The Rank Hypocrisy of Movies About the “Red Scare”

 

If it was wrong for a committee of the US House of Representatives to simply ask Dalton Trumbo if he was a member of the Communist Party, why is it not wrong for the US government to publish online the names of everybody registered with the Democratic Party and/or the Republican Party?

If it was wrong for a committee of the US House of Representatives to simply ask Dalton Trumbo if he was a member of the Communist Party, why is it not wrong for governments to publish online the names, addresses, and places of employment of people who donate to political parties and/or political causes, such as ballot propositions?

If it was wrong for private businesses to refrain from doing business with writers due to their political affiliation, will Jay Roach and Bryan Cranston be making a movie about Brendan Eich any time soon?

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  1. Guruforhire Inactive
    Guruforhire
    @Guruforhire

    I firmly believe that right of center political groups need to not report donors, and point to NAACP v. Alabama.

    • #1
  2. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    Guruforhire: NAACP v. Alabama

    Links please, you naughty Guru, you:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama

    • #2
  3. Guruforhire Inactive
    Guruforhire
    @Guruforhire

    windmills don’t work that way.

    What kind of Guru would i be if I impaired your knowledge retention?

    • #3
  4. drlorentz Member
    drlorentz
    @drlorentz

    You raise an excellent point. Public release of donor information undermines freedom of association. Then again, we don’t really have freedom of association.

    • #4
  5. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    drlorentz:You raise an excellent point. Public release of donor information undermines freedom of association. Then again, we don’t really have freedom of association.

    Well, “freedom of association” doesn’t appear anywhere in the US Constitution, and we all know something isn’t a right if it ain’t written into law by a government.

    ;-)

    • #5
  6. Mark Coolidge
    Mark
    @GumbyMark

    Great point.  And yes, NAACP v Alabama is the governing case.

    And you can’t make a movie about Brendan Eich since he’s part of the oppressor class.  Don’t you know that?

    Dalton Trumbo was a repugnant figure.  A Commie Party member taking orders from a foreign power which wanted to overthrow the government of the U.S.   An apologist for both Stalin and Hitler.  The man was a moral black hole.

    • #6
  7. MJBubba Member
    MJBubba
    @

    Misthiocracy:

    drlorentz:You raise an excellent point. Public release of donor information undermines freedom of association. Then again, we don’t really have freedom of association.

    Well, “freedom of association” doesn’t appear anywhere in the US Constitution, and we all know something isn’t a right if it ain’t written into law by a government.

    ;-)

    Right of Association is derived pretty clearly from the rights of free speech and the right to assembly, and is supported by the right to due process.

    http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/annotation12.html

    • #7
  8. MJBubba Member
    MJBubba
    @

    Misthiocracy:

    If it was wrong for a committee of the US House of Representatives to simply ask Dalton Trumbo if he was a member of the Communist Party, why is it not wrong for the US government to publish online the names of everybody registered with the Democratic Party and/or the Republican Party?

    If it was wrong for a committee of the US House of Representatives to simply ask Dalton Trumbo if he was a member of the Communist Party, why is it not wrong for governments to publish online the names, addresses, and places of employment of people who donate to political parties and/or political causes, such as ballot propositions?

    Good work.   Thanks.   This will be useful.

    • #8
  9. MLH Inactive
    MLH
    @MLH

    Here’s something a little weird: I  just Googled “the bill of rights” and got NOTHING. Even “The Bill of Rights list” got me nothing. Only explaination is that I’m “searching” news and not the internet.

    • #9
  10. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Mis,

    Where were these crusaders for freedom when Brendan Eich was having his reputation destroyed and the company he built stolen from him?

    As long as it’s for the pink-red team it’s a grand heroic cause. If somebody else needs a little protection then all you hear is crickets.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #10
  11. Knotwise the Poet Member
    Knotwise the Poet
    @KnotwisethePoet

    When you see time and again celebrities having to publicly grovel and apologize for any non-PC comment they may make, and also see the stories of people like Eich, it becomes clear who the new McCarthy-ites are in today’s world.  Ironically, many of them are the same people who like to keep reminding everyone how horrible McCarthy and the HUAC were.

    • #11
  12. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Knotwise the Poet:When you see time and again celebrities having to publicly grovel and apologize for any non-PC comment they may make, and also see the stories of people like Eich, it becomes clear who the new McCarthy-ites are in today’s world. Ironically, many of them are the same people who like to keep making stories about how horrible McCarthy and the HUAC were.

    You should have heard Ms. Clinton in the days following the Oklahoma City bombing.  Her comments may have been sanitized from the internet by now, but she was talking McCarthyite-talk about how we need to look for “links” between abortion-clinic bombers and right-wing groups.

