What To NPR Is Propaganda?

After completing my July 4 post on President Coolidge's speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I went on to read and listen to a couple of other historic speeches celebrating America's independence.  One of these was Frederick Douglass' magnificent 1852 oration What To The Slave is The Fourth of July?  While doing so I came across on YouTube an NPR presentation of the speech, produced in 2020 and recited by descendants of Douglass.  It is highly edited to be deliberately simplistic and misleading in order to ensure NPR listeners miss the point more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor.  As a reminder, at the time, NPR still received taxpayer funding so you paid for this piece of agitprop.  Since then NPR has continued its descent into madness, naming authoritarian Katherine Maher as its CEO (for more on Maher read The "Real Trouble").

I've written of Douglass several times over the years; about his relationship with President Lincoln as well as the misuse to which he's been subjected to by our current educational system (Lincoln Douglass); on his Freedman's Monument Speech in 1876; as part of a prior July 4 post (citing to his 1852 speech); after reading his first autobiography (see Readings On Slavery).  Douglass was a courageous and thoughtful man who could eloquently express complex and provocative ideas.  His story should be known to all Americans.

The 1852 speech had two purposes. One is a lengthy, searing, and accurate indictment of American slavery and the complicity of white American society in its horror.  It is to this topic that the NPR edited version of the speech, which has 1.6 million views and 2,700 comments, is exclusively devoted to (the NPR version also contains a coda, the reflections of Douglass' descendants regarding today's America, a topic to which I will return to after discussing the speech).  The second, ignored by NPR, is Douglass' case that the Constitution is a "glorious liberty document . . . entirely hostile to the existence of slavery".  The reverence with which Douglass regards the Constitution (and the Declaration, as he states elsewhere in the speech) would undermine what NPR is trying to accomplish.  It also decontextualizes the speech though it is important to understand why Douglass is making this argument.  And it adds a false contextualization placing it as somehow linked to the death of George Floyd and the riots and protests that occurred in its aftermath.

The speech was given on July 5, 1852 at the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY, the city Douglass moved to in 1847, an event organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society.  Two years before, slavery became "nationalized" with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850, heightening sectional disputes over slavery, as many in the free states who had not been engaged in the slavery issue now felt they had been made complicit by the passage of the Act.  More importantly for purposes of the 1852 speech, Douglass had split with the mainstream of the abolition movement and its leader and his former mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, over the interpretation of the Constitution.  Garrison's organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society, the leading abolitionist group, had taken the view that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document and the only solution was to dissolve the Union and for the free states to form a New Union under a new Constitution. In 1851 the Anti-Slavery Society passed a resolution denouncing any paper opposing this belief.  

After escaping slavery Douglass initially agreed with Garrison but as he studied the Constitution and the Declaration came to the conclusion they were anti-slavery documents and had broken with Garrison and started his own newspaper the North Star to promote his views.  It was to address this controversial dispute within the abolitionist movement that Douglass spent so much of his speech on this topic.  In the Coda to the NPR version one of the young people asserts that Douglass was speaking to those who already agreed with  him but, in fact, the purpose of the Constitutional argument was to persuade a divided audience.  For more on contemporaneous views of the Constitution consistent with Douglass' reading see Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States 1861-1865 by James Oakes and Natural Law and the Antislavery Constitutional Tradition by Justin Buckley Dyer.

Douglass' speech can be broken into three parts.

The first section expresses hope that America, as a young nation, can find the correct course of action and to express admiration for the Founding generation.

The second to highlight contradictions and hypocrisy regarding white Americans and slavery.  The excerpts in the YouTube video are only a sampling of the examples given by Douglass.

The final section expresses his belief that the Constitution is a glorious liberty document that provides the blueprint for the end of slavery.

At the end of the post you will find excerpts from the first and third sections. 

As you can see all of the excerpts in the NPR video are from the second section with the exception of one passage from the conclusion of the speech;  "Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country".  The following sentences are not included; "There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain."  The video contains nothing from Douglass' conclusion explaining why he does not despair, because it would undercut what NPR is trying to sell you.

And that brings me to the context in which the video was made and the significance of the coda portion. 

The video was posted on YouTube on July 3, 2020 and it was specifically linked to the death of George Floyd several weeks before.  NPR's description reads:

In the summer of 2020, the U.S. commemorated Independence Day amid nationwide protests for racial justice and systemic reforms in the wake of George Floyd’s death. That June, we asked five young descendants of Frederick Douglass to read and respond to excerpts of his famous speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”. It's a powerful, historical text that reminds us of the ongoing work of liberation.  

The description notes that the video consists of excerpts but the title of the video and the description if you do a Google search implies it is the full text.  The description also pulls a sleight of hand.  Douglass' speech is about slavery and its relation to the Constitution but NPR links it to the "ongoing work of liberation".  Like the video, NPR never directly states what that work is, nor its relation to Douglass' speech and the propositions set forth there.  Instead the description and the video artfully avoids any discussion of Douglass' proposition as it must because NPR's viewpoint is that the U.S. was defective from its founding.  The video is edited and put together in support of the thesis of the infamous 1619 Project, while the opening and closing of Douglass' speech are a refutation of its thesis. That Douglass' argument is both a refutation of the argument of the 1619 Project as well as of the similar historical arguments of John C Calhoun and Alexander Stephens, Southern politicians who argued that slavery was a "positive good", illustrates that we have entered into a world of strange ideological alliances in 21st century America.(1)

The video was released in the midst of not just "protests" but also in the midst of riots and violence that resulted in thirty deaths in the short term and the most property damage (much of it to minority owned businesses) of any riots in American history.(2)  The impacts were worse longer term.  As it turned out that large cities governed for decades by NPR-type Progressives were hotbeds of racism, those mayors and city councils withdrew police and let loose their paramilitary wings.  Prosecutors resisted filing charges or reduced charges against those causing violence and destruction and leftist groups raised bail and paid for lawyers to defend the perpetrators.  One result was a massive increase in violence in minority areas.  The increase in black homicide victims of violence over baseline of recent years for the period from May 2020 to the end of 2022 amounted to more than the total number of black lynching victims from 1882 to 1968 (for more on that tragic history read Strange Fruit).  In what way was that liberation?  How did the protests and violence contribution to any positive solutions? In what way is the current situation of Black Americans similar to that of the slaves Frederick Douglass was discussing?  None of that is addressed.  It is simply implied that they are the same.(3)

And that is the saddest thing in the video - the coda. These young people seem to believe nothing has changed since Douglass' speech.  But why?  They've clearly absorbed in their upbringing and education the notion of oppression, one even saying "pessimism is a tool of white oppression".  We have a 20 year old claiming he is "exhausted" and near the end another says "we are still slaves to the notion that it will never get better".  That last remark is double-edged.  In the context of the video I think he's saying it has not gotten any better since Douglass's speech but we shouldn't lose hope it will get better.  I also see it as a warning to everyone in that video that they have been slaves to that notion even though objectively things are much better than 1852.  

