NPR, The New York Times, and other leftist propaganda organs parading as reliable news publications wrapped up 2023 by jeering House Republicans for passing only twenty-seven bills that became laws. Hyperventilating like out-of-shape Chris Christie clones perpetually catching their breath, the Fourth Estate’s most prestigious windbags could not hide their priggish condescension: Republican legislators simply cannot legislate, they huffed in unison.
I know the “Yes, Daddy, govern me harder!” crowd gets goosebumps every time the ignoramuses and perverts in D.C. create a new rule that comes with the threat of a good spanking, but it still amazes me how desperately today’s “journalists” desire for the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.
The United States of America has been around for two and a half centuries. During that time, tens of thousands of federal laws, rules, regulations, and executive orders have been created to squash and squeeze Americans’ natural liberties into smaller and smaller sanctioned containers suitable for TSA inspection. It would be interesting to know just how many more decades of legislating and how many thousands of additional recorded laws it would take before the masochists at The New York Times finally feel as if they have been sufficiently governed!
Mr. Edward Holman commented recently that the creepy JournoList community of leftist “reporters” who collaborated to push narratives and news coverage favorable to Barack Obama during his rise to power crippled the profession permanently: “A free press cannot secretly conspire to rig elections by coordinating to destroy candidates, movements (TEA Party, MAGA, etc) they dislike with false accusations by anonymous sources.” I heartily agree. The propaganda “journalism” legitimized by the JournoList cabal was as loud of a death knell for objective reporting (and the enduring independence of the press) as they come.
Equally demonstrative of journalism’s demise has been the corporate domestication of reporters and their lamentable transformation from an unruly gang of rebellious muckrakers and misfits who naturally despised the status quo into a docile pack of housebroken and primped-up poodles all desperate to service the “ruling class.” You don’t get anything as noxious as a JournoList to eat through the body politic like a parasite through its host without first initiating a widespread campaign to spay and neuter those journalists in the profession packing cojones as well as brains.
At one time in America, newsrooms were headed by serious editors who knew that the best reporters are borderline sociopaths with such deep-seated distrust for authority figures that they’d doubt the deathbed confessions of their own mothers. Those nosy, off-putting newshounds trampled through life as sloven and rumpled oddballs who effortlessly blended in with any town’s homeless population because both groups had a lot in common. Now “reporters” are so invested in the permanent Deep State’s official narratives that they spend all their time dissecting the credibility of the occasional government critic. Even worse, they have become so concerned with their appearance, prestige, and social media popularity that they grovel outside the halls of power and finance desperately seeking any feudal lord’s patronage and the promise of a golden ticket providing the perks and privileges of admission into the ranks of the hoity-toity.
How do you destroy a free press? Fill it with people who hate free speech, look down upon the poor and powerless, and believe that only their opinions matter. Then pay them to repeat and defend everything that the “ruling class” brands as an “official truth.” It’s amazing how fast public dissent dries up when you bribe the “journalists” and censor anyone who notices.
A couple decades ago, any reporter worth his salt would have laughed in the face of some nansy-pansy critic accusing him of “hate speech.” The most well-respected reporters would have either hung the libelous dross on their cubicle walls as meritorious decoration or tossed it in the bin, doused it with file drawer whiskey, and lit the calumny on fire. Today’s JournoList poseurs, in contrast, act as both wimpy self-flagellators denouncing their own “privilege” before the priests of the DEI Inquisition toss them on the sacrificial pyre and Salem witch trial accusers all too willing to point the finger at anyone who dares to question the latest “politically correct” fads and “woke” fashions. Today’s “reporters” have so betrayed the basic principles of their own profession that they believe it is their deranged civic duty to tell everyone else what they may or may not think and say.
Where did the American press corps leave its backbone? Probably on Jeffrey Epstein’s pedo-island or some other place where integrity and self-respect are shortsightedly exchanged for fake titles, hollow accolades, uptown apartments, and petty vice. Once you descend to that level of invertebracy where you slither along the ground like a supercilious slug, you find yourself writing articles for The New York Times demanding that Congress work harder to come up with new laws and punishments suitable for a population of citizen slaves. “Reporters” are now so deferential to bureaucrats in positions of authority that they prostrate themselves before those most deserving of scrutiny. As obsequious servants to a “ruling class” that sees them as expendable, today’s “journalists” empower the powerful and silence the powerless. And when a “reporter” no longer serves those powerful interests, the Establishment’s exterminators need only decide whether to shrivel the offending slug with salt or squish it into gooey obsolescence.
Think that’s hyperbole? Why has Julian Assange spent over a decade in legal purgatory and consular captivity while trying to avoid American incarceration and assassination? Why is Edward Snowden now a citizen of Russia, rather than a celebrated whistleblower addressing college auditoriums here in America? Why is Gonzalo Lira, Sr. mourning the torture and murder of his son in a Ukrainian prison, when Joe Biden could have freed the American citizen at any time? Because Assange, Snowden, and Lira all reported truths that revealed the U.S. government’s criminality, corruption, and antipathy toward the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Because our “ruling class” believes the First Amendment, unfettered free speech, and a courageous free press are all threats to national security. Because the American police state has no interest in seeking warrants or establishing probable cause before illegally spying on the American people. Those who have sacrificed everything to report these stories have been eliminated or cowed into quiet complicity with a Deep State diametrically opposed to human liberty. Those reporters who remain have chosen the lowly existence of common slugs.
Today’s “reporters” cannot possibly fathom why any person would want to be free from government coercion. If we are all one day ushered into work camps for our “protection” and “reeducation,” it will be “journalists” from the nation’s “most prestigious” rags who write glowing articles about the State’s complimentary lodgings and new “woke” slogan promising that work alone will set us free.
In a world where the Deep State has declared war on free speech and the World Economic Forum’s “ruling class” claims “disinformation” is the greatest threat to human civilization, fearless truth-tellers are in great demand. As truth-telling is no longer a skill of working “journalists,” citizen journalists have had to pick up the baton and run the race. That’s the thing about free speech, though. Nobody needs a government license to debate the facts or reject “official” lies. Persuasive argument does not hinge on the expired prestige of reputationally-tattered publications. An idea’s value does not require a censorship board in America or Europe to first pass judgment on its validity. Free expression does not depend on the intervention of a language police force to first check whether each noun and adjective pass muster. Speaking truth requires but one thing: the courage to stop licking power’s boots.