Book review: Calling out leading liberal hypocrites

Because of the Dempanic, the Fort Mudge Library has been closed for months, so I'm reduced to reading books I bought at various garage and rummage sales but never got around to. One such is Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, by Peter Schweizer (Doubleday 2005). Although it won the Book With the Longest Title award for 2005, it's actually a fairly slim (219 pp plus notes) volume, a quick and not-too-heavy read for a hot summer day.

One might think, from the title, that Do As I Say (Etc) is going to be a hatchet job, but it's not. The author barely mentions Michael Moore's obesity and scruffiness, Bill Clinton's little tryst with an intern or Ted Kennedy's misadventure at Chappaquiddick. Nor does he dwell on the (((Jewishness))) of six of the eleven leading liberals profiled.

Instead, he presents carefully researched facts and figures detailing the record of Mr Moore, Mrs Bill Clinton, the late Senator Kennedy, and the others (Noam Chomsky, Al Franken, Ralph Nader, Nancy Pelosi, George Soros, Barbra Streisand, Gloria Steinem and Cornel West) on ethical investment, affirmative action and protecting the environment. In the Conclusion, Mr Schweizer sums up his findings thus.

How can we explain the fact that so many prominent individuals who are so passionate about their beliefs don't act accordingly? That seems to be the great paradox of liberalism as practiced by those we have profiled.... In short, they seem more interested in compelling others to embrace their vision of social change than in acting on that vision themselves....

Experience has taught these individuals that their ideas just don't work.... They really don't respect their own ideas and have privately concluded that...liberalism as practiced today does not offer them a road map to happiness.

Soak the rich, but don't soak me. Protect the environment, but let me drive my Hummer and water my lawn. Workers of the world, unite! But running a business with a union shop is just too complicated and difficult. Hire more blacks to fight racism, but let me hire my own people based on ability, not race....

The simple fact is that those in the vanguard of the liberal-left have found their own ideas to be ultimately self-defeating, self-destructive, and unworkable.

The (somewhat) good news for those of us who don't want to do what the liberal elites say is that the peasants are finally seeing at least some of the leading liberal hypocrites for what they are. The Hero of Chappaquiddick is dead. Al Franken is politically dead, killed by #MeToo. Having backed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, Cornel West finds himself outside the inner circles of the Dumbocratic Party.

Michael Moore signed his own death warrant by revealing the truth about alternative energy. And Hellery Clinton is politically dead too, although she refuses to lie down. But there is still (((George Soros))), now more than ever.

Mr Soros is more dangerous than the others who (mostly) just talk. He puts up real money -- scads of it -- to put the talkers he favours into places where they can take action to bring to pass the New World Order. When Slow Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi talk, what you're really hearing is the voice of Soros, the Master Ventriloquist. Don't be fooled!

At last people are starting to speak out vs "progressive" intolerance

Imagine that! Just a few days ago Walt posted a very positive review ("Read the book!") of Hate, Inc., in which Matt Taibbi criticizes the narrowing of the parameters of debate on social and political issues, and the culture of conformity being imposed by the political, business and media elites.

Now comes news* that dozens of artists, writers and academics have signed "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate", published in Harper's Magazine, decrying the weakening of public debate and warning that the free exchange of information and ideas is in jeopardy amid a rise in what they call "illiberalism."

J.K. Rowling, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are among dozens of writers, artists and academics to argue against ideological conformity. Another signatory is cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky, whose interview with Matt Taibbi forms an appendix to Hate, Inc. We posted a couple of pithy excerpts in "Noam Chomsky on the 'Crisis of Democracy'", WWW 1/7/20. Included in that post is a video in which Prof Chomsky's book Manufacturing Consent is summarized in under ten minutes!

Academics on the list of more than 150 signatories hail from American universities such as Princeton, Yale, Harvard Law, Brown, Rutgers and more. They wrote (collectively) that the "needed reckoning" regarding racial and social justice "has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity."

"More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms," the letter continues. "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes."

The letter says, "The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world.... But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion.... The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides."

*Just Fancy That Dept.: When Ed. went to Google to research this story and get the Harper's URL, the top three returns led to The Grauniad, New York Times and WaPo.

According to Matt Taibbi and Dave Rubin (in Don't Burn This Book) those are the three papers most guilty of pushing the kind of forced ideological (i.e. left-liberal) purity of which the signatories to the letter complain. Probably just a coincidence.

Further reading: "Learn How to Spot Fake News", Chapter 8 of Dave Rubin's Don't Burn This Book (Signal, 2020). Excerpts:
Newsrooms are now filled with progressive activists who bend the truth, as opposed to old-school professionals who feel a duty both to themselves and their audience.... News is a business like any other. Although we'd like to think that the business it's in is to inform and enlighten, we should always remember that it's really in the business of keeping our eyes on the TV or our fingers clicking.
Matt Taibbi's point exactly! Hey, you don't have to read only Chapter 8. Read the whole book!

Noam Chomsky on the "Crisis of Democracy" + VIDEO

Here is an excerpt from Matt Taibbi's interview with (((Noam Chomsky))), "Appendix B" to Hate Inc., which I reviewed last the weekend.

The Crisis of Democracy, which came out in 1975 [was] the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which is a group of liberal internationalists from Europe, United States, and Japan, three main centers of capitalist democracy.