For decades we've lived in a country where opportunities for minorities are plentiful and, in fact, privileged in education, government employment and contracts, and the corporate world.  The "system" which did once work to maintain white supremacy is gone and had been for many years.  The "system" now works the other way.  Yet the very education system which is part of those growing opportunities, teaches the opposite - that things haven't changed and further, those same educational system at the K-12 levels in cities with large minority populations is failing those populations, failing to generate the pipeline of students who can take advantage of those opportunities.  More than 40 years ago, Eddie Murphy parodied this attitude on Saturday Night Live:

But what use is it to teach children that the deck is stacked against them, when they, in fact, have opportunities if they can seize them? 

In doing research for this post, I came across a 2014 article by a history professor who has studied Frederick Douglass in which he complains that the version of What To A Slave Is the Fourth of July? being used to teach in our schools is the same as that presented by NPR.  In other words, a deliberately truncated version, omitting Douglass' context and view of the Constitution.  It is part of an effort to undermine the very foundations of this country and to indoctrinate the next generation that an end to the U.S. as we know it is the only solution.  Knowing that Douglass held the Declaration and Constitution and those who wrote those documents in such high regard is too dangerous for students.  They might draw incorrect conclusions.

The technique here is to keep everything vague, except to instill the feeling of massive racism and oppression.  The discussions we need are "what are the specific problems we are trying to solve" and "how would proposed solutions specifically help to solve them".  And that is always avoided, instead we are flooded with generalities and statements built upon false assumptions.

Excerpts from opening section of the speech: 

The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot's heart might be sadder, and the reformer's brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the
thought, that America is young. 

To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men's souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with
the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems un fashionable in our day. 

Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the  highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times 

[Douglass begins the transition to the present day and the plight of slaves.] 

How unlike the politicians of an hour! 

My business, if I have any here today, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his
cause is the ever-living now. 

Closing section of speech:

And instead of being the honest men I have before declared them to be, they were the veriest imposters that ever practiced on mankind. This is the inevitable conclusion, and from it there is no escape; but I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory, at least, so I believe.

Fellow-citizens! there is no matter in respect to which, the people of the North have allowed themselves to be so ruinously imposed upon, as that of the pro-slavery character of the Constitution. In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? it is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the
Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. 

Now, take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single proslavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. “The arm of the Lord is not shortened,” and the doom of slavery is certain.

I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope. While drawing encouragement from “the Declaration of Independence,” the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up, from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference. The time was when such could be done. Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social
impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. But a change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic, are distinctly heard on the other. 

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(1)  The 1619 Project essentially wrote Douglass out of history and most of the time the only excerpt from his speeches and writings that we hear is the misleading section of his 1852 speech.  Martin Luther King also gets downplayed because he's too positive about the American Founding in 1776 instead of 1619.  In the 1963 March on Washington Speech he echoes Douglass in calling for America to cash the promissory note issued in the Declaration and Constitution.

(2)  An example from Nellie Bowles, recounting her time at the New York Times:

 

(3)  The cluelessness of white progressives can be seen in the interview given by Tim Walz's wife to a Minneapolis TV station in the wake of the riots.  She is sitting on her back porch proudly telling the interviewer of how her family left their windows open during the rioting so they could smell the burning and the rightousness of it all, oblivious to the fact it was minority owned businesses primarily being burned and innocent people killed and injured. 

Oh, You Were Finished? Well, Allow Me To Retort

As Jules said; 

 On April 15, the Washington Post posed this query:

"Rep. Eric Swalwell’s (D) fall left many asking how someone who was dogged by persistent rumors of inappropriate behavior toward women could have risen so high and so fast in a party that says it supports women’s rights."

Answer:  Although many of his fellow Democratic politicians and many in the media knew about his behavior for years, they withheld information because of higher priorities - beating Republicans, especially Donald Trump.  It was only when running against fellow Democrats for California's gubernatorial nomination, where the D nominee will win the general election, that Swalwell became expendable.

The Post wasn't actually serious when it posed the question.  Reporters and editors already knew the answer.  We have reporters from multiple publications acknowledging they knew the stories about Swalwell as long ago as 2013, but, for some reason, never got around to investigating.  And obviously, the Democratic politicians knew, because one of his D opponents in the governor's race dropped the dime on him. 

Swalwell first came to national prominence in 2017 and 2018 when he served on the House Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.  Along with Rep. Adam Schiff he was a fixture on cable and network news promoting sensational tales of Russian interference and Trump malevolence, all of which proved false.  After wading through more than 5,000 pages of testimony taken by the committee, I made this comment about Swalwell:

The leading Democrat questioners were Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.  Schiff was a very skillful questioner.  In contrast, Swalwell acted like he was always on the verge of asking the one question that would unravel the entire conspiracy and evidenced a very high opinion of his own abilities.  I think Schiff realized fairly quickly the Democrats were drilling a dry hole in the search for a conspiracy but understood the political advantage of continuing the charade.  Swalwell was dumb enough he may really have been a true believer. 

The congressman further elevated himself with fellow Democrats by becoming a prominent critic of Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, promoting the most outlandish (and false) accusations against the nominee.(1)

In the years since, he's continued on a path as a rising star in the Democratic constellation.  This despite his dalliance with a Chinese spy while he served on the intelligence committee. 

Like many politicians in both parties it is difficult to objectively look at Swalwell and conclude he's the kind of person you would want in high elected office, or any office, for that matter.   Nonetheless, he received glowing press coverage.  When, in September 2018, Swalwell's GOP opponent was the subject of an attempted stabbing and only saved by a malfunctioning jacknife, to the extent it was covered by the media it was limited to brief one-day stories. The next day, Swalwell was interviewed on CNN to talk about how horrible Trump was and received no questions regarding the incident, not even being asked to comment on it.  No national conversation on political violence needed here! 

The bottom line is that when the media breaks a story that, on its face, is damaging to Democrats, the question to be asked is not about the substance.  Instead, ask why is this story being published now?  Because, in almost every case, the substance was known for a long time.  It is only the timing of the disclosure that matters.

Let's take two other examples to further illustrate how the system works.

The New York Times recently "broke" a story about Cesar Chavez, alleging a long time pattern of sexual abuse, inappropriate behavior, and general disrespect towards women.  Chavez died in 1993, so why now?  Much of the story was already known with biographies and other stories floating around for many years and, as with Swalwell, since the story broke many reporters have said they heard the stories years ago but had not reported on them because no one did the investigative work.  The allegations of Dolores Huerta, now 96, are new and, indeed, terrible if true but even in her case she stated the 60 year old events had not been made public before because it would "hurt the movement".

Chavez's birthday is an official state holiday in California and celebrated in other states and cities.  He had many schools, streets, and other public institutions named after him, and statues erected in many places.  His work on behalf of farmworkers in covered in many educational textbooks. So why now?

Cesar Chavez was born in 1927.  Next year is his 100th anniversary, a time when one would expect heightened attention and celebration of his life.  However, in recent years as illegal immigration has become a fiercely debated subject, Chavez's very public and very vociferous opposition to illegal immigration has become more widely known.  The very groups that have promoted his legend for decades are now unequivocally in favor of open borders and it would have been embarrassing and counterproductive to have Chavez remain a celebrated progressive hero next year.  That's why he needed to be taken down now, so his legacy could not be used by opponents of today's progressive narrative.  It's why the states and cities that celebrated Chavez over the decades have moved so quickly to take down monuments and rename things.  It is important to erase as much as possible before the 100th anniversary.

