Wednesday Potpourri

 First, if, perchance, they are feeling especially traumatized by the election, Georgetown public policy students will have treatment available. They will be able to choose a dozen different ways to feel mothered.

Yes, indeed, universities have become so completely feminized that they infantilize students, without even trying to hide it.

Francesca Block explains on the Free Press:

On Wednesday, the day after the election, most of us are going to roll out of bed, have our breakfast, and get on with our day—no matter which presidential candidate wins. But students at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy—where diplomats and policymakers are molded—have another option: They can play with Legos. Seriously.

In an email to McCourt students, Jaclyn Clevenger, the school’s director of student engagement, introduced the school’s post-election “Self-Care Suite.” 

“In recognition of these stressful times,” she wrote, “all McCourt community members are welcome to gather. . . in the 3rd floor Commons to take a much needed break, joining us for mindfulness activities and snacks throughout the day.” 

Here’s the agenda (and no, you can’t make this up): 

10:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m.: Tea, Cocoa, and Self-Care

11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.: Legos Station

12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m.: Healthy Treats and Healthy Habits

1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.: Coloring and Mindfulness Exercises

2:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.: Milk and Cookies

4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.: Legos and Coloring

5:00 p.m.-6:00 p.m.: Snacks and Self-Guided Meditation

I wanted to ask Clevenger why college and graduate students needed milk and cookies to recover from their stress—and how being coddled in college might someday affect American diplomacy—but she didn’t respond to my calls or emails.

Of course, Georgetown is hardly the only school fearful that their students will be traumatized after the election. At Missouri State University, the counseling center has set up a post-election “self-care no phone zone space” with calm jars, coloring pages, and sensory fidgets.

If you were imagining that the students involved in these forms of ersatz therapy were going to be able to function in the real world, get over yourself.

Second, cleaning up after the election is a daunting task. We note a couple of simple facts that deserve clarification.

The Harris campaign claimed that more than two dozen orthodox rabbis signed a letter supporting Kamala Harris. On the list was a scattering of females.

The problem was, as was pointed out by those who are conversant in orthodox Judaism, there is no such thing as an orthodox female rabbi. Jewish orthodoxy does not ordain women.

Third, and then there was the Doug problem. You know about Doug, the man’s man who set the new standard for manly manliness.

Caroline Glick offered the following:

Kamala Harris's husband appointed CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas affiliated group, to be one of the groups charged with implementing the administration's strategy for fighting anti-Semitism. CAIR is affiliated with Hamas and Kamala's husband appointed CAIR as an implementing organization in the "fight" against Jew hatred. What will happen to the American Jewish community if she is elected?

Fourth, Barack Obama, in his return to retail politics, declared that Donald Trump had likely never changed a tire on a car.

To which Ben Shapiro replied:

Who gives a shit? You can call AAA to change a tire. But only Barack Obama can put Iran on the pathway to a nuclear weapon, racially polarize America, and preside over the slowest economic recovery in modern American history.

Fifth, and then there is the war in Ukraine. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has declared that civilization itself is on the line in the conflict.

Others are more sanguine. Among them David Goldman, consistently a skeptic about the Ukraine policy:

The American foreign policy establishment must be praying for a Trump victory today. Ukraine is crumbling, and they will blame the collapse of their moronic misadventure on Trump. It's not about saving Ukraine, but jobs, contracting gigs and think tank funding. In a sane world, 90% of American "defense experts" would be driving for Uber.

Sixth, a note about our manufacturing prowess and the chances that we are going to onshore more and more high tech work.

Henry Kressel explains the problem in the Asia Times:

But what will be needed to increase and sustain US high-technology manufacturing? A serious resurgence of advanced manufacturing (chips being the most demanding) will require much more than investing in more sophisticated equipment in new plants.

It will require training a new generation of highly skilled personnel to operate such plants successfully. While increasingly sophisticated technology is key to much of competitive manufacturing, it is productive only with staff with very specialized training to operate in complex plant environments. Badly managed mechanization will hinder rather than promote value creation.

It’s going to take more than the CHIPS Act.

Seventh, by the by, transmania has caused an outbreak of child mutilation. Billboard Chris exposes the horror of it all:

In the U.S., we know from insurance data that up 179 girls under the age of 12.5 have had double mastectomies.” -@BillboardChris 

“Say that again,” says @AndrewGold_ok, in shock. “Up to 179 girls under 12.5 have had double mastectomies. We’re talking about 12-year-old girls getting their breasts cut off when they’ve hardly formed because they’ve been taught that they’re boys on the inside.”

