Successful propaganda is composed of equal parts deception and suppression, and the apparatchiks in the mainstream media are much better at the latter.





They may have erred in pushing the Arizona assassination attempt beyond its ideological limits last week, but they succeeded brilliantly a few months earlier in suppressing news of a nearly lethal attempt by a genuine leftist.

In September 2010 Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was scheduled to speak at Penn Valley Community College in Kansas City.

At some point, wearing black clothes and a bullet-proof vest, 22 year-old Casey Brezik bolted out of a classroom, knife in hand, and slashed the throat of a dean. As he would later admit, he confused the dean with Nixon.

The story never left Kansas City. It is not hard to understand why. Knives lack the political sex appeal of guns, and even Keith Olbermann would have had a hard time turning Brezik into a Tea Partier.

Indeed, Brezik seems to have inhaled just about every noxious vapor in the left-wing miasma: environmental extremism, radical Islam, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism and Christophobia, among others.

In his "About Me" box on Facebook, Brezik listed as his favorite quotation one from progressive poster boy, Che Guevara. The quote begins "Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism" and gets more belligerent from there.

On his wall postings, Brezik ranted, "How are we the radical(s) (left) to confront the NEW RIGHT, if we avoid confrontation all together?"

As good as his word, Brezik's marched on Toronto in June 2010 to protest the G20 Summit, where he was arrested, charged, and deported. "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED," he boasted.

Like many on the left, Brezik seemed to have found religion.

In reference to an article about Terry Jones and his proposed Quran burning, Brezik posted on the day before his planned assault, "This is now a Holy war. Scriptures have been desecrated. War U can't handle. Make a choice and quick."

No doubt, Brezik is something of a whack job, but the various rages that he acquired -culminating in Sudden Jihadi Syndrome - are those to which our students are exposed on a daily basis. For the last century or more, it is the progressive fever swamps that have nurtured most of the world's hate and virtually all of its violence, including, paradoxically, radical Islam.