We are in new territory now. Hating a president is equivalent to finding him guilty of supposed high crimes. Impeachment is a casual affair. Hearsay is as valid as direct testimony.
Neither the NeverTrump Right nor the Progressive Left has yet offered a coherent defense of their de facto, three-year-long singular effort to delegitimize and ultimately remove Trump from office before the 2020 election.
We are now in the midst of a systematic effort to impeach a president on the basis of a thought crime. Trump’s purported quid pro quo sin was issuing a temporary hold on military assistance to Ukraine that supposedly transcended legitimate worries about rampant corruption—to include specifically investigating the suspicious behavior of a corrupt Ukrainian oil company and the compromised relationship of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son around it.
The anti-Trump writ is that it is impeachable even to delay to the Ukrainians lethal military assistance while citing the need to investigate the corruption of Ukrainians, including the career of Hunter Biden, whose father, the former vice president and “point man” on Ukraine, is now running for president.
Supposedly irrelevant to this inquiry is the prior policy of denying military aid to Ukraine, intervening in Ukrainian politics to fire a prosecutor by threatening a cutoff of even nonmilitary aid, and ignoring that the vice president’s son served as a lucrative functionary with a corrupt Ukrainian company while his father was adjudicating U.S. aid to Ukraine.
So why this disconnect? The reason is not “Ukraine,” merely the latest iteration in a long series of efforts, but rather existential hatred.
“Conservative” NeverTrump Disdain
The NeverTrumpers’ position, although rarely articulated, seems fairly clear.
Whereas Trump has promoted most of the agenda they had touted over a lifetime (economic growth, near-full employment, conservative justices, tax reduction and reform, deregulation, pro-oil and natural gas production, secure borders, pro-Israel foreign policy, opposition to accords like the Paris Climate Accord and Iran Deal, increased defense spending, etc.), they nonetheless seek to abort his presidency on other grounds.
Apparently, Trump’s perceived checkered personal history, supposed outrageous behavior, and occasional unorthodox take on issues such as Chinese policy and tariffs all justify his removal from office. Thus, his personal flaws and apostasy from free-market orthodoxy are so egregious that they nullify any good that has come about from Trump’s successful implementation of many conservative policies for which such critics otherwise had fought long and hard in the past.
NeverTrumpers also believe that Trump’s very appearance, his outrageous orange tan, dyed comb over, odd ties, Queens accent, reality TV background, and vernacular and occasionally vulgar speech certainly are disqualifying traits. He does not present the sober, judicious, and restrained image that past Republican banner-carriers such as George H.W. Bush or Mitt Romney conveyed.
Whereas most past Republican grandees married into or inherited substantial money, none showed the visible scars and scabs of a lifetime’s frantic effort to expand their legacies by rough-and-tumble, wheeler-dealer, boom-or-bust frenzied business.
Progressive Loathing
The furor of the Left that fuels serial efforts to end the Trump presidency before the 2020 election is at times similar to NeverTrumpism—at least it is in that they argue Trump’s comportment and behavior should earn repulsion and justify his removal.
Both anti-Trump schools believe that Trump is such a brazen affront to the office of the presidency that rare methods are justified to remove him, including but not limited to past efforts to warp the Electoral College, to invoke the emoluments clause, the Logan Act and the 25th Amendment, to empower the Mueller investigation, and ultimately the effort to impeach Trump on grounds of “quid pro quo,” “bribery,” or “obstruction” in reference to Ukraine.
But the Left’s antipathy is also different.
In addition to these aesthetic reasons, it seeks Trump’s removal because of, not in spite of, his administration’s record and policies. That is, according to a variety of barometers, the Left considers Trump to be the most conservative, and thus the most threatening, president since Ronald Reagan. He has not just sought to undo Barack Obama’s political legacy, in many cases he has been successful—on illegal immigration, energy policy, abortion, taxes, foreign policy, and a host of cultural and social issues.
Trump also adds insult to injury in that he also has used many of Obama’s own methods to enact what self-styled progressives regard as regressive policies, especially free and unfettered use of executive orders and a similar masterful use of the bully pulpit.
If ex-reality TV star Trump lacks the teleprompted cadences of Obama, his sharp repartee and rally rhetoric are as or often more effective. Obama sometimes baited enemies like Fox News host Sean Hannity and had the government surveille Associated Press reporters; Trump matches such combativeness instead with ad hominem references to his media critics.
The Left also differs again from the NeverTrump Right on the perceived dangers posed by Trump’s unorthodox behavior. The Left fears and hates Trump’s character and persona for a variety of reasons, including the fact that his earthiness earns a large audience of middle Americans—many of them formerly blue-collar Democratic voters in critical swing districts and states.
Unlike a Romney or McCain, Trump’s earthy populism and not quite orthodox Republicanism are aimed at working people in general, and increasingly to minorities in particular. In other words, Trump is the first Republican in recent years who seeks not just to win an election from a Democratic rival, but to weaken the political foundations of the current Democratic hold on power in general.
Progressives also grasp that Trump has also ended the Republican Marquess of Queensbury rules of restraint that had helped Democrats in the past, especially in the 2008 and 2016 elections.
The combative Trump instead adopted prior “war room” protocols of liberal scrappers like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and seems to prefer winning ugly than losing nobly. NeverTrumpers share this repugnance at Trump’s politicking, but not because it might erode Democratic support. They are angrier because it is a style that neither conveys proper coastal conservatism nor reflects good breeding, education, and ZIP-code manners—and it appeals to deplorable voters, whom John McCain once called the “crazies,” and whom the establishment Republicans do not really want in their static party.
The Left also feels that Trump’s combativeness is holistic. His push-backs are not just issue-orientated. Instead, he seeks to oppose the entire progressive project in a way not seen before, ranging from weighing in on almost anything from Colin Kaepernick to railing against “fake news” and replying to celebrity tweets.