Let's talk about Andrew Cuomo.  In August 2021, Cuomo resigned as governor of New York after ten years in office.  He'd been under constant political pressure since January of that year from the progressive wing of his party.  Looking at his record, the casual observer would consider Cuomo to be a progressive, but because of his acerbic personality and willingness to only go 90% on the full progressive belief system he was anathema to that wing and they sought a way to get him out of office.  But why 2021 after ten years in office?

The first effort to attack him was from ultra-progressive State Attorney General Letitia James.  By ultra-progressive I mean she is a follower of Stalin's favorite secret policeman Lavrentiy Beria's adage, "show me the man, and I'll show you the crime".  The lever was a report released by James on January 28, 2021 alleging that thousands of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes were undercounted by Governor Cuomo, in an effort to support the effectiveness of the governor's actions to control Covid-19 in New York.  Adding to this is Cuomo's decision to send Covid positive nursing home residents back to the nursing homes contributed to the toll in the early part of the pandemic.

But there was a problem for Cuomo's fellow Democrats when it came to timing.  Although James and the stenographers at the New York Times pretended her report was a revelation, the undercounting and the deaths due to Cuomo's decision on sending Covid positive patients back into nursing homes was known in May and June of 2020.  I was following Covid developments at the time and aware of the discrepancies between the state and CDC death counts and of sending the sick back into the homes.  In October 2020 I wrote:

State politicians in some cases downplayed covid early on, in others sent infected patients back to nursing homes, in others delayed urging the use of masks, and in others completely overreacted in their dictates which have been kept in place well beyond reason.  And not enough bad can be said about the ghoulish Governor Andrew Cuomo. 

If you followed some knowledgeable conservative public health analysts you knew what was going in, but it was ignored by legacy media and Democrats.  

Why?  It's because Cuomo was being celebrated by Democrats and the media as the anti-Trump in 2020.  The politician who was responsible, sober, intelligent, and, later that year was celebrated, particularly by himself, as the man who defeated covid.

In contrast to Trump's erratic press conferences which gave him ample opportunity to demonstrate his ignorance, Cuomo was calm, reassuring, and able to fake empathy, unlike Donald.  For his party and the press to take down Cuomo for the nursing home massacre would have undermined the narrative they'd established.   In fact, they went out of their way to hype Cuomo's "accomplishments".

The Governor received an Emmy Award for his press conferences, to promote his book he did a victory tour of late night talk shows, where he was received with adoration, and was bestowed the Edward M Kennedy Award for Inspired Leadership for his covid response.

Now, look at the timing of AG James' report, January 28, 2021, a week after Joe Biden was inaugurated and Trump gone.  Once Trump was gone, the governor became expendable.  That's why it was not allowed to become a story before then and only permissible to write about once Trump was gone. If Trump had been reelected in 2020, there would have been no AG report.  James, the Democrats, and the press didn't give a damn about the thousands of deaths at the time they were occurring.  It was, to borrow a phrase, an inconvenient truth at the time.  But, rest assured, the Dems and the press were confident those who died and their families felt it was worth it because it allowed the Cuomo v Trump narrative to be sustained when most important politically.

However, the slaughter at the nursing home was not enough to get the job done, so the Dems and press turned to the tried and true tactic of sexual misbehavior, which was rolled out in February.(2)  Strangely, if you looked closely at the allegations, many of them went back years.  This was nothing new and, as with Swalwell, if you read closely you understood that it was common knowledge among party activists and some of the press, well before 2021. 

I have a personal take on Cuomo's troubles with women.  In the 1980s and 90s, I spent quite a bit of time in Washington DC on business.  The company I worked for had a Washington office to do lobbying and I was often there.  In the 90s, the head of the office was a guy who'd been a long time staffer on the Hill for a prominent Democratic congressman, beginning in the 1960s.  I learned a lot from him about the transformation of Congress over the prior thirty years, including the increase in partisanship and the collapse of once frequent cross-party personal friendships.(3)

One day our discussion got on the topic of President Clinton's cabinet, and my friend started walking through each of them, giving his evaluation.  Everyone was rated from excellent to okay from his perspective.  Then he got to Andrew Cuomo, who was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the second Clinton administration, and began a rant about how horrible a guy Cuomo was and his problems with women.  So, I wasn't surprised by the allegations more than two decades later.

The "revelation" story is never the story with institutional media.  Ask "why am I reading this now?" to get to the real story. 

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(1)  With all these revelations about Democrats and political activists, a frequent press excuse is they weren't able to confirm allegations so withheld reporting.  But none of those rules applied when it came to Kavanaugh in 2018.  The press reported breathlessly on any rumor and allegation, regardless of the lack of confirmation.  None of the allegations reported at the time, including those of participating in gang rape, were ever confirmed in any form.  The individuals who Kavanaugh's primary accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, claimed would support her allegations both refused to do so.  One of them, a long time friend and self-described political progressive, reported that her refusal to do so led to threats of ruination from other progressives.  In fact, there is no evidence, outside Ford's allegation, that she and Kavanaugh ever met on any occasion.

That the press was using the allegations as a political weapon and simply did not care if they were true is shown by the lack of any followup investigation once Kavanaugh was confirmed.  The national press didn't even give lip service to the idea the allegations were real. Hey, at least OJ said after he was acquitted he was going to find Nicole's real killer!  

The real revelation from the Kavanaugh hearings was for moderate non-MAGA Republicans.  Kavanaugh was about as mainstream non-MAGA moderate as you'll find in the GOP, yet the Democrats and press spared nothing in their efforts to not just deny him the confirmation, but to destroy him personally.  Trump may be the flagbearer but anyone associated with the GOP today is a public enemy for the press and the institutions.

(2) The first rumblings about sexual allegations began in December 2020, after the election, but it wasn't until February that the story picked up steam, which is consistent with the Covid report not being a knock out punch.

(3)  I learned from reading Robert Caro's third volume of his LBJ biography, Master of the Senate, that in the 1950s academic political scientists were very critical of the two parties because both consisted of what seemed to be ideological incompatible coalitions - for instance, the Democrats with conservative Southerners and urban liberals from the North.  This was a bad thing in their view and the recommended remedy was a realignment along clear ideological grounds, something we have finally achieved in the 21st century.  Do you think it is an improvement?

The "Real Trouble"

A few years ago there was a study of Harvard students comparing their knowledge of American history when they were entering freshmen to when they were university graduates.  The results were that they were less knowledgeable after four years at Harvard.  Not actually surprising.

I was reminded of this reading a New York Times puff piece on NPR President Katherine Maher, published on December 30. A Times reader would finish the piece not having any idea why Maher is controversial and as a less knowledgeable and informed citizen than before reading,

Before getting to the Times article, let's review what we knew about Maher before the article was published.

Katherine Maher is the daughter of a Goldman Sachs executive and grew up in the very wealthy suburban town of Wilton, Connecticut.  I'm from Wilton's significantly less wealthy neighboring town of Norwalk, so know Wilton quite well.