    The thing is, any time you want to start calling leftists McCarthyite, some conservative is sure to pipe up and say, “But McCarthy was right. There really were communists in government.”

    Sigh.

    • #12
  13. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    My personal theory is that McCarthy was being fed information by J. Edgar Hoover that the FBI gleaned from the then top secret Venona transcripts. Hoover didn’t want anybody to know what the source was, and Tail Gunner Joe was a convenient (if inebriated) front.

    So yeah, Reticulator, I’m that guy. :)

    • #13
  14. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    This is a little to the side of the main point in the original post, but I am increasingly getting irked at the idea that we should never have feared the spread of communism and that those who did fear it were lunatics. I have come to see this so differently from the way I saw it in my brainwashed youth.

    Mao Zedong was leading the communists in a civil war against–basically–Chiang Kai-shek (who was fighting the Japanese and Mao simultaneously). Mao’s communist revolution death toll:

    In contrast, critics consider him a dictator who severely damaged traditional Chinese culture, as well as a perpetrator of systematic human rights abuses who was responsible for an estimated 40 to 70 million deaths through starvation, forced labour and executions, ranking his tenure as the top incidence of democide in human history.

    The threat of this so-called revolution spreading to all of the poor and ignorant countries in Southeast Asia was real.

    And then there’s Stalin:

    Historians working after the Soviet Union’s dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines. Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million–a total of about 9 million victims of repression.

    To fear the communists and their propaganda was a realistic fear.

    • #14
  15. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    MarciN: To fear the communists and their propaganda was a realistic fear.

    Which of course is beside the point about McCarthyism, the dishonest and repugnant methods of which are now being unleashed by Hillary and others against conservatives.   (We now know, of course, that leftists were lying through their teeth when they claimed to be against the techniques of McCarthy and his followers.  They were really defending the particular targets, and not opposing the methods.  The OP did a good job of exposing this.)

    • #15
  16. Robert McReynolds Member
    Robert McReynolds
    @

    This might be why Breitbart and now Long are so demanding that we get our hands on a legitimate film studio, so that we can make that movie about Brendan Eich to satisfactory quality. Imagine if we were to put something like that out at the same time the rest of Hollywood put out their propaganda about how HUAC terrorized people who supported a system of government that is designed to terrorize people.

    • #16
  17. Robert McReynolds Member
    Robert McReynolds
    @

    The Reticulator:

    MarciN: To fear the communists and their propaganda was a realistic fear.

    Which of course is beside the point about McCarthyism, the dishonest and repugnant methods of which are now being unleashed by Hillary and others against conservatives. (We now know, of course, that leftists were lying through their teeth when they claimed to be against the techniques of McCarthy and his followers. They were really defending the particular targets, and not opposing the methods. The OP did a good job of exposing this.)

    All one needs to do is compare a list of McCarthy’s targets to the spies uncovered through the Venona Program.

    • #17
  18. Mark Coolidge
    Mark
    @GumbyMark

    MarciN:This is a little to the side of the main point in the original post, but I am increasingly getting irked at the idea that we should never have feared the spread of communism and that those who did fear it were lunatics. I have come to see this so differently from the way I saw it in my brainwashed youth.
    To fear the communists and their propaganda was a realistic fear.

    The systemmatic campaign to erase what actually happened in the 1930s and 40s and replace it with newly created memories of those times has had significant success.  The rehabilitation of communists like Trumbo has been accompanied by wiping out the fact that many even on the left were fervent anti-communists.  Norman Thomas, the head of the Socialist Party, denounced the communist party as a foreign influence dedicated to the suppression of democracy.  Today all of this has been mushed together so we are taught to think of the American communists as just slightly overenthusiastic community organizers and activists.

    • #18
  19. Mark Coolidge
    Mark
    @GumbyMark

    I was a huge fan of Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad but he is terrible as Trumbo in this trailer.  My guess is it’ll be another flop like that other recent piece of revisionist history, Truth.  However, I bet it will still be shown in high school and college courses as part of what passes for history courses today.

    • #19
  20. Fricosis Guy Listener
    Fricosis Guy
    @FricosisGuy

    My wife and I got the Trumbo and Truth trailers together a couple of weeks ago. I was so irritated by Trumbo that I almost was that guy at the theatre: howling at the screen.

    Had to settle for cracking up the Mrs. with a few “bloody Commies” and “McCarthy was too soft” remarks.

    • #20
  21. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Only commies Democrats get to ask legitimate questions, doncha know?

