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New York Times

The Three Faces of The New York Times: Woke, Patriotic, and Scared

January 4, 2022
by Peter Feinman
The three faces of the Gray Lady

The countdown to calamity continues now at three years to January 6, 2025. At that point we will see if the Hitman will be successful in ending the United States as we know it …  and whether it will be done peacefully or violently. The military knows the stakes involved and are aware of the need to prepare. Political pundits know that time of wimpy talk about culture wars must yield to more realistic talk about the America’s third civil war. At this point no one knows what the outcome will be. There is a realization that while January 6 was the poorly-planned slapdash attempt to steal the election, the effort for 2024 already is much better organized. This times the forces arrayed to overthrow the Constitution may even seize the Capitol in 2022 before turning to the White House in 2024 (excluding the impeachment efforts).

Meanwhile, what does The New York Times, as the paper of record, think about the history unfolding around us? Its responses may be grouped into three somewhat contradictory approaches – woke, patriotic, and scared.

WOKE

On one hand, there have been actions which suggest a woke outlook. Here are some snippets from the seemingly ancient resignation of Bari Weiss from the newspaper.

I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers….

But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else….

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist ;…

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

How different is Weiss’s “distant galaxy” from the “alternate reality” depiction of Trumpicans today? They, of course, have their own “orthodoxy” about the stolen election and peaceful assembly of patriots on January 6 seeking to redress a wrong until planted FBI agents fomented the violence.

The great example of the woke New York Times is its assault on the United States in the 1619 Project. Whereas Trumpicans deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency, the newspaper attacks the very legitimacy of the country as one born in sin and prospered through racism based on racist founding documents. I recognize that this Frankenstein monster may not be what was originally intended. However that does not change the fact that the closer we get to July 4, 2026, the more readers of the 1619 Project will call for the day to become one of mourning like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving and the less one to celebrate. And while Foxhub aims at adults, by contrast The New York Times seeks to educate the young not to have pride in their racist country.

PATRIOTIC

On the other hand, on Sunday, November 7, 2021, The New York Times had a special 24-page section entitled SNAP OUT OF IT, AMERICA! expressing a diametrically opposed view that ignores the 1619 Project. The front page exclaimed:

Our once restlessly inventive country has settled for sclerotic politics and modest ambitions. It’s time to dream big again. This is a special section featuring bold ideas to revitalize and renew the American experiment.

This was not the 1619 Project. The words express the hope and optimism of a country that once did dream big [until the landing on the moon] but subsequently has lost its mojo. It is a country mired in the little led by small-brained people seeking nothing more to remain in power. Today we could not build an interstate highway system or go to the moon. We can barely fill potholes with hundreds of members of Congress opposed to even such a tiny achievement.

On page 2, The New York Times expressed its vision.

America used to be a young country. And in its youth, it changed as it grew, the idea of what was American as malleable as the idea of what was America. The country expanded its borders, abolished slavery, broadened the franchise; waves of immigrants reshaped and revised America’s character; the government added and dropped functions, amending the Constitution to fit the times. It was a restless experiment.

But America is not young anymore.  

The words are more reminiscent of James Earl Jones standing in a Field of Dreams about the ever-renewing promise and potential of America than they are of the 1619 Project.

The remainder of the section contains seven essays on what America should do next. The organizing theme was changing America through amendments to the Constitution. The specific recommendations are secondary to the theme of this blog on the expression of belief that America can renew its vision of itself and optimistically face a better future even with COVID,  Climate Change, and Trump.

Sometimes people can be too idealistic for their own good. One favorite from this supplement is the call for a one-year mandatory national service program. This call is made in a country where people will not even wear masks or be vaccinated when their lives are on the line. And exactly what service could the Hitman or Speaker Marjorie Taylor Greene perform? Teach people how to wait for John Kennedy to return? To say nothing about the genuinely mentally ill. And how many ways would here be to game the system in the name of service?

