If you ever listened to rebroadcasts of The Adventures of Superman radio serial you know that Supe was woke AF from the beginning.
I am heavily excerpting this directly from James Lantz's review/summary of "George Latimer, Crooked Political Boss" from the Superman home page here.
The episodes were originally broadcast between September 03, 1946 and September 25, 1946, so if you're concerned about having a 79-year-old radio drama spoiled, you should stop reading right now.
Joe Martin, brother of the Daily Planet copy boy Beany and war hero of the Okinawa Invasion, and his Jewish friend Sam Robbins are in the state capitol speaking with thousands of G.I.s against the policies of Governor Frank C. Wheeler, who has been using prejudiced hiring methods. Most veterans have not gotten work because of their race and/or religion. Many of these jobs were promised to soldiers returning from the war. Both Joe and Sam believe that everyone should have an equal right to have employment. However, they want to protest in a different way. Joe wants to storm the capitol building, but Sam believes a more peaceful solution will work better. However, the men with whom they are talking are impatient and want a quick resolution to this problem.
Governor Wheeler is in a panic. George Latimer, corrupt man that is really controlling the political figure, is trying to calm him down. The state police have been dispatched to protect the area. Latimer has a plan that will make it look like Sam Robbins will do away with Joe Martin. All Wheeler has to do is speak to the G.I.s. He does so by saying he wants to rid the USA of foreigners that can undermine the government for true Americans. His words anger the war veterans, and in a panic, Wheeler orders the state police to fire their tommy guns. Chaos has now rocked the state capitol.
Beany has just received news that his brother had been shot while he and the other G.I.s were demonstrating at the state capitol. Perry White and Clark Kent promise to do everything they can to help Joe. Clark goes to the hospital and speaks with Sam Robbins. He doesn't know how Joe became the only one that could have been shot if tommy guns were used. Clark then investigates further by going to the state police department. Sergeant Adams, a ballistics expert that was at the G.I. protest, had told Governor Wheeler that he and his men didn't want to fire on any soldiers because many were in the war themselves. George Latimer convinced them to shoot, but the weapons were normally issued arms. Only one thing could clear the officers at the capitol building: the type of bullet that hit Joe Martin....
Joe Martin has just come out of his coma and is asking for Sam. Joe is in a critical state. Only seeing Sam could help Joe. This means Superman may have to break the law to save the lives of two human beings...
Superman has promised the police that he'll bring Sam back to prison after he helps Joe. Sam has just visited and spoke with his friend. Joe Martin, thanks to Sam Robbins and Superman, is now on the slow road to recovery...
Governor Wheeler and George Latimer are in the former's office. A message about Sam's visit and Joe's recovery has gotten to Latimer. Now, the corrupt political leader must hatch another sinister plot that could mean trouble for Superman and his friends.
Lippy Williams, reporter for the Daily Clarion, is meeting George Latimer in Governor Wheeler's office. Latimer wants to spread propaganda against Sam Robbins, Jews, Catholics, African Americans and other races and religions in order to give his friends state jobs, and he doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.
An article in the Clarion claims that the shooting of Joe Martin was a foreign plot. While Clark Kent follows a lead given to him by the rival newspaper, Some of the G.I.s at the American Legion that were at the state capitol are taking it upon themselves to attempt to get Sam Robbins out of prison. This makes George Latimer happy. Everything seems to be going better than he had planned. The veterans may very well get themselves into some really big trouble...
The unruly group of masked vigilantes led by a man named Dean Carter, an ally of George Latimer, has just taken Sam into the woods. In the meantime, Clark Kent has learned of George Latimer's "suggestion" to move Sam Robbins upstate. The irate Kent tells Governor Wheeler to pray that nothing happens to Robbins. Superman then flies to Grant City unaware of the fact that a bound Sam is being beaten by a mob of hate-filled men. Will the Man of Steel learn of young Robbins' peril?
