Words, Weapons and Rituals of the Left, and a Nod to J. L. Austin

 

 Anyone today who attempts to understand what is happening in the West (America, Europe) – the collapse into a cloaca that is the solipsistic Face Book pop culture, the avalanche of nihilism, the ciphers and the soft-totalitarian apparats, now seemingly unimpeded, closing their long, velvet-covered fingers around our necks – might wonder how a resurrected George Orwell would reflect on the rampant corruption that has greased the slide into this sewer.  

In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

Well, yes. This is, indeed, “our age,” politicized right down to the dictated pronoun assignation of transgendered whatever they fantasize they are and their restroom privileges, and you find yourself chocking on the daily output of the “mass of lies” from the sneering, self-infatuated pygmies resting on their glorified perches in the government, journalism, the entertainment industry, the NGOs and tenured professorships. Not to forget the social justice warrior CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or the vapid, preening Hollywood celebrities who never tire of massaging their bloated egos and publicly wallowing in their invincible ignorance.  

The aftermath of the recent leftist-inspired mob violence in Charlottesville with the Pravda-like organs of the mass media in high dudgeon has given us a clear and terrifying vision of the cultural Marxist monopolized control and manipulation of language that is used to shape the public perception of social conflict.

To get a better sense of what the left is all about with the relentless labeling of any and all opposition as fascist, racist, proponents of hatred, etc., and in the spirit of Orwell to try to understand how language in the service of ideology has become so corrupted, it might be helpful to consider the notion of “performative utterances” (hereafter, performatives) as developed by J. L. Austin, a British language philosopher from the last century.

From: How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962.

[Defining the Performative]

Utterances can be found… such that:

·      They do not ‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are  not ‘true or false,’ and

·      The uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would not normally be described as, or as ‘just,’ saying something.

Performatives, as Austin explains, are not, logically speaking, propositions, that is, assertions that can be shown to be true or false. They do not attempt to describe the world or to affirm or deny some aspect of reality. They are “utterances,” actions that change the social world. Austin gives a number of examples, but let me offer a couple to demonstrate the point.

A minister or priest performs a marriage ceremony and at the conclusion utters, “I pronounce you man and wife.” A judge at the conclusion of a trial says to the defendant, “I sentence you to ten years at hard labor.” Neither the minister nor the judge with these sentences describe the world; their utterances are socially sanctioned actions that change it. Now married, the couple has a different social status. The man and woman are viewed and treated differently, view themselves differently and have different roles, expectations and obligations than they had before the performative was made. Likewise, the accused now becomes a convicted criminal who is viewed and treated differently after the judge’s performative.

How then does this notion of performatives apply to the current efforts of the cultural Marxists to control and manipulate public perceptions of politics and morals? The left engages in a profound dissimulation that disguises what are actually performatives as demonstrable true propositions or assertions about reality. While they pretend to be describing someone or something, what they are really about is acting in a way that demoralizes and ultimately de-legitimates the status of those who may compete with them for power or resist their incursions into their lives. As employed by the left, these performatives do not inform; they deform people who refuse to conform. They are weapons the left uses to destroy those whom they always perceive as morally inferior beings, their enemies. Think of Hillary Clinton’s horrific “basket of deplorables” slur during the last Presidential campaign.

How, specifically, do these weaponized performatives work for the left? Let’s begin with oldest, the most reliable and the most predictable: “You are a fascist.” The speaker in making what appears grammatically to be an assertion depicting some feature of reality is really acting out in a well-established social ritual that seeks to alter social reality in two mutually reinforcing ways. First, it elevates the speaker’s social status as a morally superior and courageous person who recognizes evil and stands far above and against it. The speaker becomes immaculate. Second, the moral polarity comes into play and the “authority” of the accuser is established. Very good people must be opposed by very bad people, and what catch-all word seems to work best to capture all those malignancies associated with the villains who occupy the imaginations of the folks who write the opinion columns in the New York Times and who blabber on CNN and MSNBC– bigotry, intolerance, sexism, racism, etc.? “Fascist” works very nicely. There is, of course, no room for Fascists anywhere in “our democracy,” as they like to say (“our democracy” being their euphemism for “our invitation-only clubhouse”). Such an individual is morally contaminated, “irredeemable,” “not part of America” in Hillary Clinton’s parlance, someone beyond the pale, whose ideas and beliefs must be extinguished.

