Good Night, and Good Luck: A Primer

George Clooney’s Broadway Reboot of his W. Bush Era Film is a Call-to-Action

I don’t write Broadway reviews.

This isn’t an Entertainment piece. It’s a political primer.

George Clooney’s Broadway adaptation of his 2005, George W. Bush era film, Good Night, and Good Luck, is a loud, proud, call-to-action, TODAY.

The people who are served up to you, by the media, as responsible for our slide into fascism, are only the tip of the iceberg.

If we don’t learn from history, we’re not only doomed to repeat it. There is no focal voice of reason, no one like CBS News‘ most influential commentator of the 1950’s, Edward R. Murrow, to save us, in this age.

This is the teaser for the 2025, Musk-Trump Era, Broadway play. It will give you the vibe:

Broadcast Journalist Edward R. Murrow was about facts. Here are those facts:

On March 9, 1954, journalist Edward R. Murrow aired a segment on his CBS program, See It Now. It was an exposé of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had been started, in 1938, under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) to root out both Fascist, and Communist extremists. McCarthy’s PSI and HUAC worked concurrently, but not together. McCarthy wasn’t part of HUAC. A small error in the play’s narrative.

Notably, McCarthy was part of a much broader effort, by the Far Right of his day, to take back America from the liberalization of the nation, the “New Deal.” (Listen to Rachel Maddow’s Ultra Podcast series.)

Seeing it, I noticed that many of the people who came to the play were being “woken up” to how long this crusade to drag America’s democracy into the fascist sewers has been going on.

See it, or not, take a trip with me, here, to understand why Clooney’s play is a call-to-action to all Americans. We must be our own “Murrows.”

Who Backed McCarthy & His Anti-Communist Crusade?

Anti-Unionists

While most of the major backers of McCarthy were labeled as “anti-communist” they were largely anti-union/organized labor: