The Liberal Media and the Art of High-Tech Lynchings

May 27th, 2017 4:00 PM

The headline at Mediaite was this: 

Hillary Clinton Says Donald Trump Presidency Will ‘End in Disgrace With His Impeachment’

The story, in part, says this:

Today, Hillary Clinton returned to her Alma Mater, Wellesley College, to give the commencement address. As Clinton fans and detractors alike know, one of her first big moments in the national spotlight was when she gave the address there during her own graduation at a time when students didn’t give commencement speeches. She used that speech almost five decades ago to target a senator, launching her into the political spotlight.

Today, she targeted someone else.

She went after former presidential campaign foe (and current president) Donald Trump.

While ostensibly talking about how the country overcame the shame of Richard Nixon and the distrust in the government that he sowed, she mentioned ‘a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace with his impeachment for obstruction of justice…’”

The assembled graduates cheered as she continued, ‘– after firing the person running the investigation into him at the Department of Justice.’”

The telling part of this story? It isn’t that a loser in a presidential election has sour grapes. That would be your typical dog-bites-man story. No, the telling and disturbing part of the story is that this was 1) worth a headline in Mediaite and 2) this sentence: “The assembled graduates cheered as she continued, ‘– after firing the person running the investigation into him at the Department of Justice.’

Let’s go back in time to this moment

It is October 11, 1991, and Judge Clarence Thomas is appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee run by Senate Democrats. Recall that Thomas’s nomination had come after the resignation of the liberal Justice Thurgood Marshall - who had been the first black American to sit on the Court. As news of Marshall’s resignation spread there were quick demands from Democrats that President George H.W. Bush must nominate a black judge as this seat was now somehow a “black seat”. Note well that this demand came because Democrats consider the skin-color descriptive  “black” to be synonymous with the words “Democrat” and “liberal. Bush cleverly obliged. And to their horror Democrats suddenly realized the Bush nominee was both black and - OMG! - conservative.

On a scale of political insults to the liberal media that ranges from 1 to 10 with 1 being least offensive to a most insulting 10, the Thomas nomination was 110. So what to do? Suddenly America was presented - thanks to anonymous white staffers for liberal white Senators - one Anita Hill. Ms. Hill, also black and a one-time associate of Thomas in his various jobs in the Reagan and Bush era, came forward to accuse Thomas of sexual harassment because he had said various inappropriate things and asked her out. 

And here the media took off. This became an instant media firestorm. Outraged liberal women lectured sternly about sexual harassment, informing all that “women tell the truth.” In the New York Times, the outrage came in this memorable column by then-columnist Anna Quindlen titled "Listen to Us."

This vivid example of liberal media outrage began as follows, key sentences in bold print supplied from Quindlen’s column:

Listen to us.

You will notice there is no please in that sentence. It is difficult to feel polite, watching the white men of the United States Senate and realizing that their first response when confronted with a serious allegation of sexual harassment against a man nominated to the high court was to rush to judgment. It is difficult to feel polite, knowing they were more concerned about how this looked for them, for their party, their procedures and their political prospects than in discovering what really happened.

The gender divide has opened and swallowed politeness like a great hungry whale. Why? Why? Why? they asked. Why did Anita F. Hill, now a tenured law professor at the University of Oklahoma, not bring charges against Clarence Thomas when, she contends, he sexually harassed her a decade ago? Why did she stay on the job although, she says, he insisted on discussing with her the details of pornographic movies? Why was she hesitant about confiding in the Judiciary Committee?

The women I know have had no difficulty imagining possible answers. Perhaps she thought no one would believe her, he powerful, she not. Perhaps, if she was indeed humiliated in the seamy way she describes by her boss, regaled with recountings of bestiality and rape when she was fresh out of law school and new to the world of work, she decided it was best buried in her memory. Perhaps she thought the world would never believe that the man charged with enforcing sexual harassment laws as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would do such a thing.

From time to time I am told of the oppression of the white male, of how the movements to free minorities from prejudice have resulted in bias against the majority. Watching Judge Thomas's confirmation hearings, I wondered how any sane person could give this credence.

In one column this piece appealed to outright racial prejudice (the senators are quickly no longer senators but “white males”) and sexism, with Hill becoming not an equal but a powerless woman victimized by a powerful male.

