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Jack Webb in Red Nightmare.(Screengrab via YouTube)TV from Dragnet to the Cold War and the PC war

Television is the enemy of the people. It broadcasts Fake News. It suppresses thought. We cant let it dominate us. These media lessons originated with Jack Webb, one of the pioneers of television drama. Webb is best known for the police series Dragnet, first a 1949 radio show, then two incarnations on TV, from 1957 to 1970, where he famously portrayed just the facts cop Joe Friday.The latter episodes that now broadcast on the ME-TV cable channel bring back TVs good old days but also prove Webbs uncanny vision. Dragnets spare production values and pithy realism compacted assorted societal complexities, from ordinary crime to various psychopathologies, into 30-minute blocks.

Compared with the straightforward dramaturgy of Webbs 1954 theatrical film Dragnet (just released on Blu-Ray from KINO), the Dragnet series doesnt look like Millennial TV but resembles the modernist style of cineastes Sam Fuller, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Marie Straub. And like Fuller, Webb was a military vet turned Hollywood professional who sustained his patriotism through pop-art aesthetics. Webb brought probing Americanism to television; the best example is his 1962 drama Red Nightmare, a prediction of 21st-century progressivism that exposes what we now take for granted in Fake News TV.

In Red Nightmare, originally titled Freedom and You, Webb focused on Communist encroachment. Its a Cold War parallel to todays PC war. Webb imagined a national takeover in which citizens are told, In America you have too many freedoms. One day it will be your mission to destroy those bourgeois capitalist freedoms. Webb himself steps in as narrator and sets the scene:

From the looks of it, it could be Iowa, California, Tennessee. You might call this a college town, Communist-style, as part of a long-range plan to destroy our free way of life.

Webbs intro pinpoints academias role in social revolution: The strangest of all schools: espionage as a science, propaganda as an art, sabotage as a business long-range Communist conspiracy.

First shown to schools and social groups, Red Nightmare arose out of the film branch of the now-defunct Office of Armed Forces Information and Education, established post-WWII by the Department of Defense; the program was committed to producing patriotic American stories (PBS and NPR, no longer sharing such a commitment, have taken over these roles and reversed their ideology.) Red Nightmare was eventually broadcast on Webbs GE True TV series, sponsored by the General Electric corporation. Todays television and mainstream media use commercial spots and series for idealized portrayals of race, gender, and already-settled discussions about social justice; they criticize America for not being sufficiently woke, sufficiently communistic.

Webb saw this coming. Red Nightmare proposes a fundamentally transformed America where average white American TV dad Jerry (Jack Kelly) awakens to find his suburban town looking like barbed-wired East Berlin. Webb describes Jerrys personal shock: When theres a job to be done, Jerry, like so many Americans, is apt to ask, Why Me? But when anarchy invades his home, Jerry finds it impossible to avoid his patriotic responsibility. Webbs Midtown, U.S.A., goes from a Rod Serling Twilight Zone fantasy to John Miliuss Red Dawn.

Media junkies who take The Twilight Zone with a grain of salt might scoff at Red Nightmare, but Webb, a true populist artist, targets their cynicism in ways that echo paranoia about the Deep State and the media. Jerry is warned:

When the moral fiber of the United States weakens and the economy collapses under the pressure of competitive coexistence, you will assume control. It will be your responsibility to purge the minds of reactionary Americans.

Jerry takes his precious freedoms for granted, unlike todays college youths who are not complacent; their pseudo-sophistication thwarts those freedoms, as prerequisites for high-paying jobs at Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, which they perversely see as protecting political correctness more important to them than freedom, especially when other peoples freedom triggers their privilege. Jerrys daughter succumbs: Its true, Daddy. The party convinced me that I should free myself of the lingering bourgeois influence of family life. She sounds exactly like shes reading from the Black Lives Matter manifesto.

Red Nightmare was directed by George Waggner, produced at Warner Bros. under the personal supervision of mogul Jack L. Warner. In 1962, Communism was an alarmists simple explanation for anti-Americanism. The only real difference today is that media executives program drama and information television to reshape traditional political consciousness into wokism. TV turns FDRs basic four freedoms into the anti-freedoms mentioned up top.

