The left has taken up the mantle from the wackos on the right
When he was an up-and-coming singer in 1963, but hadn’t hit the big time, Bob Dylan famously walked off the set of the Ed Sullivan Show during a rehearsal because a network exec wouldn’t let him sing the “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Rich with biting cracks about right-wing fear, the tune mocked the anti-Communist sentiments of the day, but CBS feared a libel suit.
Here are a few of the lyrics:
Well, I was feelin’ sad and feelin’ blue
I didn’t know what in the world I wus gonna do
Them Communists they wus comin’ around
They wus in the air
They wus on the ground
They wouldn’t gimme no peace . . .
So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin’ down the road
Yee-hoo, I’m a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!
Now we all agree with Hitler’s views
Although he killed six million Jews
It don’t matter too much that he was a Fascist
At least you can’t say he was a Communist!
That’s to say like if you got a cold you take a shot of malaria
Well, I wus lookin’ everywhere for them gol-darned Reds
I got up in the mornin’ ’n’ looked under my bed
Looked in the sink, behind the door
Looked in the glove compartment of my car
Couldn’t find ’em . . .
I wus lookin’ high an’ low for them Reds everywhere
I wus lookin’ in the sink an’ underneath the chair
I looked way up my chimney hole
I even looked deep down inside my toilet bowl
They got away . . .
Today, some of the more troublesome paranoia comes from the left, particularly about the media coverage of Graham Platner, a Senatorial hopeful in Maine. For instance, a very bright progressive friend shared a Facebook post, seemingly oblivious to its paranoia, journalistic ignorance and borderline antisemitism.
Platner, readers of this Substack may recall, is a deeply flawed Democratic candidate who also is an outspoken critic of Israel. Recall that for years, until he covered it up, he sported a tattoo linked to Nazis, a skull and crossbones image resembling a specific symbol of Hitler’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, or SS. And he appeared on a podcast whose host had basked in antisemitic conspiracy theories; Platner said he was a longtime fan of the host.
In 2014, combat veteran Platner praised the tactics of a Hamas raid that killed Israeli soldiers.
The Facebook entry, attempting parody or satire, gives us a fictitious letter from the New York Times to “it’s [sic] readership,” explaining the paper’s critical coverage of Platner.
“OK, we sent a team of reporters to Maine, led by crack reporter Katie Gluek [sic, it’s actually Glueck], an ardent Zionist whose parents are part of the Israeli settler movement, to scour the state for anything that might derail the Platner campaign,” the piece begins. “We’ve been there for months and have spent thousands of dollars on the story.
“We are now publishing a lengthy piece of ‘investigative’ journalism which introduces no new facts at all. But we do have some juicy gossip for you. We found three ex-girlfriends that told us he drank too much, was ‘volatile,’ and sexist, even misogynistic at times. We also found bunch of exes that said he was loving and that they felt safe with him.
“The most damning allegation is that he was physically threatening, and that he knew that the skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest was a Nazi tattoo. These allegations come from a Republican political operative, which we mention.”
So, let’s break that down a bit. Glueck, it turns out, has covered politics for more than a decade. By her own description, she wrote “about extraordinary presidential elections, battles for control of Congress and governor’s mansions across the country, and two wild New York City mayor’s races, serving as the chief metro political correspondent in 2021.”
Glueck covered Ted Cruz for Politico in 2016 and was the Biden beat reporter for The Times during the 2020 presidential campaign. She graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, worked in Washington at Politico and in McClatchy’s D.C. bureau before moving to New York. Before joining the Times in 2019 as a politics reporter, Glueck had been published in The Wall Street Journal, Washingtonian magazine and the Austin American-Statesman.
So, in other words, Glueck is a seasoned reporter.
But, to the critic, she is “an ardent Zionist.” The evidence of that? Well, at Northwestern 17 years ago, she was a co-president of Students for Israel. Is she still a supporter of Israel or, more precisely, the Netanyahu government? Guess we don’t really know that, do we? No real evidence there.
Of course, she is a Jew, though. For the critics, that seems to be enough. That’s enough to disqualify her from covering a Maine Democrat, apparently.
