No Time For Weekend Relief . . . “Entertainment” Journalism Pushes Prevailing Propaganda

By DEXTER DUGGAN

It used to be said that students were propagandized by left-wing ideology when they entered college or even during high school. But the portside true believers never tire of imposing ideological lockdown on their captives the sooner the better.
Now it’s taken for granted that “drag queen story hours” to fasten dysfunction onto the minds of little kids at public libraries are fine. Lo and behold, the first gender-bender book aiming to flout morality and capture children’s thinking goes back to 1979, titled When Megan Went Away, about two lesbians and a preteen girl, according to Wikipedia. A baby born back in those days already would be 41 years old.
Megan predated by a decade the better-known propaganda in 1989’s Heather Has Two Mommies, which, Wikipedia says, “was one of the first pieces of LGBTQ children’s literature to garner broad attention.”
Although the left uses “culture warrior” as a derogatory term to indict conservatives, the unrelenting war on the culture and Judeo-Christian morality comes from the left instead.
When conservatives dare oppose this barrage instead of just lying down and letting themselves be trampled, the left-wing jihadists swinging broadswords incoherently yell that the rightists have launched war.
There’s no truce now by the left in their unremitting hostilities — unlike, say, in the needless World War I, a socially mangling force briefly paused when some of the two sides informally declared a Christmas ceasefire on the front lines and sang carols together. The idea of Christmas itself gives leftist aggressors now the jitters that an unworthy religious festivity hasn’t had its head cut off.
On the political front, Donald Trump isn’t as suave a personality as Ronald Reagan was, but the left hated both these Republicans from the first. Trump wasn’t even inaugurated when the left swore to end his presidency as soon as possible, and began years of corrupt fakery to try to yank him from the White House.
Well, can Americans now at least be allowed a truce, to enjoy themselves apolitically over the weekend, maybe especially when they need relief from coronavirus making their horizons no farther away than their four walls? A little entertainment escapism, perhaps? Nein, dummkopf! No ceasefire for you.
The April 17 “Weekend” section of The San Diego Union-Tribune, the dominant news platform in that part of southern California, probably was similar in tone to many other newspapers’ entertainment pages.
Under the Scrabble-stylized headline “Game Night,” the broadsheet-sized section led off by inviting readers, “Escape your quarantine screens with one of these board games for one or more players, and for kids of all ages.”
Immediately below this were six pictured board games, including Watergate, which, its review informed us, is a “timely and relevant choice.”
Something that happened nearly a half-century ago is “timely and relevant”? Why sure, the politically pummeled reader is to intuit. The 1970s President Richard Nixon was just like the villainous Donald Trump.
(Except, of course, Nixon resigned before being impeached while Trump actually was by blind Democrat partisans.)
Although Nixon died in 1994 following a stroke 20 years after his resignation in 1974, the review delicately refrains from pointing out that a very timely figure now, aging although still alive from those days, is the harridan and defeated candidate Hillary Clinton, a young lawyer back then already burning with leftist zeal to destroy Republicans who wouldn’t commit suicide to please her.
In the Watergate game, we’re told, one player is Nixon and the other is a pursuing journalist. Golly, which is the hero? Nixon wants to get control over the press, it seems, while “the press is trying to connect informants with proof to get to Nixon.”
Indeed the left never forgets, except its own many horrors — including, it must be said, the explosion of the coronavirus pandemic caused by Communist strongmen dominating — oh, how bigoted to say it — China.
Directly below this — still on the cover page of the entertainment section — is a “small screen” review of Just Mercy, about a “young, idealistic Harvard Law grad” who moves to Alabama after witnessing “a taste of the massive disparities and racism of its criminal-justice system.”
Oh, does this take a look into the strident racism and discrimination of the old Democrat South that long was run by corrupt, Klan-embracing, ahem, Democrat politicians at every level, from the nineteenth century into the same era of California Watergate Republican Richard Nixon?
Why, we’re not talking about all those old Klan-Democrat lynchings! This is about a black man wrongfully accused of the 1986 murder of a white woman.
Any such injustices are rightfully exposed. But when far more of them were done by the Democrat power structure, they, like the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, seem best forgotten.
Turn to page 2 of the entertainment section, where, by now, it seems best to put “entertainment” in quotation marks. The upper two-thirds of this page is occupied by two carefully vetted features.
The first is headlined all the way across the top of the page, “Selah brings fresh perspective to teen comedy.” The review was provided by the left-wing Washington Post. It’s illustrated by a large photo of three young black actors who revel in this film fun.
The so-called fresh teen comedy, titled Selah and the Spades — a racial epithet that’s forgiven by the reviewer in this hipster context — features distributing illicit substances to fuel parties at a Pennsylvania private school.
This high-flying illegality is all a wonderful romp in the reviewer’s eyes. Who no doubt would rise in indignation with other Washington Posties if, say, Donald Trump were to bluster about black drug dealers.
The approximate next third of this broadsheet page considers a movie about “the UN diplomat who clashed with the U.S.,” as reviewed by the Associated Press. (Oh, for the days when failing newspapers could afford to have more of their own staffs. Except, who cares when the same bias is locally written or nationally distributed?)
This movie, Sergio, features a wonderfully handsome, charismatic Brazilian diplomat (obviously before the days of the horrid conservative president Jair Bolsonaro) who stands up to the foolishness of United States bureaucrats about reforming Iraq.
Remember, these Republicans thought that overthrowing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would usher in happy Iowa-townhall days of flourishing Mideast democracy. Rather like Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton foolishly dreamed that Libya and Egypt, once shorn of their old-school strongmen, would enter the sunny uplands of responsible freedom.
I have no quarrel with some Brazilian diplomat who shared little old me’s view way back then that the Iraq invasion was a horrible mistake. I only await the spate of movies about the U.S. establishment’s foolishness that encouraged the emergence of monstrosities like Communist Cuba that bore an anti-Christian stamp from the first.

The Phyllis Schlafly Movie

Finally, about two-thirds of the third page of this “entertainment” section is occupied by a review from the left-wing New York Times, illustrated by two photos, of Mrs. America, the Hulu series generally felt to denigrate Phyllis Schlafly.
The Times reviewer snarls: “Mrs. America hardly sees Schlafly as its heroine, but it respects her cunning and force of will.” If “cunning and force of will” show her good side, Schlafly might as well be Adolf Hitler. As the Times no doubt inwardly smirks. The good gals in this series, of course, are the radical feminists.
Advancing the “culture war” leftist theme I noted earlier in this article, the Times review mistakenly says Schlafly’s 1970s fight against the Equal Rights Amendment “was the birth of the modern culture war, in which ideologues seek concrete gains by pushing sectarian buttons.”
Taking a different view, Andrew Sullivan, posting at New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column on May 1, saw actress Cate Blanchett positively as evoking Schlafly as “a woman with agency, skill, fierce intelligence, and extraordinary willpower,” who was “way ahead of her time, not behind it.”
(Although Sullivan doesn’t mention it, Schlafly puzzled many conservatives including me with her early endorsement of Donald Trump for president, but she again was ahead of the times.
(A March 11, 2016, news release said that when candidate Trump endorsed the GOP platform, Schlafly presciently declared, “We have been stuck with the losers chosen by the Republican establishment for so long, and it’s time for a change. Now we have a guy who is going to lead us to victory!”)
If weekend entertainment guides like the San Diego Union-Tribune’s had the final word, we’d all be dancing to the left-wing line. That we’re not is testimonial to many people’s enduring, unconquered good sense.