Trump is a sleepless anti-progressive in all cultural, economic, social, and political spheres. He earns an ethereal hatred from progressives for not just being against, but also eager to oppose fanatically, almost every conceivable aspect of their world view.
There are inconsistencies and incoherencies in all these anti-Trump views.
First, there is a high bar—indeed no contemporary precedent—for attempting to remove a modern president in his first term with a presidential election less than a year away, without bipartisan and popular majority support, and without a special prosecutor’s findings of illegal or even unethical behavior.
Such an unusual gambit requires some standard of prior presidential behavior that is constant across time and space—immune from the interplay of changing politics and technologies, such as the use of the Internet and social media, or the different codes, behaviors, and protocols of the current national media.
So far, we have heard none.
By that I mean, did Trump’s pre-presidential escapades with Stormy Daniels reach the levels of John F. Kennedy’s or Bill Clinton’s presidential frolicking with young female staffers, aides, or political associates in the White House itself?
Do his business deals while in office reach the level of egregiousness of Lyndon Johnson’s profiteering? Was Trump carrying on an affair with the help of his daughter as intermediary in the fashion of Franklin Roosevelt? Is his use of profanity or crudity as bothersome as Harry Truman’s?
If the Internet, social media, and a 90 percent hostile press existed in those eras, would the above had faced scrutiny analogous to that now shown Trump?
Or compare Trump’s current three years with the tenure of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama.
Was Trump caught in public on a hot mic finalizing a quid pro quo arrangement akin to the one Barack Obama summarized with outgoing President Dimitri Medvedev that soon led to Vladimir Putin giving the American president needed helpful “space” during his reelection bid in order to win U.S. abandonment of Eastern European missile defense? Was that a “bribe” in which Obama diminished U.S. security interests in robust missile defense to the benefit of his own reelection campaign? Did Trump forbid all lethal military aid to Ukraine in order not to aggravate Putin—as Obama did?
Has Trump conducted government surveillance on suspected leakers, such as Associated Press journalist critics or a Fox reporter? Had he, would he be impeached? Has he weaponized the IRS to use its vast power to deny nonprofit status to perceived hostile left-wing groups in the climate of an upcoming campaign? Are the current directors, respectively, of the Trump Administration’s Office of National Intelligence, CIA, and FBI now peddling an opposition research dossier on Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), paid for with Trump campaign money and compiled by a hired British foreign national, who in turn drew on bought Russian rumors and gossip?
I could go on. But the point is that no one yet has convincingly argued that Trump’s behavior in office does not meet the standard of successful presidents such John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton (neither of whom was removed from office). Do we wish to criminalize politicking as a substitute for elections?
The Foundations of Trump Hatred
In sum, what explains the decision to end the Trump presidency in a way we have not removed prior presidents?
First, the media is now not just 90 percent anti-Trump in its coverage, but has but merged with the Democratic Party in its activism. Most egregiously it reports anti-Trump rumor and gossip as fact, explaining why so many reporters have been forced to apologize, been fired, been reassigned, or disgraced for peddling false stories.
Second, NeverTrumpers are orphaned from 90 percent of the Republican Party who voted and will vote again for Trump. They know they are often played as useful idiots by progressives who otherwise want nothing to do with them, and will not wish to have anything to do with them, even as apostates, in the post-Trump era.
They have crossed the proverbial Rubicon and must know that they have no constituency left and cannot go back. They are tottering on their coastal perches, alienated from all their accustomed conservative loci of influence, power, and prestige. So they go even further for broke: either Trump is disgraced and removed from office and they are redeemed in “I told you so” fashion, or they will continue to become marginalized, as embittered and lonely scolds in the twilight of their careers.
Third, the Left was intoxicated on Obama’s two terms of progressive transformation. Progressives really believed “demography is destiny.” Obama supposedly had created a new 51 percent constituency of lockstep gays, blacks, Latinos, Asian, women, youth, and immigrants who together outnumbered the embittered and vanishing clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, and dregs. Voting entirely on the basis of shared race or gender or orientation was considered the new pillar of identity politics.
Then Trump won. And he won after every liberal outlet in the nation (and a few conservative ones, too) had mocked his candidacy and assured their constituencies he had less than a 10 percent chance of winning the election.
Worse, Trump did not prove to be a Manhattan liberal wolf in election-era conservative sheep’s clothing, as the Never Trumpers warned he would. Instead Trump governed as a hardcore conservative. He singlehandedly halted the envisioned 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum, a likely 7-2 left-wing Supreme Court, and hoped-for permanent legislative supermajorities—and the dream that the United States would soon become one larger version of California.
Fourth and finally, there is currently a full-fledged progressive assault on the Constitution. It supersedes even efforts to curtail the Second Amendment and stifle protected free speech by slandering it as “hate speech” and thus not protected by the First Amendment.
Almost all the Democratic candidates have called for jettisoning the Electoral College. Many states have sought to force their legislatures to have electors vote in accordance with the national popular vote. The 25th Amendment is now viewed as an excuse to demonize, emasculate, and maybe remove a president without an election.
Many of the Democratic candidates have endorsed the once infamous “court-packing” schemes of FDR to stack the Supreme Court with liberal justices in a way impossible under the current century-and-a-half protocols of judicial appointments.
A Brave New World
In this wider context, impeachment is rebooted as no longer a rare gambit, but a sort of parliamentary vote of no confidence, analogous to a European government. When Democrats lose elections, they can now immediately talk of impeachment first, and find the supposed crimes later. Democrats are not fearful of institutionalizing impeachment without cause. Indeed, they welcome its normalization in times of Republican presidencies.
The common denominator in all this frenzy hatred?
