(This is one of the last columns I wrote as editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana, where I worked for 34 years before retiring at the end of September, 2018. As you can see, I marched to a different drummer than the stereotypical liberal journalist! This column is reprinted in my collection “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?” as well as in the final volume of “Why We Needed Trump.” See link at end of story.)
By FRANK MIELE
Over the years, I’ve been asked to run anonymous letters dozens of times, but I’ve never done so. The explanation is always the same: Our readers have a right to judge the validity of a submitted opinion based on who you are and whether you have an ax to grind against the subject of your letter.
The opinion editors of the New York Times obviously feel differently. On Sept. 5, they ran a hyperbolic op-ed entitled “I am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” that the newspaper said was written by a “senior official in the Trump administration.”
The op-ed told us nothing new. It merely confirmed what has been obvious for a long time — that many figures in the Washington, D.C., establishment fear President Donald Trump and are working to undermine his administration. That doesn’t justify giving the op-ed’s author the privilege of speaking under cover of darkness. If there is someone in the White House working to subvert the president’s agenda, the rest of us — the American people who elected President Trump — have a right to know who that is, and the president has a right to hold that person accountable.
Of course, the New York Times could have just turned their anonymous op-ed into one more of their anonymous sources that they quote daily in their own tireless efforts to subvert the president. That would have been more fitting, since at least we already know what the Times’ agenda is.
The smartest thing former grey eminence Steve Bannon ever said was when he called the national mainstream media “the opposition party.” The Democratic Party barely has a presence on the national stage these days; it is CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post that carry forward the left-wing banner these days.
The word treason has been thrown around recently to describe the attempts to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump, and though treason as a crime has a very narrow definition in the United States, it also has a broader meaning that is certainly appropriate to describe the betrayal of the president and the Constitution by various powerful people and institutions.
In some ways, we are living through a new and more intense version of “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” described by French author Julien Benda in his book of that name in 1928. “Our age,” he wrote, “is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” Anyone who watched the Senate Judiciary Committee’s disgraceful hearing on the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court knows that we are still living in such an age, only more so.
Benda wrote at the beginning of the age of mass communication, and yet he already saw that “political passions have attained a universality never before known. … Thanks to the progress of communication and, still more, to the group spirit, it is clear that the holders of the same political hatred now form a compact impassioned mass, every individual of which feels himself in touch with the infinite number of others, whereas a century ago such people were comparatively out of touch with each other and hated in a ‘scattered’ way.”
The internet has accelerated these changes in ways that Benda could never have imagined, but he did state that these “coherences” of passion “will tend to develop still further, for the will to group is one of the most profound characteristics of the modern world.”
It seems that we are now living out Benda’s worst nightmare — an age of manipulation of the masses by those who think they know better — whether you call them the “deep state,” the “opposition party,” “the national elite,” “the entrenched bureaucracy” or just “the establishment.”
Benda’s conception of the intellectuals, which he distinguished in the original French text as “clercs,” is in opposition to the laymen or the masses, and thus should be understood as a class of people who envision themselves as superior to what we now call “the deplorables.” It is these intellectuals who envision themselves as the guardians of policy and politics, and who work to protect the status quo against any inversion that threatens their power.
There is no exact parallel between Benda’s assessment of the 1920s and our own situation as we approach 2020, but it is enough to understand that there exists a duality between the common man and the “intellectual,” and that the intellectuals seek to dominate political thought and use political passions as their weapon of oppression.
As Benda put it, “the ‘clerks’ now exercise political passions with all the characteristics of passion — the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed ideas. The modern ‘clerk’ has entirely ceased to let the layman alone descend to the market place. The modern ‘clerk’ is determined to have the soul of a citizen and make vigorous use of it.”
It is the fixed ideas of the establishment against which Donald Trump arose like a modern-day iconoclast, and there is no wonder that the establishment is terrified of him. They conspired against him in the halls of the Justice Department and the FBI before he was elected, and thanks to a fake Russian dossier funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, they have worked to sabotage him through the Mueller “investigation.” There’s no doubt they could very well destroy him because they see no bar on their authority — not the Constitution, not the law, not common decency.
As Benda described a similar phenomenon in his own time, we “see men of thought, or men giving themselves out as such, professing openly that they would not submit their patriotism to any check on the part of their judgment, proclaiming … that ‘even if the country is wrong, we must think it is right,’ denouncing as ‘traitors of the nation’ those of their compatriots who retain their liberty of mind, or at least of speech, in regard to their country.”
