Media Chickens of the Frankfurt School Have Come Home to Roost By Michael Walsh
Media Chickens of the Frankfurt School Have Come Home to Roost
This week’s press conference featuring the White House physician, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, ostensibly was about President Trump’s health. In reality, it was a physical and mental check-up on the White House press corps, whose jejunity, mental impairment, and ideological blindness bespoke a dangerous warning sign for both the White House and the nation. These people are sick, and getting sicker. And until they’re all in quarantine, we’re all in danger of catching what’s obviously now a deadly communicable disease.
According to Dr. Jackson, the president’s health is excellent, especially for a 71-year-old man who subsists on little sleep and an old-fashioned American diet. But that wasn’t what the media was there to hear. In fact, they weren’t there to hear much of anything at all, or indeed even to listen (since they had already mentally discounted anything the doctor was going to say). Rather they had come to speak, using Dr. Jackson as the foil for “questions” that stated and restated the same Leftist-narrative talking point: that Trump is physically and mentally unfit to lead the nation that elected him—much to their shock and anger—fifteen months ago.
You can watch the whole thing here. But do note a few things going in, including the relative youth of the media folk, especially the women—who seem to be, like the Eloi in The Time Machine, chosen for their freshness and beauty rather than the penetrating quality of their minds. The men, meanwhile, skew slightly older, although no less primped and blow-dried.
Their “questions”—which were not phrased to elicit information but to score political points—almost all contained an underlying premise: that the president is manifestly unsuited to his high office, and the burden of proof is on the doctor to prove otherwise. Even when he stated in unequivocal terms that there is nothing physically or mentally wrong with Trump, the press corps practically sneered in his face, like small children demanding to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the sun will, in fact, rise in the east tomorrow. “Some people just have great genes,” said Dr. Jackson. But in the mechanistic world-view of “progressivism,” there can be no mysteries; everything must have a cause and effect, tied directly to diet, exercise, sex, race, and climate change. Things cannot simply just be.
More Media #Resistance
The circus inside the White House briefing room was all part of the ongoing and increasingly brazen and dishonest “resistance” movement against the American people and our constitutional electoral system. Since themoment it dawned on them, late on the evening of Nov. 8, 2016, that Hillary Clinton’s triumphant waddle into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was not going to happen, the Democrat-Media Complex has waged all-out war on Trump and his administration. And not just the Democrats, but their allies-of-convenience, the “NeverTrumpers,” whose ranks not only include “conservative” columnists exposed as ideologically impotent, but also nominal members of the GOP as well, including soon-to-be-former senator, Jeff Flake, currently accepting the plaudits of the Left on his farewell tour of the Senate.
In Flake’s view, articulated in his Wednesday speech, it’s not the administration that’s under attack by a pack of howling media wolves—in fact, it’s just the opposite. “No longer can we compound attacks on truth with our silent acquiescence. No longer can we turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to these assaults on our institutions,” he said. “An American president who cannot take criticism—who must constantly deflect and distort and distract—who must find someone else to blame—is charting a very dangerous path. And a Congress that fails to act as a check on the President adds to the danger.”
Now Flake is a mendacious fool, who never would be have been re-elected in Arizona. Still, when he compares the sitting president to Josef Stalin and calls Trump’s derision of a manifestly dishonest media “an assault as unprecedented as it is unwarranted,” he’s also an ahistorical, ignorant fool.
Sarah Sanders provided a little pushback when she observed, “he’s criticizing the President because he has terrible poll numbers and he is looking for some attention. I think it’s unfortunate,” but a “more in sorrow” response is exactly wrong. This is a war that only one side can win—and which only one side is fighting in earnest at the moment. The notoriously inept White House communications shop has, from the outset, played by Marquess of Queensberry rules, treating the ladies and gentlemen of the press as if they were, well, ladies and gentlemen, instead of credentialed but poorly educated, ideologically committed propagandists. It’s no accident that 90 percent of the press coverage of the Trump administration so far has been negative, with the media determined to present everything in the worst possible light.
How Do “Conservatives” Counter This?
Note the profusion of headlines these days that now include “sources say,” “seems to suggest,” “may,” “reportedly,” and other weasel words whose plain meaning isnot. The great scheisshole flap originated with exactly one individual, the proven fabulist Dick Durbin of Illinois, but now has been accepted as gospel by (as Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, says) the Democratic operatives with bylines. And the great “Russian collusion” hoax—which I pointed out from day one was a disinformation operation facilitated by rogue, but high-ranking, members of the intelligence community, the Democrats, the Clinton campaign, and their hacks and fellow-travelers in the media—has now gossamered away in the wind, having largely been supplanted by 25th Amendment fantasies, Michael Wolff’s book, and temper tantrums over Norway and the new tax tables.
And yet, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. To counter this, what do our so-called “conservatives” have? A White House press operation that issues hopeful but random talking points with wan pleas for influential columnists and bloggers to cite them? Sarah Sanders’ media follies? If the White House comm shop really wanted a game-changer, it could start by discontinuing the briefings and dispersing the correspondents back to covering the police beat in Dubuque and town meetings in western New York State, where they might actually learn to recognize and report news, instead of shoehorning it into the Narrative.
Trump himself showed the way yesterday with his “Fake News” Awards, which went to doom-‘n-gloomer Paul Krugman for his prediction that the stock market (now at 26,000) would “never” recover from Trump’s election; ABC’s hacktastic Brian Ross, demoted after sending markets briefly plummeting with a false report about when Trump had instructed former national security advisor Mike Flynn to make contact with the Russians; CNN’s “sourced” blunder (“confirmed” by two other news organizations) about when the Trumps got access to the Wikileaks dump; and eight more, including, at No. 11, the entire “Russian collusion” fantasy.
All Trump, All the Time
Still, the sad truth is that all news these days has become Washington political news—theNew York Times can hardly issue a tweet or a news alert without some mention of Trump—and for journalistic order to be restored, a refusal to indulge this monomania and the children who embody and promulgate it would be a good starting point both for Washington and for the profession. Meanwhile, the Left’s media machine goes 24/7—“Trump unfit, Trump unfit, this just in: Trump unfit”—and even when some of their number fall victim to the pervnado, they simply replace them and keep churning.
The Bloomberg story about Wolff’s unaccountable access to the White House sums the situation up in true tragicomic-opera fashion: “Author Michael Wolff’s pitch to the White House to win cooperation for his book included a working title that signaled a sympathetic view, a counter-narrative to a slew of negative news stories early in Donald Trump’s presidency. He called it ‘The Great Transition: The First 100 Days of the Trump Administration.’ And in part due to that title, Wolff was able to exploit an inexperienced White House staff who mistakenly believed they could shape the book to the president’s liking.”
This perfectly sums up the first year of the administration. Starting with the president himself, who still believes he can charm the Beltway media the way he did the Manhattan media in his former life (“You have to understand,” one White House insider told me last summer, “the president likes Maggie Haberman”), the administration still largely ascribes good intentions to a group of politically and culturally deadly opponents who scoff at the notions of fair play, balance, common decency, and dispassion in the furtherance of their policy objectives.
Not smart enough to get into law school, they decided to “change the world” through the medium of journalism—the rooster graduate students and chicken teaching assistants of the Frankfurt School; after their long march through the institutions, they have come home to roost at the highest levels of academe, entertainment, the Democrat Party, and the media. Going forward, confronting and defeating these domestic sappers should be one of our highest priorities. The fate of the nation depends on it.
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