None of the haters cares that unemployment is at near record lows, the stock market at record highs, economic growth steady, inflation and interest rates low, minority employment at all-time levels—or that there is a looming shared need to address entitlements and deficit sooner than later.
None care that for three years, there has been a nonstop effort from within and outside government to end the Trump presidency, or at least to sabotage it along the lines outlined by the anonymous New York Times op-ed writer, the whistleblower lawyer Mark Zaid, or departing Department of Defense official Evelyn Farkas, or as bragged about by #TheResistance.”
We are in new territory now. Hating a president is equivalent to finding him guilty of supposed high crimes. Impeachment is a casual affair. Hearsay is as valid as direct testimony.
We are now living is a brave new American world never envisioned by the Founders.
A poll taken by Rasmussen finds that people fear violence if President Trump is impeached and removed from office.
But, very telling is the fact that even Democrats believe that violence will come from the left and not from conservatives.
The poll questioned 1,000 individuals between November 18th and November 19th.
The survey asked, “How concerned are you that President Trump’s impeachment and removal from office will lead to violence?”
In that poll, 53% said they were concerned with 24% saying they were very concerned.
A second question asked, “How concerned are you that those opposed to President Trump’s policies will resort to violence?”
59% said they were concerned, and 34% said they were very concerned. And even Democrats agree that the violence is more likely to come from the left than from the right by a 40% to 18% majority.
Since Donald Trump ran for president, there have been over 700 incidents of violence committed by leftists against conservatives.
If President Trump is reelected, you can expect those numbers to skyrocket out of control.
They have proven that if they can’t win at the ballot box, they are willing to defy the law and commit acts of terrorism in an effort to scare voters into going along with them.
When asked about the likelihood of a new “civil war” occurring within “the next five years,” 31% of respondents said that such a scenario is likely. 9% said it was “very likely.”
Awareness of political aggression and politically-motivated violence seems to have moved to the forefront of America’s collective consciousness.
According to a Pew Research survey conducted in April and May, 85% of respondents believe that the “nature of political debate … has become more negative in recent years.”
An October 2018 survey conducted by McLaughlin & Associates on “800 full-time undergraduates” found that a significant number of students believe that violence is justified as a preventative measure against “hate speech.”
Once unswerving defenders of the First Amendment, members of the press increasingly support restricting expression.
John Tierney is a contributing editor of City Journal and a
contributing science columnist for the New York Times.
Suppose you’re the editorial-page editor of a college newspaper, contemplating the big news on campus: protesters have silenced an invited speaker and gone on a violent rampage. Should you, as a journalist whose profession depends on the First Amendment, write an editorial reaffirming the right to free speech?
If that seems like a no-brainer, you’re behind the times. The question stumped the staff of the Middlebury Campus after protesters silenced conservative social thinker Charles Murray and injured the professor who’d invited him. The prospect of taking a stand on the First Amendment was so daunting that the paper dispensed with its usual weekly editorial, devoting the space instead to a range of opinions from others—most of whom defended the protesters. When a larger and more violent mob at the University of California at Berkeley prevented Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking on campus, students at the Daily Californian did write a forceful editorial—but not in favor of his right to speak. Instead, they reviled Yiannopoulos and denounced those who “invited chaos” by offering a platform to “someone who never belonged here.”
Free speech is no longer sacred among young journalists who have absorbed the campus lessons about “hate speech”—defined more and more broadly—and they’re breaking long-standing taboos as they bring “cancel culture” into professional newsrooms. They’re not yet in charge, but many of their editors are reacting like beleaguered college presidents, terrified of seeming insufficiently “woke.” Most professional journalists, young and old, still pay lip service to the First Amendment, and they certainly believe that it protects their work, but they’re increasingly eager for others to be “de-platformed” or “no-platformed,” as today’s censors like to put it—effectively silenced.
These mostly younger progressive journalists lead campaigns to get conservative journalists fired, banned from Twitter, and “de-monetized” on YouTube. They don’t burn books, but they’ve successfully pressured Amazon to stop selling titles that they deem offensive. They encourage advertising boycotts designed to put ideological rivals out of business. They’re loath to report forthrightly on left-wing censorship and violence, even when fellow journalists get attacked. They equate conservatives’ speech with violence and rationalize leftists’ actual violence as . . . speech.
It’s a strange new world for those who remember liberal journalists like Nat Hentoff, the Village Voice writer who stood with the ACLU in defending the free-speech rights of Nazis, Klansmen, and others whose views he deplored—or who recall the days when the Columbia Journalism Review stood as an unswerving advocate for press freedom. While America has seen its share of politicians eager to limit speech, from John Adams and Woodrow Wilson (who both had journalists prosecuted for “sedition”) to Donald Trump (who has made various unconstitutional threats), journalists on the left and the right have long shared a reverence for the First Amendment, if only out of self-interest. When liberals supported campaign-finance laws restricting corporations’ political messages during election campaigns, they insisted on exemptions for news organizations. One could fault them for being self-serving in this selective censorship, which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in its Citizens United decision, but at least they stood up for their profession’s freedom.
Today, though, journalists are becoming zealous to silence their ideological rivals—and the fervor is mainly on the left. During the 1960s, the left-wing activists leading Berkeley’s Free Speech movement fought for the rights of conservatives to speak on campus, but today’s activists embrace the New Left’s intellectual rationalizations for censorship. To justify the protection of an ever-expanding array of victimized groups, theorists of intersectionality—the idea that subgroup identities, such as race, gender, and sexuality, overlap to make people more oppressed—have adapted Herbert Marcuse’s neo-Marxist notion of “repressive tolerance.” Marcuse propounded that Orwellian oxymoron in the 1960s to justify government censorship of right-wing groups that were supposedly oppressing the powerless.
