https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/cultural-hijacking-bruce-bawer/
Never underestimate the determination of left-wing ideologues to take over social, cultural, and political institutions – or the willingness of fools and knaves to whitewash the history of those takeovers. Joe McCarthy has become a symbol of unjust persecution, but there were Stalinists in the State Department. The Blacklist has become a byword for political intolerance, but the Hollywood Ten were all Party members, taking orders from Moscow and fiercely dedicated to the overthrow of American democracy. In the years between the wars, Communists took control of one trade union after another, often succeeding simply because, relentless and brutally unscrupulous in their lust for power, they managed either to wear their enemies down or terrify them into submission.
In his fascinating 2015 book Hollywood Traitors, Allan H. Ryskind writes that during World War II, “a cabal of top Communist writers” taught newbies how to work Stalinist ideas into scripts. Seven of the Hollywood Ten – the screenwriters, all Party members, who were blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 – were part of this cabal. The protégés got career boosts; the anti-Communist holdouts often suffered professionally. But while Blacklist victims are still celebrated as heroes, Hollywood writers whose anti-Communism damaged their livelihoods got bupkus.
Ryskind also recalls the powerful Screen Writers Guild (SWG), which, while consisting in 1940 of about 400 members, was run by a small board dominated by Stalinists like Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. When in 1944 anti-Communist filmmakers formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), the SWG joined other Moscow-directed unions in attacking it – with flagrant dishonesty – as “fascistic and anti-Semitic.” So effective was this savage campaign in damaging the MPA’s reputation that Ryskind’s father, Morrie, writer of Penny Serenade and His Girl Friday, felt compelled to defend the MPA in an article for the Saturday Review of Literature. It didn’t help: the smear continued.