Lone Ranger Blacklist Kingpin?

(Santa Barbara — Feb 10, 2015) The Long Ranger, hero to thousands of Saturday morning viewers years ago, may be linked to “rogue savior of democracy” Joseph McCarthy and his heralded witch hunts in the Fifties.
According to a close, unreliable source that claims to have sat on the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Masked Man may have single-handedly ruined the careers of over 100 innocent but alleged Communist sympathizers between 1950 and 1952.
“He had a particularly gruesome vendetta against anyone who he perceived to be competition,” frowned the source. No one who rode a horse across the Silver Screen was safe.”
Congressional records just released suggest that the masked man fingered Gene Autry, Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, the Cisco Kid, Jingles, Miss Kitty, Johnny Yuma, The Rifleman, Sugarfoot, Bret and Bart Maverick, Dale Evans and Ben Cartwright in 1951 alone. Back at the Hollywood bunkhouse the boys began calling him “the masked stoolie”.
Late in 1951, the Lone Ranger turned on his old pal Trigger, accusing the mount of harboring leftist ideologies. He followed this betrayal with an indictment of his loyal sidekick Tonto during the summer. This stance prompted the now famous retort “Me no commie Kemosabe” which tugged at the heartstrings of Americans easily as much as Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which came later in the Dulles Brothers’ detrimental foreign policy scenario.
With his own series cancelled in 1958 the Masked Man ran for several minor bureaucratic positions in Southern California before getting religion and dying in 1969.
At the subsequent funeral a family spokesman told reporters that all of the public accusations were without merit, although she fell short of denying any of them. She pointed to the Ranger’s generosity in leaving both Tonto and Trigger substantial holdings in Nevada.
The righteous warrior, McCarthy, who died of alcoholism in 1957, was often featured as an extra on the television program, usually playing a bad guy. The American Civil Liberties Union has promised to look into this entire matter after lunch. – Kashmir Horseshoe