The Value Of Counter-Education

Way back in the early 1970s, as a college freshman taking a required course entitled American Thought and Language, I was assigned an anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun, written by Dalton Trumbo. Outside of his unusual name, I saw nothing remarkable about Trumbo except that he was obviously and adamantly anti-war, and seemed to have a John Lennon-like desire for peace at any price. Since the novel’s main character was a soldier who had lost all four limbs and was blinded and deafened by enemy fire (allegedly based on a real-life soldier Trumbo heard about), there was little doubt about the emphatic point the author wished to make. In the anti-Vietnam War climate of that time, it was easy for most students to align with Trumbo’s anti-war views.

Since the professor didn’t mention it, and Google wasn’t around then, I had no idea that Trumbo was in fact a member of the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of filmmakers who were blackballed in the post-World War II period because of their alleged Communist Party ties. Trumbo was a self-admitted member of CPUSA in the mid-to-late 1940s and again in the mid-1950s. He, along with the other nine, refused to testify before the House Unamerican Activities Committee in 1947, causing them to be shunned by Hollywood. Of course, to the leftists of that time and even more so today, the real villain of the piece was anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Trump-like bull in a china shop when it came to chasing communists at every turn. 

Yes, it can be argued that McCarthy went too far to identify and accuse those he believed had communist ties, thus destroying the reputations and careers of some innocent people. However, when the main focus is put on this aspect of his efforts and not on the good he did in flushing out suspected communists in our government and other influential places, it becomes easier to see why today’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have made such inroads in our political landscape. Remember how easy it is these days to turn villains into heroes and vice versa, courtesy of our demented legacy media and the prevailing culture.

So, when it came time to absolve Trumbo and his fellow travelers for being caught and punished as communist sympathizers, it’s little wonder that simply absolving them wasn’t enough. Instead, they were elevated to heroic status for withstanding the slings and arrows of their tormentor, a man accused of having “no sense of decency” prior to his censure in the U.S. Senate. It’s no coincidence that the fallout from the blackballing action included an equal and opposite action to veer far to the left in Hollywood. This they did with no looking back at the possibility that there was some substance to McCarthy’s and the HUAC’s suspicions after all, a claim that seems to ring true today given the DSA’s rise to prominence.

Like many on the right, Fox News host Jesse Watters is highly confident, to a smug degree, in his positions while equally dismissive of the disastrous DSA policies. However, the DSA-supported Senate candidate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, took Watters to school in a recent interview on the subject of transsexual mutilation of children. In responding to Watters’ challenge to El-Sayed’s support for this procedure, El-Sayed slickly avoided a direct answer and instead threw a question back about Watters’ support of circumcision. Rather than calling out El-Sayed’s obvious attempt to compare apples to oranges and duck the question, Watters whiffed and made a lame comment about circumcision being a personal matter. The point being, every missed chance to show the viewing public the charlatan in El-Sayed allows his supporters, including the legacy media, to continue soft-pedaling his extreme positions and make him more palatable (and electable) to the great masses of independents. 

A similar theme is playing out in the key U.S. Senate race in Texas. Instead of focusing on another Democratic charlatan, James Talarico, the main focus seems to be on the flaws of the Republican candidate Ken Paxton, an effective if troubled Attorney General in the Lone Star State. And this is where a true test of President Trump’s leadership may come into play. Trump holds the purse strings to a multi-million-dollar campaign account, and it’s becoming apparent that Paxton is going to need a major cash infusion to survive his opponent’s war chest that churns out pro-Talarico and anti-Paxton propaganda continuously. 

If Trump fails to provide the cash to prop up a candidate that he’s thrown his political support behind, it does not bode well for Paxton triumphing in this election. Don’t think that the upset couldn’t happen, even in (mostly) red Texas. Bottom line: the DSA and their supporters are counting on GOP apathy keeping them home when the election rolls around. We can’t afford to fall into the complacency trap. Further, we on the right need to educate voters on what the DSA is really about (and the Democratic Party’s move in their direction), and not just assume that they already know.