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"Since you did not experience the fifties and sixties you are unaware that the popular culture as exemplified by the media/entertainment media was solidly pro-American, and pro-family. Watch such tv shows as “Life With Father”, “Father Knows Best”, “Leave It to Beaver”, “Have Gun Will Travel”, “Gunsmoke”, “Wagon Train”, “Rawhide”, “Dragnet”, “M-Squad”, “Bonanza” and many others."

When I said "media", I was clearly meaning news media. You know, ABC, NBC, CBS. Those things, they generally were for the enemy. Let me remind you that it was the New York Times who was largely responsible for Castro. Not to mention Edward Murrow, Walter Lippmann, IF Stone, Walter Cronkite, what have you. The standard TV shows may have been conservative, but the news media was solidly liberal.

And I do know about those TV shows being largely conservative, because the Politically Incorrect Guide to the 1960s made that much clear.

"You will see that the media was NOTHING like today in spite of Leftist attempts to shape and control it. There was more CIA control of the media than KGB."

Regular TV programs, sure, but not news media, THOSE were the same as today, with the only real difference being that the media today's more open about it's politics and clearly isn't even pretending to be objective.

"As to the Man of the Year, where did you ever get the idea that it was GOOD Man of the Year? It is to reflect the impact or influence of a person not his virtue. Hitler was an obvious choice and Stalin was an ally when chosen in any case."

Well, for starters, Conservapedia indicated that Time even nominating them showcased liberal bias.

"Joe McCarthy was opposed in Congressional hearing by the MILITARY not the media. It covered the hearings and they did not help Joe at all but painted him as a loose cannon. I think one of his problems was excessive drinking."

The military may have done the final blow, but the media most certainly was against him, especially after Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were proven guilty. And we know that at the very least Lippmann and Stone most certainly knew he was on to them considering they WERE Soviet agents, or at least willfully aiding the enemy.

"Don’t expect me to justify the actions of Democrats, I merely recognize that the party was not all anti-American and was mostly anti-communist. Again your youth leaves you unaware of the conservative Democrats who were patriots. John Stennis, Richard Russell, Scoop Jackson, even LBJ, Russell Long, John McClelland, L. Mendel Rivers, Sam Rayburn, John Sparkman, Carl Hayden, Alben Berkley, James Eastland, Carl Hatch, Pat McCarran, Wilbur Mills, and Carl Vinson are just a few. Don’t forget that almost every other Congressman from the South was both a Democrat and anti-Communist."

Actually, LBJ even back then was very liberal. Yes, there were some conservative Democrats. However, there wasn't enough. In fact, Ronald Reagan was formerly a conservative Democrat. He switched parties after he discovered just how thoroughly infiltrated by the Communists the Democrat Party actually was.

"As with the media today’s Democrat Party is vastly different from the party it once was."

I'd beg to differ. Don't forget, a large part of FDR's cabinet was riddled with Communists, and we actually came very close to a communist as vice president and then president when FDR died (thank goodness we ONLY got Harry Truman instead of Harry Dexter White, the latter outcome would have been even worse especially considering the latter was confirmed Communist.).

"Marx may have welcome the revolutionary activity because of the trouble it caused the Czarist government but he was under no illusions of it leading to a Communist revolution because it had not gone through the stages necessary to his theory. He was well aware that the Proletariat in Russia was insufficiently developed for that to be."

That quote he made certainly didn't sound like he had anything against the Russians pursuing Communism. Actually, if anything, that quote sounded more like he was overjoyed.

"Weatherman was never Maoist, that would be the Progressive Labor Party faction not Weatherman. Most of SDS had no love for Soviet or Chinese communism and most of its actions were initiated for domestic reasons."

Ahem:

"SDS was an important subject within the Soviet directed and funded Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in early 1968. The CPUSA decided to fight for Moscow directed ideology within SDS; to include articles on SDS in its publications; and to begin to put many more CP youth (cadre) directly into SDS and into the SDS National Office in order to get direct access to the SDS leadership. The need and possibility for greater CPUSA participation in SDS, and the possibilities for CPUSA recruitment from SDS, were emphasized. Rennie Davis at this time associated with Don Hamerquist of the CPUSA National Committee who was working with New Left organizations to formulate a program for a communist movement in the U.S.

"Mike Klonsky's Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM II) faction, along with the Ayers/Dohrn Action Faction Weather Underground later were to purge all CPUSA elements from SDS leadership positions in favor of the Beijing directed Maoist strain of violent revolutionary communism. CPUSA elements accused Maoists of the Marxist capital crime of deviationism, as Maoists likewise accused Moscow directed operatives of the same heresy."

Source: http://www.conservapedia.com/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society

You were saying?

Communist influence on SDS was limited when the organization was unified. Weatherman was begun as a means to attract youth and was organizing on a cultural basis not a political basis. It did not call for a proletarian revolution but claimed to want to reform our system, stop the War and push Civil Rights, not to establish a dictatorship. Communism was too boring and too foreign to our traditions - hence the claim that there was a “New” Left.

After the split the three factions coming out of it took different approaches. Only RYMII and the PLP seriously made an effort to organized the workers, and RYMII was more concerned with neighborhood organizing eventually leading to the election of one of its dimmer bulbs to the Chicago City Council, Helen Schliller.

Weatherman was basically anarcho-syndicalist and eventually terrorist believing in the Propaganda of the Deed. A tactic commonly used was to get in the faces of the students and challenge their beliefs and knowledge. The members would go into a college lunchroom and start screaming at the diners trying to get a rise out of them and cause trouble. Their philosophy was to organize through Action not spouting the virtues of a Proletarian Revolution or Marxism of any strip. This is what turned them to violence not Maoist theory where terrorism is either marginal or massive.

A fundamental contradiction for the organization in following Mao was that there were no peasants to organize. Mao’s Little Red Book was popular in all of them but was as much a product of Sun Tsu as Mao.

It is of limited interest to me what your sources are saying since I was intimately involved in these events.

You are completely wrong about the media which is not just the news media but all recorded entertainment. Then we had Bob Hope now we have John Leibowitz. Then we had Lucile Ball now Kathy Griffin. Even the novelists were conservative for the most part. Newspapers ran comic strips which varied from Family humor to overt anti-communism, even Christian themes (Peanuts).

Same is true wrt the Democrat Party, my father, a Yellow Dog Democrat, would never be in that party today. This is simply a fact, an unavoidable fact. All but one of the Senators from the South were solidly conservative and anti-Communist. Not only is that the case but the difference in the beliefs of the parties was far smaller than today.

Richard Nixon was not a conservative just an ambitious guy who rode anti-communism to power but he was a liberal in regard to civil rights. There was no clear ideological split in the parties, merely differences around the edges. It was Nothing like today where the differences are clear and irreconcilable. If the difference between periods of history are not clearly understood, progress is not going far. The difference between fifty years ago and now is not even debatable as anyone who has lived through this period will affirm.