Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
The stench of failure hangs over Mr. X’s White House. The people know it, judging by the opinion polls. Corporate titans know it and whisper disenchantment with a fellow conservative. Washington knows it when an Administration official calls the budgeting process ”an unmitigated outrage” and when Mr. X’s closest friend in the Senate pronounces the President ”as very close to set in concrete.”
Mr. X’s loss of authority only halfway through his term should alarm all Americans. The economic nostrums he brought to office have not had the predicted effect. Only by recognizing his errors will he find better ideas. To rationalize the failure so far, or to blame his predecessors, the media and Congress, is to condemn the nation to two more years of destructive confusion.
By his own reckoning, Mr. X became President for one basic reason: to restore the morale and power of America. By his own analysis, that meant above all ”the rejuvenation of our economy” so that America could regain industrial strength, put all its people to work and defend its interests around the world.
Sound familiar? It should—it’s the opening three paragraphs of a New York Times editorial about Ronald Reagan’s first administration, published on January 9, 1983. So if you think the Times is repeating itself, you’re right. For the past half-century, the Times and other Democratic Party house organs have adopted a single unwavering posture toward Republican and conservative presidents: they’re against them, no matter what.
Hence their reliance on boilerplate editorials such as the one quoted above; presidents may come and go, editorial writers may pass through the pages of the Good Gray Lady, and times may change, but the rhetoric remains the same. If you think this is accidental, however, you must have been born yesterday.
The point of the cultural Marxist project, for which the Times is, and long has been, the chief spokesman, is to keep hammering home the same points about its enemies, until they are simply accepted as fact and no longer even contended or questioned. Do you honestly think, at this point, that there is a single soul on the staff of the New York Times who would today disagree with the sentiments expressed in 1983—or not endorse them if the editorial board substituted the name of Trump for Reagan?
Let’s continue the little experiment:
The Republican Administration has been cavalier about the environment, indifferent about civil rights, insensitive to the poor. Too many Democrats have been demagogic about trade restrictions and Social Security. But all factions share an obligation to force the President to lead in devising a new and credible plan for recovery. Between the lines of his recent utterances, Mr. Trump seems to concede some major misjudgments. The huge tax cut that he sold as a ”supply-side” stimulus to investment is now necessary to ”increase consumption,” he says… What is lacking is any clear sense of direction.
Recall this was written 35 years ago and, no doubt, will be written substantially the same way 35 years hence should there be a Republican in the White House. The point is not to offer commentary about the conduct of public affairs, or even to give voice to the “loyal opposition’s” alternative policy proposals. Rather, in true Alinsky fashion, it is to freeze and polarize the target, the better to shoot it to pieces. There can be no real engagement with the Enemy; instead, he must be caricatured, derided, mocked, demonized and ultimately destroyed.
This is also critical theory in action, the doctrine of the Frankfurt School Marxists that states there is nothing foundational about Western Civilization that should not be attacked, countermanded, or demolished. Philosophy, culture, faith, the family—and, latterly, heterosexuality and “whiteness”—must all go if we are to remake Man not only in the image of a fabricated “God,” but as a god in his own right. This, of course, is precisely the Serpent’s temptation of Eve with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden, in Genesis 3:5:“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
Milton dramatizes the scene this way in Book Nine of “Paradise Lost,” when the Serpent says:
Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe,
Why but to keep ye low and ignorant,
His worshippers; he knows that in the day
Ye Eate thereof, your Eyes that seem so cleere,
Yet are but dim, shall perfetly be then
Op’nd and cleerd, and ye shall be as Gods,
Knowing both Good and Evil as they know.
That ye should be as Gods . . .
So the Times is following in good stead one of Alinsky’s heroes, Lucifer—“the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.” Daily, it asks us to overturn all previous civilizational norms in the name of “equality”—the battering-ram that rebellious Leftists use to overthrow thousands of years of human history.
For this is how the Left sees itself (and has since Rousseau), as a permanent rebel against an unjust establishment whose destruction is a fitting punishment for all its many sins against the less-privileged. That this is a fundamental juvenile attitude, which some but not all teenagers eventually outgrow, never occurs to them. That this presumes history is a plot by the haves to keep the have-nots in permanent bondage is something they can articulate with a straight face. That Lucifer’s kingdom is Hell, and that the Left’s prescriptions for Paradise Found inevitably end in misery and death, matters not one whit to them.
Therefore, the singers may change but the melody must and will remain the same, as long as the cultural Marxists maintain their grip on the legacy media. They are not sworn to journalism per se, but to outcomes; they do not labor in the fields of “newsgathering” to inform, edify, or elucidate, they work to effect change. And not just any old change, but (in the words of Barack Hussein Obama), fundamental transformation.
That they do so under the patina of a mock-Christianity—forever worrying about the “plight” of this group or that favored group, such as Muslims, and in general sounding very much like Pope Francis at his most Franciscan—only adds to their dangerous charm. By constantly pounding the same topics of race, sex, class, “gender,” and the chimera of man-made “climate change”—and by insisting their political opponents are on the “wrong side of history”—they have a created a cartoon world of monomania that’s on display every day in the pages of the Times. Via non-stop propaganda, the argument can only move in one direction: leftward, as the Right gradually cedes ground, instead of standing on principle.
And so as journalism has come to focus almost exclusively on Washington, D.C., every story becomes political and ideological. It doesn’t matter who the president is: to the Left, if he’s a Republican, he’s always Ronald Reagan, and the end of the Republic is just around the corner.
If you don’t believe me, just ask the Times—today, tomorrow, and 35 years from now.
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