June 7, 2018

P. GREANVILLE—Why does the establishment keep burning incense at the Oprah altar as a great human being, an exemplar for others to follow? Oprah is a great misleading symbol, like Obama, or Colin Powell in his day. Prominent black faces that serve to legitimate the status quo, the idea that anyone can make it big in America, that racism is receding or largely a thing of the past—both of which are utterly false.

GLEN FORD—And, in fact, hatred of the banks is damn near universal, in that it is pervasive among all groups in society, including even many upper income whites. Rightwing libertarian Republicans, who actually do have representation in Congress, hate the bankers, who occupy an especially evil place in their worldview. I don’t pretend to understand that rightwing libertarian worldview, but they are vehement in their hatred of the bankers. I suspect that anti-Semitism has something to do with it — that they think these bankers are mostly Jewish. But, for their own reasons, they hate the banks. The hatred of bankers is near-universal in the United States.

DAVE WALSH—The product of an impoverished and often painful childhood in South London, Chaplin developed generally left-wing views. He sympathized with the Russian Revolution and in the 1930s (having moved to the US in 1913) became one of the American film industry’s leading “friends of the Soviet Union.” He came to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (formally named the FBI in 1935) as early as 1922. Chaplin’s socially critical films Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux(1947) generated tremendous hostility and fear within the American political establishment. The FBI ended up assembling a more than 2,000-page file on Chaplin.