There are few if any signs that the left's unhinged behavior in the wake of Donald Trump's electoral victory is subsiding, even among those in positions of significant authority and responsibility. In addition to CEOs and university professors, we can now add the category of "high-ranking journalist" to the list of those who, since Trump's victory, have been unable to keep their violent emotional inclinations in check.
Michael Hirsh, Politico's national editor, who has previously served as the foreign editor and chief diplomatic correspondent for Newsweek, has resigned after publishing the home addresses of an Alt-Right leader and proposing that he and someone with whom he was corresponding visit the closer of those two addresses with "baseball bats."
Looking back, one shouldn't be totally surprised at Hirsh's blowup.
This is a guy who was impressed in early October that there was a three-week West Side of Manhattan theater production where "George W. Bush is going on trial once a night for war crimes, with the audience playing the part of his jury."
In June, Hirsh displayed intense paranoia over the "Leave" side's victory in June's Brexit vote in the UK and the rise of Donald Trump, claiming that "the movement once known as conservatism ... is taking on a new form, that of an unabashed, xenophobic nationalism."
Apparently, that paranoia and Trump's electoral victory sent Hirsh over the edge, as seen in these Facebook posts since deleted, but captured by the Daily Caller (with home addresses redacted; original contained the redacted "F-word"):
As the Daily Caller's Jonah Bennett explains:
Politico Editor RESIGNS After Publishing Home Addresses Of Alt-Right Icon Richard Spencer, Advocating For ‘Baseball Bats’
... “These posts were clearly outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and POLITICO editors regard them as a serious lapse of newsroom standards,” Politico Editor-In-Chief John Harris and Editor Carrie Budoff Brown told TheDCNF. “They crossed a line in ways that the publication will not defend, and editors are taking steps to ensure that such a lapse does not occur again.”
... Hirsh’s mention of Bund meetings is a reference to the German-American Bund, a Nazi organization in the United States active in the mid-to-late 1930s, which promoted National Socialist ideology and was often subject to violent attacks by Jewish mobsters in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, using baseball bats.
While the National Policy Institute and its ilk deserve to be monitored if they appear interested in crossing the line into criminality and pursued if they actually do so, it's a stretch for the Daily Caller to characterize Spencer as an "icon" of anything. The attendance at the group's recent post-election "National Policy Institute" meeting was 275, and that's apparently their high-water mark. Varsity basketball games at very small high schools attract more interest.
NPI is best seen as a go-to club — usually figurative, but apparently not always — for reporters to use on Donald Trump and his supporters whenever they feel the need to gratuitously smear him, even though, according to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, quoted in a lengthy article in Forbes, "Trump has disavowed their support 25 times."
The attention being paid to NPI and other similar groups is wildly disproportionate. It appears that this press obsession is inflicting a great deal of collateral damage, leading a few people who you would expect to know better into believing that they have to resort to violent means to attack a tiny fringe group with no meaningful influence — or worse, to threaten to assassinate the President-Elect himself in the false belief that he intends to pursue that group's agenda.
This has long since stopped being cute, or funny, or even politically effective. But, intended or not, it has irresponsibly increased the violent threat level.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