Greg Lukianoff, who has fought free-speech wars on campus for two decades as the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), dates the ascendancy of the new censors to 2013, when student protesters at Brown University forced the cancellation of a speech by Raymond Kelly, the New York City police commissioner. “For the first time, rather than being ashamed of this assault on free speech, most people on campus seemed to rally around the protesters,” says Lukianoff, coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind.“That’s when we started hearing the language of medicalization, that free speech would cause medical harm. Outsiders dismissed this as a college phenomenon and predicted that these intolerant fragile kids would have to change when they hit the real world. But instead, they’re changing the world.”
This change can be seen at the once-stalwart ACLU, which has retreated to a new policy of rejecting First Amendment cases when the speech in question “can inflict serious harms” on “marginalized communities.” That’s the paternalistic rationale for campus speech codes, which have repeatedly been declared unconstitutional but remain popular, especially among Democrats and young people. In a national survey in 2017 by the Cato Institute, a majority of Democrats (versus a quarter of Republicans) said that the government should prohibit hate speech, and 60 percent of respondents under age 30 agreed that hate speech constitutes an act of violence.
Even journalists are adopting these attitudes, as Robby Soave observed while reporting on young radicals in his book Panic Attack.A decade ago, when Soave was an undergraduate on the University of Michigan’s student paper, his fellow editors stood in the Hentoff tradition: devout leftists but also free-speech absolutists. Starting around 2013, though, Soave saw a change at Michigan and other schools. “The power dynamic switched on campus so that the anti-speech activists began dominating the discourse while those who believed in free speech became afraid to speak up,” says Soave, now a writer for Reason. “Campus newspapers, especially at elite institutions, have become increasingly sympathetic to the notion that speech isn’t protected if it makes students feel unsafe. And now you’re seeing these graduates going into professional journalism and demanding that their editors provide a safe workplace by not employing people whose views make them uncomfortable.”
The result is what Dean Baquet, the New York Times executive editor, recently called a “generational divide” in newsrooms. The progressive activism of younger journalists often leaves their older colleagues exasperated. “The paper is now written by 25-year-old gender studies majors,” said one Washington Post veteran. She wouldn’t speak for the record, though: as fragile and marginalized as these young progressives claim to be, they know how to make life miserable for unwoke colleagues.
If their publication is considering hiring a conservative, or if a colleague writes or tweets something that offends them, young progressives express their outrage on social media—sometimes publicly on Twitter, sometimes in internal chat rooms. The internal chat is supposed to be confidential, but comments often get leaked, stoking online outrage. It takes remarkably little to start the cycle, as Times opinion writer Bari Weiss discovered last year. Weiss, already in disfavor among progressives for criticizing aspects of the #MeToo movement, got into trouble for celebrating the Olympic performance of gymnast Mirai Nagasu, the American-born daughter of Japanese immigrants. Weiss adapted a line from the Hamilton musical to tweet: “Immigrants: They get the job done.” Weiss was promptly attacked for describing Nagasu as an immigrant, making her guilty of a progressive offense known as “othering.”
“Today, journalists are becoming zealous to silence their ideological rivals—and the fervor is mainly on the left.”
HuffPost’sAshley Feinberg, who did her own version of othering by labeling Weiss a “feminist apostate” and “troll,” published the leaked transcript of an internal chat among Times staffers in which Weiss’s tweet was compared to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The staffers called for an expansion of the company’s program in implicit-bias training to combat the paper’s “microaggressions” and “hostile work environment.” Weiss tried explaining that she’d been aware of the gymnast’s family background and had been using poetic license, but eventually she tweeted her surrender: “I am being told that I am a racist, a ghoul and that I deserve to die. So I deleted the tweet. That’s where we are.”
Ian Buruma, the editor of TheNew York Review of Books, was fired for publishing an article by a man accused of sexual assault (a Canadian journalist who’d been acquitted of the charges in court but saw his career ruined). Buruma was doomed by online outrage, a staff revolt, and threats from university presses to withdraw advertising. Harper’s was similarly roiled by internal rebellion and online fury for publishing articles by John Hockenberry, the NPR host who lost his job over sexual harassment accusations, and by Katie Roiphe, whose criticism of #MeToo was controversial even before the magazine published it. Rumors about the pending article prompted Nicole Cliffe, a columnist at Slate, to call for freelance writers to boycott Harper’s unless it killed Roiphe’s piece; Cliffe even offered to compensate them for any money they lost by withdrawing their articles. Her preemptive strike didn’t stop publication of the Roiphe article, but it did inspire at least one company to withdraw an ad from Harper’s.
TheAtlantic faced a campaign to fire Kevin Williamson shortly after he was hired away from National Review. Writers at the New Republic, the New York Times, Slate, Vox, the Daily Beast, and other outlets called him unfit for the job. They were particularly appalled by an earlier podcast in which Williamson, in a spirit of provocation, said that women who have abortions deserved the same punishment as those who commit first-degree murder, even if that meant hanging. TheAtlantic initially stood by him, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of its star progressive writers, even praised Williamson’s work and said that he’d advised hiring him. But the online dragging and internal discontent soon led to his exit. At a staff meeting (a video of which was leaked to HuffPost) after Williamson’s firing, Coates apologized to his colleagues. “I feel like I kind of failed you guys,” he said.
The online outrage against Williamson was fanned by Media Matters for America, the nonprofit that employs dozens of researchers to dig up damaging material on conservatives—or, at least, material that will sound especially bad if it’s quoted without context. (Williamson, for instance, had also expressed reservations about imposing the death penalty for any crime.) One Media Matters researcher, heroically profiled in the Washington Post, spent ten hours a day listening to recordings from 2006 to 2011 of Tucker Carlson’s conversations with Bubba the Love Sponge, a shock-jock radio host. Media Matters published some of Carlson’s cruder comments and followed up with new ones on subsequent days to keep the story alive and provide ammunition for activists demanding that corporations stop advertising on Carlson’s Fox News show. The campaign succeeded in pressuring advertisers like Land Rover and IHOP to abandon the program, which runs fewer commercials than it did last year.