Eighth, with enemies like that you don’t need too many friends.

Donald Trump should thank the armies of unhinged hysterical leftists for making him into a martyr. Besides, people who are happy to use the judicial system to attack their opponents are showing themselves as lacking the temperament to govern.

The American people chose not to have a president who would giggle and cackle her way through her term. It was not a crazy thought.

Evidently, Kamala was not remotely qualified to run the country. The more we heard her the more we understood this point. She was the ultimate diversity hire. Her kiss should put a lid on DEI.

Kamala’s first executive decision was to pass over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for vice president. If one decision cost her the election, that was it. Strange how karma works. Making a decision based on anti-Semitism will send you packing, back to California.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or for a fee.

Notes on the Election

Let’s offer two notes from yesterday’s Financial Times, a leading liberal newspaper with liberal columnists that far outshine those who write for New York’s favorite liberal newspaper.

First, Jemima Kelly explains that the attacks on Trump’s character are not working.

There are sev­eral dif­fi­culties with attack­ing Trump’s char­ac­ter.

For a start, while it might be fair and indeed accur­ate to point out the gulf that sep­ar­ates him from Har­ris when it comes to the vir­tues a leader should pos­sess — basic decency, hon­our, com­pas­sion, hon­esty, humil­ity — moral grand­stand­ing is an inef­fect­ive way to con­vince people to come over to your side. It gives an air of superi­or­ity and prig­gish­ness.

Candidates who denounce their opponents’ character sound more schoolmarmish than sensible. It signals bad character. 

And besides, to belabor the obvious, among the most important moral virtues lies the ability to take responsibility for one’s failings and errors. 

As it happens Kamela has changed her mind on a myriad of issues but has never accepted responsibility for her failures.

One may justifiably suggest that Trump errs when he talks trash about his opponents. And yet, his enemies have chosen to compete with him in the world of trash talk. They have labeled his supporters fascists, Nazis, anti-American and garbage.

And then they complain about how divided the country is. 

At that point, Trump’s unfortunate bad habit becomes far less salient.

And also, Kelly explains, Trump did manifest courage in Butler, PA when he was grazed by an assassin’s bullet:

The other reason attack­ing Trump in this way is so inef­fect­ive is that he pos­sesses some qual­it­ies that make him look like he does have moral char­ac­ter, not­ably cour­age. Elon Musk wasn’t the only multi-bil­lion­aire who gushed about Trump’s bravery after he got up and shouted “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, after the attempt on his life on July 13. “Our former Pres­id­ent showed tre­mend­ous grace and cour­age under lit­eral fire tonight,” Jeff Bezos pos­ted on X.

And also, Trump comes across as principled:

And yet some­how Trump man­ages to come across as a man of prin­ciple. A recent Pew sur­vey found 69 per cent of voters feel he “stands up for what he believes in”, nine points more than for Har­ris.

Since no one really knows what Kamala believes, this charge has some sticking power. You have noted yesterday that Harris refused to comment on how she voted on a California proposition that attempts to get a grip on the crime epidemic that prosecutors like Harris allowed into the state. She could have stood up for law and order, even if it meant repudiating reforms that she herself championed.

She preferred to punt.

A couple of pages later in the FT we read some comments by Ruchir Sharma about the state of the economy. We have been hearing, from the most earnest economists, that the economy has never been better, and that we never had it so good.

As you know, most people are not experiencing the economing in quite such rosy terms. According to economist Sharma, it is a lie, a mirage:

As the US goes to the polls, its eco­nomy looks unusu­ally strong. Aver­aging nearly 3 per cent growth for nine straight quar­ters, the coun­try is attract­ing heavy flows of for­eign money, which have helped push its share of the global stock mar­ket index well above 60 per cent, a record high. Yet voters remain pess­im­istic about their eco­nomic and fin­an­cial pro­spects.

Why? US growth is a mirage for most Amer­ic­ans, driven by rising wealth and dis­cre­tion­ary spend­ing among the richest con­sumers, and dis­tor­ted by rising profits for the biggest com­pan­ies. Times look good but this growth is lop­sided, brittle and heav­ily depend­ent on spend­ing and bor­row­ing by the gov­ern­ment, which is typ­ic­ally the lender of last resort.