Armed with a university degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from NYU, Maher did post-graduate work in Cairo and Damascus.  Academic Middle Eastern studies as a field was initially funded by the Federal government back in the 1950s in the expectation that it would train experts in that area of the world who could help advise the government.  The 9-11 postmortems found that these programs were abject failures in providing graduates who could make accurate assessments of what was happening in the Middle East.  Instead, the programs had been taken over by academics hostile to the West and instead used to promote the theory that later became known as settler-colonialism, in which the West was responsible for everything bad that happened in the Islamic world.  This was the setting in which Maher was marinated (and its only gotten worse since then).

Post-graduate employment followed with UNICEF, the World Bank, and the National Democratic Institute.  In 2014 she joined the Wikimedia Foundation, initially as Chief Communications Officer and then becoming Executive Director, remaining with the organization until 2021.  Along the way Maher also joined the Council on Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council.  During the Biden Administration she was on the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.  She has all the right credentials.

The Wikimedia Foundation sets the strategy for Wikipedia and, under Maher's direction, it made a significant change in its approach. By 2014, Wikipedia was beginning to have credibility and reliability issues due to its editing process and susceptibility to manipulation.  However, its stated purpose was still to be an accurate reflection of current knowledge.  That was to change with Maher.

According to an article in the August 2024 edition of Pirate Wires,  "How the Regime Captured Wikipedia, the proposed changes generated controversy within Wikimedia:

"The controversy was ultimately about who would control the site containing “all the world’s knowledge,” and hundreds of millions in Wikipedia funding. Would the site’s community of decentralized, uncompensated editors continue to govern it according to its principles of openness, transparency, and neutrality, or would a handful of highly paid NGO technocrats re-orient Wikipedia toward endorsing and promoting the ever-shifting currents of the Western elite social justice regime? "

"The Movement Strategy, also known as Wikimedia 2030, was indeed a massive undertaking. Launched in 2017 by then-WMF executive director and CEO Katherine Maher, the strategy would be a complete re-imagining of WMF and Wikipedia’s mission. Where Wikipedia had been built on the principle of decentralized knowledge, the Movement Strategy would veer into the hyper-centralized space of top-down social justice activism and advocacy."

"As the driving force behind the Movement Strategy, Maher would directly endorse this view in comments revealed after she took the top job at NPR this year, in which she said she opposed the “free and open” ethos of Wikipedia because it was rooted in “white male Westernized construct” that precipitated the “exclusion of communities and languages.”

Further, Maher played a critical role in establishing the Wiki Endowment:

"The central aspect of WMF’s new financial strategy was the establishment of the Wikimedia Endowment, a pool of money that, as its name suggests, is designed to fund the organization essentially “in perpetuity.” Distinct from Wikimedia's budget, which funds Wikipedia's day-to-day operations, the Endowment was set up in 2016 as a donor-advised fund at leftist mega-fund, Tides Foundation, an $800 million fund that’s part of the wider Tides Center, a network of such funds “that partners with social change leaders and organizations to…accelerate social justice.” The Tides Foundation’s IRS 990 filing lists its mission as “Grantmaking through funds to accelerate the pace of social change.” 

When you use Wikipedia you will often see a page asking for donations to support Wikipedia.  However, this is misleading because Wikipedia has more than enough funding to continue its current operations.  Instead, your donations go to the Wikimedia Endowment which funnels money to left-wing causes.

Maher bragged about her accomplishments.  According to Katherine Maher's Color Revolution in the April 2024 edition of City Journal:

In a speech to the Atlantic Council, an organization with extensive ties to U.S. intelligence services, she explained that she “took a very active approach to disinformation,” coordinated censorship “through conversations with government,” and suppressed dissenting opinions related to the pandemic and the 2020 election.

In that same speech, Maher said that, in relation to the fight against disinformation, the “the number one challenge here that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” These speech protections, Maher continued, make it “a little bit tricky” to suppress “bad information” and “the influence peddlers who have made a real market economy around it.”

Maher’s general policy at Wikipedia, she tweeted, was to support efforts to “eliminate racist, misogynist, transphobic, and other forms of discriminatory content”—which, under current left-wing definitions, could include almost anything to the right of Joe Biden.

The City Journal goes on to note:

On the surface, this appears to be a contradiction. Maher backed dissent abroad but suppressed it at home. She not only censored content at Wikipedia but also supported deplatforming then-President Donald Trump, who opposed the domestic revolution following the death of George Floyd. “Must be satisfying to deplatform fascists,” Maher wrote on Twitter, after Trump was effectively removed from social media. “Even more satisfying? Not platforming them in the first place.”

This is not hypocrisy; it is the politics of friend and enemy. For Maher, “democracy” means the advancement of left-wing race and gender ideology all over the world. This requires elevating progressive dissidents overseas, while suppressing conservative dissidents at home. For partisans of Color Revolution, dissent and censorship are not in contradiction—they are two sides of the same coin.

This misuse of "democracy" is common across leftists in the countries of the West.  According to EU bureaucrats, voting the way they want is supporting democracy but voting against the desired policies of bureaucrats is anti-democracy.  In the United States context, any opposition to progressive policies is anti-democractic. 

What Maher did to Wikipedia, and her statements about why or, as she would say, "intentionality", demonstrate why she is such a danger to a free society.  Wikipedia has always had its problems, but under Maher it deteriorated into a propaganda machine that is now integrated into larger communication networks. While Wikipedia is still useful if you want to find out the release date of Reach Out (I'll Be There) by The Four Tops or the birth and death dates for a person, it is useless when it comes to any topic that progressive ideology believes is political.  The network designed for spreading Wikipedia's agitprop includes Google, where Wikipedia results show at the top of every search (Google also poured more than $200 million into the Wikipedia Foundation), and many of the AI models include Wikipedia as one of the sources used for their training.  The result is Google searches and AI incorporate deliberately misleading information approved by Maher and people who think like her.

It's also why total control of social and traditional media is so important to people like Maher and why progressives became so hysterical when Elon Musk took control of Twitter.  That progressives still controlled most social and traditional media was not the point.  Any outlet they could not control in order to suppress dissent is considered a danger to democracy.  In the case of Twitter pre-Musk, people were banned or suspended for misgendering, accounts were permanently suspended for merely posting Department of Justice crime statistics without making any comment, or accounts suppressed if then-President Trump retweeted them. I saw all of this happen; these weren't nutcase conspiracy or hardcore MAGA accounts, they just happened to not be progressives, or were progressives who dissented from orthodoxy on a particular topic.

In Maher's worldview everyone should be like her in following the strict progressive line, not deviating one inch.  In 2016 she criticized Hillary Clinton for using the phrase "boy and girl" because “it’s erasing language for non-binary people”, and it's no surprise that in 2020 she tweeted that "America is addicted to white supremacy".

So, in 2024 when Maher was named as CEO of National Public Radio, there were legitimate questions about her lack of commitment to free speech and her express agenda to privilege left-wing beliefs;  Particularly germane questions for an organization receiving significant taxpayer funding when she so publicly disdained the views of many Americans.