It’s easy to see why progressive activists have made advertising boycotts one of their chief weapons against Fox, Breitbart, and other conservative outlets. What’s harder to fathom is why so many journalists have cheered a tactic that’s bad for their profession. This kind of boycott is different from the traditional ones against companies accused of bad behavior like mistreating their workers or polluting the environment. In this case, companies are targeted not for the way they run their businesses but simply for advertising their wares. Jack Shafer, the longtime media critic, has been a lonely libertarian voice warning of the threat that this poses to journalism and public discourse. “I barely trust IHOP to make my breakfast,” he wrote in Politico. “Why would I expect it to vet my cable news content for me?”
Journalists have traditionally prided themselves on their independence from advertisers. Now the boycotters want to end that independence. If advertisers start being held accountable for content, their aversion to controversy will put pressure on media companies to churn out bland fare that won’t risk offending anyone. “It’s easy to imagine today’s boycotts turning into tomorrow’s blacklist,” wrote Shafer.
Instead of worrying about this threat to their autonomy, journalists at progressive and mainstream publications have promoted it. Activists announce boycotts regularly, but these rarely make an impact unless they get widespread public attention. Sleeping Giants, an activist group leading the boycotts, has gotten lots of publicity (and web traffic) from largely uncritical articles heralding its leaders’ pure motives. Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media columnist, acknowledged that there might be a problem if boycotters aimed at a provocative outlet like Gawker—a left-leaning site that meets her approval—but she couldn’t bring herself to condemn the tactic. Quite the reverse: “To those who sympathize with Sleeping Giants’ objections to online racism, sexism and hate-mongering—count me in this number—their efforts seem worthwhile, sometimes even noble.”
Other journalists have explicitly endorsed the Carlson boycott, including Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, and Michelangelo Signorile of HuffPost. Some have even pitched in to pressure the advertisers directly. Jenna Amatulli, a reporter at HuffPost, published a list of the show’s advertisers, complete with links to their contact information, and wrote that she had “reached out” for statements from each company—meaning, in effect, that she had personally threatened them with bad publicity. No one wants to be named in a story accusing an advertiser of supporting “racism,” “white nationalism,” and “misogyny,” Carlson’s alleged sins, reported as established facts in HuffPost articles.
Other HuffPost reporters used similar tactics against Daryush Valizadeh, known as Roosh, a male critic of feminism who ran a website called Return of Kings. After the reporters “reached out” to Amazon, YouTube, and other companies that enabled Roosh to collect online revenue, Amazon removed some of his books, and YouTube banned him from livestreaming. HuffPosttriumphantly reported the campaign’s outcome: “Rape Apologist ‘Roosh’ Shutting Down Website After Running Out of Money.”
How would the management of HuffPostreact if conservative journalists similarly “reached out” to its advertisers? I put that question to Lydia Polgreen, the editor-in-chief, noting that it would be easy to find articles (like one by Jesse Been defending violence against Trump supporters) that could scare off corporations. She dodged the question, referring me to a spokesperson’s bland statement about HuffPost being trusted by advertisers because of its “factual insights.”
A few conservatives have tried these censorious tactics against liberals, with little success. They’ve hired researchers to dig up damaging social-media posts by liberal reporters—a move that Polgreen called an “extremely alarming” threat to “independent journalism,” though it’s precisely what her HuffPost staff and Media Matters do to conservative journalists. Some conservatives responded to the Fox boycotts by announcing counter-boycotts against MSNBC, but these efforts got virtually no press coverage. Conservative journalists eagerly criticize the bias of their progressive colleagues, but they don’t have the same power to censor—or the same zeal.
To get an idea of the imbalance, consider the cases of Quinn Norton, a libertarian technology writer, and Sarah Jeong, a progressive technology writer. After the Times announced that it was hiring Norton for its editorial page, it took just seven hours for progressives to get her fired. On Twitter and in an internal Times chat room (as HuffPostreported), Norton was attacked for having tweeted that she was friends with a neo-Nazi hacker whom she had covered. She had always repudiated his ideology, calling him a “terrible person,” but that wasn’t enough to save her job. Six months later, in August 2018, when the Times hired Jeong for the editorial page, conservative activists unearthed tweets from Jeong, an Asian-American, denigrating white men as well as whites as a race. One used a hashtag “#CancelWhitePeople”; another predicted that whites would soon go extinct and said, “This was my plan all along.” The Times stuck with its decision to hire her. (The paper recently announced that Jeong would no longer be part of its editorial board, though she will continue as a contributing writer.)
Conservative journalists criticized the Times for its double standard, but they didn’t unite with the online activists demanding that Jeong be fired. The Times’s Bret Stephens wrote a column urging the paper to overlook the offensive tweets. In New York, Andrew Sullivan lambasted Jeong’s bigotry and the progressive dogma that it’s impossible to be racist against whites, but he, too, urged the Times not to fire her because media companies should not succumb to online mobs. You might think that Sullivan’s forbearance would win him some points with progressives, and perhaps even make them question their own enthusiasm for purges, but the column didn’t play well even with Sullivan’s colleagues at New York. Brian Feldman, an associate editor, tweeted: “Andrew Sullivan’s newest column is complete garbage and I’m embarrassed to be even tangentially associated with it.” Not exactly collegial, but again, that’s where we are.
