Open The New York Times’ politics page Thursday morning and the top headline reads, “Democrats Begin Push For Biggest Expansion In Voting Since 1960s.” It’s a story about the most important election power-grab in modern legislative history, with a slim, partisan majority of senators seeking to wrest control of elections away from state governments to ensure Democrat control for decades to come.
For starters, H.R. 1 will ban voter ID requirements, mandate early voting windows, allow outside activist groups to deliver votes for counting, do away with notarized absentee ballots, force states to accept absentees for 10 days after an election is over, narrow the Federal Election Commission by one member to allow for partisan control, mandate counting illegal aliens in voting districts, allow the IRS to investigate non-profits’ political ideas, and make it nearly impossible to sue over the new rules.
In short, it’s a story about Democrats aiming to seize massive power over how elections are run. Of course, you wouldn’t get any of that information from The New York Times headline or copy. In fact, funny enough, the second story on The New York Times’ politics page Thursday morning was the one headlined, “Republicans Aim To Seize More Power Over How Elections Are Run.”
That one’s a story about Republicans working to pull control of the elections back from judges and officials’ extra-legislative “emergency rules” and rulings. The moves, the story reports with a straight face, are “threatening the fairness that is the bedrock of American democracy.”
Reasonable people can disagree on if they think the Democrats or Republicans are right or wrong in their different initiatives, but the stark difference between these two top news headlines is glaring — and not too long ago would have been deeply embarrassing to any serious news editor.
Meanwhile, over at Axios, the news sites’ two co-founders wrote an article about President Joe Biden’s plan to “re-engineer America quickly.” At a closed-door White House meeting, they report, “the historians” agreed with the presidents’ thinking that, “It is time to go even bigger and faster than anyone expected. If that means chucking the filibuster and bipartisanship, so be it.”
There’s virtually zero skepticism in their reporting. Instead, in the condescending little “Why It Matters” breakdown, readers are treated to how bold and historic this massive left-wing power-grab will be. “[Biden] won’t rub [Republicans’] noses in it,” they write, predicting instead that he is on his way to becoming a modern President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The intensity with which these outlets simply spewed Democratic propaganda Thursday morning was shameless. While this is no longer unusual, in an age when Americans from coast to coast have grown used to casually shrugging away their freedoms at the whim of a television doctor and his political allies, this kind of propaganda is seriously dangerous.
For the past year here in Washington, D.C., as well as in cities and states across the country, we’ve been told not to gather with our friends, neighbors, and family, not to worship God with our parishes, and not to visit our sick or elderly loved ones. We’ve even been told not to admire outdoor beauty, with the National Park Service’s Tuesday announcement that they will be choking off the number of people permitted to admire the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin this spring.
And every single day we are subjected to more base lies disguised as lofty truths. Breathing freely without two masks is selfish. Staying indoors is good for your neighbors. Our differences are what make us a community. We are all in this together.
Powerful black people are oppressed and poor white people are privileged.
Qanon is marching on Washington and the Ku Klux Klan is right behind every door.
Men are women, women are men, and pregnant women make great professional soldiers.
Power-grabs are voting rights. Election integrity threatens “the bedrock of American democracy.”
Joe Biden is an historic visionary.
“Democracy dies in darkness.”
Except that last one is true. The problem, of course, is while corporate media were excited to scream it from the rooftops during President Donald Trump’s four years in office, at a time the most powerful people in the country are insisting the truth is a lie and their lies are the truth, many of our best-known reporters are not merely absent, they’re complicit.
Thursday afternoon, when the president took questions for the first time in more than nine weeks, PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor, for example, asked how the president deals with the tension of attracting ungovernable masses of illegal immigrants to the border after being “elected as a moral, decent man.” Instead of rolling their eyes, two more reporters referentially played off her questions.
Will Biden run for re-election in four years, another reporter queried. Will Vice President Kamala Harris be his running mate? Why isn’t he moving faster to smash the tools designed to protect the Senate’s minority party?
“How far,” AP’s Zeke Miller asked at the top of the presser, “are you willing to go to achieve those promises that you made to the American people?”
We already know the answer to that question because the Democratic Party has made it abundantly clear they will go as far as they physically can. They will come into our schools, they come into our churches, they will come into our social media, our place of employment, our private company, our home, and our family.
The real question is: How far will we let them come? Because no one else is going to stand up for us.