PURELY POLITICAL: Agitprop

By Jim Buckley

Winning The Optics War

When President Trump gave “Border Czar” Tom Homan a green light to begin the deportation of the “worst of the worst” among the millions of unvetted “newcomers” who’d rushed across our border at the invitation of Alejandro Mayorkas and Joe Biden, you knew it could get ugly.

It did.

It got ugly because governors, mayors, congressmen, and congresswomen, in “sanctuary” states across the United States were committed to withholding their support from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Democrat officials saw immediately that the necessary actions that would have to be taken by ICE would be the opening they’d been waiting for. Any unfortunate mishap, particularly that of a legal resident mistakenly caught up in the dragnet of illegals, could be put to full emotional advantage.

It’s called “Agitprop,” and the Democrat Party has mastered this lowest form of political combat. Its successful implementation is dependent upon the willful participation of a compliant press, something the Republican Party has not been able to achieve for many decades, but that the Democrat Party has harnessed to its great advantage.

Agitprop is an Orwellian term that melds “agitation” with “propaganda” to form an idea that people would immediately understand. It is what Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and the rest of the gang who led the Soviet Union until its official dissolution at the end of 1991 officially called it.

Agitprop was such an important tool of the early Communist Party that within three years of the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), government officials had established a dedicated Department of Agitation and Propaganda.

Democrats have become adept at the use of agitprop and now that they’ve lost the presidency, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court, it has little else. Without their hands on any of the public levers of power, Democrats are still able to call upon the most powerful weapon in their arsenal: “friends” in the media who can and will buttress the latest lie the Left is attempting to disseminate. Creating the optics of oppression is easy, especially when the context is blurred and no questions are asked.

The “Yip-In” Police Riot

My first exposure to Democrat – or to be kind “left-wing” – agitprop here in the good old USA was as a junior journalist covering an event at New York City’s Grand Central Station in the late 1960s. It was called a “Yip-in,” (“Be-ins” were popular at the time), and featured mass disobedience of the anti-marijuana laws that existed. Thousands showed up at the train station at midnight, along with a contingent of New York’s Finest, some on horseback. There they/we were, 5,000 strong, reeking with the sweet smell of pot peacefully breaking the law.

The police simply stood by and watched. This was, however, not what activists among the crowd wanted. They wanted a demonstration of “police brutality,” so before long a small group of young men climbed on the iconic four-sided clock atop the Information Center in the middle of Grand Central’s main concourse and proceeded to pull at its brass hour and minute hands.

That was it.

The Men in Blue rushed to rescue the clock and remove the young men from it. Policemen on horses rode through the main portal to disperse the crowd. Glass doors were shattered, heads were busted. Mayhem ensued.

I tried to find news reports of the day to confirm the distorted mainstream coverage, but it wasn’t until I Googled “police riot” that I uncovered the following. Here’s how Don McNeill of The Village Voice (the left-wing weekly of its day) described the event, originally published March 28, 1968:

“The Grand Central Riot: Yippies Meet the Man

“The cops dropped me in the street and disappeared. My face, and my press card, were covered with blood. I went to the hospital to get five stitches in my forehead. So, I missed the climax of the Yip-In, but I can pass on various accounts of witnesses

“Inside A Yip-In

“All the brass was watching. Chief Inspector Sanford Garelik, shielded by a cluster of Tactical Patrol Force heavies, leaned against the wall in the 42nd Street entrance to Grand Central Station, intently watching the churning sea of demonstrators. Sid Davidoff and Barry Gottehrer, NYC Mayor [John] Lindsay’s roving sensory apparatus, roamed around the terminal for hours. And a dozen privileged persons of some sort lined the balcony above the escalators leading to the Pan Am Building, observing the mêlée below like Romans digging the arena.

“All the brass were watching, and the cops were having a ball. ‘It was the most extraordinary display of unprovoked police brutality I’ve seen outside of Mississippi,’ Alan Levine, staff counsel for the New York Civil Liberties Union, said at a press conference on Saturday. ‘The police reacted enthusiastically to the prospect of being unleashed.’ Levine reported seeing several people forced to run a gauntlet of club-wielding cops while trying to flee from what has been characterized as a ‘police riot.’ Spitting invective through clenched teeth, cops hit women and kicked demonstrators who had fallen while trying to escape the flailing nightsticks. It was like a fire in a theater.

“It was a Yip-In. ‘It’s a spring mating service celebrating the equinox,’ read a Yippie handbill, ‘a back-scratching party, a roller-skating rink, a theater, with you, performer and audience.’ The Yip-In was held for Yippies to get acquainted, and to promote the Yippies’ ‘Festival of Life, which will coincide with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this summer.”

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I was there and, rather than depending upon “various accounts of witnesses,” I can report directly to you that it was no “Festival of Life.”

The distorted half-truthful coverage of this so-called “police riot” at Grand Central Station is a textbook example of classic – and highly successful – Agitprop.

A Short List of More Recent Agitprop:

The “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, Virginia;

Collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia;

ICE “kidnapping” people off the street and “throwing them into vans”;

Border Patrolmen on horseback “whipping Haitian refugees”;

Jussie Smollett attacked by whites claiming Chicago was MAGA country;

Covington Catholic School student Nick Sandmann “smirking” at Native American agitator Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial;

Presidential son and crackhead Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian “plant”;

Michael Brown’s “Hands up, don’t shoot” confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri;

The “innocence” of George Floyd, and… as the king (Yul Brynner) says to Anna (Deborah Kerr) in “The King and I… “Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…”

So, don’t lose hope when you hear how awful it is that ICE agents are “rounding up innocent civilians” and/or “law-abiding citizens.”

They’re not.

But mistakes will be made when there are so many “sanctuary” cities and states from which to extract actual criminals, and when ICE gets no cooperation from local law enforcement. The easiest thing to do (for Democrats and other Trump haters) is to portray ICE officers as “Nazis.” They certainly do look scary, but they are just doing the job that at least half of America has asked them to do.

So, next time you see or read a news report that unsettles you, try to look beyond the sensationalism of the coverage to see the entirety of the event.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, what you’ll find is Agitprop.

What you won’t see is the truth.

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