As for her parents being part of the Israeli settler movement, well, turns out there’s no evidence of that either, even though this claim and the “Zionist” charge against the reporter have spread across the Net like a virus. In fact, at last report, in 2018, her parents – Dr. Robert M. Glueck, a cardiologist, and Miriam Glueck – lived in Haifa, where he directed the clinical operations at the Technion American Medical Program and Mrs. Glueck was a volunteer fundraiser for a health program.
The critics readily found that info, drawn from the journalist’s marriage announcement years ago. But are the parents settlers? Perhaps in some antisemite’s imagination.
Still, the attacks on Glueck and the Times can be found in a bevy of sites. And some of the posts go well beyond the Facebook poster in their slams, damning Israel and “the Israel lobby” for Glueck’s work on Platner.
The poster my friend cited is particularly pernicious in a way that, despite its leftist cast, is reminiscent of the Birch Society attacks from the right. They were fear-filled, laced with unsubstantiated innuendo, and ultimately baseless.
The FB comment contends that Glueck’s reporting on Platner is “basically a gossip column dressed up as news. Shameful,” for instance. It goes on to attack the Times as “a ruling class, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist institution. Have we forgotten their coverage leading up to the Iraq war, or the [sic] their long record of coverage on Israel-Palestine?”
First, can anyone seriously call the coverage in the Times pro-Israel? Perhaps such folks have missed all the Gaza coverage, as well as the Lebanon coverage of late. Guess they missed headlines such as “Gazans are dying of starvation” and “As Israel Pounds Gaza City, and Overwhelming Exodus.” Maybe they were absent when the paper ran “Israeli Expansionism is Shaking the Middle East.”
Certainly, many of the editors at the Times would consider themselves “pro-capitalist,” as most Americans would. “Pro-imperialist?” That’s a hard one to prove and the poster doesn’t bother to offer any backing for that.
And then, is it gossip when a political journalist digs into a candidate’s background and finds some disturbing stuff? Is it gossip when other media outlets find similar problems, such as the sexually explicit texts Platner exchanged with numerous women while he was married, as the Wall Street Journal reported? Or that various women came to Platner’s former campaign political director to share what she called “their own disturbing stories” about him, as she recounted in The Washington Post.
It’s the job of news outlets to uncover and report on the baggage politicians and would-be politicians carry. That’s not motivated by political bias, by Zionism, by partisanship or by capitalism even. It’s what reporters do so voters can see their candidates, warts and all – some of which Platner has acknowledged.
“Throughout this campaign, I’ve been open about what was a very dark period of my life where I struggled with undiagnosed PTSD, too often self medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend,” Platner said in a statement to CNN. “I take responsibility for all of that, and wish I had been better. Any characterization beyond that is false, and I believe, politically motivated. I’m not proud of who I was then, but I am proud of the work I’ve done since, and the movement we are building in Maine.”
Despite the flaws slowly becoming apparent, voters very likely will choose Platner in the June 9 primary and he’ll likely run against Susan Collins in the fall. Then, it will be up to Mainers to make yet another choice. Will they see him as a flawed but reformed character? Or will they look at a 41-year-old political naif’s past and be unsettled?
If more voters had looked at Donald J. Trump’s sordid past more critically, would he have become president, twice? Lord knows, that was amply covered by the Times and the other publications. Was that “gossip?”
Some critics have suggested the best course for Democratic leaders would be to put as much distance between themselves and Platner as possible.
“To defend Platner, Democrats will have to choose between two strategies: denouncing as liars a possibly growing number of women—or else accepting the stories, but then arguing that twisting a woman’s arm and locking her in a room is not quite the same as beating her,” David Frum wrote in The Atlantic. “Do they want to haggle over just how inappropriate these romantic relationships were, even as they argue that wearing an SS tattoo throughout most of one’s adult life does not prove that one is a literal Nazi?”
In the meantime, we’ll likely hear lots from the conspiracists who don’t understand the role of the press, who feel free to attack reporters who happen to be Jews, and who warm to baseless information just because it floats around on the Net. To them, not doubt, there are plots everywhere “in the air, on the ground,” as Dylan might have said.
Instead of “gol-darned Reds,” however, the offenders whom these Birchers of the left see are journalists. They are reporters doing their jobs on behalf of voters.