But according to the Times you would be mistaken if there were legitimate questions to be asked of Maher.  Let's look at how the story starts:

NPR’s C.E.O. Was a Right-Wing Target. Then the Real Trouble Started.

Katherine Maher has taken an unyielding approach to NPR’s biggest battles — which has sometimes put her at odds with her colleagues in public media.

 

A flattering photograph depicting a resolute Maher notes that she "has dealt with plenty of criticism this year.  Did she consider quitting?  "I really don't like bullies," she said. 

The third sentence of the article tells readers, "Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts on social media and tried to get her fired." 

When reading the New York Times what you need to focus on is not the substance of a story.  The key questions are why is the Times publishing this story at this particular time and what is the narrative it is trying to create?

For the narrative part look at the beginning; title and sub-title, photo, and opening sentences.  The narrative here is Katherine Maher is one of the "good guys" since she was a Right-Wing Target (which in Timespeak is equivalent of being a Nazi).  She's "unyielding", a fact reinforced by the photo and legend telling the reader those attacking her are "bullies".  And just to make sure there is no doubt, we learn "Right-wing activists dredged up her old posts".  Ah, those Nazi dredgers!  And, since they are old posts of what possible relevance could they be?

All this to set up the closing part of the narrative - that some of those who should be her allies in public media may not be as steadfast as they should be in supporting here because of that nasty right-wing intimidation. They need to strengthen their backbones to deal with those Nazis!

Here are some other excerpts with my comments.  The entire article is linked at the start of this post. 

She has become a target not just of NPR’s traditional opponents on the political right but of some within the tightknit world of public broadcasting, who wanted her to take a more pragmatic tack. At one point, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, one of NPR’s biggest supporters, told Ms. Maher she should quit. Her predecessors were accused of bringing a tote bag to a knife fight.  “The government targeted public funding to punish specific editorial decisions it disagreed with,” she said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “That’s not a funding dispute dressed up as a constitutional case; that’s textbook First Amendment retaliation." Ms. Maher’s stance brought support pouring in for her organization. NPR emerged from the biggest political battle in its history on firm footing, generating record donations.

This is a warning to those in public broadcasting to toughen up.  Maher is a role model. It also casts her as a champion of the First Amendment.  The First Amendment argument is absurd.  Maher would never stand up for the First Amendment rights of someone she disagreed with, and arguing that a decision by the government not to fund an organization dedicated to bias and being one-sided has anything to do with the First Amendment is simply nonsense.  It is Maher's sense of entitlement that makes her demand that I fund NPR.  She is compelling my support of her speech, while wanting to suppress mine even though I'm not seeking federal funding.

As we've seen Maher was singing a different tune before being appointed to NPR.  So was the Times.  Remember that after the 2022 midterms, when it was looking like Biden would be reelected and the Democrats could also control the House and Senate, the Times began running news stories and op-ed pieces about how "we" needed to rethink the First Amendment.  If the Democrats had achieved a trifecta and controlled Congress the crackdown on speech would have been brutal.  The Progressive view of speech and freedom is expressed in this quote from Frank Herbert's Children of Dune:

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

The Times then tells us about the crisis faced by Maher as her critics "seized the moment".  

In early April 2024, Ms. Maher and NPR faced an unexpected crisis. Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, published an essay in The Free Press accusing the network of a liberal bias in its news coverage.

The crisis deepened a week later. Chris Rufo, the conservative activist who ran social media campaigns against figures including Claudine Gay, the former Harvard president, circulated years-old social media posts from Ms. Maher that criticized Donald J. Trump and supported liberal causes. (“Also, Donald Trump is a racist,” read one.) 

NPR’s critics seized the moment. In early May, Republicans in Congress called on Ms. Maher to testify on allegations of bias. Compounding the situation: Some at NPR were surprised by Ms. Maher’s social media posts; she told The Times that the board hadn’t asked her about them before she was hired. 

The hearing was predictably divided along partisan lines. The Republicans, who argued that NPR and PBS were outmoded, a waste of taxpayer money or liberally biased, interrogated Ms. Kerger and Ms. Maher, asking the NPR chief executive about her social media posts and the network’s coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

There are several things to note about this section.  The Uri Berliner piece created an uproar.  Berliner was a long time NPR employee and, by 20th century standards, a card-carrying liberal who voted against Trump.  You can read his article here.  To describe it as "accusing the network of a liberal bias" is a misleading characterization; that's not what Berliner is complaining about.  He writes;

It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. 

In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. 

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America. 

That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model. 

There’s an unspoken consensus about the stories we should pursue and how they should be framed. It’s frictionless—one story after another about instances of supposed racism, transphobia, signs of the climate apocalypse, Israel doing something bad, and the dire threat of Republican policies. It’s almost like an assembly line.  

He goes into some detail using three examples, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, and COVID coverage, of the bias and distortion in NPR and how it failed to admit mistakes.(1)

Berliner also tells us, "I wrote to a top news executive about the numerous times we described the controversial education bill in Florida as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill when it didn’t even use the word gay."  Of course it would not be corrected by NPR because, at the time, the Democratic priority was to damage Governor DeSantis, so anything that aided in that goal was fine. It is also consistent with traditional media practice in referring to Republican bills by the name Democrats give it, while referring to Democrat bills by the name preferred by Democrats. 

Finally, he writes of the madness that descended upon NPR in the wake of George Floyd and transgender mania.  He never uses the word, but what Berliner describes is a morally corrupt organization.

Berliner was suspended without pay for writing the article and resigned several days later. 

The Times article is very careful not to be too specific about the allegations made by those nasty right wingers. The author and his editors want the reader to understand who the bad guys and good guys are and not get too caught up in the details.  The piece also states that Maher was criticized for supporting "liberal causes", but Maher is not a liberal, she's a progressive authoritarian.  A liberal supports free speech, freedom of conscience, due process, equal protection under the laws, fairplay, treating people equally.  21st century progressives reject all of this.

The only two specific "right-wing" claims mentioned in the article are Maher's characterization of Donald Trump and NPR's coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop. NPR refused to cover the story at all, with its managing editor for news writing “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”  As we now know, the FBI validated the contents of the laptop in 2019 and the 51 Intelligence Community former officials who denounced it were very clever in stating that it had "all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation", allowing them to later claim that they never said it was disinformation.  The truth is that NPR refused to cover the story because of the potential damage to the Biden campaign.

Near the end of the Times story we encounter this passage: 

On a call this spring, Patricia Harrison, the chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, asked Ms. Maher whether she would be willing to say anything to members of Congress or the press to acknowledge concerns from listeners who viewed NPR’s reporting as biased, according to two people familiar with her remarks. 

Ms. Maher rebuffed that suggestion. She didn’t believe that NPR was biased, and she thought saying so would undermine the organization and fail to placate those who were critical of the network, according to a person familiar with her thinking.

Maher is one of those folks who talks about "her truth" and "your truth" and how we all have truths.  But, in truth, she believes her truth is the real truth and if you don't agree with it you are wrong, so she is not biased and you have no right to speech.  Katherine Maher and the New York Times are blights upon this nation.  They are at least as great a threat to our future as creatures like Tucker Carlson. 