As someone who has been similarly denounced, let me conclude by saying that “I am Part of the Resistance Inside the News Media.” To paraphrase the Times’ anonymous op-ed, I believe my “first duty is to this country” and that the news media “continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” I am not loyal to the news industry but to the truth. Anonymous sources, biased reporting and smirking superiority in the newsroom should be decried by everyone who works in this business. We can only get to the truth by putting aside our personal beliefs and telling stories fairly and without an agenda of our own.
The news media should not be “the opposition party” to Republican presidents; rather, it should be the umpire that fairly calls balls and strikes. Is that too much to ask?
WHO WE ARE
Frank Miele has spent four decades in the news business and now offers conservative commentary to counter the left-wing bias in the national media. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will consider purchasing one of my books. They are available at Amazon in paperback or Kindle editions. My new book — “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” — shows that Fake News has been around for years. The “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy tackles the politics of the last two decades: Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” Also consider subscribing to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use.
Thank you, Mr. Miele, for your thoughtful and intelligent article “Be Glad Trump, Not Hillary, is Protecting the Border.” So important to read your words. You backed up your rationale citing Article IV of the U.S. Constitution. You provided the definition for people like me to refer to and pray the politicians refer to it. Since many may not know how to cite the correct source to explain why most American citizens depend upon President Trump AND our government to keep us safe from an invasion of thousands of people from several countries away from us, your words were inspirational. These so-called liberty seekers look like migrants but if they were in uniform we could get a better grasp of this invasion. They don’t speak our language, they don’t have the American culture or respect for the rule of law which most of our citizens have, they claim they are leaving their own countries because they are in danger but they don’t mind bringing danger to our country? We have law enforcement because as much as we hope our citizens obey the laws of our country which keep us from being Honduras, American citizens still break the laws. So why would we want to import people who plan to immediately break the law by pummeling their way across our borders and forcing themselves on the American way of life? Sounds very much like bullying will be rewarded, or worse, the “metoo movement for all Americans. (The left and democrats made their livelihood by identifying bullies and then bullying them out of places. Whether the target deserved it or not.)
Your articles are brilliant. I noticed a Twitter critic of this article has “influencer” after his name. That’s the same as “paid propagandist.” Also, $20 million dollars from Bloomberg pays for many “loud mouth activists” and “influencers” and “disruptors.” I think there is a correlation between how aggressive the antagonists get with how much money per hour they get. There is a network of people who work solely as agitators and the bigger the disruption as with the Kavanaugh hearings, the more money they get. Please ask people to follow the money after you learn the names of the loudest people at the Kavanaugh hearings. Also, there is no way Cesar Soyak was organized enough to carry out the pipe bomb threat. No way. Again, could someone please follow the money? Not saying he didn’t do it but he had help. Someone with a lot of money offered to take care of his family if he got caught. I’m just not sure the FBI is up to this since they “caught” their man, they won’t look further. Look what the FBI tried to do to a duly elected president.
Sincerely,
Joe Morrisco
Washington, D.C. 20003 and occasionally
Bedminster, NJ 07931
Hi Joe: Thanks for your comment. I especially appreciate your thoughtful border analysis. As for who paid whom to do what, I’m going to stay out of that until facts emerge.
Thank you for your thoughtful posts including the article at real clear politics that led me here. Congratulations on your first day as a contributor.
You did not name, in the article on this page, all the media outlets that have an agenda.
The video linked below was cut and spliced so the first thing one sees is a bunch of people shouting “USA” and
the noisy Republican supporters look like the “angry mob” in the title.
Then the video spins around back to the beginning of the event when the speaker is interrupted by people calling her a white supremist. At this point it becomes obvious that the security guards taking those people away are being cheered on by Republican supporters who chant “USA.”
Had we not seen a similar video of this event elsewhere that was UNSPLICED we would have assumed it was a video of an angry Trump mob.
The average person will watch two seconds of a video, ignore the written content and move on.
The creative editors of this video were possibly counting on the “average person.” Perhaps your friends at real clear politics would like to see the spliced and diced ABC video below.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blackburn-angry-mob-interrupted-rally-tennessee-lindsey-graham/story?id=58819868
We were also quite interested in this well-written story from Virginia that deserves national attention. It is another incident involving an ICE catch and release that turned deadly:
https://pilotonline.com/news/local/crime/article_4be29ae0-d3cf-11e8-8613-ef2dde1bcd16.html
Best wishes and thanks for letting us share a few tidbits for thought.
Hi: Thanks for your kind words, and your ideas. I will take a look at the links when I have more time.