...The "Crisis of Democracy" is that in the 1960s, all kinds of sectors of the population that are supposed to be passive and apathetic begin to try to enter the political arena to press for their own interest and concerns, and that imposes too much of a burden on the state, which becomes ungovernable. So, what we need is "more moderation in democracy." That's their phrase. People should go back into their corners and leave it to us.

In fact, the American rapporteur Samuel Huntington looked back kind of nostalgically to the Truman years. He says Truman was able to govern the country politically with the aid of just a few Wall Street bankers.

Then we had democracy. But he goes after the media. he says the media have bcome too adversarial, too independent. We may even have to institute government controls to try to contain them, because of what they're doing.

That's the liberal position. The Trilateral Commission also went after what they called the de-legitimation of the universities. They said that the institutions -- and this is their phrase -- these institutions responsible for the "indoctrination of the young" -- are being de-legitimized.

We've got to have more indoctrination. Remember, that's the liberal end of the spectrum. Over to the right wing, you get much harsher things... but that's the intellectual background. We've got to stop "too much democracy," "too much freedom."

The 1960s were always called the "Time of Troubles". That was a time when all this started.

The emphasis is mine. I've been saying as much since the hippy-dippy `60s, which I remember well. Just because Prof. Chomsky is a leftie peacenik doesn't make him wrong. I'm putting Manufacturing Consent, recommended by Matt Taibbi, on my reading list. Oh... wait...



You can stop listening at 8:35 when the speaker starts talking about the Iowa primary (although it's a good example of the media manipulation under consideration.) What precedes that part pretty well sums up what both Noam Chomsky and Matt Taibbi are saying. It all has to do with money. Surprised?

From the inside: Matt Taibbi explains why the media want to keep Americans perpetually at war...

...with each other!

In fact, "Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another" is the subtitle of Matt Taibbi's latest book, Hate Inc. (OR Books, 2019), which I have just finished reading and recommend highly. Mr Taibbi's political views are quite different from mine, but I always enjoy reading his accounts of what's really happening in American politics. He is a worthy successor to Dr Hunter S. Thompson.

Hate Inc. is something of a confession, a mea culpa for the part Mr Taibbi played in creating and feeding Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), both before and after the revolution of November 2016. See Walt's review of Insane Clown President, WWW 10/8/17.

The author now admits having been deceived by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns, and having deceived himself into being part of the "groupthink", the "conventional wisdom" purveyed by the lamestream media, which held that someone as worthy as Hellery Clinton couldn't possibly lose to such a patent phony as the Donald. To his credit, Mr Taibbi gives numerous examples of where he went wrong, while at the same time pointing out that he wasn't the only one.

But Hate Inc. is not an apologia for the honest mistakes of the media, because very little of the "news" they fed us was "honest". Mr Taibbi argues that what they gave us, and are still giving us, is a twisted and highly hyped form of the kind of entertainment epitomized by a WWE wrestling match! It wasn't an election, he says, but the grand finale of Wrestlemania, complete with a "babyface" (Mrs Bill) and a "heel" (Mr Trump) straight out of a reality TV show.

The "face" was supposed to win, but somehow managed to defeat herself, and that's a story already told by Mr Taibbi and countless others. The real story of Hate Inc. is why the media did it, and how they are still doing it. The answer is simple. Anger and hatred attract more viewers/readers than sweetness and light. More viewers/readers means more advertising revenue. More advertising revenue means more profit! Especially when you don't have to pay for the content! In fact, election advertising is a hyuge revenue stream for the meeja. The more elections, the more hotly contested, the more money they make.

And you, fellow "news consumers", are swallowing every drop of vitriol, every morsel of loathing, and begging for second and third helpings. In Hate Inc. you will find countless examples of the media's most egregious manipulation of your ignorance, prejudices, and fears. They whipped you into a frenzy, gentle reader, and want to keep you there so you won't log off their websites or turn off your TV, even though "some viewers may find this disturbing!"

I would like to post some excerpts, but Ed. tells me I have gone on long enough and must find just one for the conclusion of this review. Here `tis:

News consumers on both sides today behave like cultists; self-isolating intellectually, kept that way with a steady diet of terrifying stories about fellow citizens. Red-staters are told liberals are terror-sympathizers, desperate, out of white guilt, to eviscerate American cultrure from within.

Blue-staters are peppered daily with stories of fellow travelers and traitors in their midst, an incredible example being NBC's effort to paint presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard as a tool of the Kremlin.... 

This deeply paranoid view of the human experience, telling all America it lives on a violent invisible influence battlefield, is the opposite of what the news used to be.... We are trying to keep your brain locked in conflict, not just for the grubby commerical reason that it keeps people tuned in, but because it prevents them from thinking about other things.

What other things? Read the book! If doing so causes you to stop reading WWW, I won't be offended, as long as you also stop watching The View and Rachel Maddow and [That's enough biased "news" sources! Ed.]

Footnotes:
Hate Inc. doesn't have an index (tsk, tsk) but it does have an appendix entitled "Why Rachel Maddow is on the cover of this book". Enough said?

A second appendix is an interview with Noam Chomsky, co-author (with Edward S. Herman) of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988). Walt recommends reading this appendix first, before the book itself, to understand where Matt Taibbi is coming from. In the interview, he says to Prof. Chomsky: The main idea of Manufacturing Consent is...that it looks like we have a vigorous system of independent journalists, but the debate has been artificially narrowed. Why that is so is what Hate Inc. is all about.