Criminal Intent

One of my favorite shows is Law and Order: Criminal Intent. I can get sucked into a marathon of this program very easily, especially on a humid, stormy day like yesterday. USA has taken over the new episodes of this show from parent company NBC, which still has the first runs of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Other than changing the theme of the show into an over-produced, hard-to-listen-to piece of music, USA has pretty much remained true to the spririt of the show and Jeff Goldblum, alternating the male lead with my favorite Vincent Dinofrio, is a solid addition to the cast.

Law and Order: CI has pretty much steered clear of any kind of political statements in the past; they generally leave that to the writers over at SVU. But last night's season finale was an exception. The teaser for the show said it was about a small group of "homegrown terrorists". It turned out that the leader of the terrorists was an established terrorist from Germany and the "daughter" he kidnapped from a family he killed and raised as his own, unbeknownst to her. The group was rounded out by a "homegrown" drug dealer who met his demise early in show when the father and daughter team determined he was a liability after he panicked during their operation to kidnap a Wall Street banker.

The first half of the show seemed promising; the terrorist father was clearly a communist, who reminisced fondly to his daughter about the Communist revolutions of his youth. Their politics were clearly of a Communist bent and at one point, Jeff Goldblum's character, Nichols, criticizes the FBI's public response to the act of terrorism-- that they had situation well in hand-- saying it was like a dare to them. "Why not just come right out and say that Communism is dead? That it makes no sense to replace a flawed system with a failed system?"

Apparently, another group of writers took over for the second half of the show, or the NBC censors, detecting a bit too much conservatism in this episode, decided to apply a little ideological balance of their own, in an underhanded and factually incorrect way.

After setting off a bomb on Wall Street, the daughter is surfing the internet and excitedly tells her father that their plans for revolution are catching on, "There was another Tea Party up in Boston this weekend!" she tells him. This line completely misrepresents the purpose of the Tea Parties, which is decidedly ANTI-Communist and are protests against taxation. This is a subtle--and probably effective--attempt by NBC to portray the Tea Party movement as an enemy of democracy and freedom instead of a facet of it. This is how the MSM and Hollywood win the ideological battle; people who are not of a political bent, who are too lazy or disinterested to really follow political events, may now be inclined to believe Tea Parties (and the subsequent anti-Obama care protests) are a facet of Communism or at the very least, anti-democratic. Make no mistake; this is completely intentional.

The second slam was more blatant, and probably less effective in the context that it was presented. The FBI agent working with the CI detectives announces that data mining of monitored credit card data has revealed that one person had recently made several purchases of large quantities of chemicals known for making bombs and it tripped their alarm system. After determining who the purchaser was and where she lived, one of the characters asked, "Wait a minute. Whose credit card transactions are being monitored?" The FBI agent replies, "Don't ask." Someone else says, "All of ours," and another sarcastically adds, "Thank you, Dick Cheney." Yes, thank you Dick Cheney, for giving us the tools to track down potential bomb-making terrorists by mining data supplied by credit card companies. The writers of the second half of Law and Order: CI seem to think we'd be better off if we just remained in the dark about these things.

This is just one show on a cable network but it is an example of the power of popular culture in the hands of a media giant with an agenda. This is what we need to target and fight against, because it is the Left's most powerful weapon against us; the ability to sprinkle political disinformation into popular television shows to subtly influence public opinion.