“Fascist” is one of the most important words in the lexicon of the left, wrenched from its historical, political moorings, so vague and protean that it is descriptively useless. Bearing only vague, emotional associations, it has been stripped of its referents, and thus serves as an all-purpose, expandable-contractible label for prospective targets who may pose as obstacles or irritants.

  

Once upon a time there were real flesh and blood fascists, people who were recognized as such because they actually called themselves “fascists,” dressed up in black shirts, took power for a time and talked about how great fascism was as compared to the decadent bourgeoisie. As we know, things turned out badly for them, and Benito Mussolini, the man who brought fascism to the world ended up as a battered corpse hanging upside down from a steel girder above a gas station in Milan next to his mistress, Claretta Petacci in 1945.

That marked the grisly end of fascism as embraced and practiced by people whom everyone, including themselves, recognized as fascists; as an ideology and a movement that attracted a mass following it was kaput, an attraction that has lingered on for a few out on the fringe.

It was Joseph Stalin who recognized the mobilizing power of the word, “fascist” and fashioned an abstract, malleable “fascist,” introducing a being, unlike Mussolini, immortal and ubiquitous (Leon Trotsky was “baptized” by Stalin as one). Fascists who populate the Stalinist universe can only be contained by their antipodes, thus, “anti-fascist,” a word which endows one thus designated with a heroic, moral invincibility. The anarchists during the Spanish civil war who raped and murdered nuns and burned down churches were anti-fascists and thus remain vanquished heroes who fought a losing battle for “democracy.” The antifas who attacked and beat up people recently at Charlottesville and other rallies are lauded predictably by Nicholas Scylla Kristof and Mitt Charybdis Romney as opponents of bigotry and hatred. Stalin’s “fascist” was the gift to the left that keeps on giving and every generation of leftists since his demise has happily and eagerly attached it to whomever displeases them, most recently Donald Trump and his supporters.     

The “You are a fascist” performative is the paradigm for the cultural Marxists’ engagement with all dissent and opposition. It moralizes the speaker, enveloping him with goodness and virtue. As well it immunizes him from (moral) criticism and (legal) accountability and at the same time demoralizes the accused making him into an enemy who represents an existential threat to their fictional “our democracy.” “Politics” for the left is shorthand for conniving at the destruction of the opposition, politically, always, physically, if possible.  

“Racism” works in tandem with “fascism.” “You are a racist” is a weaponized performative camouflaged as a descriptive, yet another one of the expulsion rituals that render the accused “untouchable” while confirming the impeccable moral credentials of the speaker. Like “fascist,” “racist” has migrated from being a word that once perhaps referred to real and distinguishable features of someone to a slippery, nebulous abstraction that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. This is why racism which has risen to the heights of a raging moral plague has of necessity been metastasizing into various strains such as, “covert racism,” “legacy racism,” “economic racism,” “environmental racism,” “systemic racism,” “institutional racism.” There is no relief, no escape from it; with this the left is refereeing a game of whack-a-mole that never ends.  

No one today accused of racism can prove the accusation to be false. This means that the accuser cannot be held accountable, and because of this, as long as the threat of being accused of racism is widely and commonly resisted and feared, the left will use it with increasing recklessness and indifference to whatever damage it does. It has worked to perfection for them; whenever the threat goes down, the white flag always goes up. So, it is a near certain prediction that the racism that plagues the West will continue to mount toward epidemic proportions.  

What Austin’s performative utterances may help us to understand is that for the left politics in all of its manifestations is war with no Geneva Convention-style restrains, with unconditional surrender as its end game. For them there is no compromise, no loyal opposition, no notion of fair play or rules of a civil society that limit what the players should do. We are the enemy. We forget it at our peril.

