It was confirmed, through both the Robert Mueller and John Durham special investigations, that there was no truth to the crazy 2016 campaign season claim that business titan and then–presidential candidate Donald Trump was a spy for Russia. It was all a lie. It wasn’t a mistake or a misunderstanding. It was a deliberate hoax, imagined first in Hillary’s chardonnay-soaked brain and then implemented by her political machine in league with various stooges in the federal government and the entire Democrat media machine backing it up.23
A major project was launched and became an attempt to ruin and remove a duly elected president. You don’t decide to falsely accuse the most powerful man in the world of being a traitor and expect that person to remain in office. The goal isn’t to ruin their dinner. It’s to eliminate them from every single arena in life.
The crux of the claim was that Trump was committing treason and colluding with a hostile government to win the 2016 presidential election. This fiction was also meant to frighten the American people enough to allow the government itself the leeway to act officially to destroy Trump, his family, and associates and then ultimately remove him from his elected office.
This establishment temper-tantrum wish-fantasy was produced and proliferated by people in our own government and other powerful political elites. It relied on shock value and fear in an effort to turn the American people against their president; it required government agencies leaking every action, the media spooling out small scoops on who was being “investigated” and for what, and talking heads speculating that this must be the tip of the iceberg.
The media were the mechanism used to spread that hoax, and somehow, none of them determined that a story accusing Trump of the completely absurd was . . . absurd. The New York Times and the Washington Post were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage, while even the most modest of unbiased investigations would have revealed the supposed Trump-Russia collusion story was fake.
What their work did reveal is that those previously respected newspapers and much of the legacy media stopped being reporters and behaved instead as partisan activists and stenographers for the Democratic Party.
With the revelation that all he was accused of was part of an elaborate political hoax, Trump sent a letter to the Pulitzer board requesting that it rescind the prizes to the Times and Post. Not surprisingly, the board refused. Rescinding the prizes would have amounted to a confession that the foremost liberal newspapers in the United States performed as propagandists spreading fear and chaos in the name of defending the bureaucratic status quo.
As we look back, the Russia hoax was a shocking abuse of power and a flagrant display of the disregard the American political establishment has for the will of the people and the rule of law. Many exceptional books, columns, and television and radio commentary have exposed the details of this attempted coup of a duly elected president. Like the Thomas and Kavanaugh catastrophes, the attack on Trump was exclusively reliant on the liberal media to make the lie come alive, and amplify it without questioning or care.*
After Attorney General William Barr announced that “the Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election,”24 Gregg Jarrett pulled no punches in describing the media’s putrid role in this fraud against both Trump and the American people:
Many journalists were . . . reckless and malevolent. Most of them never bothered to examine the facts, evidence and the law. They refused to do their jobs. Instead, they abandoned objectivity and suspended their sense of fairness. They allowed enmity to obscure their judgment. In the process, the media squandered credibility, its only currency.
It is no wonder that many Americans have little trust in journalists to be honest in their reporting. Will network brass take action to punish those who so egregiously exaggerated or, in some cases, even lied to Americans? Not a chance. Network chiefs were complicit cheerleaders. The media, together with Democrats, are already parsing and pivoting.25
If the past ten years have taught us anything, it’s that none of us can predict the future. Trump’s ability to disrupt was less about his nature and more about the establishment’s shock at the unplanned and completely unexpected nature of the American people embracing Trump as evidenced by his 2016 win for the presidency. They were caught by surprise because they had forgotten about the American people in general, believing power and money would all flow naturally to them as the “system” was firmly in place. And yet, ironically, it was exactly those same forgotten men and women who delivered Trump into the White House.
Ultimately, the establishment was blinded by their own smug overconfidence as the media placated, assured, and massaged the system’s apparatchiks day and night, and they began to believe their fiction was reality.
Off with Their Heads!
Young progressive journalists are increasingly trying to impose their woke sensibilities on their own news organizations. Like political commissars in the old Soviet Union and China who enforced communist orthodoxy, or the Thought Police in Orwell’s novel 1984, progressive journalists have gone to extremes to impose their standards of what is politically correct and to make everyone fear violating those standards.