Another thought experiment: suppose, after a small organization announces a march in support of abortion rights, that an alliance of antiabortion protesters vows to shut it down. As the marchers proceed, they’re confronted by a much larger group of counterprotesters wearing masks, carrying clubs, and chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” The counterprotesters block the marchers’ progress and throw eggs, milk shakes, and rocks at them. Fights break out, inspiring a news article: “Six people were injured today in clashes between anti-murder demonstrators and a far-left group linked to infanticide. Leaders of the anti-murder protesters blamed the left-wing group for provoking the violence and vowed to ‘continue defending ourselves and the most vulnerable members of our society.’ ”
Are there any right-wing journalists capable of misreporting a story so dishonestly? They haven’t had a chance to try. There’s no group of right-wing masked thugs who regularly try to stop left-wing speeches and marches. The “no-platforming” strategy is a specialty of Antifa, the left-wing network whose members have brawled at conservative and Republican events in Berkeley, San Jose, Charlottesville, Washington, D.C., Boston, Portland, Vancouver, and other cities. They describe themselves as “anti-fascist,” a ludicrous term for a masked mob suppressing free speech, but journalists respectfully use it anyway.
Media coverage obscures Antifa’s aggression by vaguely reporting “clashes” between antifascists who claim to be acting in “self-defense” (though they typically outnumber their enemies by at least four to one) against the violence of “racists” and “white supremacists” of the “alt-right.” It doesn’t matter if the conservative group is rallying to support free speech—hardly a traditional priority for fascists—and has specifically banned white supremacists from participating. Enterprising journalists can always find someone at the rally somehow linked to what some left-wing organization has designated a dangerous “hate group.” And journalists can turn to the much-quoted Mark Bray, a historian at Dartmouth, to provide a rationale for the masked mob’s tactics. In his Anti-Fascist Handbook, Bray acknowledges that Antifa’s no-platforming strategy infringes on others’ free speech but maintains that it is “justified for its role in the political struggle against fascism” and approvingly describes violence as “a small though vital sliver of anti-fascist activity.”
This coverage jibes with the media narrative that the great threat to civil liberties comes from the right, a rationale used for censoring conservatives. If a lone sociopath with right-wing leanings turns violent, commentators rush to blame it on the “climate” created by President Trump and Fox News, which makes no more sense than blaming Elizabeth Warren for the recent killing spree in Dayton by a supporter of hers, or blaming MSNBC for the Rachel Maddow fan who opened fire on Republican members of Congress in Alexandria, Virginia. Violent young men certainly exist on the right, but no conservative academic or journalist tries to rationalize their attacks as “self-defense.” They can post online threats and domination fantasies, but they don’t have the numbers or the institutional power to silence their opponents.
“Most journalists obsess over right-wing dangers while ignoring or downplaying the actual violence on the left.”
Yet most journalists obsess over right-wing dangers while ignoring or downplaying the actual violence on the left. There are exceptions, like Peter Beinart of TheAtlantic, who has warned about Antifa and criticized TheNation and Slate for celebrating one of its assaults (the punching of white nationalist Richard Spencer). But few others have paid much heed to Antifa. Some, like Carlos Maza and the New Republic’s Matt Ford, have praised its milk-shaking tactic. While working at Vox, Maza tweeted, “Milkshake them all. Humiliate them at every turn. Make them dread public organizing.” He has also tweeted, “Deplatform the bigots,” and put that idea into practice with the outspoken support of Vox’s executives. His pressure on YouTube triggered the “Vox Adpocalypse,” in which YouTube cut off advertising revenue to Steven Crowder and other conservative commentators.
Outside of conservative and libertarian outlets, Antifa hasn’t attracted much scrutiny, even as its followers have assaulted journalists. (They also stood outside Carlson’s home, chanting, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!”) The latest victim is Andy Ngo, a writer for Quillette, City Journal, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications, whose coverage of Antifa’s violence led to threats and harassment from the group’s members over the last two years. In June, Ngo was attacked at a rally in Portland for men’s rights that attracted two dozen supporters. They were opposed by 400 protesters who blocked streets and threw milk shakes handed out by organizers. As Ngo was reporting, masked Antifa protesters rushed him, stole his camera, showered him with milk shakes and eggs, kicked him, and pummeled his head, cutting his face and tearing his earlobe. He was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage.
Among major newspapers, only the Wall Street Journal editorialized against the Antifa assault on right-leaning journalist Andy Ngo, who was seriously injured in June. (MORIAH RATNER/GETTY IMAGES)
Any attack on a journalist for reporting usually inspires displays of professional solidarity, but the Wall Street Journal was the only major newspaper to editorialize in support of Ngo. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which issues frequent news bulletins on threats to the press, published nothing on the assault. Last year, the committee ran a detailed report on American journalists who felt threatened by the far right (none of whom had been physically injured), but it seems uninterested in Antifa.
Some progressive journalists condemned the assault on Ngo but faulted him and the conservative organizers of the rally for inviting violence, as in a HuffPostarticle headlined “Far-Right Extremists Wanted Blood in Portland’s Streets. Once Again, They Got It.” Aymann Ismail, a staff writer at Slate, tweeted, “This is bad, but Ngo has done worse.” The Portland Mercury tried discrediting Ngo by claiming that he previously had been complicit in an attack by right-wingers on Antifa—a baseless claim debunked by Reason’s Soave but nonetheless repeated by the Daily Beast, Vice, and Rolling Stone. Zack Beauchamp of Voxcondemned the physical assault on Ngo but offered excruciating rationalizations for Antifa’s rage. “The mere fact that Ngo was assaulted doesn’t say what the meaning of that assault is, or what the broader context is that’s necessary to understand it,” he wrote, explaining that the controversy “isn’t really a debate about press freedoms” but rather about “two divergent visions of where American politics is.” One of those visions just happens to require silencing the other side.
