Illiberalism

by Jim Buckley

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil. – Eric Hoffer

In 2024, the mass movement is Woke Liberalism.

The devil is Donald Trump.

The Depressing News

I’m bummed.

You must be too.

How can you not be depressed by the current flow of events?

Firstly, there’s the Trump “trial.”

The “crime” this time?

A felonious attempt to suppress embarrassing charges made by several women just before a critical election.

Q. When did that become a criminal act?

A. Aaah, never.

Well, never until now.

Can you say, “Hunter Biden’s laptop?”

Can you say, “51 Intelligence Officials?”

Can you say, “Garbage”?

I can.

This is what Joe Biden said during a 2020 televised “debate,” after Donald Trump referenced Hunter Biden’s laptop: “There are fifty former national intelligence folks,” he barked, “who said that what he’s accusing me of [knowing full well it was the truth] is a Russian plant… Five former heads of the CIA – both parties – say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”

Biden, and the FBI, and the CIA, and President Obama, and the Lord only knows how many other Democrats and high officials knew of the degradation and utter corruption revealed on Hunter Biden’s loosely abandoned computer.

They chose to not only lie about it but also to prevent the public from learning of its validity. They used every arm of the establishment – the entertainment industry, the press, intelligence agencies, social media platforms, Democrat Party officials – to quash any coverage of this damning, explosive, and very real, litany of drugs, sex, and corruption at the highest level of government.

Could that have been construed as “a felonious attempt to suppress embarrassing charges?”

Well, yes. Of course.

But according to Democrats it was just politics as usual.

“We won, didn’t we?” is their mantra.

What Donald Trump did was go around the Democrats’ blue wall of establishment linemen to throw an historic “Hail Mary” pass on his way to the presidency in 2016.

That, my friends, was an unforeseen, unforgivable, and now punishable, offense.

The New York Times International Edition

I’m writing from Paris, France, where I’ve been since mid-April. The only U.S. sourced reading material regularly available is The New York Times. So, I’ve been picking it up almost daily.

It’s Monday morning, the sixth of May, and on the lefthand side of the paper, above the fold, is an “Opinion” piece: “The origins of American illiberalism.”

Before I get into that, however, moments earlier I had just finished reading an interview with New York Times Executive Editor Joseph (“Joe”) Kahn in Semafor, a website that bills itself as an “objective” media arbitrator and, to my astonishment, has been (so far) judiciously even-handed.

The article was a summation of an interview conducted by former New York Times columnist (2020-2022) Ben Smith, who now performs full-time media duties as co-founder of Semafor.

Smith asks Kahn why he doesn’t see his job as one of “saving democracy” or “[stopping] Trump,” and asks, “What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?”

“To say that the threats of democracy are so great,” Kahn replies, “that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote – that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.

“It’s also true,” Kahn continues, “that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So, there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.”

Kahn then completes his job description and that of his newspaper:

“It’s our job,” he says, “to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one – immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? … [Should] We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish – what?”

The News becomes Partially Impartial

Kahn could have continued that thought and could even have suggested that “saving democracy” was so important that even the saintly New York Times should abandon democratic norms – as the Democrat Party along with the entire ruling class and its institutions already had – and work to re-elect its champion regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of the information promulgated.

But he didn’t, and in fact reiterated how important it was to deliver the news as impartially as it could.

So, I said to myself, “Wow! If the Executive Editor of The New York Times has determined that it’s not his job to help elect his/their chosen candidate, that must mean we’ve got a chance to win this thing.”

Well, maybe.

We certainly hope so.

But here’s the sickly truth of all this:

Journalistically, The New York Times is a New York newspaper, and all the news it deems fit to print reflects that sensibility.

We can probably expect to find a Republican-sensitive (never actually “positive”) article, written by a Peggy Noonan or (enter RINO name here), but we can’t expect much more than that.

Now, to its Monday morning May 6, 2024 “Opinion” column written by Pulitzer-prize winner Stephen Hahn, accompanied by an italicized inset reading “The New York Times publishes opinion from a wide range of perspectives in hopes of promoting constructive debate about consequential questions.”

Okay. That’s a good start.

Then it begins: “In a recent interview with Time [magazine], Donald Trump promised a second term of authoritarian power grabs, administrative cronyism, mass deportations of the undocumented, harassment of women over abortion, trade wars and vengeance brought upon his rivals and enemies, including President Biden….”

Blah, blah, blech.

Oh yes, the column goes on to ascribe all the evils of “American illiberalism” to Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party. I’ll bet you didn’t know or weren’t aware that, for example, the Democrat-inspired Ku Klux Klan was a Republican plot. Hahn doesn’t say quite that, but according to him, the Klan was just the tip of the spear of unholy aggression thrust by evil-minded Republicans against the democratic norms of the righteous Democrat Party and all its rational and peace-loving followers.

I’ll dive deeper into the morass of misery wrought by us illiberal heathens and dutifully exposed by the soulful and very liberal Stephen Hahn in the soulful and very liberal New York Times next week.