Back in the 1950s, a number of private corporations (most famously, movie and television studios), that had every legal right to choose who they did and did not want to do business with, enforced an appalling blacklist as a means to intimidate, silence, and punish those who held beliefs and opinions unpopular with the establishment.
This never should have happened in America, and today we rightly look back on this era with shame.
Moreover — and this is important — no one looks back at the infamous 1950’s Hollywood blacklist and says, “Hey, the studios were corporations, not the government, so they had the right to hire and fire whoever they wanted.”
And yet…
That very same excuse is being used to justifying today’s ongoing blacklisting campaigns.
There is no question political blacklisting has returned with a vengeance. Once again, just as we saw during the Hollywood blacklist of old, large corporations are de-platforming, refusing to serve, firing, and stripping sponsorship from those who hold beliefs and opinions unpopular with the establishment.
We even have large media corporations, like the far-left CNN, openly demanding the blacklisting of certain opinions.
What’s more, in a truly ironic example of history repeating itself, we have the powerful in Hollywood calling for the blacklisting of certain opinions.
Yep, just as we saw happen to television personalities in the McCarthy era, Hollywood director Judd Apatow is openly calling for Fox News primetime star Tucker Carlson to be blacklisted, for his commercial sponsors to pull their support, for him to lose his platform and career.
Already a number of sponsors have joined this blacklist, and Apatow is calling for more, simply because Apatow doesn’t like Carlson’s political beliefs.
Because of his political beliefs, Bowflex, SmileDirectClub, NerdWallet, Ancestry.com, Pacific Life Insurance Company, Indeed.com, and nearly a dozen others have pulled their sponsorship of Carlson’s programs, are all blacklisting Carlson and, by extension, intimidating anyone else they sponsor.
Sound familiar?
Sure, you can cower behind the word “boycott,” but a blacklist is a blacklist is a blacklist, and this is a goddamned blacklist.
During those dark days of the 1950s, commercial sponsors were bullied and threatened by political operatives into enforcing the blacklist.
In turn, if a television show employed the “wrong” people or expressed the “incorrect” beliefs or ideas, sponsors would either threaten to pull their sponsorship or pull it altogether. This was not only a way to control people, it controlled what was said, which opinions and ideas were discussed and aired to the public.
Look around today and you will see that there is no difference between what happened then and what the establishment media, large corporations, and left-wing activists are doing today to silence the political right.
As I write this, a number of leftists are desperate to blacklist Carlson.
Popular Information’s Judd Legum, a leftist-in-good-standing in Twitter’s blue checkmarked mafia, has made a project out of blacklisting Carlson.
It gets worse…
Rather than condemn the fact this hideous Hollywood history is repeating itself, the far-left Hollywood Reporter is aggressively participating in this Carlson blacklist by using the old trick of pretending to be engaged in journalism as it publicly pressures Carlson’s advertisers to answer if they agree with Carlson’s statement (which is factually true) that the wrong kind of immigration makes our country “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.”
The un-American act of blacklisting unpopular political beliefs and opinions has become a common a cause for the organized left and just one more example of how is is the left killing liberalism.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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