Jack Webb knew that TVs impact as social conditioning went deep, yet his narrative ingenuity was never humorless. Jerry drags his kids to church (Now youre really gonna find out what the truth is all about), but its been converted into the Peoples Museum: Soviet Inventions. Red Nightmares prescient parable is TVs most precise, exacting analogy for Millennial revolution.

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When Television Was Anti-Communist and Jack Webb Was King - National Review

The new book 'Faith in the Masses' includes a range of topical and biographical essays from across the Communist Party USA's first century.

Faith in the Masses: Essays Celebrating 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA, edited by Tony Pecinovsky, is an ambitious undertakingalmost as ambitious as the work the book describes. These essays cast a wide net aiming to capture the breadth of the Partys efforts to change society over the last century. The celebration is heartfelt, reverent at times, hyper-romantic at others, and decidedly not uncritical.

The collection of short pieces is itself one manifestation of faith about which there is much to like. The very first contribution is Norman Markowitz and Tony Pecinovskys outline of Party history, providing a framework helping the reader to understand how the organization responded over the decades to the critical problems of American society and government. Their brush is detailed as well as encompassing. Real people respond in organized fashion to the issues of their time. Of particular interest is how the Party responded to various internal missteps along the way, to the almost ceaseless red-baiting attacks from outside, and to the winds of change involving race and gender questions.

Once set, the structure of this collection is embellished by a dozen topical chapters, a bit unevenly sewn together, but cohering by the force of their telling and the historical import of their subjects. C.J. Atkinss gracefully written, well organized recounting of the often overlooked life of Party founder Charles Emil Ruthenberg, who, alas, died all too young, at 44, in 1927, is a true gem that stands as a metaphor for the Party itself: hard, selfless work to make a difference in the world of its time.

Centerpieces of the Partys strugglethe labor movement, civil rights, and electoral politicsfollow the models of historical overview and origins tales. Joshua Morriss Playing by Our Own Rules: The Communist Partys Presidential Campaign in 1932 well lays out the promise and perils of participation in bourgeois electoral politics. Timothy V Johnsons The Communist Party and the African American Question traces the rocky path toward defining a politics of the Black nation in large part informed by widespread discussions within the international Communist movement in the 1920s and 1930s over colonialism.

In Has White Supremacy Ended Your Pain: Beulah Richardson and Art in the Struggle Against Racism by Denise Lynn, and The Cartoons of Ollie Harrington, the Black Left, and the African American Press During the Jim Crow Era by Rachel Rubin and James Smethurst, the authors explore the development of political line and actual struggle in the Communist Partys vital, central role at the intersection of class and race through powerful examples of cultural expression that were perilously on the precipice of being forgotten. It is made clear in these essays that though the current term intersectionality may be new, the CP had arrived at the exact same analysis decades before (the work of Claudia Jones among others comes to mind).

Again on the issue of race, Peoples World writer Al Neal, who covers the sports beat for the paper, contributes a fascinating piece, First to Start the Fight: Communism, the Daily Worker, and Baseball. Neal reminds us that the CP in its early days remained highly skeptical of sports as a topic even worth covering in its Party press, being an unhealthy diversion of workers attention from the class struggle. But he shows how gradually that attitude changed, and the Party, with writers such as Lester Rodney passionately following the unfolding story, became one of the leading lights, with the African-American press, in the national struggle to integrate baseball and other sports.

Labor issues suffuse the collection of essays. Robert Zeckers Faith in the Masses: The International Workers Order tells the story of that worker-run and Party-led mutual insurance and benefits society that fell victim to the axe of McCarthyism in the early 1950s. Long before the New Deal, the IWO, and the Workmens Circle before it, along with many other, mostly ethnic fraternal societies, created critical networks of social support addressing functions that in better organized welfare states the government addressed. This raises a glaring question to place before conservatives, even today. If they want to get government off our backs, why then do they attack people and their homegrown organizations for self-help?

Other references to workers issues run like rich veins begging to be mined. But among the core tenets of Party history and values, the labor movement itself is given short shrift, as noted in the Introduction for good reason. By now labors oft-told stories are otherwise accessible, through the work of scholars like Philip Foner et al and biographies of labor leaders, organizers, and workersmany of these also available from International Publishers. Still, it would have been of greater value for less familiar younger generations, and even those knowledgeable, to include more extensive coverage of working-class struggles alongside the kindred topics.