A better approach would be draw on traditional American values of voluntarism and community associations as noted by Tocqueville. Providing incentives to do something constructive (higher social security payments?) probably would be more effective. National service then would be a choice and not a compulsion. Regardless of the details, the proposal hints at the need for a discussion on what it means to be an adult citizen in a constitutional republic.

The most immediately impactful suggestion in the current political arena is the one to redraw the map of the states. As one who has written about the West Virginia solution, the dividing of Confederate states into their Union and Confederate parts, I strongly support this recommendation which can be achieved through Article IV in the Constitution. All the issues of gerrymandering, voter suppression, rigged counting, partisan Secretaries of State, imperial state legislatures, and rural domination disappear if our states better reflected the different constituencies that exist today.  The teeny-tiny view of thinking about Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia exemplifies the small-mindedness of sclerotic leadership noted on page 1 of this special supplement.

Regardless of what you may think about the seven proposals made or my comments on two of them, the point is they reflect an attempt to resurrect the can-do attitude than once made America the envy of the world and a magnet for millions. Now we a fading has-been on democracy death watch.

SCARED  

The New York Times has caught up with reality and it is scared. It began the New Year with a big editorial on Sunday, January 6, 2022, entitled “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now.”  Exactly. Every day is part of the war leading up to January 6, 2025, when we will know who won or if we will divorce.

Every day is January 6 as the House Select Committee works to document and reveal the truth about the attempt to steal the election and overthrow the Constitution.

Every day is January 6 as the Hitman and his confederates both in and out of Congress fight back against the efforts of the House Select Committee to document and reveal the truth.

Every day is January 6 in Waiting for Godot style for the appearance of an Attorney General to indict the conspirators, a wait perhaps to end this January 5.

Every day is January 6 as Trumpicans seize control of the election infrastructure, the one infrastructure they believe in, so there will not even be a need to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2025.

Despite the editorial, The New York Times still has not fully come to grip with the real world. It writes:

Political violence is not an inevitable outcome. Republican leaders could help by being honest with their voters and combating the extremists in their midst.   

ARE YOU SERIOUS? Republican leaders on CNN are going to free the Republican Party from Trumpican domination? How many Republicans as opposed to Trumpicans do you think there will be in the House of Representatives after the 2022 elections? Yes, there still are some Republicans out there and Larry Hogan intends to find them. But they can only return to power in the Republican Party if a disaster occurs to Trumpicans and the soul-selling Trump wannabees and that has not happened yet. Until then MAKE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AGAIN is wishful thinking.

The New York Times concludes the editorial with an expression of awareness of the stakes involved. It calls upon the American people recognize the threat to Constitution sooner rather than later if we are to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger. Exactly right. Maybe the televised hearings will do it. In the meantime, The New York Times 1619 Project has been weaponized to undermine exactly what the newspaper professes to want in the supplement and fear in the editorial.

Happy 1619, Not July 4th, Birthday: All the History Fit to Print that the NYT Omitted

July 1, 2020
by Peter Feinman
The New York Times Heats Up the Culture Wars (https://blackjunction.tv)

Even without the coronavirus, the United States should not be celebrating July4th as its birthday according to The New York Times. In its Pulitzer-Prize winning Sunday Magazine issue entitled “1619” (August 18, 2019), The New York Times asks us to accept 1619 as the true birth year of the United States and not 1776 (see the blog The Battle between 1619 and 1776: The New York Times versus the History Community). It claims that a ship carrying “a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans” marks the country’s origins. It does so even though no country existed at that time and there weren’t even close to 13 British colonies then either.

As one might expect, there was a negative reaction to this publication. For the most part the NYT was able to swat away these responses. What was striking about them was that they were mostly about the American Revolution and Abraham Lincoln. Hardly anyone commented on about the  attempt to redefine American history by having it originate not with the Declaration of Independence but with “original sin.”

