Free Republic

Glenn Beck, as even Jon Stewart admitted in his TV interview with Bill O’Reilly, is a talented guy. A week ago, I reviewed and praised Beck’s first documentary on Communism, although I did note a few shortcomings. I have also given him credit for his role in bringing to light the appointment by the Obama administration of people like Van Jones, who largely because of the exposure Beck gave to Jones’ largely unknown Communist views and belief in a 9/11 conspiracy theory, was forced by the administration to resign from his position as the “green jobs czar.” But when it...

While the Obama administration continues its war against its media critics, well-known liberal journalists — instead of defending freedom of the press — are joining the attack on a news network they despise as much as does the administration. Gone is any seeming concern for the right of commentators to voice their own opinion, because mainstream liberal editorial writers are sure their opponents are both extremists and wrong. Take, as our first example, Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of The Slate Group. Writing in last week’s Newsweek, Weisberg explained at the start that anyone who watches Fox News knows immediately that Anita...

A Guest Blog By RONALD RADOSH I noticed the controversy over the late Senator McCarthy in the comments column at NewsReal. It is a mistake for conservatives to think that just because McCarthy's targets were real, the Senator did no harm. Stan Evans has contributed mightily to this confusion in his recent book Blacklisted By History. NewsReal readers may be interested in my review.There were Communist spies, and they did infiltrate the U.S. Government at the highest levels during the New Deal years of F.D.R.’s presidency. While the U.S. treated the Soviet Union as an ally during the war against...

WE'LL LET YOU KNOW WHEN YOU'RE BEING CENSORED By Ann Coulter Earlier this year, the Screen Actors Guild (news - web sites) issued a statement lamenting that "those in the public eye should suffer professionally for having the courage to give voice to their views. Even a hint of the blacklist must never again be tolerated in this nation." Feeling the lash of a right-wing blacklist, the Dixie Chicks (news - web sites) recently played to an adoring, sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden. Ann Coulter   But earlier this week, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., denounced a radio corporation's decision...

That some liberal sources of opinion have, in the very last days of the Bush Administration, tried to make a more balanced assessment is cause for hope. As a historian, I believe that any final judgment about the Bush years must be put off for at least a minimum of ten years, when we can see how things work out in the future, and more records of the administration are made available. Indeed, it is foolish for historians to echo commentators who make firm statements about how history has proved Bush to be evil incarnate. Similarly, I think it foolish...

Here’s some fun for the weekend, if you enjoy reading about left-wing hypocrisy. Saturday’s New York Times has two stories. The first is about the performance in the South Village in New York City by Steve Earle and his wife Allison Moorer. The folk/country duo sang at a new high class venue, The City Winery. It seems we’ve come a long, long way since that day in the early 40’s when Woody Guthrie walked out of the Rainbow Room on the eve of his scheduled performance, and sang in front of the NBC Building on the street for free, strumming...

We know that history holds many surprises. One doesn't expect to learn more about the secret history of of the Gulag than we already know from both Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Acrcipelago" and Anne Applebaum's "Gulag: A history." This feat, however, is exactly what author Tim Tzouliadis has accomplished: the previously unknown story of the thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, sought employment and a better future in the "worker's paradise" built by the Bolsheviks. All kinds of Americans joined the exodus. Some of them were Communists or fellow-travelors but the majority were average Americans - skilled workers promised paid passage,...

Joe McCarthy Demythologized by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 12, 2007 In a recent critique of Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies that appeared in National Review, historian Ron Radosh makes numerous assertions about the book by M. Stanton Evans that are completely unsupported by the work itself. We will deal with just one of that multitude in this column. “In a similar fashion, Evans supports McCarthy’s outrageous assertion about Gen. George C. Marshall,” Radosh writes. “It is fair game to argue that Marshall had a wrong and naïve view of...

Poor Ron Radosh is still hoping liberals will forgive him. He wrote a good book a quarter-century ago with Joyce Milton -- "The Rosenberg File" -- which was supposed to exonerate Julius Rosenberg, but instead concluded that Rosenberg was guilty of Soviet espionage. Radosh has spent the rest of his life apologizing to liberals for that book. This week, he's apologizing in the pages of the increasingly irrelevant National Review with a nasty review of the greatest book since the Bible, M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies....

THEY'LL NEVER FORGIVE YOUby Ann CoulterDecember 5, 2007Poor Ron Radosh is still hoping liberals will forgive him. He wrote a good book a quarter-century ago with Joyce Milton -- "The Rosenberg File" -- which was supposed to exonerate Julius Rosenberg, but instead concluded that Rosenberg was guilty of Soviet espionage. Radosh has spent the rest of his life apologizing to liberals for that book. This week, he's apologizing in the pages of the increasingly irrelevant National Review with a nasty review of the greatest book since the Bible, M. Stanton Evans' "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator...

