My mother and father were both born in 1921. They met for the first time at a mass meeting of the Young Communist League at Madison Square Garden in 1939. Neither were members of the Communist Party, but they came to this rally to protest America’s refusal to support the 2nd Republic against the uprising of Francisco Franco’s Fascist movement in Spain.
If you were a college student in New York City in the late 1930’s and you weren’t a liberal or a leftist, you were probably blind, dumb or both. That’s what the world was like in the late 1930’s, primarily because memories of the Great Depression were still fresh and around.
Plus, in a country which had actually suffered in some places from famine, the 1930’s just wasn’t a time when you could get very far politically by touting the free enterprise system as the way we had to go. In fact, when Alf Landon, the Governor of Kansas headed the GOP ticket in 1936 but refused to campaign because the Republicans refused to support the New Deal, Roosevelt ended up carrying every state except Vermont and Maine.
Things really changed after World War II came to an end. What was supposed to be a quick and easy ‘police action’ in Korea turned into a military mess. The Soviets now occupied all of Eastern Europe and had exploded their first atom bomb. When Eisenhower ran for President in 1952, his basic campaign narrative was to attack the Democrats for being ‘soft on Communism’ both here and abroad.
Who helped Ike create the anti-Communist messaging of the 1950’s, complete with loyalty oaths for government employees, executions of the Rosenberg ‘atom spies,’ Hollywood ‘blacklists,’ and two lawyers named Roy Cohn and Robert Kennedy primping themselves in the Senate hearings led by Joe McCarthy who was finding a Red under every bed?
None other than J. Edgar Hoover, who once the whole Lindbergh trial was over, his federal police force had next to nothing to do. After all, violent crimes like murder, robbery, and rape, are almost always local affairs chased down by local cops.
So, if you’re not out there fighting some international conspiracy which threatens to destroy everything that makes America the land of the free and home of the brave, how do you justify keeping a whole national police force busy beyond walking around airport parking lots looking for stolen cars?
Compared to J. Edgar Hoover, contemporary conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones whose Sandy Hook massacre never occurred and Donald Trump with Obama born on Mars are rank amateurs at best. Hoover even got the FBI onto a weekly, prime-time TV show which ran for nine years starting in 1965 and has now come back on for its fifth season with a sixth season right behind.
Given the degree to which the FBI continues to be seen as America’s premier crime-fighting force, I never understood how Trump could have been so stupid to dump James Comey in 2017 the way he did. Nixon hated Hoover, called him ‘the Queen’ behind his back, but dealt with him by ignoring him until Hoover suddenly died in 1972.
It was Trump’s removal of Comey which led to Mueller, which then led to the first impeachment, which then made Trump an easy target in the 2020 campaign.
And who came to the FBI’s defense beginning in 2017 and is now defending the agency against GOP charges that the federal police force has become an example of ‘weaponized’ government authority? None other than the selfsame liberals in Congress who have been heaping ‘unstinting’ praise on the FBI ever since Trump told Comey to take a hike.
These are the same liberals, by the way, who heaped scorn on the FBI when Comey revealed that Hillary’s email server was still being investigated on the closing days of the 2016 campaign. Now the fact that it took Hillary three months to come out with an explanation for the server’s existence in her home while Trump was leading the ‘lock her up’ chant every night, somehow escaped the watchfulness of the Fake News.
So, for the liberals, Comey starts off as a bad guy and then becomes a good guy. Ditto the agency he headed which is once again being defended by liberal politicians and media noisemakers because that shmuck Jim Jordan is using some nonsense about how the Democrats have ‘weaponized’ the FBI as a GOP narrative for 2024.
My father and mother had friends who lost their jobs in the 1950’s because they refused to sign loyalty oaths. Which federal agency was responsible for enforcing laws which required government employees to swear fealty to the United States?
The same agency which is now being defended as the prime protector of our civil rights.
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