In some ways the lack of comments on 1619 was not surprising – there was hardly anything written in the magazine about 1619! One would think that in a magazine with the title “1619,” there would be at least one article devoted to that topic. Instead it was almost absent save for a few stray comments here and there that mentioned 1619 in passing. The supplement contains more information. But if you really wanted to know about 1619, you are far better off reading the vastly superior account in USA Today [see my blog 1619: The New York Times versus USA Today (and Hamilton)].

There were a few comments that directly addressed the year in question. For example, Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University, wrote (How We Think about the Term ‘enslaved’ Matters):

Nell Irvin Painter

People were not enslaved in Virginia in 1619, they were indentured. The 20 or so Africans were sold and bought as “servants” for a term of years, and they joined a population consisting largely of European indentured servants, mainly poor people from the British Isles whom the Virginia Company of London had transported and sold into servitude.

Enslavement was a process that took place step by step, after the mid-17th century. This process of turning “servants” from Africa into racialized workers enslaved for life occurred in the 1660s to 1680s through a succession of Virginia laws that decreed that a child’s status followed that of its mother and that baptism did not automatically confer emancipation. By the end of the 17th century, Africans had indeed been marked off by race in as chattel to be bought, sold, traded, inherited and serve as collateral for business and debt services. This was not already the case in 1619.

How come The New York Times didn’t know this? As you can see from Prof. Painter’s comments, the slavery system developed ad hoc over time as new situations occurred. For example, suppose someone was baptized, then what? Suppose someone had a white father and a black mother, then what? The system whereby 75% -white Sally Hemmings was legally both black and a slave did not exist in 1619. It took time for different combinations and circumstances to develop.

What then should be done to redress the shortcomings, omissions, and errors in the NYT’s publication? The answer is fairly straightforward. Have a conference or conferences to plug the gaps and provide the information that was to fit to print in “1619” but wasn’t. Specifically, there are 5 topics which should be covered by my count.

1. Where’s Africa?

According to a recent NYT note on the “1619” publication, an earlier draft by Nikole Hannah-Jones began the story earlier than July 4th and the American Revolution (“Telling ‘the Sweep of 400Years’,” June 18, 2020, print). It began with the Middle Passage where she wrote “They say our people were born on water.” I don’t know who “they” are in the sentence but that beginning would have been a step in the right direction. It’s still not Africa, but it’s closer. The phrase was used by Tiya Miles in “1619” who then mentions the Mbundu, Akan, and Fulani peoples. But the phrase ignores what the people of the Middle Passage brought with them from Africa to the Western Hemisphere. It’s as if the Middle Passage had “severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply vanished from the earth.” The presence of the King of the Kongo at Pinkster celebrations demonstrates that not everything had vanished. What was this kingdom and why was its king remembered?

The story “out of Africa” should begin in Africa. If the focus is 1619, then the area of concern is the modern country of Angola. No such country existed in 1619 and no people there self-identified as “Angolans” then either. However it is the region that produced over 5 million of the 12 million people brought to the Western Hemisphere, especially Brazil, and was the source of people on the vessels that were captured by pirates and brought here. The study would explore the Kingdom of Kongo and the Mubundo and Imbangala peoples as they were the ones most involved in the slave trade. There are scholars with expertise in this subject who could have been consulted in the preparation of “1619” and who could be invited to do a session, symposium, or conference on it.

2. Where’s Europe?

Similarly there is a story to be told about the Europeans who were involved in 1619. The key people are the Portuguese who arrived in Kongo in 1481. What were they doing there? How did it happen to be that the Portuguese were making the difficult voyage south along the African coast (going south was easy, it was the return north that was the challenge)? What did slavery mean in the European tradition? Why were owned people called “slaves” anyway? What was the geo-political situation at the time including Christian-Moslem and Protestant-Catholic? Why did the Dutch and the English get involved? These relationships are important. In 1491, the Kongo king voluntarily became Catholic beginning a long relationship between the independent country (not a colony) and the Church. In 1618, the Thirty Years War began which included the Kongo as well. There are scholars with expertise in these subjects who could have been consulted in the preparation of “1619” and who could be invited to do a session, symposium, or conference on them.

