New York Times Nearly has Moment of Clarity, Catches Self

A recent article in the New York Times begins with

Do you remember what monstrous, contemptible or demonstrably false thing Donald Trump said one year ago? Six months ago? O.K., last week? Probably not.

Taken in isolation, these sentences are a wonderful confession. Do you recall specifically any monstrous, contemptible, or demonstrably false thing Trump has uttered? No? Why not? We understand why that would be so: because Trump's mainstream persona is a fictional character propagated by the corporate media. Sure he blunders, talks off the cuff, rebukes his enemies to the point of pettiness, and engages in Twitter frenzies, but he's not really said anything monstrous or contemptible. Doesn't it seem dangerous for the New York Times to be reminding readers of the vacuousness of its own propaganda? It's a risky move. Fortunately the author is very smart, like all journalists, and immediately catches himself and steers towards the proper narrative of Trump hatred.

The effect of this presidency-by-horrors is to induce amnesia in the public, as if we’d all been given a memory-loss drug.

The reason people can't remember Trump's Hitleresque diatribe is not because it is imaginary, but because Trump is so extraordinarily evil he has actually caused mass amnesia among the voting left! It just makes too much sense.

The author, being principled and not at all a mindless political hack, follows up in the next paragraph with his strongest evidence to support his claim, that Trump has said many "monstrous, contemptible, and demonstrable false things."

To recap: A year ago, Trump lied repeatedly in his first debate with Hillary Clinton, and was reminded that he had called women pigs, slobs and dogs. Six months go, he settled for $25 million two lawsuits and a fraud case regarding his phony university, a huckster scheme that duped people out of their personal savings. And last week, he unleashed an attack on the free-speech rights of athletes, using a profanity that could not be repeated on the news without a warning to children.

This is the hard evidence. That Trump doesn't hold the highly sexist viewpoint that women are, by virtue of their magical lady parts, above rebuke. That he settled a politically motivated lawsuit that was threatening to derail his nascent political career. And that he, the President of the United States of America, criticized public figures for openly disrespecting the traditional symbols of the United States of America. The horror.

The article goes on like that, I imagine. I didn't finish reading it and neither should you. Well, not unless you want to learn how to be a properly devout practitioner of the leftist religion. In that case, the article is quite instructive. Some commentators on the right, such as ZMan, have noticed that in the modern era observing things has become something of a moral crime. For instance, it's not acceptable to notice that black people commit way more crime than everyone else. We aren't supposed to notice, and certainly aren't allowed to comment, aspects of reality that contravene the narrative. (Perhaps this is generally true of religions.)

The author has nearly made a disastrous blunder. He's noticed something. He's noticed that, off hand, he can't really think of anything awful Trump has said. He's worried that his observation is akin to thought crime, and is terrified that other people might be noticing the same thing, so he engages in proper rationalism to bury the apparent contradiction. It also makes for a wonderful vehicle to rehash the narrative and to give their acolytes their necessary serving of Trump hate on a slow hate day.