One member of the mob named Doc has had a change of heart. He helps Sam escape the hate mongers. They flee for their lives in the dark woods. Meanwhile, Clark Kent is worried. It's been three hours since the patrol car carrying Sam left Metropolis, and it hasn't reported in anywhere. As Superman, he flies on a frantic search for Sam, who is running through the forest with Doc's aid. A war injury has prevented Sam from moving without help. They make it to an old barn. However, the masked vigilantes are closing in and shooting, and thanks to some burning hay, the structure Doc and Sam are inside is starting to catch on fire.
Superman has just seen the barn fire. He shields Sam and Doc just as the roof collapses. Taking Dean Carter's mob of bigots to the state policemen he had untied, the Man of Steel is now prepared to take Doc and Sam to Metropolis. Later, in Perry White's office, Clark Kent tells the chief of recent events and new information. The G.I.s with Joe Martin and Sam Robbins swear that the latter didn't have a gun. Plus, the direction of the bullet that hit Joe indicates that it was shot from the steps of the state capitol building...
Superman is meeting with Inspector Henderson later that night. The Man of Steel carries him and lands on the balcony of Latimer's apartment home. Henderson also has a small record player and a record. Superman takes both and prepares to get a confession from George Latimer. The voice of Governor Wheeler is heard in the hate mongering political boss' bedroom. Latimer is crazed with fear. Taking a revolver, he fires at the shadowed figure of Superman. As the Governor Wheeler's voice continues, Latimer confesses to all of his crimes and is taken to prison. As a result of Latimer's arrest, Governor Wheeler resigns his post in the state government. Superman has once again fought injustice...
It is late at night in the home of Clark Kent. Bruce Wayne, who is Batman, has just called the reporter for help. At the Wayne home, Bruce tells Clark how his friend John Grayson and his wife were killed during an acrobatic act that they had performed five years ago in the circus. John's last words were for Bruce to take care of his son Dick, who we all know is Robin the Boy Wonder. John Grayson's diary and conversations Dick had overheard say that a man named George Larson had blackmailed the Graysons because Mrs. Grayson was French and had family that was part of the underground during the war. When the Graysons could no longer pay Larson, they threatened to go to the district attorney. Larson had later tampered with the high wire used in the Graysons' performance.
Trivia: Charles Boulty, Chairman of the American Veterans Committee, gives the series a commendation for fighting against prejudice before the beginning of chapter eleven.
In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.So that’s where we are now.
Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why, then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.
Trump Goes Code Pink on George W. Bush
It was weird that an angry Code Pink-style protester interrupted last night’s Republican presidential debate with a barrage of familiar Democratic talking points about George W. Bush—that he lied the country into a disastrous war in Iraq, failed to prevent the September 11 attacks, and even whiffed on an opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden. It was especially weird that the protestor was one Donald J. Trump, who happens to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
Trump didn’t just call the Iraq war a mistake. He called it “a big fat mistake.” And he didn't call it an inadvertent mistake because of faulty intelligence. “They lied!” he thundered. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction … and they knew there were none.” ...
Then Trump turned and pointed the finger directly at "Jeb!"
[Trump] spent much of the night mocking George’s brother Jeb as a weak, incompetent, lying loser.
The biggest scandal of the last 5 years isn't that corporate media united to lie to the public about Biden's cognitive decline, though that is a gigantic scandal.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 14, 2025
It's that unelected people exploited it to run the country in secret in Biden's name.https://t.co/mWy9hSVEtL
He is blowing on the dying embers of his years as Tucker Carlson's wacky "liberal" sidekick in the hopes of keeping his rep as a minor MAGA celebrity alive.
David Brooks can spend more words tediously bullshitting and sidestepping his way around obvious answers to obvious questions and then racing to the Both Sides Do It safe house than anyone I know. And in his maundering, 34 paragraph ramble through Western Civilization ("Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?") Brooks outdoes himself: burying the inevitable Both Side Do It razor-in-the-apple all the way down in the 27th paragraph.
And it's a doozy. So let's get right to it (with emphasis added by me):
As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.
So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent. He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don’t feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you’re lying to yourself...
