LIBERAL BETRAYALS

MAX PARRY—It is apparent that the caricature of the Soviet Union in both productions is really a stand-in for the present-day Russian government under Vladimir Putin. As only American exceptionalism could permit, Hollywood did not hold the same disdain for his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, whose legacy of high inflation and national debt have since been eliminated. In fact, most have forgotten that the same filmdom community outraged about Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 U.S. election made a celebratory movie back in 2003, Spinning Boris, which practically boasted about the instrumental role the West played in Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection in Russia.

RAINER SHEA—The DPRK has a multi-party system that’s tremendously more democratic than what we have in the United States, and that’s delivered the country’s people universal healthcare, free food and housing, and guaranteed employment. China’s anti-poverty programs of recent decades have been so successful that poverty is coming close to no longer existing in China, with the country’s current extreme poverty rate hovering below 1%. After both of these countries overcome the economic war that the capitalist world is waging against them, as well as complete their efforts towards transitioning to green energy, they’ll stand as paragons of Marxist social development…

LUCAS KOERNER—In an assessment of NPR’s Venezuela coverage (4/9/19), the network’s public editor, Juliette Rocheleau, recognizes an “imbalance” in which “opposition voices have outnumbered those of Maduro supporters in NPR‘s reporting.” The slant is fairly overwhelming, since Rocheleau can only name four occasions that NPR interviewed government supporters.

According to Chris Hedges, liberal institutions are to blame for the downward spiral of the American political system. In his Big Thinkinglecture at Congress 2012, he argues that the liberal class—the press, universities, liberal religious institutions, labour unions and the Democratic Party—have forsaken their core values and sold out to corporate interests. Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitorand National Public Radio, and the author of such books as War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), American Fascists (2007), I Don’t Believe in Atheists (2008) and Empire of Illusion(2009). He is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University.

Amid all of the outrage and celebrations, only a few are pointing out the laziness of rehashing the same old stories with ‘diversified’ casts in blatant attempts to make bag-loads of money pandering to more varied demographics – all without having to get the creative juices flowing to come up with entirely new characters and storylines.