947 and his death ten years later. During much of that time, his primary function was to accuse various people in the media, military, government and entertainment industries of being subversive pro-Soviet Communists.
Being shocked by the weakness of the Republican Party is a bit like being shocked by the intellectual vacuousness of the Democrats. The Democrats along with their neo-con fellow travellers are ramping up their ‘everyone who disagrees with us is a Russian agent’ campaign, this time from the heart of Congress.
We still don’t have any sort of apology or retraction from the Washington Post for promoting “The List” — the highly dangerous blacklist that got a huge boost from the newspaper’s fawning coverage on Nov. 24. The project of smearing 200 websites with one broad brush wouldn’t have gotten far without the avid complicity of high-profile media outlets, starting with the Post.
We welcome Ed Opperman to the series and discuss the 2005 docudrama Good Night, and Good Luck which retells the story of the 1954 confrontation between senator Joe McCarthy and television journalist Ed Murrow of CBS. McCarthy was pursuing Communists within the State Department and other government agencies and innocent people were getting caught in the crossfire, creating a climate of suspicion, mistrust and hostility.
Over recent weeks, instances of alleged antisemitism by a handful of marginal ‘leftists’ such as the principled Jewish socialist, Tony Greenstein and the eccentric Gerry Downing, have been brought into the public domain mainly by the Jewish press as well as leading labour figures within the PLP, many of whom are clearly intent on exaggerating this metaphorical ‘storm in a teacup’ by suggesting that Jeremy Corbyn is somehow tolerant of antisemitism within his party.
There actually are people who want to have all the power and wealth in their own hands, and so it is in their interest to make the rest of us believe we have no power, no choice. Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister in the 1980s, had the perfect phrase for it, “TINA — There Is No Alternative.” That is what they would love us to believe.