The media’s most destructive meme: Why we need to admit that the GOP’s extremism is virtually unprecedentedFor years, the political press has covered for Republicans, insisting (without evidence) that Dems were just as bad
Perhaps, like cuttlefish using chromatophores to mesmerize small prey before they are gobbled up, Brooks thought the boredom he could induce by meandering through 23 centuries of human history before getting to the fucking point would dull reader's senses enough that they would just glide right past it. The op-ed equivalent of white line fever: that altered state drivers can fall into during long, monotonous drives, after which they have no conscious recollection of the trip.
Or perhaps Brooks thought that to get away with a razor-in-the-apple this idiotic and this poisonous he'd better take a helluva running start.
Which is exactly what he did.
I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.
The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle...
Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages.
Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced.
Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems...
And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created....
Today, we live in a world in which...
We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong...
People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences...
Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe...
Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities...
No wonder Brooks thought he had to go all the way back to "Athens in the age of Aristotle" to get a big enough running start to make a leap this huge and loathsome. But I think even starting with ancient Greece didn't give Brooks a runway nearly long enough to get this turd in the air.
Got to go back further. Say to the dawn of agriculture.
Did you know that the story of Cain and Abel was originally intended as a metaphor for the defeat of the nomadic herdsman economy by the agrarian economy? Cain is depicted as a tiller of the soil, while his brother Abel is a keeper of sheep. Cain kills Abel, but isn't himself slain by God. Instead he is sent exiled; sent into the world and cities based on regional agriculture are born.
This gives rise to written languages, mathematics, op-ed columns and lying.
But no, that's still not far enough.
Got to go back even further, say to the breakup between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. One theory holds that a giant, black, Lucite brick came down from Heaven and gave man's simian ancestors the ability to use tools to beat each other up.
This was the beginning of partisan politics. Sad!
But wait. Perhaps we need to go back further still. Does the answer lie within the infamous Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary when a large asteroid strike caused the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and other species? Or the Permian-Triassic boundary which marks the end of the Paleozoic Era and the beginning of the Mesozoic Era? This event, known as the "Great Dying," is the largest mass extinction in Earth's history.
(See! I can read Wikipedia summaries too!)
Who can say what kind of species memories these prehistoric catastrophes stamped into our DNA?
On the other hand, who can say what effect the free-wheeling, if-it-feels-good-do-it manic abundance of the Cambrian Explosion has had on the most ancient parts of our brains?
What we know for sure is that, sometime after the Cambrian Explosion and the Great Dying, came people. Possibly from a garden and made out of dust. Or from a rib. The records are unclear, Anyway, here comes people. People who did stuff. Then, according to one theory, came the big black brick, but according to another theory a guy killed his brother over some nonsense and tried to cover it up, but according to yet another theory a guy lost his best friend fighting the Bull of Heaven. Then there was a flood of some kind that really disordered things, but thanks to a weirdo who Yahweh hired as a shipwright subcontractor, hurry-up-quick things got right back to normal and urban culture made a big comeback, along with written language, astronomy and editorial boards.
And yes, it is very impressive how I juxtaposed "weirdo", "who" and "Yahweh".
Anyway, then came poetry, trebuchets, metallurgy, gunpowder and coffee. Forced perspective. Indoor plumbing. Followed by the invention of poker, capitalism, box fans, jazz and Marxism.
Libertine men and scarlet women! Ragtime!
Then came hippies with their protests and moral relativism and the pill.
Then Republicans thought, hey, being awesome is boring and very much no fun, let's try some of that moral relativism stuff.
The next thing you know, Republicans in Viking hats were stomping cops and pooping on the floor in Congress.
And don't fucking lie to yourselves, Democrats! If you ever spent 30 years letting grifters, lunatics and demagogues take a shit in your skull every night, then raised up a corrupt, bigoted game show host and convicted sex offender as your demigod, and you owned a Viking hat, you know damn well you would have done an insurrection to put your Dear Leader back on the throne, and pooped on the floor of the People's House too!
The End.
