A Nightmare Campaign of Outright Idiocy

No society can tolerate this for long. The arsonists will not burn down society; the society will awaken and banish the arsonists.

by Conrad Black

As we get into high summer, there must be a very large number of Americans now actively considering whether the country is going mad.

The leading newspaper in the nation’s capital has accused the president of plumbing “new depths of depravity” in a perfectly unexceptionable and soaringly eloquent speech at Mount Rushmore last Friday. Praising the American revolutionary ideal that “all men are created equal” and its reaffirmation by Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War that brought about the abolition of slavery somehow made Donald Trump “dark” and “divisive.” The president deplored academic and national media self-hate and espoused the highest objectives identified and pursued by every admired American leader from Washington and Franklin to Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan.

As the violent crime rate skyrocketed in New York City 10 days ago, the City Council voted to reduce the police budget by $1 billion. Meanwhile, Chicago celebrated the July 4 weekend with 87 people injured and 17 killed by gunfire, including two children, but the city’s mayor rebuked the police chief when he suggested there is room for improvement in city governance.

NeverTrumpers like Mitt Romney, who walked in the Black Lives Matter parade last month, express solidarity with the group even when it affirms that it does not accept that all lives matter and its New York leader, Hawk Newsome, announced on national television, “if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. All right?”

The Democratic presidential nominee is a waxwork dummy hiding in his basement. Joe Biden can scarcely utter a correct English sentence and has the haggard countenance of a fatigued nonagenarian. In his few television and internet appearances, the former vice president is ambiguous about defunding the police and continues to regard BLM as a valuable political ally fighting racial inequality, even though in the last month it has revealed itself proudly as a white-hating Marxist urban terrorist organization.

Fatalities from the coronavirus have declined by nearly 90 percent and evidence has piled up in nearly 40 million coronavirus tests that large numbers of healthy Americans have contracted the disease and had no or minimal symptoms. This progressively immunizes the public from it, yet in a barefaced attempt to prolong economic miseries and public hysteria, the Democrats uniformly agitate for a resumed economic shutdown.

That party is bound hand-and-foot to the palsied hulk of organized labor and is a tinny echo of the teachers’ unions’ demands that schools be kept closed until there is a vaccine: an indefinite fully paid holiday for the nation’s underworked teachers who, in a great many cases, provide no more education to America’s youth than would a daycare center.

Last month, David Axelrod, the Democrats’ keeper-in-residence of the flame of legendary agitator Saul Alinsky, treated readers to a denunciation of the “cruel” policy of the administration in reopening the economy. The cruelty was not in the facilitation of 20 million suddenly unemployed people resuming their jobs and incomes; it was apparently the unspeakable attempt to deprive the Democrats of their sole possibility of election victory: hanging around the neck of the president like a toilet seat the responsibility for an induced economic depression, not needed to protect public health, but because of the administration’s moral duty to commit political suicide for the benefit of the Democrats.

In the absence of a feasible presidential nominee, the Democratic campaign is being conducted by the national political media with almost the sole exception of Fox News and its affiliates, the Wall Street Journal and New York Post. The New York Times has at least declared that its objective is not simply to report even-handedly but to oppose the Trump Administration. All the others do the same without acknowledging it.

This is the general and entirely voluntary immolation of the professional integrity of the American news media. The majority of Americans recognize and respond in polls that they think the media is untrustworthy. The unofficial opposition to Trump is an informal alliance between hooligans, terrorists, Democratic urban machine crooks, mudslinging media, and a pernicious virus.

With less than four months before the election, this is the campaign: a constant media carpet-bombing of defamatory lies about the president on behalf of a comatose candidate, propagation of unfounded hysteria over a fading pandemic, self-induced and redundant economic depression, open borders to admit and give free medical care to the unskilled peasantry of the world, and national self-abasement before militant African Americans demanding minority rule and the renunciation and degradation of those who founded the United States and led it to a pinnacle of influence in the world unequaled in all history. And this ludicrous, almost unimaginable, mockery of a quest for the world’s highest office is, in the perversity of these times, apparently leading in the polls.

It is impossible and it will blow up.

To remind ourselves of the character of the election campaign and to test our resistance to orally and visibly induced nausea, my wife and I on Monday jointly took the pledge to watch part of what was billed as the CNN evening newscast. For 10 minutes, Don Lemon performed with Chris Cuomo as his straight-man, perfect Fredo in a political mafia hit job (“The Godfather”). Cuomo gave no views but Lemon delivered a fluent monologue, building from thin air the purported certainty that President Trump is a racist and has based his campaign for the presidency and his execution of that office on racism.

There was no evidence of any of this—and there can be none—because he is not in the slightest degree a racist. But that only proves the truthfulness of Trump’s assertion that most of the media are liars and bloodless assassins. They are and therefore he must be assassinated (preferably) bloodlessly.

With sophomorically affected worldliness, Lemon allowed that Trump’s flummery and charade are about to end: “This is what happens when a candidate is trailing and his number’s up.” He said this in the same voice and with the same po-faced certainty that he told us throughout the Russian collusion fraud that “The walls are closing in on the president.” Straight-man Fredo nodded and mumbled throughout. This is the same font of wisdom who described Antifa in 2017, after it committed arson at Berkeley, as “a progressive reform organization,” and said at the height of the post-George Floyd rioting: “Where does it say that protesters have to be peaceful?” (He might consult the criminal statutes.)

This is some new form of farce noire, a nightmare of outright idiocy, part slapstick and part horror, playing on a gigantic stage. Fortunately, we know it has to end on November 3, but the audience will likely tire of it and bring down the curtain well before then. No society can tolerate this for long. The arsonists will not burn down society; the society will awaken and banish the arsonists.

First published in American Greatness.