Stalin is supposed to have said, “one death is a tragedy; thousands are but a statistic.” Let us, for a moment then, ponder this statistic, from the very opening sentence of Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s majestic new biography of Chairman Mao: “Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives on one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.” Think about that for a moment. The staggering figure exceeds that of the deaths caused by Stalin and Hitler combined. But while one can find almost...

  I Don’t Believe in Ghosts, But They Do ExistA Review of Ronald and Allis Radosh’s book:Red Star Over Hollywood, The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the LeftBy Michael WhitcraftAn old Spanish adage states: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but they do exist.” Paraphrasing this adage, an astute analyst could state: “I don’t believe in conspiracies, but they do exist.”Though refusing to see black helicopters looming around every corner, an intelligent observer will conclude that powerful forces operate behind the scenes, influencing many aspects of society. Considering the history of the past few centuries, nothing could be more logical. As...

RED STAR OVER HOLLYWOOD: The Film Colony’s Long Romance With The Left By Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh .....leftist activist, (Radosh once) set out to write a book on the Rosenberg spy case intended to exonerate Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.......what he and his co-author found convinced them that, at least in Julius' case, the guilty verdict was entirely appropriate, a fact subsequently confirmed by the release of long-secret Soviet files. That book cost Radosh a legion of old friends and left him a pariah in leftist academic circles, where ideological purity is too often prized over honest scholarship. But the...

Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (San Francisco, 2005: Encounter Books). Pp. 292. $29.95. In August 1940, the actor Franchot Tone explained to the Dies Committee (forerunner of the House Committee on Un-American Activities) that to him as a liberal, the Communist Party of the United States as it operated in Hollywood was “just another political party.” If anything, that view is even more widely and strongly held today, 65 years later, by the artists of the film colony. The understanding in Hollywood is that the Hollywood Communists, including...

Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left by Ronald Radosh, Allis Radosh ----- Until now, Hollywood's political history has been dominated by a steady stream of films and memoirs decrying the "nightmare" of the Red Scare and how it victimized political innocents. But in RED STAR OVER HOLLYWOOD, Ronald and Allis Radosh tell for the first time the "backstory" behind this myth.

Sarah Baxter is a life-long Labour voter in Britain and a registered Democrat in the United States. So how come she wants George W Bush to remain president?It was the kind of glittering occasion at which John Kerry and his wife would feel at home. There were millionaires in tuxedos with their Botoxed and bejewelled wives, graceful daughters with flawless skin in evening gowns, members of the Kennedy and Hearst dynasties and, because this is New York high society, there were artists surrounded by their patrons and benefactors. They had come to celebrate the National Arts Awards, but it was...

"It was taken for granted among us that [Julius and Ethel Rosenberg] were guilty. We had this kind of double thinking. While they were guilty, of course they were innocent. They were framed. Because anyone ... indicted by the capitalists was ipso facto framed." -- Ronald Radosh quoting John Gates, member of the U.S. Communist Party's central committee, in The Rosenberg File. You'd think this verdict, coming from a bona fide red-diaper New York intellectual, would end the argument over this notorious duo, who went defiantly to their execution in 1953. But the campaign to deify the Rosenbergs and other...

Guilt of the SonBy David HorowitzFrontPageMagazine.com | June 23, 2003 Last week frontpagemag.com posted an “Open Letter to the Rosenberg Son,” written by Ronald Radosh in response to the newly published memoir -- An Execution in the Family --- by Robert Meeropol who has kept the name of the adoptive parents who raised him after the death of his own. Among the adverse reactions to Radosh’s article was an email from Harold Meyerson, editor of The American Prospect, Bill Moyers’ vanguard publication for the Democratic Party’s socialist caucus. In the “Open Letter,” Radosh had written: In the end the truth...

An Open Letter to the Rosenberg SonBy Ronald RadoshFrontPageMagazine.com | June 18, 2003 Dear Robert: It has been fifty years since your parents’ execution, and it is understandable that as the son whom their actions betrayed -- along with their country -- you should still cling to the idea of their innocence. But in the decades since 1953, we have learned much about your father, Julius Rosenberg, and the contributions he made to the Soviet Union as an active espionage agent. We also know, contrary to what you claim in your new book An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey, that...

<p>June 19, 2003 -- FIFTY years ago on this day, I stood with a few thousand largely Jewish and left-wing New Yorkers on a street off Union Square, vainly hoping that our vigil would call off the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.</p>