Authoritarian Left now practicing informational “McCarthyism” as group calls for blacklisting and shutting down more than 500 conservative news sites

The American Left hated Sen. Joe McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican who conducted a five-year investigation beginning in 1950 that sought to identify and root out Communist sympathizers as the Soviet Union rose to compete with the U.S. following World War II.

By any measure, McCarthy’s effort failed to turn up any substantial evidence that the U.S. government and military were infiltrated by anti-American figures loyal to Moscow. What’s more, following televised hearings in which he berated a young Army lawyer and other witnesses, he was sanctioned by the Senate, lost most of his allies, and all of his support. 

The fear McCarthy generated, according to The History Channel, “came to define – and, in some cases, corrode – the era’s political culture.”

But as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same, for today, nearly seven decades after McCarthy’s rise and fall, American Leftists who revile him and what he stood for are using his tactics to browbeat, attack, mischaracterize, accuse, and — eventually — shut down competing political voices, especially online.

As WorldNetDaily reports, the Poynter Institute, a non-profit “journalism” organization, has just published a list of 515 media sites including WND, Breitbart News, the Drudge Report, Natural News, and NewsTarget, that it suggests should be blacklisted and shut down. 

Laughingly, Poynter says on its webpage that the organization stands for press freedom, including a quote from former mainstream media newsman Bob Schieffer, who said, “We can’t have a democracy as we know it without a free press, and that’s why Poynter is so important.”

And yet, given Poynter’s call for hundreds of websites to be blacklisted, defunded, and banished, that sounds more like what Communist China, Communist Cuba, and other authoritarian regimes actually do.

Poynter attempts to portray its list as nothing more than a public service, however, claiming that the sites listed are not real news sites, are “unreliable,” and therefore cannot and should not be read, frequented, or trusted.

The Left can’t compete on a level playing field

It is a blatant attempt to get these websites defunded. In its introduction of “UnNews index,” Poynter says it hopes that the list will be “useful for advertisers that want to stop funding misinformation.”

“Advertisers don’t want to support publishers that might tar their brand with hate speech, falsehoods or some kinds of political messaging – but too often, they have little choice in the matter,” the group notes further.

“Most ad-tech dashboards make it hard for businesses to prevent their ads from appearing on (and funding) disreputable sites. Marketers can create blacklists, but many of those lists have been out-of-date or incomplete,” Poynter adds.

“Aside from journalists, researchers and news consumers, we hope that the UnNews index will be useful for advertisers that want to stop funding misinformation.”

Sites were added to the list for “bias,” “fake news,” “clickbait,” “conspiracy,” and for being “unreliable” — making those not on the list even more interesting. 

For instance, none of the so-called “mainstream media” outlets like CNN, the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and others were included, though all of them have demonstrable “bias” against POTUS Donald Trump, have published several accounts of “fake news,” use “clickbait” headlines, and have enabled in the greatest political conspiracy of our time — the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. (Related: Russia hoax COLLAPSES: Not a single American charged with collusion with Russia; left-wing media has been LYING all along.)

Worse, Poynter researchers used biased ‘fact-checkers’ to help with their list — like Snopes and PolitiFact.

“This is nothing less than the return of the 1950s’ blacklisting crusade against those who hold inappropriate, unacceptable, and unapproved opinions,” Breitbart News editor-at-large John Nolte wrote regarding Poynter’s list.

The Left hates competing in the realm of ideas because it can’t win there, so it must smear, lie, obfuscate, censor, defund, and ban its ideological opponents with a has-been tactic they used to despise.

Read more about the fake news establishment media at NewsCartels.com and CNNSoFake.news. 

Sources include:

TheFederalist.com

NewsTarget.com

Breitbart.com

WorldNetDaily.com