We’re about to launch the first annual Anti-Communist Film Festival. It will be held October 1-4 at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C.
We already know how the media will respond to the event. There will be three prongs to the attack. First, mockery. Look! It’s another red scare! A bunch of right-wingers is screening cheesy old movies from the 1950s!
The second tactic will be rolling out the old “victims” of the first Red Scare and painting them as innocent martyrs. Joe McCarthy will be mentioned. A lot.
Third, and on a more minor note, will be attacks on me, the creator of the festival.
First is the mockery. Look for snarky headlines like “Red Scare II: Authoritarian Boogaloo,” “The Commies Are Coming (Again)”, or “Exhuming McCarthy.” Potential lede:
Are Bolsheviks hiding in your bathroom? According to the organizers of the first annual Anti-Communist Film Festival, the answer, even decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, may be yes. Camp classics like Red Dawn, My Son John and I Married a Communist will be screened or discussed at the event, which is being held at the Victims of Communism Museum on October 1-4. As is fitting for a new age of authoritarianism, the 1950s are back. Have they no sense of decency, at long last?
The mockery will obscure the fact that our centerpiece film is The Lives of Others, which is not from the 1950s, not campy, and directly relevant to the psychology of the new Marxists.
Second will come the attempts to whitewash the damage caused by actual communists. This has already begun. Recently Columbia University held a symposium on - of course - “The New Red Scare.” Guests included Molly Jong-Fast, Mary Louise Patterson, and Michael Meeropol. Fast’s grandfather was novelist Howard Fast, who was a member of the Communist Party from 1943-1957. Patterson’s grandparents were radicals, William and Louise Patterson. Louise Patterson was recently feted by the communist Party USA. Michael Meeropol is the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for espionage.
According to Columbia magazine, here’s part of what went down at the symposium:
Meeropol acknowledged that “terrible things” occurred under Stalin, and that US Communist leaders erred in backing the Soviets at every turn. And Patterson argued that the USSR, under pressure from the Cold War for much of its seventy years, hardly had opportunity to fulfill the principles on which it was founded — many of which, she observed, “are in sync with the values of this institution that we’re sitting in.”
That’s right - they are still arguing that real communism has never been tried. It was prevented from doing so because of “pressure” put on the USSR by the West.
In their book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Annals of Communism), John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr detail the extensive communist espionage during the Cold War. “Communists were depicted as innocent victims of an irrational and oppressive American government,” Haynes and Klehr write. “In this sinister but widely accepted portrait of America in the 1940s and 1950s, an idealistic New Dealer (Alger Hiss) was thrown into prison on the perjured testimony of a mentally sick anti-Communist fanatic (Whittaker Chambers), innocent progressives (the Rosenbergs) were sent to the electric chair on trumped-up charges of espionage laced with anti-Semitism, and dozens of blameless civil servants had their careers ruined by the smears of a professional anti-Communist (Elizabeth Bentley). According to this version of events, one government official (Harry White) was killed by a heart attack brought on by Bentley’s lies, and another (Laurence Duggan, a senior diplomat) was driven to suicide by more of Chambers’s psychiatric problems.”
Liberals are still bent on depicting the Red Scare of the 1950s as a “witch hunt” that had no basis in reality. Look for an editorial about the film festival by New York Times reporter Clay Risen. In his recent book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, Risen glosses over how the Venona transcripts, cables that were unclassified by Russia in 1990 to reveal the extent of American communist activity during the Cold War, quickly pivot to the real issue - how the Red Scare was about American authoritarianism, which has its modern version in Donald Trump. “Around the time I graduated high school,” Risen writes, “the federal government revealed the Venona program, which had captured secret Soviet communications and which, once decoded, offered compelling proof that figures like Hiss and the Rosenbergs and the leadership of the American Communist Party had, in fact, worked for the Soviet Union and against the United States. There was substance to concerns about Soviet infiltration. But it remained clear that the response, in the form of blacklists and congressional investigations and book bans and loyalty tests, went so far beyond what was necessary that something else was in the mix. Explaining that ‘something else’ became a driving force for this book.”
No, “something else” was not in the mix. Americans reasonably came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was out to destroy us, and that their spies and sympathizers were evil and needed to be confronted and defeated. It’s 2026, and considering the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, we’re here all over again.
Finally, the media will take shots at me, the Director of the Anti-Communist Film Festival. I was connected to the Brett Kavanaugh saga, and outmaneuvered the tactics of the American Stasi. There will most likely even be a trifecta of all of the three tactics - mockery, virtue-signaling in defense of communist traitors, and hit pieces to make me look malevolent or stupid. The headline writes itself: “Kavanaugh Drinking Pal Resurfaces Promoting New Red Scare.” Of course, this is the same media that once begged me for six years to submit to a profile, only to spike it when it didn’t turn out as planned.
Hipster mockery, presenting communist spies and true believers as victims, obsessive citations of Joe McCarthy, and me as a guy linked to Brett Kavanaugh and the events of 2018 - or even the 1980s. This is how the media will cover the film festival. They won’t like the fact that this is just the first of many Anti-Communist Film Festivals, and that eventually they will be held all over America -even as the mainstream press dies out. If the media were still at all relevant, their played-out, predictable nonsense might make a difference.
Editor's Note: We now have the room to run outside commentary by some of our favorite and most provocative thinkers on the Right. That only happens because of the support of our readers, who ensure that we have the resources to keep providing an independent platform and independent voices in a sea of Protection Racket Media domination.
Help us maintain that fight! Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member