Read a preview chapter from the book: Gus Hall and the Communist campus tour of 1962

There are fascinating pieces on feminism (Elizabeth Armstrongs Gita, Betty, and the Womens International Democratic Federation: An Internationalist Love Story, which recalls activists Gita Bannerji of India and Betty Millard of the CPUSA); on literature (Joel Wendland-Lius enlightening A Culture of Human Liberation: U.S. Communist Writers in the 20th Century); and the environment (Marc Brodine and Tony Pecinovskys Virginia Brodine: Deciphering and Communicating the Science of Environmental Sustainability).

Topicality notwithstanding, one of the most forward-looking essays is Pecinovskys chapter Far from Marginal: The CPUSA in the 1960s and early 1970s, recounting the energetic bounce back from McCarthyite persecution. The Party had built new organizational outlets and conducted speaking tours, particularly on campuses, throughout these years, well engaging itself in the tumult of the times, including the Free Speech Movement, Civil Rights, and anti-war movements. One only hopes the space given to this chapter did not shut out another voice or topic, because much of this material was also covered in the authors 2019 book Let Them Tremble: Biographical Interventions Marking 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA.

Although this chapter only contracts to deal with Party activity into the 1970s, here would certainly seem to be a place to continue and expand Markowitz and Pecinovskys earlier outline of Party history. The fifty years that have elapsed since the seventies, particularly in the aftermath of organizational splits, demand more thorough updated explorationperhaps in a follow-up volume if its not too soon for historians to dredge up some uncomfortable incidents in the recent past involving persons very much still with us.

Yet as the question of marginality is raised, it is not unfair to shine a light on the more recent Party work, national and local, individual and organizational. Historic struggles in civil rights, peace, anti-apartheid, labor, environmental, and other movements have grown through direct action participation, from the fight to preserve public education to the Dakota Pipeline to the Black Lives Matter marches and anti-gentrification, housing, and anti-white supremacist demonstrations, not to mention some history-making electoral campaigns.

Faith in the Masses shows clear signs of having been rushed into print for the centennial of the Party. Too many are the typographical and grammatical errors, misspellings (both Nakita Khrushchev and Pete Seager on p. 39), incomplete bibliographical data, and repetition of common mistakes such as International [rather than Industrial] Workers of the World (p. 99 and again on p. 129), that needlessly distract the reader and unfortunately detract from the overall confidence in this book as a source. It deserved better. Hopefully, many of these can be cleaned up in a second printing.

Most laudable is the inclusion of a number of essayists whose names had been unfamiliar, at least to this reader. There seems to be a whole industry now of scholars committed to studying the history of the CPUSA and setting the record straight not only on its accomplishments but on its earnest grappling with problems the larger society was not paying heed to.

Lets continue this inspiring story in classrooms, on picket lines, and in the streets!

Faith in the Masses: Essays Celebrating 100 Years of the Communist Party, USAEd., Tony PecinovskyNew York: International Publishers, 2020425 pp. with illustrations, $19.99ISBN 10: 0-7178-0829-7

Order here: Faith in the Masses

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'Faith in the Masses': Communist Party history gives something to believe in - People's World

In the late 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood studios under pressure from the right promised they would not knowingly employ a communist. This blacklist eventually became notorious, especially in Hollywood, which came to lionize its victims in several films. And yet it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the blacklist policy from the emerging current treatment of right-wingers.

Earlier this week, Gina Carano, an actor in The Mandalorian, was fired from her job after a controversy over an allegedly anti-Semitic social-media post. In short order, UTSA, her talent agency, dropped her as a client.

Many media accounts have taken the anti-Semitism charge at face value (USA Today: an anti-Semitic Instagram Story that she shared from another user.) The post in question, which triggered a social-media firestorm that quickly led to her firing and loss of representation, was not anti-Semitic by any reasonable definition. The post simply argued (uncontroversially) that the Holocaust grew out of a hate campaign against Jews, which it then likened (controversially) to hatred of fellow Americans for their political views:

Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors even by children. Because history is edited, most people today dont realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views

I dont find this post especially insightful. But overheated comparisons to Nazi Germany are quite common, and, more to the point, not anti-Semitic. There is no hint anywhere in this post of sympathy for Nazis or blame for their victims.