    • #21
  22. Crabby Appleton Inactive
    Crabby Appleton
    @CrabbyAppleton

    Read this book: Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters – Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler by Allan H. Ryskind. Fascinating and informative as heck!

    • #22
  23. John Penfold Member
    John Penfold
    @IWalton

    Yes it’s tiresome.  The left never rests, never learns and never goes away.  McCarthy was a dishonest demagogue and served the interests of the far left by helping shut down the hunt for real spies and to make fellow travelers righteous victims instead of the dangerous warped infestation they were.  And now we see the results in the endless stream of sleaze and dishonesty coming out of that industry. He captured a real and legitimate fear but he captured it dishonestly.  There was a lot going on in his head and those of staffers on both sides of the aisle that shared his sexual proclivities.   I suppose  it was a tribute to Truman that he refused to bring McCarthy down because of McCarthy’s and the network of similarly oriented staffers.

    • #23
  24. Great Ghost of Gödel Inactive
    Great Ghost of Gödel
    @GreatGhostofGodel

    Robert McReynolds:

    All one needs to do is compare a list of McCarthy’s targets to the spies uncovered through the Venona Program.

    Darn, beat me to it.

    Post-Venona and having sponsored a Vietnamese boat family, I don’t want to read one more [CoC] word about how awful McCarthy was. The right thing to do with any self-identifying Communist, who make the Nazis look like open mic comedy night at the local coffee shop, is hang them from the neck until dead (which, if you aren’t an incompetent hangman, takes a fraction of a second… so use an incompetent hangman so they suffocate instead of having their neck mercifully broken).

    • #24
  25. Mark Coolidge
    Mark
    @GumbyMark

    Robert McReynolds:

    All one needs to do is compare a list of McCarthy’s targets to the spies uncovered through the Venona Program.

    So is there any overlap?

    • #25
  26. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    Robert McReynolds:This might be why Breitbart and now Long are so demanding that we get our hands on a legitimate film studio, so that we can make that movie about Brendan Eich to satisfactory quality. Imagine if we were to put something like that out at the same time the rest of Hollywood put out their propaganda about how HUAC terrorized people who supported a system of government that is designed to terrorize people.

    Glenn Reynolds often mentions the need for conservatives to do something about the popular media imbalance. His idea is that rich conservatives ought to purchase a couple of popular women’s magazines.

    • #26
  27. Fricosis Guy Listener
    Fricosis Guy
    @FricosisGuy

    Great Ghost of Gödel:

    Robert McReynolds:

    All one needs to do is compare a list of McCarthy’s targets to the spies uncovered through the Venona Program.

    Darn, beat me to it.

    Post-Venona and having sponsored a Vietnamese boat family, I don’t want to read one more [CoC] word about how awful McCarthy was. The right thing to do with any self-identifying Communist, who make the Nazis look like open mic comedy night at the local coffee shop, is hang them from the neck until dead (which, if you aren’t an incompetent hangman, takes a fraction of a second… so use an incompetent hangman so they suffocate instead of having their neck mercifully broken).

    Alger Hiss is still the infallible progressive detector. Any hint of rationalization or misdirection re: Hiss? Then you know you’re dealing with a fellow traveler.

    • #27
  28. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    I’m sure this doesn’t have to be noted, but I still like to note it whenever this bit of history comes up: Joe McCarthy was a senator.

    Dalton Trumbo, the other Hollywood communists, and other private citizens not employed by the US government were questioned by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.

    I find that McCarthy gets way too much blame for the actions of the HUAC. His committee and the HUAC had very different mandates.

    • #28
  29. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    And these people don’t even see the irony of their words on this trailer: “Nobody has the right to tell you what to say / think / write … ”  when that’s exactly what they do, only when they do it, it’s noble.

    I remember once when my liberal sister-in-law was spouting off about McCarthy. I told her it wasn’t wrong to try to root them out, and it was no witch hunt either. A witch hunt is looking for something that isn’t there. The victors write the history books though.

    • #29
  30. Misthiocracy Member
    Misthiocracy
    @Misthiocracy

    Barfly:

    Robert McReynolds:This might be why Breitbart and now Long are so demanding that we get our hands on a legitimate film studio, so that we can make that movie about Brendan Eich to satisfactory quality. Imagine if we were to put something like that out at the same time the rest of Hollywood put out their propaganda about how HUAC terrorized people who supported a system of government that is designed to terrorize people.

    Glenn Reynolds often mentions the need for conservatives to do something about the popular media imbalance. His idea is that rich conservatives ought to purchase a couple of popular women’s magazines.

    “You want to know the best way to go broke – get an increasing share of a shrinking market; DOWN THE TUUUUUUUBES.”

    • #30
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