Although the world mar­vels at “unsink­able” US con­sumers, a grow­ing num­ber are priced out of homes and fall­ing behind on credit-card debt. The bot­tom 40 per cent by income now account for 20 per cent of all spend­ing while the richest 20 per cent account for 40 per cent. That is the widest gap on record and it is likely to widen fur­ther, says Oxford Eco­nom­ics, a con­sultancy. Most Amer­ic­ans now spend so much on essen­tials such as food that they have little left for extras like travel or eat­ing out.

And this does not include the most recent discouraging jobs report, not to mention the fact that most of the jobs created under the Biden administration have been government jobs or have been held by migrants.

As for the last word, to keep you company as you wait on line outside the voting booths, we turn to Second Gentleman, man’s man, Doug Emhoff.

Kamala did what Kamala always does. She put her head down and went to work.

Some people have found an erotic innuendo in those words. I would not presume to offer such an undignified interpretation.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or for a fee.

Britain's Cultural Revolution

By now I suspect that you have already decided who you are going to vote for. And you might even have voted already. Good for you.

So, let’s take a look at a phenomenon that our media has largely ignored, the cultural revolution unfolding in Great Britain.

As you know, the British recently elected a Labour government, that is, a leftist government. Led by one Keir Starmer it has set out to wreck Once-Great Britain. It is doing so by applying the most absurd principles of identity politics to the nation’s past history.

If you think that things are bad over here, a brief glance across the pond will show you that things can get a whole lot worse.

Theodore Dalrymple reports from Great Britain. One would very much like to think that he is making this up, but, alas, one understands that he is not.

Just in case you believed that America had cornered the market in stupid politicians, Dalrymple offers an insight into the mind of the British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy:

In 2014, the man who is now in charge of Britain’s foreign policy, David Lammy, then 42, appeared on a television quiz show. He was asked, among other things, for the surname of the couple whose first names were Pierre and Marie who won the Nobel Prize for their research into radiation.

“Antoinette,” he replied. Evidently, he thought that Pierre Antoinette had won a Nobel Prize.

Asked for the name of the fortress built in the 1370s to defend the gates of Paris that was later used by Cardinal Richelieu to imprison enemies, he replied, “Versailles.”

Asked where the “Rose” revolution that had overthrown the government of Edouard Shevardnadze took place, he replied, “Yugoslavia.”

Asked for the successor to Henry VIII, he reflected for a moment and replied, “Henry VII.”

Somehow or other, Lammy graduated from Harvard Law School.

And then there is the patriotism issue. How has Keir Starmer’s new Labour government shown respect for the nation’s past? The short answer is that it has not. Wherever possible, it has removed paintings and statues of Britain’s heroes.

Starmer has removed the portrait of William Gladstone from 10 Downing Street because of the Gladstone family’s involvement in slavery. He has removed also the portraits of Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth I—the latter, perhaps, because Virginia was named after the Virgin Queen, and Virginia was a slave state. Finally, he removed the portrait of Shakespeare, perhaps because the Bard was not fully on board with correct political views, or maybe because he would serve as a perpetual and reproachful reminder of the prime minister’s mediocrity.

The new chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has struck a blow against patriarchy, by erasing her male predecessors:

Meantime, … the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has taken down the pictures of all men in her residence, 11 Downing Street, to be replaced by women. This is surely ironic, in view of the prime minister’s removal of the pictures of two of the most significant women in British political history. But of course, what counts in these gestures is not truth but the ideological purity of the intention behind them.

It’s not about building on the past. It’s not about sustaining patriotism by exalting the nation’s past heroes. It’s about making wokeness an overarching tyranny, by erasing the past. And by undermining national pride… and mental health and emotional well being.

Keep in mind, the antidote to despair is pride, not hope. That is, pride in achievement. It does not always need to be personal pride. If you belong to a family where your parents have achieved great things, you share the pride. You profit from their successes.

Historically, Great Britain has been one of the most accomplished cultures in world history. It gave us the Industrial Revolution, parliamentary democracy, human rights, free enterprise and Shakespeare. And let us not forget being on the winning side of two world wars. There is much to be proud about.

Now, the British Labour party wants to strip away that pride, to diminish the achievements of the crown’s subjects and their ancestors. It wants to replace pride with guilt. Those who succeeded did not compete honorably; they cheated and exploited.