3. Where’s the Slave Trade?

How did the people who were brought to first the Atlantic Islands and Europe and then to the Western Hemisphere come to be brought to these areas? What were the mechanisms by which so many people could be brought to the Western Hemisphere by so few people? Miles uses the phrase “people stolen from western and central Africa.” This phrase expresses a popular explanation (see Roots):

Spike Lee: “just the fact that we were stolen from Mother Africa and brought here through the Middle Passage… (Time, June 22-29, 2020, print).

Other people take a different view.

Frederick Douglass:

Depend upon it, the savage chiefs on the western coast of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage, and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily see and accept our moral and economical ideas, than the slave-traders of Maryland and Virginia. We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave-traders, than to stay here to work against it. (“African Civilization Society,” February 1859)

Henry Louis Gates: The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred…. But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming they had violated her new Christian precepts. (Ending the Slavery Blame-Game, The New York Times, April 22, 2010).

Who is right? There are scholars with expertise in this subject who could have been consulted in the preparation of “1619” and who could be invited to do a session, symposium, or conference on it.

4. Where’s Virginia?

As Prof. Painter’s comments on “1619” indicate, there is a story to be told about what happened in Virginia in the 1600s. The people who were legally free, though indentured, when they landed in Virginia, paved the way for the slavery system The New York Times took granted existed in 1619. That story would include the values the English settlers brought with them to Virginia including on slavery, free people, and servants. It includes the values of the English Puritans and Anglicans who settled in Virginia. It includes the values of small landholders and tobacco plantation owners in Virginia. There are scholars with expertise in these subjects who could have been consulted in the preparation of “1619” and who could be invited to do a session, symposium, or conference on them.

5. Where’s New Amsterdam?

The importance of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam is that it provides another example of a colony going through some of the same issues that occurred in Virginia at the same time. It does so with a different cultural background. New Amsterdam began as a trading port or merchant city that would become an “island at the center of the world.” Later on, it expanded northwards and created “manors” including here in Westchester where I live. The environment here was not conducive to tobacco. The church here was Dutch Reform and not Anglican or Puritan. I mention these points to suggest that the Virginia model, which itself required decades to finalize, is not the only model for understanding slavery in the colonial period. Virginia and New Amsterdam both struggled with the defining the meaning of slavery and the place of Africans in their respective colonies. There are scholars with expertise in these subjects who could have been consulted in the preparation of “1619” and who could be invited to do a session, symposium, or conference on them.

By coincidence, I just received an eblast from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture announcing an online conversation on “Slavery and Freedom in the Era of Revolution” focusing on abolitionism. The series of conversations will be based on The New York Times 1619 Project-related event “Slavery and the American Revolution: a Historical Dialogue” (March 6, 2020) held in New York involving several scholars.

I also just received a notice from the American Historical Association of a webinar to be held July 2 on “Erasing History or Making History? Race, Racism, and the American Memorial Landscape” including Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University, who participated in the March 6th event above.

Even in the time of Covid-19, it is possible to discuss topics such as the ones I listed above and there are organizations conducting similar type discussions. The issue is does anyone really want to know about 1619?

New York Times Investigates the Brain of Donald Trump: President Has a Hissy Fit

April 15, 2020
by Peter Feinman
Presidential Press Conference

The New York Times has investigated the brain of Donald Trump. That was not its intention when it published above the fold on the front page “Despite Timely Alerts, Trump was Slow to Act” (April 12, 2020, print). Its intention was to document the failures and shortcomings of the impeached wartime President in his handling of the coronavirus crisis. In that effort it appears to have succeeded.