 --------------------------------

(1) Berliner notes how on Russia, "we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.  Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports".

If you've read my Russia Collusion posts, you know that Adam Schiff lied about everything.  I've read the same testimony he heard and then lied about.  None of the "journalists" at NPR had the slightest interest in comparing documentary evidence with Schiff's claims because it would have undermined their desired narrative.

Credit..

An Urgent Problem

The entire New York Times Editorial Board published an opinion piece on anti-semitism in the June 14 issue of the paper.

It is welcome to see the Times address this issue, but how the Board chose to do so illustrates the shortcomings of its blinkered worldview and why, at the end of day, it amounts to a bunch of meaningless words because of the Board's refusal to even mention the underlying causes in today's America, including the role of the Times in fomenting that hate among its heavily progressive readership.

I also see that the structure of the editorial which, as always with the Times, starts with an attack on Trump, is done in the hope that their left-leaning readers will pay attention to what follows. 

For these reasons, the Board uses tortured language and phrasing throughout.

My interests are not in defending either party.  I've voted in every presidential election since 1972, but in 2024 left the presidential line blank because both Trump and today's Democratic Party were unacceptable to me, albeit for very different reasons.  A former long time reader, I've written about my own discouragement with the Times here.

Below is the editorial in full, with my comments entered in brackets and boldface. 

 

Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem.  Too Many People Are Making Excuses. 

The list of horrific antisemitic attacks in the United States keeps growing. Two weeks ago in Boulder, Colo., a man set fire to peaceful marchers who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages. Less than two weeks earlier, a young couple was shot to death while leaving an event at the Jewish Museum in Washington. The previous month, an intruder scaled a fence outside the official residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and threw Molotov cocktails while Mr. Shapiro, his wife and children were asleep inside. In October, a 39-year-old Chicago resident was shot from behind while walking to synagogue.

[Important to note that all of these incidents were by supporters of Hamas, who are also linked to the Left, a fact admitted by the Times later in this article.] 

The United States is experiencing its worst surge of anti-Jewish hate in many decades. Antisemitic hate crimes more than doubled between 2021 and 2023, according to the F.B.I., and appear to have risen further in 2024. On a per capita basis, Jews face far greater risks of being victims of hate crimes than members of any other demographic groups.

American Jews, who make up about 2 percent of the country’s population, are well aware of the threat. Some feel compelled to hide signs of their faith. Synagogues have hired more armed guards who greet worshipers, and Jewish schools have hired guards to protect children and teachers. A small industry of digital specialists combs social media looking for signs of potential attacks, and these specialists have helped law enforcement prevent several.

[The Jewish population of the U.S. was at its peak in 1940 when Jews constituted about 3.7% of the nation's population. Relative to America's overall population, the Jewish population has been shrinking which has societal and political consequences.  Even with this decrease in relative population, demographic changes since WW2 have resulted in 80-85% of the world's Jews living in just two countries, the U.S. and Israel, with about equal populations.  The next three largest populations, about 400,000 each in the UK, Canada, and France, constitute about 7-8% of the world's Jews. The first two countries are governed by political parties hostile to Jews.  In France, the governing party is not hostile but although Jews constitute less than 1% of the population they are the objects of more than 60% of hate crimes.  And all three countries have large and rapidly growing Muslim populations, which the governing parties are desperate to placate.  It looks like the Jewish population will become even more concentrated in Israel and the U.S.  Overall, since the Holocaust, the global Jewish population has, at best, been restored to its pre-1940 numbers even as the world's population has more than tripled.]

The response from much of the rest of American society has been insufficient. The upswing in antisemitism deserves outright condemnation. It has already killed people and maimed others, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who was burned in Boulder. And history offers a grim lesson: An increase in antisemitism often accompanies a rise in other hateful violence and human rights violations. Societies that make excuses for attacks against one minority group rarely stop there.

Antisemitism is sometimes described as “the oldest hate.” It dates at least to ancient Greece and Egypt, where Jews were mocked for their differences and scapegoated for societal problems. A common trope is that Jews secretly control society and are to blame for its ills. The prejudice has continued through the Inquisition, Russian pogroms and the worst mass murder in history, the Holocaust, which led to the coining of a new term: genocide.

In modern times, many American Jews believed that the United States had left behind this tradition, with some reason. But as Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish writer and politician, noted, “Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” It tends to re-emerge when societies become polarized and people go looking for somebody to blame. This pattern helps explain why antisemitism began rising, first in Europe and then in the United States, in the 2010s, around the same time that politics coarsened. The anger pulsing through society has manifested itself through animosity toward Jews.

The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame. Yes, he has led a government crackdown against antisemitism on college campuses, and that crackdown has caused colleges to become more serious about addressing the problem. But Mr. Trump has also used the subject as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education. The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.

[What the Times describes as a "pretext" for a "campaign against the independence of higher education", is actually an attempt by the administration to stop blatant violations of the Civil Rights Act by academic institutions, violations that have led to the outbreak of antisemitic incidents at the most progressive universities in this country.  It's not Donald Trump that created a partisan issue. The partisan issue was created by progressives turning much of academia and other institutions into platforms where only their opinions are considered legitimate, where dissent is suppressed, and where discrimination is rampant against disfavored groups.  In fact, the Supreme Court case that gave birth to "diversity" used the term because of the perceived importance of diversity of opinion, which is not allowed today on most campuses. Without addressing these violations, which the Times apparently supports, antisemitism in academia will never be effectively curtailed, because it is embedded in the very essence of academia.  I discussed this at exhaustive (and probably exhausting) length in The Danger Within: Equality or Equity, Which Side Are You On?]

[Donald Trump can be, and has been, reckless and careless at times in his actions and rhetoric, as I've pointed out at length in numerous posts, but it is his administration that has tried to dismantle the ideological framework leading to the increase in antisemitism.  In contrast, while a number of Democratic politicians have voiced support for Israel and/or opposition to antisemitism, I don't know of any prominent figure in the party who objected to the Biden administration's goal of embedding this hateful ideology into the federal government and American society as a whole.]

Even worse, Mr. Trump had made it normal to hate, by using bigoted language about a range of groups, including immigrants, women and trans Americans. Since he entered the political scene, attacks on Asian, Black, Latino and L.G.B.T. Americans have spiked, according to the F.B.I. While he claims to deplore antisemitism, his actions tell a different story. He has dined with a Holocaust denier, and his Republican Party has nominated antisemites for elected offices, including governor of North Carolina. Mr. Trump himself praised as “very fine people” the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant “Jews will not replace us.” On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.

["Even worse, Mr Trump had made it normal to hate".  Doesn't the Editorial Board read its own newspaper?  According to the 1619 Project, which the Times published to much fanfare, America from its inception has been a nation founded on the principle of whites hating others.  According to the Times, we've always been a horrible country.  And, if you don't accept the Times characterization of this country, let's look at another indicator of hate and race relations.  Since the early 1970s the Gallup organization has been regularly polling white and blacks on the status of race relations, asking whether they are good, okay, or bad.  Over four decades, starting in 1972, those of both races responding good or okay had slowly but steadily climbed, reaching in 2012 to 72% of whites and 67% of blacks.  And then the trend began reversing, well before Trump's appearance on the scene.  By 2022, the figures were 42% for whites and 33% for blacks.  You can now look at numerous surveys of use in the media of terms like "racism", "white supremacy", and see an enormous upturn in their use during the second Obama administration.  Fomenting racial tension and resentment has been part of the declared mission of the Times over the past decade.] 