This would be comical if the consequences weren’t so serious. Reporters, editors, and other newsroom employees must now live in fear that they will lose their jobs if they write, edit, or broadcast anything that angers the left—not just among their audiences but among their colleagues. Their fear is not unfounded, and as a result, it’s safe to assume that many journalists must be censoring themselves to avoid deviating from liberal orthodoxy.
One of the journalists falling victim to the woke mob was James Bennet, the powerful editorial page editor at the New York Times, who was considered a contender to eventually become executive editor. But in June 2020, Bennet made a career-ending move by committing the unpardonable sin of publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, a conservative Republican representing Arkansas.
There is absolutely nothing unusual about the content of the op-ed, titled “Send in the Troops.” It expresses the very reasonable and commonsense view that “as rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy,” US troops should be sent to the cities under the Insurrection Act to restore order. The rioting was sparked by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for over nine minutes. The officer was later convicted of murder for the brutal crime.
Pointing out how rioters had looted and burned stores, shot and assaulted police officers, and even murdered a retired black police captain, Cotton wrote that “the rioting has nothing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved relatives have condemned violence. On the contrary, nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction, with cadres of left-wing radicals like Antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes. These rioters, if not subdued, not only will destroy the livelihoods of law-abiding citizens but will also take more innocent lives.”26
Cotton then noted accurately that “during the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson called out the military to disperse mobs that prevented school desegregation or threatened innocent lives and property.”27 Back then, liberals praised these actions.
Four days of furor ensued, as Times staffers and others said Cotton’s op-ed endangered black people. This charge was preposterous because Cotton never called for rioters or peaceful protesters to be shot or otherwise assaulted by the military, the police, or anyone else. Cotton said nothing remotely racist in his piece, and the words black and African American never even appear in the op-ed.
Bennet defended himself in a tweet (since deleted), saying the role of the op-ed page was to publish competing opinions and that the Cotton essay advanced debate. New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger at first defended Bennet but then gave in to the woke mob and forced Bennet to resign. The newspaper has left the op-ed on its website but has put a groveling editor’s note running an extraordinary 317 words on top that reads like the forced confession of a political prisoner in North Korea, concluding that “the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.”28
Bennet stayed silent on his forced resignation for over two years, but in October 2022, he spoke out in an interview to blast Sulzberger. Bennet said the publisher “blew the opportunity to make clear that the New York Times doesn’t exist just to tell progressives how progressives should view reality. That was a huge mistake and a missed opportunity for him to show real strength.” The former editorial page editor said Sulzberger “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage” to win “the applause and the welcome of the left,” including subscribers who expect “the Times will be Mother Jones [a far-left magazine] on steroids.”29
The end result of this disgraceful episode is clear. First, Times editors who want to keep their jobs must now be reluctant to publish any more op-eds from Republicans, at least without heavy editing to water down conservative opinions. Second, the Times opinion pages are now even more hostile to conservative opinion and less ideologically diverse than they were before the Cotton furor. In fact, the Times announced it would publish fewer op-eds going forward, said they would undergo closer review, and renamed outside opinion pieces “guest essays” to make clear they are not written by the newspaper’s employees.
Then–New York Times opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss tweeted in response to the Cotton episode: “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country.” In a long Twitter thread, she added that the “New Guard” (woke young staffers at the newspaper) believes that “the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.” And in another criticism of the New Guard, she added: “The New York Times motto is ‘all the news that’s fit to print.’ One group emphasizes the word ‘all.’ The other [the New Guard], the word ‘fit.’”30
Proving the accuracy of Weiss’s complaint, Times staffers called for her to be fired for daring to criticize her colleagues on Twitter. After being targeted for continuing harassment, she resigned and posted her resignation letter on her personal website, writing:
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi [despite Weiss being Jewish] and a racist . . . some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name [on company Slack channels]. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.31
Weiss added that “intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm. . . . If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear. . . . Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired.”32 Weiss has since gone on to create a very successful independent news operation.33
With all we’ve seen, you would not be incorrect in thinking those woke New York Times staffers sure have a lot of passion about keeping people safe from the idea of keeping people . . . safe. Until it’s not the convenient political position. Mara Gay, an editorial board member of the paper and considered one of its leading “progressive” voices, was very public with her own outrage against Cotton’s op-ed in 2020, tweeting at the time, “Running this puts black people in danger. And other Americans standing for our humanity and democracy, too. @nytimes.”34 Her tweet, in part, led to the firestorm that followed.