Free speech should be of special interest to the Columbia Journalism Review, which calls itself “the leading global voice on journalism news and commentary.” But CJR sees the issue through a progressive filter. It not only criticized TheNew York Review of Books and Harper’s for publishing articles by journalists fired for sexual harassment but also essentially advocated a blacklist: “The men who feel they have been unfairly treated following accusations of harassment or abuse are entitled to their perspective, but nothing demands that editors turn over the pages of their publications to these figures.” CJR applauded Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for “stemming the flow of toxic ideas” by banning “hate-mongers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.” After the violence at Berkeley and Middlebury, CJR urged reporters covering campus unrest to “be wary of amplifying flashpoints that match Trump’s own ‘intolerant left’ narrative,” and it has been following its own advice.
CJR showed little interest in Antifa’s censorious tactics until prompted recently by Quillette, the online magazine devoted to “dangerous ideas,” which has run articles by journalists and academics on the culture wars over free speech. Eoin Lenihan, a researcher in online extremism, reported in May on an analysis of the Twitter users who interact most heavily with Antifa sites. Most turned out to be journalists, including writers for the Guardian, the New Republic, and HuffPostas well for pro-Antifa publications. Following a group closely on Twitter, of course, doesn’t mean that one endorses its activity; journalists do need to track the subjects they cover. But these journalists seemed more devoted to promoting the cause than covering it impartially. “Of all 15 verified national-level journalists in our subset, we couldn’t find a single article, by any of them, that was markedly critical of Antifa in any way,” Lenihan wrote. “In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying Antifa violence while advancing Antifa talking points, and in some cases quoting Antifa extremists as if they were impartial experts.”
CJR responded to Lenihan’s article—but not by analyzing the press coverage of Antifa. Instead, it ran an article, “Right-Wing Publications Launder an Anti-Journalist Smear Campaign,” by Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch, a project of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way. Holt’s article was a mix of ad hominem attacks, irrelevancies, and inaccuracies. Cathy Young, who wrote about the controversy for Arc Digital, concluded that every key point in his argument was wrong. Even worse was what Holt omitted. He didn’t even address Lenihan’s main conclusion: that press coverage of Antifa was biased—the issue that should have been most relevant to a journalism review.
Yet CJR remained uninterested in Antifa even after the subsequent assault on Andy Ngo. This past summer, it ran an article about rightists attacking journalists in Greece, but Ngo’s assault didn’t even rate a mention in CJR’s daily digest of journalism news. The only reference to the Portland melee was a summary of a Media Matters article criticizing Fox News for its coverage. Fox, like other outlets, had quoted a report from the Portland police that some of the milk shakes handed out by Antifa contained quick-drying cement, but no other evidence existed that this was true. To the nation’s leading journalism review, that was apparently the most important lesson of the episode for reporters: be careful not to exaggerate the violence of leftists opposed to free speech. And never mind that a journalist is in the hospital as a result of that violence.
Is there any hope of reviving the spirit of Nat Hentoff on the left? The zeal for banning “hate speech” doesn’t seem to be abating, though some progressives are developing a new appreciation for the First Amendment, thanks to Trump’s incoherent comments about it, like his offhand remark that “bad” speech is not “free speech” because it is “dangerous.” While the dangers of Trump’s “war on the press” have been exaggerated—no matter how much he’d like to silence “fake news CNN” or the “failing New York Times,” the courts won’t suspend the First Amendment to please him—there is a danger of the federal government stifling speech on social media.
There’s some bipartisan support in Congress and even among journalists for removing what’s been called the Internet’s First Amendment: the exemption that allows social media platforms to publish controversial material without being held legally liable for it. Removing the exemption appeals to some Democrats who want to restrict “hate speech,” and to some Republicans, too, angry at the platforms for censoring right-wing voices. This censorship is often blamed on social media companies’ progressive bias, which may well exist, but it’s due at least in part simply to the greater external pressure from progressive activists and journalists. If progressives keep trying to de-platform their opponents—and if Twitter and Facebook and YouTube keep caving to the pressure—there’ll be more bipartisan enthusiasm to restrict all speech on social media.
A more immediate danger is self-censorship by writers fearful of being fired or blacklisted and by editors fearful of online rage, staff revolts, and advertising boycotts. After the firing of Williamson, TheAtlantic (to its credit) published a dissent from that decision by Conor Friedersdorf, in which he worried about the chilling effect it would have on the magazine’s writers and editors, and how their fear of taking chances would ultimately hurt readers. That’s the danger at every publication that bows to the new censors. Resisting them won’t be easy if journalism keeps going the way of academia.
But all editors and publishers can take a couple of basic steps. One is to concentrate on hiring journalists committed to the most important kind of diversity: a wide range of ideas open for vigorous debate. The other step is even simpler: stop capitulating. Ignore the online speech police, and don’t reward the staff censors, either. Instead of feeling their pain or acceding to their demands, give them a copy of Nat Hentoff’s Free Speech for Me—but Not for Thee. If they still don’t get it—if they still don’t see that free speech is their profession’s paramount principle—tactfully suggest that their talents would be better suited to another line of work.
Brian Stelter talks about Trump and his followers acting like a cult.
New book says there is a 'cult of Trump'
Reliable Sources
Steven Hassan, a cult expert with firsthand experience escaping the Unification Church, says Trump's cultivation of his base is cult-like. Brian Stelter questions the claims in Hassan's new book, "The Cult of Trump," and Hassan stresses the importance of "contact outside the bubble."
Fat Boy Stelter babbles about a cult of Trump, in fact he even used that pathetic Scaramuchi to babble such nonsense.
But who really had a cult? Did children sing about Trump like Obama?
This is the kind of stuff we see in North Korea. School Teachers indoctrinating small children to sing praises to the "Dear Leader"
Hell, when Clinton was in Reporter's wished they could give Bill blow jobs or having sex with him.
