Wingnut Dolt Chuck C. Johnson Says Ferguson Protesters Sang “Communist Song” in the “Opera”
Chuck C. Johnson is developing into one of the most disgusting, dishonest smear merchants in the right wing blogosphere, and that’s really sayin’ something. As we all know, the right wing base has a Pavlovian reaction to the “communist” word, so here comes the Ginger Avenger with a really vile (and really sloppy) smear job to attack the protest by Michael Brown supporters at the St. Louis Symphony.
This is his original post, still in the Google cache: Ferguson Protestors Sang Communist Song at Opera.
He’s edited it since he posted it, after people pointed out to him on Twitter that he got the location wrong (it was the St. Louis Symphony, not the Opera), and got Florence Reece’s name wrong (he called her “Florence Reed”). A screenshot:
Ferguson protestors didn’t just disrupt the St. Louis Opera. They disrupted it by singing “Which Side Are You On?” a Communist song from the 1930s.
Here’s the video of the protest.
Here’s a cover by Pete Seeger of the 1931 song by Florence Reed, a pro-Communist union activist.
The choice of a union song suggests that this Michael Brown protest might have been led by union organizers. Gotnews has already pointed to the role the New Black Panthers have played in deceiving the public about what really happened between Michael Brown and Officer Darren Wilson.
“I’ve paid $85 for one ticket … I’d like to know how they got in to hang a banner,” says a Twitter tipster.
So would we.
Oooh, the “Black Panther” connection! Scary!
But if “Which Side Are You On?” is a “Communist song,” that’s pretty amazing — because Florence Reece was actually only 12 years old when she wrote it. That’s awfully young to be a goddamn commie.
In fact, the song is about the Harlan County War — the coal miners’ strike against their brutal exploitation by thuggish mine owners, who were sending goons to beat and murder striking workers. Typical of right wing shill Chuck Johnson to label that “communism.”
And his question about how the protesters got into the Symphony — can you guess how these evil commies did it?
By buying tickets, those sneaky Marxists! And members of the symphony and the audience actually applauded the protesters.
The newspaper reports that the interruption was met with applause from some members of the audience and the symphony.
Symphony publicist Erika Ebsworth-Goold tells KMOX-TV and the Post-Dispatch that the protesters were ticketed members of the audience.
Right wing journalism at its finest!
But the fail gets even more fail-ier! LGF contributor @lawhawk points out that, in fact, the protesters didn’t “disrupt” anything; they timed their protest for right after the intermission, before the symphony began playing the second half of the concert.