Many of the reports of Caranos termination string together the trumped-up offense of her post about Nazism with a series of controversial posts. The worst of them is a post insinuating elections are rife with voter fraud and should impose photo ID a claim that, while provably false, is also a standard-issue Republican belief. The second-most controversial post in her history is a very small joke, in which she added boop/bop/beep to her Twitter profile, before apologizing for the insensitivity of seeming to mock the practice of including pronouns in social-media biographies.

The remainder of her case history seems to consist of commonly held beliefs. Variety solemnly reports, Other posts, including a quote saying Expecting everyone you encounter to agree with every belief or view you hold is fucking wild and one saying Jeff Epstein didnt kill himself, remained. The suspicion that Epstein was murdered is hardly unusual. And Caranos belief that we should not expect everybody we encounter to share all our beliefs is not only widespread but utterly sensible. Indeed this seems to be the central point of disagreement between Carano and her former employer and client.

Whats most striking about the news coverage of Caranos defenestration is the utter absence of any scrutiny of her employer or her (now-former) agency. The tone of the reporting simply conveys her posts as though they were a series of petty crimes, the punishment of which is inevitable and self-evidently justified. The principle that an actor ought to be fired for expressing unsound political views has simply faded into the background.

If you think blacklisting is only bad if its targets have sensible views, I have some bad news for you about communism. While some victims of the McCarthy-era blacklist were liberals or progressives who refused to turn in the names of their colleagues, others were bona fide communists. Dalton Trumbo a Hollywood writer who was blacklisted, then wrote under front names, and whose story was told in a recent hagiographic movie starring Bryan Cranston followed the Communist Party line in the Stalin era. When many fellow communists dropped out of the movement after Stalin formed an alliance with Hitler, Trumbo followed the new party line.

Trumbo gained some martyrdom when he was hauled to Washington to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. This is the beginning of the American concentration camp, he warned. (Fortunately for Trumbo, his antagonists, unlike Caranos, were not witless enough to confuse hyperbolic Nazi comparisons with anti-Semitism.)

Of course the point with Trumbo and other blacklist victims was never the soundness of their thinking. Technically, the studios had the legal right to refuse to associate themselves with people who had abhorrent beliefs. But a fairer and more liberal society is able to create some space between an individuals political views and the position of their employer. A Dalton Trumbo ought to have been able to hold onto his screenwriting job even though he supported a murderous dictator like Stalin. And actors ought to be able to work even if they support an authoritarian bigot like Donald Trump.

Analysis and commentary on the latest political news from New York columnist Jonathan Chait.

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Firing Actors for Being Conservative Is Another Hollywood Blacklist - New York Magazine

This week we take on CNNs comparison of the Smith Act trial defendants with the January 6th insurrectionists, along with examining the CPUSAs attitude to the new administration.

Image: Smith Act Trial defendants Robert Thompson and Benjamin Davis (public domain, Wikimedia Commons).

The Communist Party USA is a working class organization founded in 1919 in Chicago, IL.

The Communist Party stands for the interests of the American working class and the American people. It stands for our interests in both the present and the future. Solidarity with workers of other countries is also part of our work. We work in coalition with the labor movement, the peace movement, the student movement, organizations fighting for equality and social justice, the environmental movement, immigrants rights groups and the health care for all campaign.

But to win a better life for working families, we believe that we must go further. We believe that the American people can replace capitalism with a system that puts people before profit socialism.

We are rooted in our country's revolutionary history and its struggles for democracy. We call for "Bill of Rights" socialism, guaranteeing full individual freedoms.

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This Week @CPUSA: CNN's anti-communism and lying - Communist Party USA

Rachel Chiu, Opinion contributor Published 7:00 a.m. ET Feb. 3, 2021

Hong Kong activists and Uighur minorities are under assault from Chinese President Xi Jinping's old communist playbook. America can come to their aid.

Seventy-one years ago, my grandmother was beaten, enslavedand nearly killed by the Chinese Communist Party. China continues to do the same thing today and America should offer its new victimsrefuge.

