I am more and more dismayed and disgusted at the open vile lies fed to the public whether on You Tube, on network and the liberal cables by once respected “journalists” never mind the brazen lies of elected “leaders” in Congress. I doj’t care if it’s poliatical fodder directed at potential voters. Given our system of two parties (and occasionally small special issue parties) in my lifetime I can remember differences with opposing parties, but NEVER to the extent of spreading bald-faced lies exhorting violence, preaching misinformation, and outright trying to remove the opponents from office in numerous ways.

— Cindy Simon

Exactly two things have changed over the last sixty years on this issue:

1. The Establishment had effectively total information control in the period from 1945-1988. There were other voices, such as National Review, but they were very definitely marginal. The major big city papers like the NYT and Washington Post set the tone for all coverage, the Big Three news organizations were largely trusted by the public.

They did not deserve that trust, even back then, but they had it.

2. That monopoly began to crack and break in 1988, and the crack has only widened since then. I pick 1988 because that was when the Rush Limbaugh Show started. It’s hard to remember in 2026 just how rapidly Rush exploded and how huge his impact was. For the first trime in decades, the Establishment narrative monopoly was cracking. They’ve spend the 38 years since trying to recreate it.

Today’s partisan lies are no bigger or less nasty than the ones routinely repeated in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. It’s just that back then, the Establishment (which is mostly Lefty or business oriented) could put a mannerly, erudite mask. Walter Cronkite would quote a Republican or conservative statement, and then ad “Experts say, however-” and explain that it was not true and the Democrats were right.

Of course the ‘experts’ were themselves partisan Dems, but Cronkite was trusted and people assumed he met neutral technocrats. (Technocrats were unduly trusted back then, too.)

It became such a trope that conservatives would just mouth the words ‘experts say’ as a shorthand for media dishonesty.

What changed is that the monopoly broke, conservatives began to make progress toward rolling back liberal gains and gaining control of the GOP away from the business wing, and the Establishment went into an ever-more-frantic panic to stop this. The lies were no more nasty and false, but they were more blatant and direct.

Watergate was pure partisan, it was an attempt to remove a President they could not defeat at the ballot box by legal warfare. It worked because he played into their hands, but it was never non-partisan. They hated Nixon from the day he was sworn in because he won in a big election and because he was prosecutor for Alger Hiss.

Siding with the enemy in war is nothing new. It didn’t start in Iran, or Iraq, it happened in Vietnam, half a century ago.

Look at some of what was thrown at Goldwater.

Things were like this in the 1930s, too. Back then, FDR was the insurgent force pressing to throw down a former Establishment, and it generated the same panic and frantic hate. Human beings don’t give up power and social status easily.

Thanks for the correction, although Bill Gates is still in the running for Antichrist.

Gate’s products made it famous ….

Control, Alt, Delete”

The Ctl-Alt-Del escape sequence was invented at IBM by an engineer named David Bradley because he knew there had to be a way to reboot when the system froze completely, but not prone to be entered accidentally. They held a retirement party for him a few years back, attended by Gates, and the story went like this:

” … Bradley said ‘I may have invented Control-Alt-Delete but it was Bill Gates who made it famous’. Gates didn’t laugh”.

https://www.google.com/search?q=How+long+did+Abbey+Grossman+work+for+Tucker+Carlson&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari

Glad you enjoyed the Jim Carroll link. Yes, he wrote “People Who Died” — his most well-known song.

He was one of the best high-school basketball players in NYC, then broke bad into drugs and became a junkie, while working hard on his writing. In the 70s he ended up in the beat-hippie-Warhol crowd.

In the 80s he got off drugs and took a turn as a rock star. I thought his albums were great. He performed “People Who Died” in the youth film, “Tuff Turf” (1985).

My favorite books were his diaries — “The Basketball Diaries” and “The Downtown Diaries.” Hilarious, though simultaneously grim.

Control, Alt, Delete

I haven’t entirely given up on Bill Gates. 🙂

Trying to identify “the Antichrist” has been going on since the 60s, and I don’t mean the 1960s. BTW, The Apocalypse refers to thiss guy as “the Beast”, not the “Antichrist”. There is no single person identified as “The Antichrist” in Scripture. The first candidate for the role, of which I’m aware was Caesar Nero. The Greek Neron Kaiser, translated into Hebrew, adds up to a numerical value of “666”. Plus, Nero was also referred to as a “beast” by historians of the period.

Waidmann