The reason is, the people who mostly accomplished these things were white males. And the Labour Party cannot have that. The reason is simple-- the accomplishments of one group make certain other groups feel bad for not having accomplished as much. So, the Labour Party wants to make other groups feel good about themselves by diminishing, disparaging and erasing the achievements of white males.

Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam posited that when we want to unite disparate cultures we need to stop lauding multiculturalism and to produce an encompassing culture, one that includes everyone. The word for this is patriotism, loyalty to the nation, making sure that everyone belongs.

When you undermine patriotism, as the British Labour Party is doing, you cause the nation to fragment, into oppressor and the oppressed, into exploiters and victims. You can choose sides, to work with the oppressed or even to join the ranks of the oppressors.

 You are not living in a nation, you are living in a narrative fiction, the kind that has been peddled by the radical left for well over a century now. You belong to the vanguard of the revolution-- you know, the one that failed so miserably during the twentieth century. 

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Sunday Pause

As has become habitual, I pause on Sunday. It’s that time of the week, a time for reflection and contemplation. It also allows my readers to catch up on posts that they might have missed during the week.

I would like to think that among the topics of deep reflection is this one. Considering the time and effort it takes to write these posts, one would like to think that they are worthy of compensation.

Thus, in place of a tithe, I make a humble request for donations. 

I have been posting on this blog for well over a decade now. It is not self-evident. I could not have done it without the financial support of you, my readers.

If you would like to show appreciation and to encourage me to continue, a good way would be by making a financial contribution. Gratitude is a virtue. 

I try to make my writing sound effortless, but, as the old saying goes, it takes a lot of work to make anything seem effortless. 

The internet is awash in blogs and Substacks. I am grateful to those who have chosen to spend a small part of their days reading mine. I have tried to be worthy of their confidence, by presenting reflections and analysis that are unlikely to be found elsewhere. 

If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal button on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.

I’m counting on you. 

If you have already donated, please pass the word along to your friends, family, associates and colleagues.

Thank  you in advance.

Saturday Miscellany

First, a few words from the seriously mentally challenged Kamala Harris:

Understand the difference here moving forward. Moving forward, understand the difference here. What we are looking at is a difference in this election. Let's move forward and see where we are.

I defy anyone to tell me what that means. 

Second, let us not ignore the idiocy of one Mark Cuban, who derides Trump for not being surrounded with strong, intelligent women-- when he says so in defense of a weak idiot. Evidently, you do not need to be smart to be rich.

Third, when Hamas demonstrators overtook the campus of Columbia University last spring, House Speaker Mike Johnson led a delegation of Republicans to meet with the Jewish students who were being persecuted and harassed. He met with the Columbia president and recommended that she not negotiate with Hamas supporters.

Where was the Biden Administration? Where was Chuck Schumer? Well, now we know. He was standing up to protect the anti-Semites.

Daniel Greenfield explains:

Sen. Schumer spent decades campaigning in the Jewish community as a "shomer" or "protector" of the Jews. The House report reveals that Sen. Schumer was actually a "shomer" for campus antisemites. This is why Schumer's numbers catastrophically collapsed among New York Jews from 82% to 45%

Fourth, Michelle Obama came out of hiding and tried to scare up some Kamala voters. At the least, her imagery was vivid:

If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.

Of course, there is no such thing as a ban on treatment under these circumstances. 

Heather Mac Donald explains in the City Journal that Michelle Obama was lying. What a surprise!

The former First Lady proffered the hilarious thesis that females are discouraged from talking about their bodies and their “reproductive health.” One could have sworn that that is almost all we have been talking about this election season. According to Obama, we need more discussions of menstruation and menopause—presumably, discussions emanating from the White House. Naturally, she sounded the maudlin note that females were prematurely dying because of male indifference. In fact, females live nearly six years longer than males; males die of diabetes at a 60 percent higher rate than females; the male cancer death rate is 189.5 deaths per 100,000, compared with 135.7 cancer deaths per 100,000 women. The federal government showers billions of taxpayer dollars on women’s health initiatives; men get virtually nothing coded to their sex. And yet amazingly, it is women who are underserved, according to Obama’s harangue to insufficiently chivalric males: “And in those terrifying moments when something goes wrong—which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country—let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us . . . And look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel.”