Somehow the subject of the article became aware of it. Obviously he did not read it. Obviously also no staff member briefed him on the contents of the article. He may have seen the headline on a print copy. (I don’t know if the White House still receives print copies.) He may have seen and heard it discussed on a news show other than on Fox. However it happened he did become aware that he had been taken to task for his failures and shortcomings. Naturally he responded as he would be expected to respond.

He is even more reliable than Old Faithful in his eruptions.

But the article did more than simply document his failure and shortcomings in managing the coronavirus crisis. It also provided a window into how his mind operates and on what level.

Example #1 [from the front page]

The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, and protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.

CONFEDERATES FIRE ON FORT SUMTER. ABRAHAM LINCOLN SLOW TO ABSORB THE SCALE OF RISK

What can we learn from this passage?

1 Adults in the White House understood the scale of the risk. Their brains had the mental necessities to understand the situation, to recognize the full gravity of the pending crisis; he did not, his brain does not function at that level.

He provided a demonstration of the smallness of his mind at the news conference the following day. During the Q&A, he got into an exchange with a reporter about what he had done. He kept answering that in January there were no deaths and no infections. Other people in the White House were capable of projecting into the next weeks and months when there would be infections and deaths on an epidemic scale. He was not able to do so. His analytical skills were limited to DOW JONES DOWN. ELECTION LOST. Beyond that he was out of his league. His inability to grasp the magnitude of the risk matches the silliness of his forbidding a cruise ship to dock to keep the number of cases down on his watch. After all, he declared the virus would not strike here so the ship had to be kept a sea. We have contained the threat.

2. It’s all about him. Obviously.

3. Every day is like another episode on TV and he has to control the narrative. Obviously.

The takeaway from this passage is not about his failure to act. The takeaway is not about his choosing Option A instead of Option B. The takeaway is his lacking the cognitive skill to grasp the situation. He didn’t understand what adults in the White House could understand.

Example #2 [page 14]

These final days of February, perhaps more than any other moment during his tenure in the White House, illustrated Mr. Trump’s inability or unwillingness to absorb warnings coming at him. He instead reverted to his traditional political playbook…squandering vital time as the coronavirus spread silently across the country.

GERMANY BOMBS LONDON. WINSTON CHURCHILL UNABLE OR UNWILLING TO ABSORB THE SITUATION

What can we learn from this passage?

1. He still had not grasped the situation. He lacks the ability to do so.

2. He reverted to form, in this case being the seventh-grade-smart-aleck-dumb-aleck that is his true self.

At the infamous press conference Monday, he got into an exchange with a reporter about China.

The discussion went back and forth. He was having problems since he was trying to defend his world of make believe in which he is most comfortable against real world questioning. Finally he could fake it as an adult no longer. He had exhausted himself and reverted to his old standby: FAKE NEWS.

There are limits as to how long he can do the penguin walk and fake being an adult. He can maintain that façade for brief intervals like a child going to grandma’s funeral or delivering a State of the Union address. A two-hour press conference exceeds his mental capacity to keep it up. At some point he inevitably will go off script and revert to being the person he truly is.

Example #3 [page 15]

Mr. Trump took a conciliatory approach [towards China] through the middle of March, praising the job Mr. Xi was doing.

That changed abruptly when aides informed Mr. Trump that a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman had publicly spun a new conspiracy about the origins of Covid-19: that it was brought to China by U.S. Army personnel who visited the country last October.

Mr. Trump was furious. [He responded on Twitter, “Oh Yeah! Oh Yeah! Oh Yeah! I’LL SHOW YOU!] The China Virus.  

CORONAVIRUS WREAKS GLOBAL HAVOC. IMMATURE CHILD PRESIDENTS BOASTS OF HIS SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE

What can we learn from this passage?

CHINA HAS HANNITYS TOO! CHINA HAS HANNITYS TOO! CHINA HAS HANNITYS TOO!
SO DOES RUSSIA!

