In 1936 my friend Howard had an opportunity to acquire a newspaper route. The “Great Depression” was nearing an end, but jobs were still very scarce, so Howard jumped at the chance without considering possible undesirable consequences. During the summer months Howard’s family liked to go on fishing trips at least once every week. Now Howard couldn’t go with them as he had to deliver his papers. Like a good friend should, I learned Howard’s route and substituted for him on family trip days so he could go, too.
One of Howard’s customers, I called her Mrs. C because she seemed to have some kind of a connection to the Communist Party, USA, also subscribed to The Daily Worker, a daily newspaper published and distributed by the Communist Party. Each time she saw me coming to deliver her paper she would collar me and insist that I read two articles she had cut from her Daily Worker she thought I needed to read.
Because of a strange grammatical construction and the spellings of some words I assumed the first article was written in Moscow. It exaggerated and extoled the virtues of certain Democratic politicians who were advocating changes to our government’s goals and procedures that aligned with the Communist agenda. I thought it was trying to make me dissatisfied with Capitalism and ready to switch to Communism or Socialism.
The second article seemed to me to be written by Democratic politicians from Washington, D.C. It slandered and demonized every Republican leader and their speeches and voting records. I thought it wanted me to go home and tell my family to always vote Democratic, never Republican again.
After I had endured the third or fourth of Mrs. C’s propaganda barrages I went to our Chief of Police. I thought he ought to know about what Mrs. C was doing. To my surprise, he already knew. By the way, he also called her Mrs. C. He told me there are hundreds, maybe thousands of Mrs. C’s scattered around the country, all spewing the same garbage. I asked him why the Republicans didn’t put a stop to it. He asked me if I was going to go home and tell my family to always vote Democratic.’
“No way!” I replied. “Her articles are full of lies and nonsense. I don’t believe one word.”
“That’s the way the Republicans see it, too. They just laugh at her. Any loyal American with even an ounce of sanity, intelligence, and common sense will just laugh at their garbage. The Democrats love what the Mrs. C’c are doing. They think this is helping them to win elections. I think their garbage brigade is totally impotent and irrelevant.”
So that was 82 years ago. Have the Mrs. C’s been conducting their propaganda network all these years? I don’t know, but I suspect that they have. So what is different today? Why are the Democrats so unglued that the Russians were trying to influence a 2016 Presidential election when they have been doing it for more than 90 years? Are they angry because this time they think the Russians didn’t help them? Maybe they helped the Republicans? It looks like it. This time the second article doesn’t contain just a few cherry-picked fake dirt news items, carefully selected for believability. Somebody hacked into the DNC files and published the entire Democratic talking points, all 239 pages of it.. No one could read that much fake dirt without realizing it was phony. But don’t blame the Russians. Security on the DNC files is so bad anybody could have done it. Any honest person would have done it if they were aware of the disinformation attack the Democrats were generating against Donald Trump.