Liberals and their Democrat followers are vile people worthy of eradication.
A massive purge of Islamic State
(IS) accounts on the messaging app Telegram - the main platform used by
the group - has resulted in serious disruption of its propaganda
distribution online.
EU crime agency Europol said in a press release on 22 November
that a concentrated day of action had meant "a significant portion of
key actors within the IS network on Telegram" had been "pushed away from
the platform".
The statement provided no statistics, but Telegram
itself said that 2,096 "terrorist accounts and bots" had been taken
down on 22 November and 2,959 the following day - compared to a daily
average of 200-300 takedowns.
That number was lower than a similar
spike in takedowns on 6 December 2018, when 3,276 accounts and bots
were disabled in a single day, according to Telegram's statistics.
Europol did not claim to have been involved in that action.
Europol
previously claimed to have compromised the propaganda distribution
capability of IS during another co-ordinated day of action in April
2018.
But the impact of the disruption appeared to be far greater
this time than either the April or December 2018 events, heavily
targeting the distribution network of the IS-affiliated Nashir News
Agency, which publishes the group's official propaganda.
The
action has also affected accounts on Telegram linked with, or supportive
of, al-Qaeda, as well as other jihadist figures active on the platform.
A small number of IS distribution channels survived the cull and they
quickly advertised replacement accounts, but in most cases those too
were swiftly taken down, highlighting the intensity of the cat-and-mouse
chase.
Similarly, IS supporters scrambled to rebuild their
networks on Telegram, voicing defiance, but their regenerated accounts
were swiftly disabled.
On 25 November, IS networks were still
struggling to rebuild their channels on Telegram. The accounts of Nashir
News Agency, the IS-linked online disseminator, remain extremely hard
to come by, which significantly minimises visibility of IS propaganda.
Similar to previous clampdowns on IS networks online, the latest
action is unlikely to have a lasting impact unless it is persistent.
Already supporters have been discussing how to respond to the clampdown on Telegram.
While
the majority have insisted they will persevere on the platform, others
have recommended alternatives to Telegram - such as RocketChat and Riot.
But IS-linked accounts on RocketChat, where IS disseminators
launched their own server in the wake of a similar Telegram disruption
in 2018, have not posted anything since 5 November.
Other IS
supporters were also observed to promote the decentralised social
network Riot, which jihadists have experimented with in the past,
arguing that an alternative to Telegram was now required.
In a
more cryptic message, the pro-IS media group Quraysh warned Telegram
that its takedown campaign would backfire and implied it would drive
jihadists underground where the authorities could not see what they were
doing. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-50545816
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own
and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall
The Unspoken Truth:
What Impeachment Exposed About Trump and 2020
Source: AP Photo/Jeffrey McWhorter
For those who got stuck watching the past two weeks of testimony in the circus inquiry into impeaching President Trump there is a bit of news that has been uncovered.
Let's face it only about 3 percent of the American people spent time watching the proceedings. Compare that to the near 30 percent of the American people who tuned in to view the Clinton impeachment proceedings and you already understand something very important.
After watching the Democrats attempt to displace a lawfully elected president via fake charges of collusion with Russia, the voter doesn’t seem very impressed with an effort to displace him over a phony charge of “quid pro quo.”
Denying due process, witnesses, or even their choice of the committee members who would be allowed to speak just added to the (****yawn****) sham and why people felt no compulsion to view the goings on.
Now that it appears Democrats have called their final witnesses and they are preparing to recommend the formal articles of impeachment, it’s my belief that the president’s team will finally be allowed to punch back for the first time.
But before they do we need to point out a significant and vital truth.
Post intel-committee polls are pointing out this truth. But it deserves a wider recognition.
It would be wise for Pelosi and Schiff to consider it prior to taking even another step forward.
Democrats cast President Trump as someone who is so self-driven that he’s attempting to subvert justice just to “win an election.” That his thirst for victory pulsates through his heart so obsessively that he would break laws to have foreign governments interfere in our process just so that he could beat a Democrat.
Yet here’s the unspoken truth: He doesn’t need to.
He never has.
In 2016 he literally spent the least in campaign operations to win an impressive 30 state (plus) victory.
He spent less than his GOP opponents in the primary.
He is spending way less than any of the Democratic candidates at present, with hundreds of millions in cash on hand, ready to go to work when the time is right. But the truth is he’s had hundreds of millions in the bank since his victory in 2016.
The Democrats didn’t lose because the Russians spent $90,000 on Facebook ads. Team Hillary spent upwards of $69 million.
They lost because her message didn’t connect with voters who felt like Washington, D.C. was ignoring them.
In 2016 candidate Trump had no track record, but he had ideas, and he made promises. In 2020 he’s kept 87 of those promises, and he still has ideas not yet implemented.
In 2020 he will likely spend less money on media than his opponent. He will focus resources into going to meet voters at his enormous rallies. People will feel heard, they will look at his track record now, and will easily send him back to finish the fight.
He doesn’t need Russian bot-farms. He doesn’t need Ukrainian investigations. He doesn’t need a thing.
And it seems voters understand this.
Multiple polls showed movement with independents since the “public” impeachment inquiry had begun. Different polls showed differing amounts but the range was 8-11 percent in the president’s favor.
The media—which is the public relations arm of the Democrats—has helped spread the idea that if President Trump has done something illegal, that it should be looked into.
Voters gave the Democrats the chance to make their case. And just like with Russia, collusion, and Mueller, the wheels fell off the cart under scrutiny.
Donald Trump will win more states in 2020 than he won in 2016. (I’m on record saying 34-38. He won 30 in 2016). And he doesn’t need any help from anybody, minus the voters that he has worked tirelessly for while in office.
Believing otherwise is just playing the sucker the impeachment Dems tried to convince you that you were these past two weeks.
