Anyone who wants to peek into the engine room of the mainstream media’s megalomania should pay close attention to the Twitter account of the New York Times.
You have to act fast, though, because some of the most revelatory tweets soon disappear like dew on a feminist’s jackboot. No, silly, those messages are not suppressed by Twitter. This is the New York Times, after all, warden of wokeness, prefect of political correctness. The commissars of conformity running Twitter exist to enforce the dispensation smiled upon by the New York Times and other unofficial outposts of Democratic machine, not silence them.
But every now and then the Times, like other such tools of The Narrative, fail to observe the important advice offered by Gertrude Stein. It is critical, quoth Stein, to know how far to go when going too far.
The Times not infrequently neglects this sage advice. They did so, for example, when they went all out in their flood-the-zone endorsement of the embarrassing and mendacious 1619 Project. That morass of malignity and historical fantasy, arguing as it did that America was founded as a ‘slavocracy’ and that the Revolutionary War was fought primarily to perpetuate the institution of slavery, instantly met with some small portion of the contempt and refutation it deserved. The Times, rather than admit forthrightly that Nikole ‘Ronald McDonald’ Hannah-Jones was an America-hating political fantasist, secretly doctored its web site to make its 1619 claims (slightly) less absurd.
And now that we are embarked on the 2020 presidential election, the Times took to Twitter to tell the world who announces the winner of the election. Why, it is the Times and its sister leftwing organs!
Yes, that’s right, there it was in white and black on Twitter. ‘The role of declaring the winner of a presidential election in the US falls to the news media,’ it said. ‘The broadcast networks and cable news outlets [which ones, do you suppose? Fox? OAN? Breitbart?] have vowed to be prudent. Here’s how it will work.’ There follows a link.
Some upstanding citizens took a screenshot of this hilarious specimen of hubristic overreach, because if you look for it now what you see is ‘This tweet has been deleted.’
As well it should have been. The unfounded arrogance of the tweet is one for the history books.
It’s all of a piece, of course, with Hillary Clinton’s advice to Joe Biden not, under any circumstances, to concede tonight. It’s also of a piece with the attorney general of Pennsylvania’s assurance that Donald Trump cannot win Pennsylvania. (How does he know?)
And it is especially of a piece with what Biden’s advisers told Axios: ‘If news organizations declare Joe Biden the mathematical president-elect, he plans to address the nation as its new leader, even if President Trump continues to fight in court.’
How do you suppose that would go down? Someone should ask the several hundred thousand people who attended Trump’s rallies over the last several days. Then they should ask the 63 or 64 or 65 million people who will have voted for Trump.
Richard Nixon decided to concede to John F. Kennedy when Richard Daley stole the election for Kennedy in Chicago in 1960.
[special_offer]
Neither Trump nor his supporters will be so accommodating. It’s one of the things that the left and the ‘decorous’ NeverTrump formerly right fraternity have never been able to stomach or even understand about Trump. He fights.
No human organization can survive if its members are determined to push things to extremes all the time. This is true of clubs, families, companies, and even countries.
Some small group willing always to push beyond what is accepted and expected, to litigate every decision, to insist on every perquisite, can wind up destroying what they attempt to control. The Democrats, like their mouthpiece the New York Times, seem willing to go way too far in going far. They hope that William Hazlitt was right when he said ‘those who lack delicacy hold us in their power’. They still, even now, have failed to take the measure of Donald Trump.
