90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

‘Where are the questions?’: Kayleigh McEnany demands reporters investigate Obama officials over Flynn unmasking

When knowledge, wisdom, independent thought, even basic competence were no longer requisites for success, then the media naturally slid into mediocrity, and mastered networking and obsequiousness instead of valuing independence.

By Victor Davis Hanson • May 24, 2020

As a general rule, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite.

Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth.”

Take the strange case of the respective records of liberal New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Florida counterpart Ron DeSantis. Both states have roughly equal populations, with Florida slightly larger by about 2 million. Both have populations that travel daily back and forth between their respective major cities. Both are major international tourist and travel hubs. Both have widely diverse populations.

Both have large numbers of retirees and long-term-care homes. Yet, New York has suffered 14 times the number of coronavirus deaths as has Florida. Florida is now increasingly open, and on May 19 saw 54 deaths attributed to the virus. That same day, New York was completely locked down and yet saw nearly twice that number at 105 deaths.

One would never know from the media of the contrasting fates of the two states during the epidemic.DeSantis is often rendered little more than a reckless leader who exposed Floridians to needless danger. Cuomo, in contrast, increasingly is deified by the media as likely presidential timber who finesses press conferences in the lively fashion of his legendary beloved father, and iconic liberal, Mario Cuomo.

Yet on the principle of media’s commitment to untruth, the public legitimately could deduce from the hagiographic news coverage that the frenetic Cuomo has proven the most incompetent governor in the nation in dealing with the virus. He sent the infected into vulnerable long-term care homes. He neither applied social distancing to, nor cleaned, mass transit. And Cuomo exaggerated his need for some medical supplies, while neglecting shortages in others.

In contrast, the media furor at DeSantis is a good guide to his successes in both mitigating viral fatalities while charting Florida’s path back to economic normality.

Hagiography of the Unfit and Unprofessional

The media assures us that failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is a statuesque heroic figure who is an experienced state politician, a successful polymath, and would be a valuable asset as Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, but even better—wink-and-nod—a likely next president.

That new media consensus narrative is best typified by a recent and obsequious promo piece in the Washington Post. So given the media deification and the Doctrine of Media Untruth, we might assume that Abrams never has held statewide office, in incoherent fashion could not concede her legitimate defeat in the last Georgia gubernatorial race, and until recently still had not paid off an enormous credit card, student, and tax debt well over $200,000.

In other words, read the media narrative on Abrams and without knowing much else, one could conclude that she is not a photogenic candidate; she is not gracious in defeat; and she is without much experience of victory. Her baggage and lack of even a statewide constituency would mostly hurt a Biden ticket, which explains why his opponents hope that she is the vice-presidential nominee.

The Doctrine of Media Untruth was a valuable guide during the serial psychodramas to abort Donald Trump’s presidency. When Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee was canonized for tele-diagnosing Donald Trump as unhinged and in need of forced removal under the 25th Amendment, we knew the media glorification signaled she was unprofessional in making such a diagnosis of a patient she never met, and would never dare offer such a long-distance mental assessment of...

CLOWNWORLD: Gay Sex Club Operates as ‘Essential Business’ in Michigan While Barbers Face Jail Time for Cutting Hair

We are approaching peak clownworld.

Under the regime of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan has some of the most strict shutdown edicts of any state in the entire country. Whitmer has gotten off on kicking barbers, restaurateurs and other small business owners in the face throughout the demeaning charade.

However, one particular establishment has received a pass for no reason other than to promote debauchery and vice: A popular Lansing, Mich. swingers club where homosexual degenerates regularly swap fluids. The underground gay establishment, Club Tabu remains operational with the state looking the other way.

On their website, they are “defined as “private party” lifestyle socials” in which gay sex is allowed “in the privacy of your own accommodations” within the establishment. They also confirm that there are several gloryholes in the establishment so sodomites can engage in illicit, dangerous and perverted sex. The club confirmed on their Facebook page that they have been open since May 1.