It’s always nice to have a few facts with your morning coffee. They ought to be an effective antidote to the falsehoods peddled by aspiring demagogues.

Fifth, after calling Trump supporters garbage, and having his staff and his flunkies lie about it, Joe Biden went out to bite the toes of some babies.

And we had thought that Biden was merely suffering from a hair sniffing fetish. Think of how painful it must have been for him to avoid sucking toes for all these many years. Now, of course, he has been liberated from the requirements of decorum and propriety.

You cannot make it up.

Sixth, in the matter of Yahya Sinwar, formerly head of Hamas, recently executed by Israeli soldiers, you might ask yourself what the United Nations has to say about it all.

Well, Nellie Bowles, of the TGIF column in the Free Press, explains:

When Israel killed the head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, they could have been gentler about it. Did you ever think about that? Here is United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese on the matter: “They killed him in a way that is quite inhumane. I do not believe that this is justice. I find that it is a use of violent force.” I’m no general but usually when you kill the head of a terrorist organization, some violent force is involved. They don’t sit him down like, “Hey, so there’s been a restructuring.” I think that’s probably for the best. 

Seventh, in due time business schools will be offering courses in what went wrong with Boeing. Some have suggested that the management error lay in handing the company to a group of accountants, rather than a group of engineers.

Anyway, the new management is trying to right the ship at Boeing. Among their most recent actions -- ridding the company of the diversity, equity and inclusion department.

The New York Post reports:

Boeing reportedly dismantled its global diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) department as part of an overhaul of its operations ordered by the company’s new top executive — becoming the latest major company to ditch the controversial initiative.

The aerospace giant — which was slammed by tech mogul Elon Musk for prioritizing DEI over safety and quality controls after a near-catastrophic blowout during an Alaska Airlines flight — said staff from its DEI office would be absorbed into another human resources team focused on talent and employee experience, according to Bloomberg News.

Sara Liang Bowen, a company vice president who was put in charge of the now-defunct DEI unit, left the company on Thursday.

 Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

The Electoral Choice

Yesterday was a slow morning, so I turned on a television show called Squawk Box to accompany my breakfast. The show reports on money and markets, often intelligently. Rather than expose myself to more political spin, why not tune in to the views of people who manage money.

Such was my thought. 

As I was watching the show a serious money manager or market strategist appeared. He was going to explain his choice in the presidential election. Not entirely an undignified task.

But then, in the midst of what seemed to have been an endless disquisition about God-only-knows what, he asserted his basic principle. He did not care about what the candidates had done. He was tuning in to their language. He cared mostly about what they were saying. 

Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. So much so that I changed the channel. If that was his thought process I did not care to hear his conclusion. And, I did not even record his name. Some names are best left unsaid.

Obviously, we have reason to distrust what politicians say when they are scavenging for votes. Some politicians will say just about anything to persuade you to vote for them. Some will repudiate every position they took in the past in order to make you think that you can trust them with the future.

Then again, by a certain perverse logic, one might say that one of the presidential candidates has a record. He has been there and done that. The other candidate might choose to run on the record of the president she served, but, beyond that, her record of achievement is very thin indeed. 

So, we might say that we can judge our own experience of living under the presidency of one candidate versus our hopes, dreams, wishes and fantasies of living under the presidency of the other. The first is experience; the second is an idea.

It may be the case-- it is almost certainly the case-- that the Harris campaign does not want any of us to think of the record of the Trump administration. After all, the Biden presidency does not shine in comparison.

Were we to try a slightly different angle, we would point out that Kamala has no real executive experience. Trump has a great deal. Since Kamala has been shown to be an incompetent manager-- no one wants to work for her for very long-- she fails the experience test.

As we have often noted in these pages, Trump gave us the Abraham Accords. Biden gave us October 7-- at least indirectly. You might think that Trump has made some infelicitous remarks, and many of us would largely prefer that he show more discipline, but how many dead Ukrainians are you willing to accept as a counterweight.

Better yet, many serious commentators have taken to the media with the message that, speaking of the economy, we never had it so good. And yet, everyday Americans do not think so. However glowing the reports, they continue to believe that the economy sucks, and that they had it better under Trump.

Again, which is more important, their experience of the economy or the opinions of a band of experts.

Now, if you have waded into intellectual history you might recognize the argument here. In the mid-eighteenth century British philosopher David Hume laid the groundwork for British empirical philosophy by asking a simple question.

