Mainstream Media Goes Full McCarthyite

It’s not just dishonest; it’s childish.

Senator Joe McCarthy perfected the technique in the United States: whenever you disagree with anybody, don’t debate ideas, go right into name calling. In McCarthy’s day, the epithet of choice was  “Communist.”  In recent years, it has morphed into some variant on bigot: “racist, sexist, homophobe, latinophobe, Islamophobe, xenophobe etc., etc.

There were Communists in McCarthy’s day, which made his technique seem to work for a while. Richard Nixon was accused of being a McCarthyite because he thought State Department employee and Georgetown upper crust favorite Alger Hiss was a Stalinist agent, but eventually Soviet records confirmed that Hiss was indeed a Stalinist agent. Because there are racists and sexists in our society, it makes it easier to try to destroy people with these epithets whether they fit or no

Hillary Clinton called this “ the politics of personal destruction.” She complained that it was being leveled at her, but this may be what the psychologists call a “projection.” She gave at least as much as she got and then some. The whole recent campaign was consumed by it, and one had reason to hope that the end of the campaign would provide some relief. But apparently this is not to be. The mainstream media won’t let it go.

Today’s NPR Evening Edition discussed some recent Trump appointments. Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, was described as a racist. Anybody with any familiarity with Sessions knows that this is a complete falsehood.  He isn’t remotely a racist.

The basis of it is the claim by one person, now dead, that in the 1970’s Sessions had used the phrase “ white folks,” which Sessions said had been just “folks.”  There was also a joke from the same era about KKK’ers smoking pot. Note that this was over a quarter century ago.

Evening Edition then moved on to interviewing someone from Foreign Policy Magazine who described Trump White House senior staff appointee Steve Bannon as an “ethno-nationalist.” At first hearing, this sounded tame compared to the flood of recent epithets flung at Bannon: “racist, anti-semite,” etc. As we have noted in other articles, none of this has a shred of evidence behind it. I have had some experience of Bannon myself and as his colleague Peter Schweizer very accurately said, “ he doesn’t have a racist or bigoted bone in his body.” If this isn’t defamation and libel, I don’t know what is.

This is a rather minor quibble, but also consider the term  “ethno-nationalist.” What does it mean? What can it mean? America is famously a nation that is not an ethnicity. So if I am an American nationalist, I cannot be against any American ethnic group.

Why then is this illogical terminology being used on this show and accepted without demure by the host? Because it is a sneaky way to convey the shameful falsehood that Bannon is a white racist whose allegiance is not to the nation but to his so-called race. I say so-called race because no one ever has or ever could define exactly what a white person is in scientific terms.

Bannon himself couldn’t care less about anybody’s race. Nor is he anti-semitic, Islamophobic, or any other “ ist” or “phobe.” It is all a witch hunt with not a shred of factual basis. Tolerance of other people and other views is one of his cardinal beliefs. Just look at his staff at Breitbart. He has hired and promoted gays, Jews, and Muslims.

Sessions and Bannon were just warm up. Evening Edition then moved to interview the grandson of a Jew who escaped Austria before World War Two to go to Palestine and thereby saved his life. The grandson’s lesson seemed to be that we should regard Trump as some kind of Hitler figure and protect ourselves before it is too late.

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