Tension is already brewing between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. During last month's Davos Agenda conference, Xi condemnedthe arrogant isolationism of the Trump era and cautioned that a cold war, hot war, trade war, or tech war would lead to division and even confrontation. This is the oldest play in Chinas Communist handbook, which values economic and social power above all else.

Bidens next move should be a decisive one a warm welcome for Hong Kongers, Uighurs, and Chinese political dissidents.

At its core, communism involves socio-economic restructuring.But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always wanted morethan command of resources and capital and, to that end, continues to pay a high price for fear and respect. Despite their best efforts, Xi and his predecessors have never been able to buy complete compliance from other nations nor its own people.

Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published these words in 1848;100 years later, Mao Zedong, the leader of the CCP, put this belief into practice. In the late 1940s and 50s, Mao and the early Chinese communists galvanized working class tenants with the promise of social equality and property rights.

This massive and deadly disinformation operation, known as the Land Reform Campaign, mobilized the working class to pillage and seize property owned by their landlords.But it didnt end there. Controlling the infrastructure wasnt enough, so rebels humiliated, torturedand killed the ruling class.

Hong Kong activists: We're protesting for our freedom from brutal Chinese authoritarianism

By the time the uprising reached Sun Wui, my grandmothers hometown in southeast China,the landlords had already fled. Their wives, many of whom were originally from the working class, were left behind to care for their children and home. They committed no transgressions against the tenants, yet were persecuted as if they did. My grandmother was sent to a hard-labor campin 1950, where she was forced to tear down her neighbors homes during the day and endure beatings by her captors in the night.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden on Sept. 24, 2015, at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland.(Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)

During her four years of torture, my grandmother's infant son died from starvation and illness and shetried to escape repeatedly, failing three times. Her town was overrun by the Communists, but they needed the wives and children to remain as slave labor before they were executed. They took all of her belongings and broke her bones, but they could not destroy her dream of living safe, freeand happy. On her fourth escape attempt in 1954, she succeeded.

Incredibly, she was able tobringherself andthree of her young children to freedom, she finally made it to the United States in 1968.My family now calls Americaour home.

Xi and the CCP are not as strong as they portray themselves. The CCPs ascent to power required the deaths of millions during the Land Reform Campaign and subsequent Cultural Revolution, yet they continue to struggle for social control. Chinas communist handbook contains only authoritarian solutions their go-to response to opposition is to resort to violence, arbitrary detention, imprisonmentand disappearances.Similar to the Land Reform Campaign, the government uses disinformation and arrests to silence political activists in Hong Kong, and they use surveillance and "re-education" camps to torture the Uighurs.

But like my grandmother, the CCPs political opponents do not yield.

The United States should follow the United Kingdoms lead and provide special visas for qualifiedHong Kongers. Since a new national security law went into effect last summer, dozens of pro-democracy activists have been arrested,and many more are at risk, even those no longer on Hong Kong soil.

Hong Kong national security law: Hong Kong freedom lovers deserve global support against Chinese Communist Party's new Red Terror

Last summer, the UK government quickly provided Hong Kongs British National (Overseas) passport holders the opportunity to apply for special visas, which allow for prolonged visits and provide a pathway to citizenship. Such visas from the United States, in addition to refugee and asylee admission, would send a powerful signal to the CCP and all those suffering under its rule.

Rachel Chiu in Ithaca, New York, in 2016.(Photo: Family handout)

The United States has direct interests in the region, including 85,000 U.S. citizens living in Hong Kong and a trade surplus of $26 billion.The Hong Kongpro-democracy demonstrations in 2019 pushed back on authoritarian encroachment from Beijing, championing the freedoms and liberties that the United States believes are central, inalienable rights.

Furthermore, the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992 states that Support for democratization is a fundamental principle of United States foreign policy. As such, it naturally applies to United States policy toward Hong Kong. The United States should honor these social and economic ties by protecting those who similarly champion a free society.

The inability to garner absolute obedience, from the 1940s to present day, is the CCPs mortal wound. If Biden wants to get tough on China, he needs to save its people.

Rachel Chiu is a Young Voices Contributor and public policy researcher at the Cato Institute. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect her employer's. Follow her on Twitter @rachelhchiu.

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My grandmother stood up to the Chinese Communist Party. President Joe Biden should too. - USA TODAY