Last night’s episode of CBS’ NCIS: Los Angeles offered a veritable smorgasbord of liberal tropes–Tea Party types portrayed as terrorists, private healthcare insurance companies slammed and a potpouri of anti-capitalist themes.
The episode started off in an interesting direction when the NCIS team came across the murder of a 1960s leftist radical who had been on the run from the feds for inadvertently killing a fellow terrorist. But it wasn’t long before the idea of a ’60s-era radical became an attack on all things conservative.
As the team members entered into their investigation, they discovered a tie to a local college professor. The team decided to go undercover and, as Agent Kensi Blye (Daniela Ruah) began to socialize with students, she found one planning an Occupy Wall Street protest on campus.
All the talk about Occupy was entirely positive, of course, but in one scene as the peaceful Occupy gathering was in full swing, a group of violent thugs dressed in red and sporting bandana masks burst onto the scene. The thugs, wielding bats, assaulted the peaceful Occupiers and destroyed their displays.
Viewers were told that these thugs were members of the “Red Tide,” a group of wayward ultra patriots that are against the Occupy movement and spout quotes from the Founding Fathers. So, the show gives us innocuous Occupiers but portrays patriots as mask-wearing, baseball bat-wielding criminals that destroy public property and assault innocents.
This characterization, of course, is precisely the opposite of reality.
It was Occupiers that covered their faces in masks, destroyed public property and perpetrated assaults, rapes and gun violence. Let’s not forget the Occupy members who plotted to blow up a Cleveland bridge.
We’ve yet to hear of a similarly violent incident involving a Tea Party activist even if the media tried oh, so hard to create a few examples from whole cloth.
As the episode continued we found that the professor that was initially thought of as a target of the nasty patriot “Red Tide” group was actually the organization’s instigator. This professor was also an aging, radical from the ’60s. He created “Red Tide” on his campus because he felt that further violence was necessary to bring his anarchist principles to realization.
In a bit of logical disconnect, the NCIS team told viewers the “Red Tide” group was designated a “domestic terror group” by the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, if this was a lone group isolated to a single college campus, as portrayed on the show, the idea that DHS would designate it an official terror group–or even notice it at all–is slim to nil. But the goal here was to brand patriots as domestic terrorists, not initiate a logical plot point.
That wasn’t the only absurd aspect of this week’s plot.
To indulge in a bit of anti-capitalism, viewers also learned the main “Red Tide” leader was the son of an evil construction company owner. As this college kid was being interrogated, he excused his violence by saying, “The men who founded this country were terrorists, but you call them heroes.”
The episode even took a shot at private health insurance companies. One of the poor, innocent Occupiers told the investigators that an evil health insurance company had denied coverage to someone close to him.
To cap it all off, viewers were treated to the leader of the Occupiers contemplating taking his own ideas into the realm of violence, but at the last second he realizes that he is going too far, unlike the stupid, brutish patriot “Red Tide” folks who didn’t.
Sadly, it was just one liberal shibboleth after another for NCIS: LA.
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