What disease, you ask? Trump hatred, of course:
The breaching of the Capitol happened because of a conspiracy theory: that the election was actually won by Mr. Trump but stolen from him by bad people. That theory hasn’t gone away, it’s growing and spreading. What might be called the Trump Underworld—the operatives, grifters and media figures around him—is pushing the theories harder than ever. It’s as if they think he’s not going to be a candidate in 2024 and they’d better make their money now, the window is closing.
This conspiracism is bad for the country: It leaves us more polarized and lessens our faith in our systems. It is bad for one of our two major parties: It leaves the GOP with an untreated cancer.
I added the emphasis.
Peggy Noonan was once a graceful and effective speechwriter…but she’s never been much of a thinker. The emphasized sentence is a clear indication of a refusal to think. The very terms she uses – “polarized,” “faith,” “our systems” – make it plain that her thought processes have stopped short at her distaste and dismay over the trivial events of January 6. This is a sin for which no commentator can beg forgiveness.
People who do think would ask sharp questions. Why are we polarized? What is the virtue of “faith” in a system blatantly designed to facilitate massive fraud? And of whom are we speaking when we refer to “our systems?” Either these questions are opaque to Noonan, or she’s sniffed them aside out of her prissy dislike of disorder – and many a “conservative” will embrace injustice in preference to disorder.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal were once more discriminating than this. Yet they too are afflicted by irrational anti-Trump sentiment. The reasons need not concern us at this time. And Noonan still commands a modicum of prestige from her service to previous Republican Administrations.
The Trump Administration’s achievements were considerable. Unfortunately, many of them were dependent on the retention of the Oval Office, so that the changes Trump wrought would have time to become “the way things are.” But the editors of the Journal appear more attached to “stability” – “the mess we’re in,” as Ronald Reagan put it – than to any pro-American principle they once espoused.
It is plain that even the Journal, once a safe harbor for conservatives, has been targeted for colonization by America’s enemies. There must be no refuge for Americans weary of the voices hectoring them to hate their country and themselves.
2 comments
Noonan has all the fire and drama of a glass of warm cocoa at bedtime. Lena Dunham is more entertaining.
The WSJ was a daily must read for me for several years but then vanished from even my occasional reading. I should have abandoned it years before as I was well aware of Robert Bartley’s treasonous “There shall be open borders.”
I to liked the journal for a long time. Even used to read Peggy’s writings. When the Murdochs bought the paper my gut said it won’t be long till they to are a tabloid as well. Sad to see it happen but the old wisdom is if there is even a wiff of liberal it will become full liberal. The supposed conservative side of media, which I don’t watch either, tries to be exactly the opposite which is the same as the divide in our country. In the end the writers and talking heads as usual are all about the money and very little substance.
Thank you all for what you do.