by Conrad Black
The collapse of the Trump-hate fraud is forcing the American national political media, with infinite regret and trepidation, to subject the Biden Administration to an elemental level of oversight.
When Joe Biden accuses 40 states—including, implicitly, his own home state of Delaware—of “Jim Crow” racial bias in administering elections, the media simply cannot allow such nonsense to go unnoticed. In their delirium of happiness at having won the presidential election, the Democrats naïvely believed that they could go on running against Donald Trump, presumably because they believed that he could not possibly be less noisy and productive of a target-rich area of easily denigrated utterances than he was as president.
The former president has outsmarted his enemies, however, and has graciously allowed his successor to take center stage and blunder and misspeak on a level never approached in the history of his great office. Warren Harding invented the word “bloviate,” and both Presidents Bush were inexhaustible storehouses of malapropisms: “We’ve got them on the run, and they’re running,” said George W. Bush. But with Joe Biden, it never stops.
China’s decision to tear up the Hong Kong treaty with the United Kingdom and its 65 percent reduction of the birth rate of the Uighurs are just “cultural differences.” Anyone who wants any process of verification that voters are who they say they are and are entitled to vote is a racist. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, pretending to be bicycling rather than being conveyed in rich livery in his official car, purports to discern “racism” in the roads and highways of America.
Despite the full metal jacket of media support for Biden, 60 percent of Americans disapprove of his southern border policy. They can’t make anything out of rabid Trump-hating prosecutor Andrew Weissmann’s claims that the prosecution of the former president for—in a phrase of Kafka’s—“nameless crimes” must proceed. They can’t make anything out of the breathless news that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is on his ninth visit to the Manhattan district attorney’s office to talk about his former client.
There are absurd lamentations that the promised 9/11-style inquiry into the hooliganism at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 is not happening, as if there were the slightest comparison to be made between a carefully planned foreign quadruple suicide mission against the most prominent buildings in America and a rapidly improvised trespass on the Capitol by habitual troublemakers that could not have occurred if the speaker of the House and the mayor of Washington, D.C. had listened to the appeals of the head of the Capitol police.
There is nothing to investigate about Donald Trump; the extended persecution of him by politicized intelligence and justice officials, and the two unfounded impeachment trials inflicted on him completely failed to produce one scintilla of evidence of his wrongdoing.
It is all becoming absurd. The group photograph of the Biden cabinet has 17 people sitting masked and socially distant despite the fact that they have all been vaccinated. The idea that they might transmit or be afflicted by the coronavirus is simply goofy. The cover of Vogue magazine is featuring a seriously overweight African American woman. This is not Vogue and what is she doing there? Police invade churches to remove socially distant unmasked mothers of newborn children. CBS simply lies about Florida governor Ron DeSantis, is exposed, and then repeats the story. A nerve-racking and obnoxious black-masked woman calls for “respect” and “dignity” in a grating voice from U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas)—by which she means that he must not attempt to photograph from his cell phone desperately overcrowded conditions in holding facilities for unaccompanied minors illegally crossing the southern border.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden declares that the country is afflicted by “systemic racism,” though he knows this to be false. He declared the attack on the Capitol on January 6 was “white supremacist” as was the conduct of the Capitol police on that occasion, another falsehood. He regularly declares an “existential crisis” over climate change, for which there is not a shred of real evidence either. The president says that if everyone remains masked and socially distant for another three months, they may be able to have a couple of family members over for a hotdog on July 4. There is not the slightest excuse for waiting until then.
Destructive, mindless wokeness and charges and confessions of “white privilege” are everywhere, and the United States government is complicit with the vicious drug and slave gangs of Mexico in the importation of large numbers of illegal migrants, up to 80 percent of whom are sexually violated on their way to the southern U.S. border. It emerges that virtually the entire state school system and almost all of the university academy are peddling the lie that the United States was established as a slaveholding enterprise as its raison d’etre, effectively up until Black Lives Matter exposed this heinous state of affairs and promised to “burn America down” if it were not changed. We have also recently learned that the U.S. armed forces are systematically propagating within their ranks critical race theory, which is a complete and dangerous fiction and just more mud-slinging and myth-making about the nature of the country. And now Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is trying to recruit the entire world to pledge to raise corporate taxes—an insane and fatuous concept.
It was impossible to foretell that the reaction of the post-Reagan bipartisan and political class to its being rejected as a failure, by the forces led by Donald Trump in 2016, would be not only to confect such a wave of defamatory hatred against the incumbent president that, with the aid of unconstitutional election rigging in the name of facilitating a broad popular vote during a public health pandemic, he would be driven from office, and the hatred that had been generated would be transmogrified into a hatred of America. Eerily, Richard Nixon’s warning that the United States could become “a pitiful helpless giant” appears to be coming to pass.
Except that it really isn’t—90 percent of Americans think only eligible American citizens should vote in American elections. Approximately 80 percent of Americans think that all who enter the country should do so legally. And a solid majority of Americans recognize that China is a threat to American democracy and our national security and that this threat must be resisted.
The United States has never in its history been so battered by self-hate and so belittled by angry minorities who, for the most part, should be more thankful to be American. It is an aberration and it will end soon, and perhaps the surest and most dramatic rejection of it will come if America is affronted by China in a way that excites its profound patriotic instincts.
If the Chinese leaders continue to belittle America, and attempt to face it down militarily in Taiwan or elsewhere, they will say, as Japanese Admiral lsoroku Yamamoto may have when congratulated on the success of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which he had opposed: “I am afraid we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve which will soon be turned upon us.”
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Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.
