THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Richard looked up an old Quaker Oats ad and told me THAT was the original Quaker Oats ad, not the one I referred to.

I looked up the Mule Train on Google and found only a reference to one that showed up at civil rights rally in 1968.

I could be wrong on both counts, but I doubt it seriously.

It could be that there is a conspiracy, but I doubt that, too.

I saw the original Quaker Oats box in a history of advertising, with a discussion of it. I saw the Mule Train arriving at Cape Kennedy when there was the usual burst of publicity about it on TV in 1969.

This is one reason so many people believe in conspiracies. I am used to people seeing major stories on TV and talking about them and then, a year later, totally forgetting anything like that ever happened.

I tried to Google the name of the original congressman who introduced and put through the creation of the House un-American Activities Committee. He was a Communist that KGB files showed was a paid Soviet agent. HUAC was set up to hunt down Nazis and KKK in the 1930s, and the left only got it abolished in a long campaign after it turned against the Reds after WWII.

John Ashbrook was on HUAC.

But I couldn't find the information I was trying to find about the Communist congressman. Some people here and on SF found it finally.

The problem is that if you look up HUAC, the only stories are about its persecution of Hollywood and so forth.

A Conspiracy? No, what you find is what someone PRODUCES. What exactly would anyone GAIN by ignoring Hollywood and going back to what I was looking for?

Here's a story you won't read elsewhere. While I was on Capitol Hill, they decided to dispose of the HUAC file, the WHOLE thing. They offered to GIVE it to anybody who wanted it, libraries, individual staffers, ANYONE.

No takers.

So I assume most of it got burned. If I had had the space, I could have it now. For all the volumes written about it, no one wanted the actual files. There were THE LATEST news stories to deal with, and everything that they needed for the stories on McCarthyism and HUAC were already there for the taking of anybody who wanted to get published.

Does that sound like a conspiracy or simply that no one wanted to bother with it?

There is only one giant industry that almost NEVER has a real scandal. Why? Because what exactly would someone who is making his livelihood inside that industry GAIN by exposing a scandal of this sort? The two blacks that wrote false stories, one of which got a Pulitzer Prize that had to be taken back, are both still making a good living in the media. That would have ruined a politician or a member of any other profession, but conservatives were the first to say it was a minor matter, really. This is not a conspiracy. This is a cost of information.

Let me say it again: information is a PRODUCT, like bread or potatoes. It is not so much suppressed, as it is simply not produced, not repeated. Who would GAIN by talking about the civil right's attack on the space program in 1969?

People on our side are as fixated on today's news as the newspapers. Their time is spent on the latest outrage. The only people who would be interested in these old things would-be professionals and professionals are the LAST people who are going to drag up the Quaker Oats bit in the middle of an age of Political Correctness, or report scandals in the media or dwell on the Gods of Civil Rights' opposition to the Moon Landing.

Do you really think that Bloomberg, who wrote the book Bias, is ever going to get a big job in the media again?

This is not conspiracy. This is the way the world WORKS.

When the Watts Riots got going, I stayed up at night listening about them on the radio. That was back when radio stations still signed off. I was on the East Coast, so the station I was listening to was going off the air. They finished up at about midnight California time and wound it up by repeating what every media outlet in America was saying at that point:

"This is NOT a race riot. This is NOT racial."

Try to find THOSE quotes on Google!

I remember that after Kennedy was shot, the first words out of Chief Justice Earl Warren's mouth were that this showed the danger of right wing extremists who had killed the President. Look THAT one up, gang!

Conspiracy, hell! Conspiracies aren't that efficient!