NPR Host and NYT Guest Stress That Russia Is Communist While Vilifying Uninformed Republicans

Terry Gross: "a communist country – Russia! – has been retweeting social media from the far right."

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In a remarkably unhinged analysis, NPR host Terry Gross and New York Times Magazine writer Robert Draper claimed that Russia is a communist country – as they went on about how detached from reality rightwing Republicans are.

Here’s the crux of the clip (many thanks to Bryce Greene), which almost comes off like a comedy sketch (text at bottom):

After I and others tweeted about this, NPR posted this correction:

POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the audio version of this story, Terry Gross incorrectly states that Russia is a communist country, when she meant to say that Putin was the head of the KGB during the communist era.

Which almost makes it worse. If you substitute what NPR now claims Gross meant to say, it really doesn’t make any sense. Gross and Draper were riffing off each other in what can most charitably be described as a ridiculous example of groupthink.

It displays the all-too-frequent smugness of liberals, going on about other people’s failing to fact check, in this case talking about seniors with “a lot of time on their hands” – while getting the most elementary facts wrong. It’s remarkable projection.

The “correction” ignores that Draper similarly remarked that Putin is “the one great promoter of that [communist] ideology.”

The “correction” is also wrong because Putin wasn’t “head of the KGB during the communist era” – he quit the KGB in 1991 as a lieutenant colonel. He would be appointed head of the successor group, the Federal Security Service, in 1998, years after the fall of communism in Russia, by U.S. tool Boris Yeltsin.

(One of Draper’s most recent books is To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq, which came out last year. If Google books search is to be believed, the book is something of a cover-up. It has nothing on Biden’s presiding over the rigged hearings that helped ensure the invasion, which Biden has continuously lied about.)

Here’s the text of the excerpt:

GROSS: So, like, a really ironic [chuckle] thing about this fight against communism that the far right is doing now is that a communist country – Russia! – has been retweeting social media from the far right. So they’re, in their own way, almost aligned with Putin. So it’s – don’t you think it’s strange that they’re the ones who are, you know, decrying communist infiltration of our country?

DRAPER: Yes. Yeah. No, it’s certainly paradoxical. It’s also paradoxical that this, you know, very rock-ribbed conservative Republican Party in the state of Arizona is so prone to Russia disinformation. And I had that said to me over and over by a number of long-time Republican operatives who said, you know, I think that Arizona is in the top seven, eight or nine when it comes to the number of – the percentage of its population that is senior – that’s senior citizen. They have a lot of retirees that live in Arizona. So people have a lot of time on their hands, and so a lot of them sit on the internet. They’re on Facebook, and they’re reading a lot of things. And amongst conservatives who have come to reject the so-called mainstream media, they’re very, very prone to information that confirms their biases. And they don’t exactly fact-check this information.

So much of it has, in fact, come from – or at least been amplified by Russia-based social media, according to these Republicans that I’ve spoken to. And, you know, it’s also very enemy of my enemy. I mean, I think that Trump has been accused – had so many associations with Russia, he and his campaign operation, and thus was accused of somehow, you know, being intertwined in a very unseemly way with Russia. That the left has, in the eyes of conservatives, has launched that argument means that maybe there’s something not so bad about Russia. It means that Russia is being smeared the way that Trump is being smeared. So it’s all quite convoluted. And to have the word communist used as the ultimate put-down, when essentially the one great promoter of that ideology, Vladimir Putin, is very much shaping their minds or at least, you know, putting out disinformation that can shape their minds – yeah, it’s all a very, very paradoxical situation, to be sure.

Here’s a link to the NPR page which has a full text and audio of the interview.

Sam Husseini is an independent journalist and founder of VotePact.org – which helps break out of the two party bind. His latest personal writings are at http://husseini.posthaven.com/ and tweets at http://twitter.com/samhusseini.

10 thoughts on “NPR Host and NYT Guest Stress That Russia Is Communist While Vilifying Uninformed Republicans”

  1. Another demonstration of what Andrei Martyanov continually talks about: the utter ignorance and absolute lying that the mainstream media demonstrates almost without exception.

  2. This dovetails well. Aug 19, 2022 What is imperialism? Exploring theories of hegemony (with historian Aaron Good)

    A discussion of different theoretical concepts of imperialism and hegemony and how they relate to the United States empire.

    https://youtu.be/OYywVTzV524

  3. Look I’ll skip the part about how bright Terry Gross is or isn’t. But I will risk throwing a turd in the pool party pool by saying that a number of Multipolaristas also seem not to have noticed that Soviet “Communism” ended 31 years ago and have carried on blithely as if it hadn’t. Thus the reluctance to call Putin a capitalist thug, alongside our own capitalist thugs.

  4. The most important story on antiwar.com in over a month. Terry Gross is closer to John Ford (Why We Fight) than Walter Cronkite(CBS broadcaster Vietnam era). There is a f’ing war in Europe!!! It didn’t begin in 2022, it began in 2014 and the gatekeepers blew it by not enforcing
    against escalation on Minsk II’s* line-of-control. Wars need propaganda to continue and for their embers to keep burning.

    *Minsk 2 Agreement.

  5. Draper didnt learn even the alphabets from the cover of the book that he wrote —To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.
    Its interesting that we denounce Wolfowitz ,Feith,Cheney and then we celebrate the successors occupying same positions ,enjoying same power,and blithlessly preparing for next war.

  6. this is nothing for Terri Gross, one of the stupidest people in America.

    one time I heard her in an interview ask sudanese rapper Emmanuel Jal if he was a muslim.

    dude’s name is Emmanuel, not Mohammad!

    typical NPR false erudition – important to know what American State Media is telling people; otherwise no reason to listen to NPR

  7. These people are just stupid, brainwashed idiots. They don’t know how to think either. They watch TV, read the NYT and the WaPo and hate Russians, Russia, Vladimir Putin,and Donald Trump.

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