Writing in his book, A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume asked: which comes first experience or ideas?

It is a difficult question, and I am not going to solve it today. In particular, Hume was asking whether we learn ideas and then apply them to our experience or whether we have experiences and use them to formulate and to understand ideas.

In more specific terms, can you understand the idea of redness if you have never seen a red object? Simple and direct, as questions go. 

In more pedestrian terms, when a detective encounters a crime scene, does he begin by collecting evidence or does he begin by formulating a theory of the crime? Does he prejudge the outcome or does he begin with an open mind and wait until the evidence points toward one or another theory.

Some people are impervious to evidence. Their faith is such that they will never accept any facts that disprove or discredit their beliefs. They are, as the saying goes, prejudiced. They cling to their beliefs and only accept evidence that seems to prove them right.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Jeff Bezos Takes on the Media

Cue the outrage. Cue the anguished expressions from journalists, or pseudo-journalists, if you prefer, that their newspapers have chosen not to endorse a candidate for the presidency. 

By now you know that the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today have refused to endorse presidential candidates. Or better, the owners of those papers have exercised owner prerogatives and rejected the notion that they should tell their readers how to vote.

Or else, you can consider that they have chosen not to endorse their obvious choice, Kamala Harris. Clearly, a vote of no confidence in her.

Then again, if you have been reading the biased coverage of the political campaign and do not know where the newspapers stand on the issues, then you probably do not know how to read.

So, a few of its pseudo-journalists quit the Washington Post. As did, a certain number of subscribers. By all accounts owner Jeff Bezos can afford the loss.

But, Bezos, having allowed his newspaper to become a propaganda arm, has suddenly decided that he wanted to return the newspaper, if not to solvency, at least, to objective reporting.

One suspects that the outraged staff members who resigned in protest were working for the paper in order to foist their jejune opinions on an unsuspecting readership, not to report the facts objectively and dispassionately. If they were produced by the biased university system, they do not believe in facts anyway.

But then, there is this. The events underscore the simple fact that the mainstream media has a credibility problem. Most citizens do not believe that these outlets can be trusted to report the news, without fear or favor.

Heather Mac Donald explained it well in the City Journal:

Endorsements are a trivial part of the media’s loss of credibility. The erosion of public trust derives from daily news coverage in which reporters uninhibitedly pass off their own political views as “fact,” editorializing with as much abandon as any editorial writer. It was under Bezos’s tenure that the Washington Post dedicated itself to its anti-Trump Democracy Dies in Darkness crusade. It was under Soon-Shiong that the Los Angeles Times ran one white-privilege mea culpa after another during the George Floyd race riots.

The problem is less the editorials and more the news. Newspapers and even television news programs happily editorialize in their presentation of so-called facts. It is never just that Trump said this or that, but that Trump lied. The drumbeat is constant. 

For example, when the New York Times reported that Joe Biden had said that Trump supporters were “garbage,” the paper inserted the word “appeared,” as in “appeared to say.”

Strangely, these media outlets have not figured out that they are selling their credibility for the dubious sense that they are not just reporting, but making history.

This is not disconnected from the fact that the most important influence on the way news is reported lies with social media. One has difficulty thinking that social media is any more credible.

As we now know government officials lean on social media outlets, the better to have them censor anything that would make Trump look good or Harris look bad. Didn’t Twitter put its large thumb on the scales in 2020 when it suppressed the New York Post story about Hunter’s laptop? 

Some have suggested that Bezos was inspired by the fact that some of his companies are subjected to federal regulation. Thus, he was defending his business.

On the other hand, you can ask why he bought the paper in the first place. At the least, he must have felt that it would give him prestige. Not necessarily power, but prestige. It would enhance his public reputation.

Now, he seems to have discovered that the editors of the Post have turned the paper into a propaganda rag, and that this fact does not grant him any respect or prestige. It makes him less reputable.

So, Bezos intervened in the endorsement process, almost as though he is warning his journalists to get their act together. He also added that he wanted the paper to have more conservative columnists, which would surely move the paper in a more respectable direction.

Journalism is in crisis. It has largely been taken over by ideologues who are more interested in promoting their own jejune beliefs than reporting the facts.

Bezos wrote this in the Post:

Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.

You would almost think that he was competing with Elon Musk, the man who brought Twitter into the world of objective journalism.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.