Big League Politics reported yesterday on how barbers were issued misdemeanor citations for giving haircuts outside the State Capitol, as salons are considered a non-essential business:

The Michigan State Police (MSP) issued $500 fines for “disorderly” behavior to barbers who participated in Operation Haircut, a rally against arbitrary quarantine edicts issued by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer…

One of the barbers targeted by police is Sarah Huff, the 29-year-old owner of the Ardor + Grit salon in Holland, Mich. She received a citation for being a “disorderly person” for cutting hair outside of the Capitol on Wednesday.

She spoke to Big League Politics about the tyranny she endured for being willing to stand for her livelihood at the Capitol.

“When I talked to the cops, I actually asked them specifically if they were okay with doing this, and I had two cops, who were very nice, and they kind of both looked at each other, and then looked at me and said they cannot have an opinion,” Huff said while describing the incident.

“I don’t know. That’s kind of crazy that you can’t have any opinion on liberty,” she added…

Huff is following in the footsteps of heroic barber Karl Manke and opening up her salon without permission from...

The only way that America can unite the world to contain communist China is if it can unite itself. Today, nobody is under any illusions about the chasm of polarization in the United States, and yet that cleft must be repaired, or at least diminished, if we are to withstand the threat from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It’s simple: If China, boasting four times our population, is held together by the iron grip of the CCP, and if the United States is still disuniting, then the communists will win.

To be sure, the U.S. will always have partisanship and division. In a free country, such divides are a feature, not a bug. And yet at the same time, under threat, we must be able to come together as a team. That was the lesson, for example, of the U.S. in World War II.

In the late 1930s, we were plenty split, New Deal vs. anti-New Deal, internationalist vs. isolationist—and yet after Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the nation came together to fight and to win. We held elections all through the war, including a presidential election in 1944, and yet neither party, Democrat or Republican, wanted anything less than full victory overseas. And thankfully, that’s what we got because we had earned it.

Yes, it was a painful victory, coming at the price of more than 400,000 dead, but the alternative—a world dominated by Hitler’s aggression and genocide—was infinitely worse.

A similar story of collective national resolve could be told about the Cold War against Soviet communism, which lasted from 1946—when Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech with President Harry Truman in the audience—until 1991, when came the final collapse of the Soviet Union.

So for nearly half a century, the U.S. engaged in what a great Cold Warrior, John F. Kennedy, aptly described as a “long twilight struggle.” And yet while America’s Cold War consensus was sorely stressed at times, as during the Vietnam War, it held together until the successful conclusion of the struggle, during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Indeed, as we think about our national institutions in times of trial—including, today, the coronavirus crisis—we might be reminded of the idealistic motto of The Grange, that venerable American farm organization: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” For our purposes here, we’ll focus on the essential unity—that is, today, the essential of unifying to thwart communist China’s bid for world hegemony.

By now, every American should be familiar with the threat from the CCP’s control of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The CCP’s so-called “hard power” of economic and military might—much of it gained by manipulating and hacking America these past three decades—has surged.

And yet the CCP’s hard power has been joined by “soft power,” which is intangible, but still important, because it affects the human mind and heart. As the philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote, public opinion is “the queen of the world.” Oftentimes, soft power is thought of as idealism about, say, freedom or democracy, and yet it can be any sort of opinion, including the concern over victimization and racism. Anyone who thinks that these concerns aren’t powerful forces in the world today hasn’t been paying attention.

In fact, incidents of bias and hate, of all kinds, are painfully real. Yes, incidents have been magnified, exaggerated—and sometimes even fabricated—by provocateurs, aided by an often biased and clickbait-hungry media, and yet abuses have been real—and they are nasty, inexcusable, and sometimes, criminal.

It’s in this media-drenched environment that propagandists in Beijing have proven themselves skilled. Skilled, that is, at claiming victim status for China. Skilled also at playing the...