{"id":113,"date":"2007-07-18T13:37:57","date_gmt":"2007-07-18T17:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/godandculture.wordpress.com\/2007\/07\/18\/the-great-danger-to-our-country\/"},"modified":"2007-07-18T13:37:57","modified_gmt":"2007-07-18T17:37:57","slug":"the-great-danger-to-our-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/the-great-danger-to-our-country","title":{"rendered":"The Great Danger to Our Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City and author of the new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism<\/a>. In a recent conversation with Mr. Piereson on my talk program, I asked him why most Americans think of the civil rights foment of the 1950’s and 60’s as the catalyst for the assassination of JFK\u00a0 when in reality it was a Communist, Lee Harvey Oswald,\u00a0whose motives were influenced by leftist ideology rather than racial bigotry, who killed the president.<\/p>\n

His response has enormous implications for our own time:<\/p>\n

We have to remember that in the 1950’s we had the background of McCarthyism. McCarthyism was viewed by the liberals as a great threat to everything they held dear, because they saw McCarthy as a very successful demogouge who is accusing liberals and New Dealers basically of being soft on Communism, and some of them indeed of being traitors. Liberals got it into their minds in the 1950’s that the great danger to the country came from something they called “the radical right.” This was a collection of anti-Communists like McCarthy, racial bigots in the south, and what they regarded as Christian fundamentalists who had radio programs<\/em> which generally were anti-Communist, and what they (liberals) regarded as anti-modern or anti-progressive. They said that domestic communism was absolutley no threat to the country and that the radical right was demented or crazy for thinking so. Now along comes a Communist who assassinates the president. The liberals had great difficulty digesting this. Logically, in their minds, it should have been a far right person, someone from the radical right, a bigot maybe, an anti-Communist maybe, who did the deed. But it wasn’t. It was a Communist. Many were afraid, after the fact, that if a Communist or Communism were tagged with the crime that we would have a replay of the McCarthy movement of the early 1950’s. And therefore they sought to deflect blame away from Oswald and Communism and toward what they called this “climate of intolerance.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Christian fundamentalists who had radio programs.”<\/em> Conservative talk radio in our own day has consistently and articulately warned of the threat from Islamofascism, not unlike those Christian fundamentalists with radio programs warning of the communist threat in the 1950s. And yet in the same way the leftists in 1950 and 1960 refused to take seriously the threats from communism, voices on the left today deflect\u00a0the\u00a0warnings of today’s conseravtive talk radio hosts regarding the threats America faces from Islamofascism as the mere rantings of ‘radicals’ while embracing Islam and its representatives in radical yet mainstream Muslim organizations like CAIR.<\/p>\n

Is history repeating itself? As far as the left is concerned, the great danger this country faces is not from those who have actually murdered our citizens. No. The great danger America faces is conservatives using the medium of talk radio to inform Americans about the threat posed by Islamofascists. Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer want “a legislative fix” to the talk radio problem, while calling for policies that would mandate losing the war against a very real and present danger in Iraq.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t a racial bigot on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963. And it wasn’t talk radio hosts who flew planes into our buildings on September 11, 2001.\u00a0 Yet, “Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.” (Senator Trent Lott to the Washington Post). The more things change the more they stay the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York City and author of the new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. In a recent conversation with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}