[The term "Since he entered the political scene" is doing a lot of work here.  According to the FBI data there was no increase in hate crimes for much of Trump's first term.  There is a huge surge during the George Floyd riots of summer 2020 (make of that what you will), and while it is followed by a rapid decrease, hate crimes during the Biden administration occur at a rate of about double that of the Trump administration.  The increase in Asian attacks is, uncomfortably, attributed to a highly disproportionate number of assaults by blacks, which is why it has attracted less attention after an initial outburst aimed at alleged white anti-Asian hate. Perhaps the Biden administration's relentless emphasis on race essentialism and promoting the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have plotted to maintain White Supremacy may also have had something to do with the increase.] 

[By citing the Charlottesville quote, the Times shows it is a prisoner of its own false narrative.  It is part of the "unexamined life" of those that work at the Times.  The full transcript of Trump's remarks show that right after he says "very fine people", he goes on to state he is not talking about neo-nazis and white nationalists.  Later in the same ramblings, he restates he is not talking about neo-nazis and white nationalists, adding "they are bad people".  In the context of his remarks it is clear Trump is referring to the debate over what to do with the Lee statue and clear he condemned those the press explicitly and repeatedly  said he refused to condemn.  In 2024, the leftist "fact checker" Snopes finally acknowledged that the prevailing media use of the term was misleading and false. Nonetheless, President Biden, VP Harris, and former President Obama all used the false accusation during the 2024 campaign, with Biden saying it was the reason he decided to run in 2020.

The Charlottesville incident also demolished the last bit of lingering respect I held for the traditional news media.  While, by 2017, I mistrusted most of what I heard and read from those sources, I still felt that they could get the basics right.  My mistake.  When I first heard about Trump's Charlottesville remarks my reaction was "Well, the guy's an idiot" and assumed he said it and meant exactly what the media told me he meant.  It was only a couple of years later when I came across a full transcript of the press conference that I realized I had been lied to.] 

["On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for “the big Jew,” referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said."  Oh, my God, one rioter!!  And the source is Chuck Schumer?  The Times is really reaching here for examples.  Here's something we do know about Senator Schumer.  In 2024, confident that the Dems would hold regain the House, and hold the Senate and the Presidency, he reassured Columbia University, in an email obtained by a Congressional committee, that it could ignore all those Republicans pestering the school about antisemitism because it would all go away after the election.  I don't think the Times wrote a story about that email.]

The problem extends to popular culture. Joe Rogan, the podcaster who endorsed Mr. Trump last year, has hosted Holocaust conspiracy theorists on his show. Mr. Rogan once said of Jews, “They run everything.” In the Trumpist right, antisemitism has a home.

It also has a home on the progressive left, and the bipartisan nature of the problem has helped make it distinct. Progressives reject many other forms of hate even as some tolerate antisemitism. College campuses, where Jewish students can face social ostracization, have become the clearest example. A decade ago, members of the student government at U.C.L.A. debated blocking a Jewish student from a leadership post, claiming that she might not be able to represent the entire community. In 2018, spray-painted swastikas appeared on walls at Columbia. At Baruch, Drexel and the University of Pittsburgh, activists have recently called for administrators to cut ties with or close Hillel groups, which support Jewish life. In a national survey by Eitan Hersh of Tufts University and Dahlia Lyss, college students who identified as liberal were more likely than either moderates or conservatives last year to say that they “avoid Jews because of their views.”

["Progressives reject many other forms of hate even as some tolerate antisemitism."  Can we please stop with this progressive self-congratulation?  How many articles has the NY Times published in the past decade about white people, that had it been done regarding any other race would be promptly denounced as racist?  Answer: A google search in October 2023 on 'NY Times Whiteness" came up with 5.6 million results. The Times supported continuing the documented Ivy League practice of discriminating against Asians in admissions and denounced the Supreme Court decision banning the practice. And have you read the outpouring of hate by some progressives against Hispanics because of their increased support for Trump in 2024?] 

[And progressives don't just "tolerate antisemitism", they encourage it with the ideology they promote.]  

[Notice how all the college examples they give are of students, none of administrators or the institutions themselves, despite many well-documented incidents.  There is no mention of the recent report on Harvard's blatant anti-semitism.  That's because mentioning antisemitism condoned or practices by the institutions would be seen as pro-Trump and lead to bigger questions about what is happening more broadly in education.  Both college and K-12 education is failing on many fronts, but regarding Jews, unless there is radical reform soon, the doctrines being taught to our children will increase antisemitism, making this country increasingly hostile to Jewish life, a point the Times refuses to address.] 

One explanation is that antisemitism has become conflated with the divisive politics of the current Israel-Hamas war. It is certainly true that criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism. This editorial board has long defended Israel’s right to exist while also criticizing the government for its treatment of Palestinians. Since the current war began, we have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza. Israel’s reflexive defenders are wrong, and they hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism. But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction. They have engaged in whataboutism regarding anti-Jewish hate. They have failed to denounce antisemitism in the unequivocal ways that they properly denounce other bigotry.

[There are many Jews, including me, who don't like Netanyahu and think at least parts of the settlements policy in the West Bank are bonkers.  But there are vanishingly few Jews who do not support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.  The small cadre of anti-Zionist Jews can be found primarily in academia or the NGO community where their real religion is Progressivism.  We see a recent example in the proud announcement of Harvard Divinity School regarding its first Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, Shaul Magid, an anti-Zionist Jew.  A reviewer accurately calls his most recent anti-Zionist book "an intellectual crime". The school boasts of Magid, “His disciplinary range stretches from Hasidic mysticism and American Judaism to critical Black studies and political theology".  We know what that phrasing really means.  This is Harvard Divinity School saying to those protesting Harvard's antisemitism, "screw you Jews, you better know your place." It also illustrates why institutions like Harvard are incapable of reforming themselves without outside pressure being brought to bear.  Otherwise they will succeed in their strategy of waiting things out until a Democratic administration, tolerant of their discrimination, is back in power.] 

["This editorial board has long defended Israel’s right to exist while also criticizing the government for its treatment of Palestinians."  This is a joke.  Yes, the Times defends Israel's right to exist but it opposes both editorially and, more importantly, in its news sections, anything Israel does to ensure its continued existence.  The slant of the Times news section regarding Israel has been evident for years.  Remember when one of their most experienced reporters wrote an article casting doubt on whether a Jewish temple ever existed on the Temple Mount, endorsing an outrageous claim made by the Palestinians?  I do. More recently, since October 7, the Times news staff credulously reports any claim made by Hamas and continues to do so no matter how many lies Hamas is caught in, while treating any Israeli claim cautiously, inserting every possible caveat and doubt.  The Times problem is not just with Israel.  The Sulzberger family have always been uneasy around "Jewish" Jews and Jews who dress "funny" and in recent years the paper launched a full scale assault on those "embarrassing" Jews, starting a jihad against Hasidic Jews, based on alleged defects in the education provided to Hasidic children.  The Times campaign is illustrative because it combines several elements.  