No one has a monopoly on bull-trump. China is just as capable of slinging it as Fox, the Presidential spokespeople, or the impeached wartime President himself. He has been lucky so far that the Democrats have not given him a taste of his own medicine. Perhaps they should observe how the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian Hannitys act.

How then after weeks of failure did he finally grasp the situation?

Example #4 [page 15]

But in the end, aides said, it was Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the veteran AIDS researcher…who helped to persuade Mr. Trump. Soft-spoken and fond of the kind of charts and graphs Mr. Trump prefers, Dr. Birx did not have the rough edges that could irritate the president. He often told people he thought she was elegant. 

What can we learn from this passage?

1. Mad Dog tried the same technique. Do you think he was soft-spoken without rough edges? Do you think he successfully hid the fact that he was dumbing down his presentation to the level a person with limited cognitive skills and of great ignorance could understand? Do you think he threatened the masculinity of Bonespur Boy?

2. The key to leading him to knowledge appears to be the proverbial old-fashioned school marm. For all we know, Dr. Birx reminds him of teachers he had in elementary school, teachers before his father put in him military school in the vain hope that he would man up.

3. If he were in elementary school today, he would be classified as “special.” He proves the need for special-ed teachers who can give students the 1:1 time they need to be able to learn despite certain challenges.

As Jill Filipovic wrote (A day after claiming ‘total’ power, Trump caves in, CNN, April 15, 2020):

This is an important moment to reemphasize that Donald Trump is not a learned man. Yes, he has a business degree, but he shows no interest in learning, no curiosity about the world around him, and little apparent ability to ingest much in the way of new information that is not presented in simple pictures or on TV. Comprehending complex material seems far beyond his grasp.

His intelligence briefings have to be pared down to child-like levels, and he still barely reads them, and resists receiving them regularly. Some believe he’s indifferent to the printed word. Does anyone really think this man has even read, let alone understood, the US Constitution?

In conclusion, The New York Times article written to expose the failures and shortcomings of the impeached wartime President also reveals that those failures and shortcomings are not his fault. When you are a child living in the land of make believe, you make up the rules. If you want to be king, then you are king. The problem occurs when you try to live in the adult world and even Kellyanne Alternate Reality Conway can’t save you. Our president genuinely lacks the mental necessities or cognitive skills required to function as an adult, a deficiency that cannot be hidden during a crisis unless you only watch Fox. Unfortunately mental limitations are not a high crime or misdemeanor or removable under the 25th Amendment. At present there is no legal remedy for removing a President during a crisis because he can’t grasp the situation.

Suppose the New York Times and Anonymous Already Plan on Going Public

September 7, 2018
by Peter Feinman
Another Delivery to the New York Times

Suppose the New York Times and Anonymous already plan on going public. In the past 24-hours or so, I have heard a great many people on radio and TV and I have read articles in print and on the web about Anonymous. One common comment is “Why now?” Another relates to how does this op-ed piece advance the cause to which Anonymous aspires. The follow-up thought declares that its publication makes no difference, causes no change, solves no problem…unless simply ticking off the impulsive child President was the goal.

At the same time, Anonymous is referred to a senior administration official in the singular. One possibility floated about is that Anonymous has military/security/diplomatic experience.

Let’s follow through on that supposition. People with that kind of experience make plans. They consider different scenarios. They ponder alternatives. They anticipate reactions. Is it possible that the New York Times and Anonymous never considered what would happen after the publication? We know they were aware of the possibility of being fired but did it ever occur to them that the identity of Anonymous would not remain a secret for long? Did they expect that everything would go back to normal after Hurricane Anonymous passed?

It seems more likely, that they anticipated the disclosure of the identity of Anonymous and decided to take control of the situation. After all, isn’t that what you expect if Anonymous had military background? We can see that deceptiveness is in the author’s toolkit. The use of the word “lodestar” is not a clue to author’s identity…except showing a familiarity with Mike Pence’s vocabulary. The Capital’s biggest brown nose is on a mission from God to become President. There are no circumstances under which he could be Anonymous.