To his eternal credit, Judge Thomas would not only have none of this. He would use their own tactics against them. He was, after all, not a “white male” but a black man. And he and everybody watching knew the history of the Left and its hostilities on race as expressed in political support for slavery, segregation and more. Thus it was that Thomas took his seat at the witness table, and as the cameras rolled, looked the “white male” Democrats on the committee - and white liberals in the media like Quindlen - in the eye and said among other things, this:

“And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. -- U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.

And in a blink, liberals in and out of the media had their game demolished. The term “high tech lynching” entered the American lexicon. It defined both accurately and vividly what happens when a Republican - especially if a conservative who happens to be black, Hispanic, a woman or any kind of outsider - encounters a situation where they may hold an important and powerful political position. The media and all their liberal allies will instantly swing into what was once labeled by conservative Pat Buchanan as the “politics of personal destruction.”

What does this have to do with today’s news? The latest target in this game of “high tech lynching” is, of course, President Trump and the men and women who are his staff.  Trump as president is always the target. The others shift in and out of the spotlight depending on the news of the moment. Its Kellyanne Conway one moment until its Steve Bannon unless its Jared Kushner …and on and on. But make no mistake, all are being targeted for the next “high tech lynching” that has become a liberal media speciality. 

Over here in Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake has this figured exactly. His headline:

Trump's Allies, Convicted of High Crimes Without a Trial

Maybe Flynn committed treason. But so far no one has presented any evidence, just innuendo. That's not justice.

Lake writes in part:

“Heard any good Mike Flynn jokes lately?

How about this one from "Morning Joe," this week? "When it comes to legal issues, he's like Charmin. You just keep squeezing." Maybe you've seen Stephen Colbert's segment from February about Trump's former national security adviser: "It's funny 'cause it's treason.”

…Well it's nice to see our elites are in such good humor about something so grave. If there truly was treason, it's no joking matter. If there was not, then this man's name is being tarnished unfairly. Ha. Ha.

…None of this would be happening without some very dirty business from the national security state. It's a two-pronged campaign. First there are the whispers. Anonymous officials describe in detail elements of an ongoing investigation: intercepts of conversations between Russian officials about how they could influence Flynn during the transition; monitored phone calls about how Flynn had lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to his colleagues; how Flynn failed to disclose his payment from the Russian propaganda network on his official forms. This prong of the campaign is at least factual, but the facts don't speak for themselves.

The second and more insidious element here is the innuendo. Yates never says Flynn was a spy for Russia. But her public remarks to Congress and the media appear designed to leave that impression.

Yates's innuendo is nothing compared to that dropped by former CIA director John Brennan. This week he treated the House Intelligence Committee to a feast of ominous suggestions. "Frequently, people who go along a treasonous path do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late,” he warned. Contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian individuals "raised questions in my mind about whether Russia was able to gain the cooperation of those individuals." This cooperation could be "witting" or "unwitting," he cautioned. 

Notice that Brennan did not accuse anyone in Trump's orbit of espionage or treason. He didn't say the Russian plan worked. He just said that when he left office he had questions. A definite "maybe."

By now the art of the liberal media high-tech lynching has been so polished and used so often that even liberals are becoming wary. And they should be. Note well, as mentioned, that as former secretary Clinton essentially cheered on the liberal media lynch mob in her commencement address, Mediaite reported that “the assembled graduates cheered.”  

No less than Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz - no Trump supporter or conservative he - is alarmed at all of this and has felt compelled to speak out about all of the liberal media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome over Russia in his role as a  strong civil libertarian. Says the Harvard law professor to Fox’s Tucker Carlson

“Show me the criminal statute. I still sit here as a civil libertarian. I don't want us ever to become what Stalinist Russia became when Stalin was told by Lavrentiy Beria, show me the man and I'll find you the crime. What is the crime?”

Former Bush 43 Attorney General Michael Mukasey has said a version of the same, asking on CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront “Where’s the crime?”

“Where is the crime?” is the exactly correct question to be asking. The liberal media settles on the target - over the years the targets have been as varied as former Bush 41 Vice President Dan Quayle, Alaska’s ex-Governor Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Fox News, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and, at the moment, Sean Hannity (and more) - and then the lynch mob is off and running. They want somebody fired or not confirmed or not elected or impeached or whatever.

The bad news is the existence of this disgraceful game. The good news is that even some liberals like Professor Dershowitz are beginning to realize the danger of, to quote Dershowitz again, creating repeated situations in which the guiding philosophy is “show me the man and I'll find you the crime.”

As the latest round of stories headline Trump aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner - with zero proof of anything whatsoever - it must be said that a better definition of how the liberal media plays the high tech lynching game could not be had.