It targets distinctively Jewish looking Jews.  They seem odd even to many other Jews.

The created narrative is those greedy Jews (Oppressors) are stealing state education funds from black kids (Oppressed).  Well, what else do you expect from privileged Jews? (Let's ignore that the Hasidic community is poorer in general than non-Hasidic Jews).

State support should be reduced and Hasidim schools must be made to conform their instructional programs to state requirements, which include equity.  In other words, Hasidic children must be taught their parents are racist White supremacists and they should be ashamed of them and of their religion.

To allow educational flexibility by these schools would make other children feel unsafe, cause harm, and encourage racism.  It's why the progressive state must control every aspect of life.

Bigger message - all private schools must be either abolished or under close State control to ensure conformity.

Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.

Looking at the support for the allegations made by the Times, I would have sent the reporters back to answer a dozen questions about methodology and have them do a comparison with the performance of New York City public schools before proceeding with publication.  The Times, interested only in creating narratives to support its preferred policies, would not take the risk of finding anything that would disrupt that narrative.] 

Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, has suggested a “3D” test for when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism, with the D’s being delegitimization, demonization and double standards. Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years. “Americans generally have greater ability to identify Jew hatred when it comes from the hard right and less ability and comfort to call out Jew hatred when it comes from the hard left or radical Islamism,” said Rachel Fish, an adviser to Brandeis University’s Presidential Initiative on Antisemitism.

["Hard right" and "hard left" are false equivalencies. The "hard left" includes the most progressive universities in this country, as well as publications like, well, like the New York Times.  And all of this antisemitism is nested within the broader race essentialism promoted as its top domestic priority by the Biden administration and embraced by many of our leading institutions. These are power centers within our country.  There is also a growing and very disturbing trend towards antisemitism in the "hard right".  Some of it from those who've gone insane over the past few years like Tucker Carlson, some from grifters like Candace Owens, some from nasty pieces of work like Nick Fuentes, among others.  They do have a lot of followers but where do they rate against the institutional strength of the "hard left"?  Another way to look at it is polling data regarding Jews and Israel, which demonstrate a lot more support from Republicans and conservatives, with less and rapidly eroding support from Democrats and progressives.] 

Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur — an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War — and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

[Glad for the Times to say that last sentence clearly.  On the other hand, why does the Times consistently refer to Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student the administration seeks to deport, and who enthusiastically supports the murder of Zionists, as simply "a Columbia pro-Palestinian activist"?  To be fair, Khalil is consistent as he also supports the destruction of the U.S. as a settler-colonist entity.  A good example of why it is important to rigorously review people before they are admitted in to this country.]

Historical comparisons can also be instructive. The period since Oct. 7, 2023, is hardly the first time that global events have contributed to a surge in hate crimes against a specific group. Asian Americans were the victims in 2020 and 2021 after the Covid pandemic began in China. Muslim Americans were the victims after Sept. 11, 2001. In those periods, a few fringe voices, largely on the far right, tried to justify the hate, but the response from much of American society was denunciation. President George W. Bush visited a mosque on Sept. 17, 2001, and proclaimed, “Islam is peace.” During Covid, displays of Asian allyship filled social media.

Recent experience has been different in a couple of ways. One, the attacks against Jews have been even more numerous and violent, as the F.B.I. data shows. Two, the condemnation has been quieter and at times tellingly agonized. University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia. Islamophobia, to be clear, is a real problem that deserves attention on its own. Yet antisemitism seems to be a rare type of bigotry that some intellectuals are uncomfortable rebuking without caveat. After the Sept. 11 attacks, they did not feel the need to rebuke both Islamophobia and antisemitism. Nor should they have. People should be able to denounce a growing form of hatred without ritually denouncing other forms.

["University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia".  This is a misunderstanding about why university leaders are uncomfortable.  They are uncomfortable because the principles of critical race theory are so embedded in curriculum and the very ethos of progressive universities that antisemitism cannot be denounced unequivocally because it would undermine the entire oppressor/oppressed analytical structure the universities have embraced without reservation.]

Alarmingly, the antisemitic rhetoric of both the political right and the left has filtered into justifications for violence. But there has been an asymmetry in recognizing the connections. After a gunman murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, observers correctly noted that he had become radicalized partly through racist right-wing social media. There has been a similar phenomenon in some recent attacks, this time with the assailants using the language of the left.

The man who burned marchers in Colorado shouted “Free Palestine!” and (awkwardly) “End Zionist!” The man charged with killing the young Israeli Embassy workers in Washington last month is suspected of having posted an online manifesto titled “Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home.” His supporters have since published a petition that includes “Globalize the Intifada.” The demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the right bore some responsibility for the Pittsburgh massacre; the demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the left bears some responsibility for the recent attacks.

Americans should be able to recognize the nuanced nature of many political debates while also recognizing that antisemitism has become an urgent problem. It is a different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism. Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life expectancy in today’s America. Yet the new antisemitism has left Jewish Americans at a greater risk of being victimized by a hate crime than any other group. Many Jews live with fears that they never expected to experience in this country.

[These sentences reveal the Times worldview; "It is a different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism. Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life expectancy in today’s America".  In other words, racism is America's real problem while antisemitism is a problem for Jews and one that distracts from America's real problem which is why antisemitism needs addressing.  This means that Times has learned nothing, or wants to learn nothing, about the ideology and fake history, as in the 1619 Project, it has promoted in recent years.  In that respect, the Times continues to endorse a racist ideology in which the only reason for any discrepancy between races and ethnic groups in our society is because of white and Jewish supremacy.  The Times will never escape its contradictions until it repudiates racial essentialism.]

No political arguments or ideological context can justify that bigotry. The choice is between denouncing it fully and encouraging an even broader explosion of hate.

The position of the Times reminds me of the recent book, Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson in which they breathlessly report how the media, including Tapper, were hoodwinked by the Biden administration into believing Joe Biden was actually functioning as president.  The truth, as anyone observing Biden during the 2020 campaign and his presidency could see, was that he had severe difficulty in functioning, leading many of us to wonder who was really running the White House.  The legacy media including Tapper, wanted to be mislead because reporting honestly would have helped the Republicans and avoiding that was much more important than the truth, and that part of the story is ignored in Original Sin.

Same thing with the Times.  This editorial studiously avoids examining the paper's role in its reporting, and that of progressive institutions, in support of the poisonous ideology of critical race theory in leading to the eruption of antisemitism among those who share the beliefs of the Times own staff.  Instead it is all attributable to this mysterious "hard left", about which the Times gives us no details as to constitutes this faction.

The closing words of the Times editorial are meaningless.  Just words.  I guess it now allows them to say they denounced antisemitism even on the left and now they can go back to doing exactly what they've been doing all along.

You can read all of my reporting on the Times here.