Hillary Clinton & Nicholas Kristiof: Bringing Self-Pity and Self-Righteousness Together

To put your gag reflex to the ultimate test, try watching the entire 55-minute interview of Hillary Clinton at the Women in the World  Summit  Women conducted by New York Times columnist and fake humanitarian, Nicholas Kristof.  It is hard to say which of the two is more revolting.  Hillary Clinton,  just when we thought she might go away, like Jason in the Friday the 13^th horror franchise – is  back, or, Nicholas Kristof, the Walter Duranty of our time, a relentless self-promoter, a tireless virtue signaler and a full-time water carrier for Hillary.  

The New York Times was one of the leading propaganda outlets for Hillary’s most recent failed bid to become the North American counterpart to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the Argentine (now, ex-) President, currently under indictment (Kirchner-corruption).  For those who don’t closely follow the horrors shows that make up South American politics, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner were the Bill and Hillary of the Pampas. This ambitious duo began as law school classmates. They married and quickly morphed into ruthless, leftist kleptocrats who ascended to the highest office in Argentina, governing as good Peronists always do, which is, to paraphrase President Obama  in 2010 addressing his adulators, “punish your enemies and reward your friends.”  

Cristina was luckier than Hillary, and not having the personality of an East German border guard probably didn’t hurt her either.  Unlike our own Lady Brezhnev of Chappaqua, la Señora Kirchner was able to succeed her husband, Nestor, as the first-elected woman President of Argentina in 2007.  He was bogged down by scandals and ill health and stepped aside after this first term for his wife to run. Nestor then in 2010 finally did his patriotic duty and died of a heart attack at age 60, leaving Cristina alone to complete the looting and exit office with multiple felonies hanging over her head.  One cannot help but wonder: if Hillary had won the recent election how soon Bill would have followed his Latin doppelganger to the great beyond.  The timing would have been perfect for her.  She no longer needed him. She never trusted him. She enjoys revenge and he did plenty to make her want it. Being a grieving widow for the Great Slickster would boost her poll numbers. No downside.

Back to the interview. The testosterone deficient Kristof who talks and comes off, for the lack of a better word, like a big sissy, one of those, goody-goody, suck-up-to-administration nerds from tenth grade student council, is always painful to watch.  A long-time Hillary court-lackey, Nicky was the right “woman” interlocutor in this Woman in the World Summit to bring out the inner-Hillary, the very best we have come to expect from the only Presidential candidate of a major party to run for office while under a major Federal investigation. 

Thus, he opens the conversation with the woman (shoe-in candidate) who shocked the world by losing to the man who Kristof spent months in his columns mocking as a clown, a buffoon, Mussolini-redux, who had no chance of winning: “We should offer you condolences, but maybe you should offer us condolences.”  This is vintage Kristof, oily, ingratiating, and, of course, needing to articulate at the beginning the premise of what this Summit is all about – holier-than-thou rituals of the privileged down-trodden, or as Bertrand Russell put it, the superior virtue of the oppressed.

Next comes the question we have all been breathlessly waiting for: “My social media followers want to know how Secretary Clinton is doing. So, [with a gentle therapist inflection] how are you doing?” Again, this is Kristof at his best.  Granted, he is a certified, high-placed Hillary-worshipper, but also being a Walter Duranty-style self-promoter, he wants everyone to know about his many “followers”.  He is not just any ordinary NYT leftwing know-it-all columnist like Tom Friedman: he feels your pain.  He is the voice of the voiceless, the personification of a movement.  Kristof knows well how his role in this encounter is to be played.  He must, Oprah-like, hit all the right therapeutic, inspirational cords.  Everyone has to feel good -- self-esteem can be fragile.  Shortly after the November election one of Kristof’s columns was “a 12 Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump.”  In the interview Kristof also had to adroitly channel the audience’s warmth, admiration and affection, but most importantly, the appreciation for Hillary’s goodness and selflessness had to be enhanced.    

This lead-off question, the “humanizing” question, is also the entrée into the perfectly choreographed, perhaps, first ever coronation of a loser.  Hillary’s response is, well, very Hillary with a minute or two about “long walks in the woods”, being a grandmother and some smelling the roses falderal.  The irony, of course, is that Hillary’s efforts to humanize herself simply make her look even more like what she really is and always has been– a soulless, political robot. Her answer comes off as – “let me get this obligatory and annoying preliminary Grandma nonsense quickly out of the way, and get down to the fundamentals: how wonderful I am, how terrible for the country that I lost and how unfair it all is to me.”  Welcome to a vast, collective spectacle of self-righteous self-pity.