Fast-forward four years to 2024, an election year when defunding the police and de-criminalizing crime has put New York City and so many other blue cities, in the grip of crime waves. Inexplicably, polls are also showing Americans across the board are deeply unhappy with the downward plunge in the direction of the country.35 Enter New York governor Kathy Hochul announcing that she would be deploying—wait for it—the troops supposedly to help quell the crime and violence plaguing the system. One thousand members of the National Guard and State Police were dispatched to perform bag checks (specifically only to “deter” crime) throughout the New York City subway system.36
Right on cue, über-woke Mara Gay, still on the New York Times’ editorial board, chimes in but, hold your horses! She has an entirely new perspective. As though it was an opinion delivered to her by a leprechaun, Gay now thinks law and order and deploying the troops as a way to fight crime is fine and dandy.37 Heaping approval on Hochul’s plan to use the military to supposedly deal with subway crime, she wrote, “New York City cannot function without a thriving subway . . . ensuring that the system not only is safe but feels safe is paramount,” noting that Hochul’s decision was “the right one.” In her genuflection on using the National Guard in this fashion she noted that if this “can provide even some psychological comfort, nudging additional riders back to the subways, it could help the system become safer.”
That’s quite the leap. From insisting just the idea in an op-ed of using troops to quell murderous urban riots “puts black people in danger” (even though many of the victims of the riots were also black), but totally no problem to actually implementing it to make subway riders “feel safe.” She is also tacitly acknowledging in her comments that actual law enforcement is not at play, but simply getting more people into the system is the goal. As long as there is no actual law and order, we’re good. Perhaps that adds to her comfort zone.
Understandably, the astonishing turnaround is accurately being described as rank hypocrisy.38 But it’s also more than that—it is an open illustration (and confession) of the left’s commitment to chaos and victimhood through unrelenting crime. And even when it gets so bad that it can’t be ignored, their solution is to deploy troops, not to arrest people, but to perform security theater. This subjects the law-abiding to an even more onerous experience, while still not bothering to deploy the transit police onto subway trains to write tickets, and act on crime as it unfolds. It is security theater at its most pornographic.
Meanwhile, a few weeks after the troops were stationed as security models, a man on a subway train was shot by his own gun during a chaotic and violent scene recorded by another straphanger’s cellphone. When asked by reporters about that crime despite the presence of the National Guard, Hochul quipped her plan was “working as expected.”39 Indeed.
Another example of wokeness gone wild costing a journalist his job is the case of David Mastio, who was deputy editorial page editor at USA Today and had worked as an opinion journalist for thirty years. He was demoted at the flagship Gannett newspaper in August 2021 (and later left the paper) because he tweeted that “People who are pregnant are also women.”
Writing later in an op-ed in the New York Post, he said: “That idea was forbidden because a ‘news reporter’ covering diversity, equity and inclusion wrote a story detailing how transgender men can get pregnant . . . the LGBTQ Employee Resource Group and the newsroom ‘diversity’ committee thought I should be fired. . . . Gannett’s top editors and publishers are filling the company with a cadre of young college graduates who share a narrow ‘woke’ ideology that is alien to the values of most of its readers.”40
It is a sad realization that the liberal media have been consumed and destroyed by Marxist woke enforcers. This hurts the industry itself, but even more importantly, it harms America. Principled media presenting a spectrum of perspectives on the issues are important for the health of our republic. Right now, virtually the full burden of presenting TV news outside the framework of the Democrat-Media Axis is on the shoulders of Fox News, the relatively small number of similar news organizations, and independent media and journalists.
Fox Derangement Syndrome
This obsession with controlling the conversation explains the unhinged reaction by the establishment’s cultural, political, and media infrastructures to the emergence and success of Fox News.
Suddenly, in 1996, the liberal, Democratic, and establishment nightmare had an awakening—no longer were they the only source of TV news. There was now an alternative source for news and commentary that was not part of the Democrat-Media Axis. Unlike all the news organizations under the control of the liberal establishment, Fox News took conservative opinions seriously, rather than dismissing them as the bigoted and backward views of “right-wing nuts” to be marginalized or condemned.
