This is almost laughingly misleading, as it leaves out everything before the letter.
▪️After being repeatedly lampooned by the Smothers Brothers over Vietnam, Johnson finally had enough. One night at 3 am he called the head of CBS William Paley, demanding that he “get those bastards off my back.”
▪️Paley then asked the heads of CBS entertainment to get them to back off of LBJ. However, instead of backing off the Smothers Brothers doubled down, booking a folk musician performing “Waist Deep,” an anti-war song about a soldier being stuck in the mud while “the big fool says to push on,” clearly a dig at LBJ.
▪️At the last minute, CBS cut the song from the pre-taped show to the outrage of the Smothers. They continued to push the boundaries off and on for the rest of his presidency, with CBS sometimes cutting segments that they thought went too far. Basically, it was a soft form of censorship.
▪️It wasn’t until Johnson made his surprise announcement not to run in 1968 that the brothers wrote the letter conceding they had “occasionally overstepped our bounds.” Which prompted the gracious response by LBJ, but this was more than a bit hypocritical given the context.
▪️The Smothers Brothers continued their anti-war satire against Nixon, who also wasn’t amused. Some Nixon campaign funds were even used to investigate them. Just 3 months after Nixon took office, CBS canceled the show. The Smothers claimed it was from pressure by the Nixon Administration. CBS claimed they failed to deliver an advance tape of a sensitive segment in a timely fashion.
Anyone who’s not young should know this is bs for the simple fact that almost everyone was poorer when they were younger, and dumber with their money. There’s a reason why payday loans and pawn shops are located in poor areas.
Also, living within your means is only the first tier of being smart with money. Smart with money means figuring out how to make a lot of it and protect it. Almost by definition, poor people aren’t smart with money.
As with the leftist freak out over “banned books” this is not banning books, it’s still easy to get Harry Potter and bookstores should be able to limit whatever books they want for whatever reason. But not only does it show a double standard, the rationale is far less justifiable than removing certain content from school libraries. At least there the justification was the content of certain books are inappropriate for children, clearly not every book should be available in a school library. Here, there’s no argument about the content they just don’t like the author’s politics!
