The dateline: October 24, 2015.
The cover of Time magazine? Art work of Donald Trump’s hair and face-melting. The headline: “Total Meltdown.”
In fact, the cover was the second Time cover depicting a melting Donald, the first running in August of 2016 and titled simply: “Meltdown”
The two covers can be seen here.
Inside the second cover story, the article is filled with those now priceless doom and gloom quotes from the GOP Establishment types. House Speaker Ryan is advising his House GOP candidates to fend for themselves in the face of what was seen as a looming disastrous loss for the party’s presidential nominee. A “large number” of voters were being “pulled disgustedly into the ranks of #nevertrump”. The Trump campaign was now reduced to nothing more than a “primal grunt.”
Then, ever so casually, comes the line that would signal the theme laced through not only Time’s story but reporting and commentary from the rest of the “mainstream media”. The line from Time: “It sounded, at times, like the last gasp of the angry white male.”
And there it was. The liberal media’s normalization of racism. Trump was “on track to lose” because Trump, went the heavy-handed implication, was a racist. So too were his supporters, openly disdained by Hillary Clinton as a “basket of deplorables”, the full quote as here reported by The New York Times:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” she said to applause and laughter. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
And on and on and on it went all through the campaign.
Over at The Washington Post, establishment Republican columnist Jennifer Rubin looked down her nose and did her own version of normalizing racism. The column headlined: “Trump’s party of angry, white, abusive males.”
Rubin dealt the race card this way, citing: “White, unhinged men, most well past their prime, acting abusively toward women.”
The line was so casually racist, sexist and ageist — and, typically, Rubin never even blanched to put it in print, nor did her paper. Rubin, without a hint of understanding the hypocrisy involved, quoted First Lady Michelle Obama thusly on Trump:
As Michelle Obama said: ‘I have to tell you that I listen to all this, and I feel it so personally. And I’m sure that many of you do, too — particularly the women. The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman? It is cruel. It is frightening.’
Not a word from Rubin that this is the very same Michelle Obama who has repeatedly campaigned or entertained at the White House one Jay Z, who has made the fortune he uses for contributions to both President Obama and Secretary Clinton by rapping out songs like this one, which - disgusting alert here — is titled “Pussy.”
The lyrics to this jewel — again be forewarned — read this way:
The power of the P-U-S-S-Y,
Thatz why every mutherfucka in the world dress fly.
Every baller
that can afford it they cop the best ride, for the power of the P-U-S-S-Y.
(Let's have some fun)
The power of the P-U-S-S-Y, thatz why niggaz get they hair cut, try to dress fly.Every baller that can afford it he cop the best ride.
For the Power of the P-U-S-S-Y.
To get just a glimpse of the depth of the hypocrisy involved, here is a Daily Mail story headlined this way:
- Mrs Obama went to the concert with her daughters at Soldier Field on Thursday night and a fan snapped them in the crowd
- The First Lady was in Chicago for a Democrat fundraiser
And yes indeed, there is a photo of Michelle Obama — with daughter Sasha and a big smile on her face — clearly enjoying Jay-Z’s rapping, the very same man who raps away with lyrics like that above — lyrics that are as racist and misogynistic as they are disgusting.
And from Rubin or her paper? Not a raised eyebrow.
Over at the Huffington Post was this day-after-the-election headline: "Angry White Men Triumphant."
The piece opened this way:
For the past eight years, America has had an African-American president. Faced with the prospect of a white woman succeeding him, America instead just elected an angry white man as president. Call it the triumph of angry white men everywhere. Millions of Americans are about to find out what it’s like to be led by the equivalent of the drunk uncle at the Thanksgiving table who refuses to follow the rules of politeness and political correctness. Was it a backlash against our first black president? Or rampant misogyny towards Hillary Clinton? Or just free-floating rage against a changing culture that is becoming more tolerant and multicultural by the year? It’s impossible to accurately say, really. The only thing that can be said for certain is that angry white men are now dominant.
One could go on and on with other examples from liberal media outlets and, but of course, liberal politicians. But let’s cut to the chase.
What has been going on for decades in the American liberal media - the “mainstream media” — is the normalization of racism. Under the guise of “political correctness” or “identity politics” or “diversity” or “multiculturalism” the liberal media has been mainstreaming the culture of racism that has been the political fuel for the progressive left and its political party of choice — the Democrats — for some 200-plus years.
An opportunity is rarely if ever missed to judge Americans by skin color. Whether its all those headlines and stories about the “angry white male” or that priceless photo of a smiling Michelle Obama at a concert by an “artist” who makes his bones spewing racist (and misogynistic) garbage, the fact is that racism has been mainstreamed — normalized” — into American politics and culture by liberals who piously pretend to be condemning it.
Long gone from the Left — and to be frank it was never really there to begin with (these are, recall, the political and ideological heirs to the party of slavery and segregation) — was the idea that America is a nation built around ideas of freedom and liberty and not race. The brief belief in Martin Luther King’s dream “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” has long been banished in the mainstream media, where everyone — and I do mean everyone — is judged by skin color.
If there is one thing that Americans can be hopeful for this Thanksgiving weekend, it is that the election victory of Donald Trump — an election victory fueled not by racists (as is, but of course, the popular liberal media lore of the day) — signals a return to the core principle as expressed by the Declaration of Independence. That being, of course, that “all men are created equal.”
The liberal media and their normalization of racism have at long last been roundly rejected by Americans. Let us hope that we can get back to the future envisioned by both the Declaration of Independence and Dr. King, the latter who said this of the Declaration’s promise in his “I Have a Dream” speech:
In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
Exactly right.
It is time — way, way past time — for the liberal media to stop obsessing over race and normalizing racism. It is time for Time and The Washington Post and The New York Times and the Huffington Post and all the rest to Just Stop It.
The question is: will they? Are they even capable of that kind of soul searching?
Call me skeptical — but hopeful.
