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August 7 - August 26, 2020
In distinguishing between objectivity and impartiality, Human Events’ editors created a space where “bias” was an appropriate journalistic value, one that could work in tandem with objectivity.12
There was a toxic strain of anti-Semitism in the America First movement quite content to see Hitler deal with Europe’s “Jewish problem.”
In that positioning was the framing of the relationship between their audience and what would later be called the “mainstream media” that continues to this day. Their attitude was clear: we see the world as it really is, uncorrupted by the powerful forces that manipulate the rest of the press and much of the public.
They believed mainstream American journalists were shutting out alternative points of view, that they were “coloring, slanting, selecting and editing the news” in order to tamp down any criticisms of the war.
that for all his well-crafted sentences and love of language, Buckley was often a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.
You can draw a straight line from that blend of kooky conspiracy theory, anti–foreign alliances, and instinctual victimhood to Donald Trump’s worldview.
The Federal Communications Commission’s fairness doctrine was one limiting factor for conservatives,
Stopped by Regan
Broadcast operated under the FCC’s fairness doctrine, whose core requirements were that broadcasters cover matters of public importance and that they do so fairly, mostly in the sense that they air competing positions.
right of reply for politicians who were subject to personal attack and other elements of the broader “public trustee” doctrine that held that private broadcasters holding licenses to public airwaves should act in managing those airwaves as a trustee for the real owners—the American people.
The 1987 FCC decision to stop enforcing the fairness doctrine supercharged conservative media into a billion-dollar industry.
no need to be concerned with offering equal time or performing a news function.
For all the reasons discussed above, conservatives were hungry for a different source of information and belief, a stronger bond than mere opinion, that would validate and confirm their view of the world that was strikingly different from that presented by “mainstream” media.
“Limbaugh called his fans ‘dittoheads’ because they mindlessly echoed his prejudices—or he theirs; the pandering went both ways.”24 Conservatives have managed to turn the phrase “mainstream media,” or “lame stream media,” as that noted arbiter of intellectual rigor, Sarah Palin, called it, into a pejorative.
It’s the journalism that believes in standards, strives to report facts, and has a professional standard to correct errors. It’s the news the majority of Americans consume.
The entire purpose of this ever-increasing brand of conservative journalism—and it does great violence to the profession to call most of it by that term—is to confirm not just your opinion but also your feelings.
The gut. Per the rise of idiot America
The birthers “felt” that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could not truly be an American, so a cottage industry was born attempting to “prove” a lie.
the “larger” truth that Barack Obama wasn’t “really” an American because an America that could elect a man with the middle name Hussein is not really America.
forever tilted against the side that has standards, because part of those standards is admitting mistakes and correcting them on the record.
The Trump era’s consistent denial that you did not hear what you heard and did not see what you saw has managed to make George Orwell one of the most relevant authors of the day.
When Donald Trump tweets, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Orwell’s 1984 is the perfect framework in which to understand his mentality: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”27
Conspiracies are dominant realities in the world Trump and his followers inhabit.
This is the language not of journalism in search of truth but of a cult.
It wasn’t facts that led her to the conclusion but knowing “many people who voted for Trump,” as if it were impossible that many good people could have voted for Donald Trump and been unaware that his campaign had been working with Russians.
it did uncover the largest effort in American history by a hostile foreign power to influence the selection of our commander in chief.
Almost every Republican elected official in Washington knows Donald Trump is unfit to be president.
The Republican Party stood by a candidate who ran on a religious test to enter the United States. They knew it was unconstitutional and indecent, but they were silent.
And in that miscalculation began the surrender of any sense of self to Donald Trump. So now the nation is in full possession of the reality that Russians—Russians, for cryin’ out loud—worked on the same side as every Republican volunteer, donor, elected official, and Trump voter.
those Republicans who are more worried about defending Donald Trump than defending America:
Competition fuels party conflict by raising the political stakes of every policy dispute. When control of national institutions hangs in the balance, no party wants to grant political legitimacy to its opposition by voting for the measures it champions.
Despite the widespread belief that both parties have moved to the extremes, the movement of the Republican Party to the right accounts for most of the divergence between the two parties. Since the 1970s, each new cohort of Republican legislators has taken more conservative positions on legislation than the cohorts before them. That is not true of Democratic legislators.11
That was before Republicans decided “globalists” was a code word for some shadowy international cabal of Jewish bankers.
As is always the case with campaign finance reforms, once the system was broken, it proved impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, and subsequent candidates rejected public funding. Today some defend the decision by then senator Obama to blow up the system, insisting it was necessary to cope with the large amount of money Republicans could raise after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed contributions from corporations to be treated the same as individual donations—an explanation that makes no sense, because the ruling was two years after the 2008 campaign. The
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Donald Trump consistently benefited from the inability to imagine him winning.
has said that the assumption of a Clinton victory prompted his release of his infamous letter revealing that the FBI was investigating a newly acquired batch of Clinton-related emails.
Even Goldwater won college-educated Republicans in 1964.
that the media coverage of Trump was more as a phenomenon or, in the beginning, a joke than as a potential presidential candidate. In a primary debate, Hugh Hewitt asked Trump, “What’s your priority among our nuclear triad?”
which made it painfully apparent that the guy who was running for the job to hold the nuclear codes didn’t have a clue about the most fundamental basics of the deterrent strategy at the core of America’s nuclear weapons arsenal.3 It’s difficult to think of a more disqualifying answer for a potential president.
debating Hillary Clinton in September, he was still completely clueless about nuclear weapons, managing to say that America should never use nuclear weapons as a first strike and “we shouldn’t take anything off the table” in the same answer.
led by a man who not only was ignorant of the basics of national security but was willfully and unflinchingly proud of his ignorance is just one more milepost marking the journey of Republicans on their way to the junkyard of history.
The idea was simple: if a third-party candidate with an appeal to the center right ran and took votes from Trump, it would block his path to victory. I spoke to each person under strict confidentiality and so will not reveal names or states, but they were high-profile conservatives who believed that Trump was a disaster for the party and it would be better to lose one election than lose the moral mandate of a conservative movement.
Legitimizing hate is like a war: it is easier to begin than to stop.
Both assume that a society is threatening to spin out of control or, at the very least, speeding toward an unknown and dangerous destination that compels true patriots, that is, conservatives, to act.
In reality this “threat” was Papen’s pretext to seize control of the Prussian state and police and thus to consolidate the power of the central government, thus paving the way for a more authoritarian system in Germany.10
a grad school version of the racism later celebrated in the neo-Nazis’ march in Charlottesville to protest the removal of a Confederate statue. America was under attack from nonwhite heathens, the Barbarians at the Gate, who threaten the values of white America:
This is a familiar racist plea, and it is not surprising that the author at the time chose to keep his identity secret. (As a general rule, if you are afraid to be associated with your opinion in public, it’s probably time to rethink your opinion.)
a former speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani named Michael Anton, proving that both boss and staffer can compete side by side in the humiliation derby of the Trump era.
“Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism”—like
foreboding fear of a nonwhite, non-Christian world that is the essence of Trumpism:
a characterization that any German of the 1930s and 1940s would recognize as Untermensch.
When the Trump era and the preceding descent of the Republican Party into a legitimizing force for white nationalism are studied, it seems inevitable that the greatest weight of history will rest not with the Trump voters or even the red-faced Trump rallyists screaming their anger at the press, but with those like Anton and the leaders of the Republican Party who failed a fundamental test of civic decency.