The delay in announcing the identity of Anonymous is deliberate. It is a set up. It provides an opportunity for people to go on record in response to the op-ed piece. It provides an opportunity to prove the claims in the op-ed piece are true. It provides an opportunity to nail people to the wall and hang them out to dry once they have publicly responded.

Let’s consider the reactions of the target President, Congressional Republicans, and Fox.

As expected, the impulsive immature child was in full volcanic mode. There is nothing new there. What is interesting to observe is his choice of words to condemn the action. He called it “TREASONOUS.” One can be a traitor to one’s country. Even the person who thinks Canada burned the White House and Lincoln was a Democrat probably has heard of Benedict Arnold. Treasonous acts do threaten the national security, should be investigated, and should be punished. However, the narcissist is defining treason in terms of himself and not his country. Again, there should be no surprise there. But it substantiates the claims made about his amoral lack of values.

Between Woodward and Anonymous, he is in full form. He is an A+ president, doing a great job, possibly the greatest job ever by an American President. He anticipates a red wave. His polling numbers are great. No one can touch him in 2020. No doubt, Republicans, who, like the Chinese, only get their news from one source, the government-authorized propaganda media, agree. Anyone who reports otherwise is the enemy of the people engaging in FAKE NEWS.

Suppose the very stable genius is wrong about the red wave. Suppose the Democrats win control of the House. Suppose the Democrats act on that basis and investigate all the items on the Republican hit list of potential problems where they are at risk. Will the President honor the election results? If a blue wave puts Democrats in charge will the President of the United States honor the results or will he demand a full investigation into the rigged results?

Suppose the very stable genius is wrong about 2020 (assuming he is still in office and chooses to run again)? Will the President honor the election results? Will the President leave the White House voluntarily? Will he demand a full investigation into the rigged results? Will he remain in the White House until the investigation by his Attorney General (not a stupid Southerner)is completed? (Can he go without playing golf for that long?)

Our A+ President who is doing a great job can’t be subpoenaed, can’t be impeached, and can’t be voted out of office.

If Anonymous (and Woodward’s) goal was to expose the truth, getting his reactions has been priceless.

Turning now to the Congressional Republicans, the response to Anonymous is not surprising. They couldn’t care less about the merits of what Anonymous wrote. Their only interest is to punish Anonymous. This reaction confirms my longstanding belief that when the little boy exclaimed that the Emperor was naked, he would immediately be stomped to death by an enraged mob that didn’t want to know the truth.

Finally, there is Fox News. Fox has been hyperventilating about the Deep State subverter of the vote of the American people. They don’t care about the Russian violation of that vote. They do care about how the duly-elected President is being thwarted by unelected people who think they know better than the American people what should be done. Fox vehemently castigates the White House Resistance (plural) who put their judgment over that of the We the People. One almost gets the impression that Fox considers Anonymous and the Resistance to consist of Democrats, holdovers from the Obama administration.

Now let’s return to the original suggestion: suppose the New York Times and Anonymous already plan on going public. Imagine if Anonymous is a composite. Imagine if multiple people contributed to its writing. No one would be trumping if they denied writing it since no one person did write it. Now imagine say, H. R. McMasters, John Kelly, and James Mattis, as military hero John McCain was dying, finally saying, “enough is enough.” Suppose the career military officers who have been repeatedly humiliated by the ignorant 5th grader decided that they had had it. Suppose these people decide to go public and expose Crazytown. Suppose these people decided to set up Congressional Republicans as ballless and Fox as brainless. Suppose these people publicly sited chapter and verse documenting that the incumbent President lacks the emotional maturity, knowledge, and character to hold that position and that he should be removed from office as soon as possible. Then what?

It’s not Seven Days in May. It’s not Dr. Strangelove. But it’s not General McArthur either.

Obviously I am speculating but it is unreasonable to assume that Anonymous is a one-act event. There’s more to come.