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Out of curiosity the other day, I decided to Google the words “Trump + authoritarian + New York Times.” I discovered 134 entries.
Wow. In virtually every case, the association was positive, as in “Donald Trump is an authoritarian.”
Then, I noticed a Google alert that my search had omitted some entries “very similar” to the ones already displayed. Lured by Google’s implicit invitation, I opted to see all the omitted entries as well.
All told, Donald Trump has been linked to “authoritarianism” 386 times in the so-called “paper of record”!
What makes this so strange is the Trump phenomenon in modern politics is the exact opposite of authoritarianism.
If the Trump presidency meant anything, it meant less government. Specifically, lower taxes, less regulation, and fewer (potentially war-causing) foreign entanglements.
True, Trump is no libertarian. He believes in federal funding of infrastructure and industrial policy – but maybe smarter and less intrusively so than Barack Obama or Joe Biden.
Typical Trump supporters are also anti-government – even more than Trump is. They were more suspicious of Anthony Fauci and the CDC, more opposed to lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and mask mandates during the Covid pandemic, more suspicious of the “deep state,” and less trusting of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court have given us rulings that are consistent with an anti-authoritarian approach to public policy. Among recent major decisions, the court has strengthened Second Amendment rights, limited the reach of the regulatory state, and protected the right of shopkeepers and merchants to follow their conscience rather than bow to the dictates of woke regulators.
You might suppose that the Court’s decision rejecting affirmative action at Harvard is an example of too much government intervention in the affairs of a private organization. Yet the federal government has been pressuring the private sector to engage in affirmative action ever since the days when John F. Kennedy was president. The latest Court decision begins to put limits on that intrusion.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade might be seen as a case of the Court’s failure to protect the individual from the state. But half the country doesn’t see the issue that way. Instead of being an arm of the federal government making abortion decisions for the entire country – the Court chose to let the people decide.
It was under the administration of Donald Trump that you gained the right to talk with your doctor by phone, email, Zoom, Facebook, and Skype. Under Obama, all that was illegal. Because of a Trump executive order, employers today can buy individually owned health insurance for their employees – insurance they can take with them from job to job and in and out of the labor market. If employers did that under Obama, they could be fined $100 per employee daily.
Under Biden, we are getting predictable backsliding – a reversion to the regulatory state. Thanks to a Trump executive order, 3 million families have “short-term” health insurance – plans that meet their medical and financial needs for as little as one-half the premiums charged in the Obamacare exchanges. Biden is going to take that freedom away – beginning next January.
But the most unsettling sign of impending authoritarianism is not the expansion of the regulatory state. It’s the willingness of federal law enforcement and our intelligence agencies to toss aside impartiality and directly interfere with democratic government.
As the Durham report makes clear, under the Trump administration, the real threat to democracy came not from the president or from an unruly mob on January 6th. It came from law enforcement and intelligence agencies intervening to change election results and undermine a duly elected presidency – along with help from the mainstream media and Big Tech.
It may surprise some readers to know that the New York Times was our nation’s first real newspaper. Prior to its founding, many newspapers had a political party’s name in their title, such as “Democrat” or “Republican.” Some of these newspaper names have survived even today. Regardless of the name, almost all the newspapers at the time were political party propaganda. The New York Times was the first newspaper that pledged to report impartial news.
All that changed with Donald Trump. When Times writers weren’t calling him “authoritarian,” they called him a “traitor” (270 times). When they weren’t calling him a traitor, they routinely called him other names, including “racist,” “misogynistic,” “xenophobic,” “homophobic,” and occasionally even “anti-Semitic.” These charges were just as baseless as the charge of treason.
At first blush, the Times today looks very much like the newspapers it replaced almost 200 years ago – as an organ of the Democrat Party. But the reality is worse than that. The Times, more often than not, is acting as the government’s newspaper.
The New York Times once printed the Pentagon Papers and fought for its freedom to do so against the U.S. government’s attempt to censor it all the way to the Supreme Court. Today, it rarely publishes anything that would be embarrassing to the FBI, the CIA, the Biden family, or the government in general.
Sadly, it is the Times itself that is proving to be a friend, not an enemy, of authoritarian tendencies in our body politic.
The NYT is the Pravda of the Democratic Pafty
Pravda indeed.
N.Y. Times is the “Uptown Daily Worker.” William F. Buckley, Jr.
I’m sure NY Times changed long before Donald Trump.
Perhaps with Nixon vs. Hiss?
Definitely by Goldwater vs. Johnson.
The story is that when running for mayor, Buckley posted signs in Manhattan of Fidel Castro reading the NY Times, captioned: “Fidel loves to read the Uptown Daily Worker.”
I don’t know if the story is true, but my parents (now deceased), who worked with James Buckley on his senate campaign, told me it is.
See Mark Levin’s “Unfreedom of the Press.” The NYT has been mis-information much longer than Nixon/Hiss. They tried to cover-up the Holocaust. Levin’s book gives the NYT special attention.
It’s truly amazing that there are enough bird cages in America to keep the New York Times in business.
But you are assuming that it the NYT’s role is to provide “all the news that’s fit to print.” It is, instead (like The Washington Post) just a propaganda organ for the Left. And to the Left, which has gone all post-modernist, there is no objective truth and there are no facts. There are only narratives. So that is what they publish – the Left’s narratives. If the Left’s narrative is that Trump is somehow a fascist or authoritarian, then that is what they give give their largely uninformed and extremely gullible readers all objective evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Foreign media, although mostly leftist, still is more credible than 90% of American media.
It is easier to translate for the truth media from Russia and China than American media.
When reporting on the USA, the foreign media of our allies often is more credible. It seems easier to translate communist propaganda, but we still have access to more accurate data to test it against. It can take a lot of digging to get to it, but it’s still there, here. How long that will last, is worrisome.
In a speech delivered by Hillary Clinton at the Women’s World Summit on April 23, 2015 (presumably written out in advance and read from a TelePrompTer, as reportedly was her custom), she said: “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. AND DEEP-SEATED cultural codes, RELIGIOUS BELIEFS and structural biases HAVE TO BE CHANGED. (At one time, I had an “electronic videotape” of the speech on my computer, so I know that she said it.) So who, among the presidential candidates in 2016, was the “authoritarian”?
According to hillary’s professors, she was a totalitarian marxist, and they meant it as a compliment. She and bill went “third way,” which is the fascist, but also a leftist, economic model. Both are totalitarian.
Bill Gstes is Landru and he was to have us all Absorbed/Assimilated
Being Ultra MAGA, I never knew how much I craved authoritarians, until now. Thanks google.
I believe that the Associated Press, Thomson Reuters, Google, Facebook, ABC, etc. etc. are all actually controlled and run by the National Security Agency. They decide what is known, what is news, and what is kept from the populace. And they do everything they can to keep us in the dark as they build their totalitarian surveillance state one world government based on the Chinese Communist Party model of total control with no opposition.