What is so remarkable about this interview is how timeless it is, capturing Hillary as we have known her for decades.  There is not the slightest trace of humility. She always projects her short-comings on to her enemies who thwart her at every turn.  She appears to have no sense of responsibility for her failure and a barely dissimulated, pathological resentment for any and all who might question her sense of entitlement to power.  In her mind and in those of her followers, she did not lose the election. It was stolen from her.  She had underestimated the size of the “basket of deplorables” and the depths of its depravity.  A country with more of the right kind of people in it would have responded to her with a landslide. America last November was just not good enough for her.  With her superior virtue, talents, experience, whatever political legitimacy remains in the land rightfully belongs to her, and now, after a couple of “walks in the woods” she is rested and back. She intends to be “the real” President: Trump is the pretender.

Lest this be doubted, view the portion of the interview which is really the only piece in this self-serving farce that matters. Kristof finally gets to the point:  will you ever run for office again?  Everyone knows in advance what the real answer is.  Disappointing but entirely predictable is the artless response starting with fake hyperventilating, frantically clutching her bosom and some spastic head bobs, followed by several minutes of the usual sort of incoherent verbal smog that Hillary blows out whenever she gets a question she does not want to answer.

The question is not, will she run for office again, rather, it’s how much millage is left in the Clinton political machine.  As long the rich donors (foreign and domestic) give her money, potential rivals back off, and the stooges in the commentariat like Kristof continue to faun over her she will never give up.  There is nothing inside of her other than her sociopathic drive to be in power.  Right now it looks as if once again, we need to be Ready for Hillary.                   

              

Nicholas Kristof -- Away with the Hitler Metaphors

You have to give the devil his due, and the devil I speak of is Nicholas Kristof, a preening, self-righteous ideologue who pretends to be a journalist. He belongs to a very exclusive troupe of professional pontificators known as New York Times columnists.  These haughty sycophants serve the Democrat party in a Pravda sort of way, predictably parroting its officially sanctioned propaganda talking points and relentlessly hectoring and smearing any and all outliers who might resist the iron fisted orthodoxy peddled by the “progressives”.  For the shills who man the loud speakers of progressive politics the only obstacle to the complete institutionalization of the progress they envision for all of the lesser lights under their tutelage is the moral malignancy of the political opposition, immersed as it always is in the evil of racism and its progeny, sexism, homophobia, and on we go to infinity. There can be no good faith opposition to progressive policies which embody everything that is good, just mean, selfish people who discriminate and hate. Boiled down to its essence progressive politics is about really good people who should be in charge (them), and very bad ones who should not (us). 

By my count there are nine of these regular pulpiteers, the best known likely being the globe-trotting, blow hard, Thomas Friedman, a prolific but mediocre wordsmith unsurpassed in being able to say so much about things of which he knows so little.  A close second might be the supremely arrogant and condescending Paul Krugman, a master of vitriol who at some point forsook economics to become a party scribbler, a hack ideologue who preaches only to his own little choir.  Oh yes, and there is the NYT-designated resident “conservative” in the claque, David Brooks, who in 2008 swooned over the “crease” in Obama’s slacks, an intellectual pretender who seems to be taken seriously only by himself.

But my favorite, as suggested above, is Nicholas Kristof who is the complete New York Times columnist package, political correctness incarnate. He is more akin to the “good cop” of the NYT enforcers and goes busily about, hither and yon, proclaiming himself as the “voice” of the oppressed, specifically, those “victims” chosen by the Democrats and most recently by Hillary Clinton.  These are the various mythically persecuted legions who needed protection from the rampant bigotry of the millions of “deplorable” voters who for some inexplicable reason could not stomach the prospect of a professional grifter and her sexual predator consort once again polluting the rooms of the White House.  

More in contact with reality than Friedman, more condescending but less openly arrogant and vitriolic than Krugman, less ponderous and intellectually pretentious than Brooks, Kristof is the perfect progressive -- earnest, oozing with compassion, his sensitive moral antennas ever alert to pick up the faintest signals of any of the “isms” or “obias” (racism, sexism, xenophobia, “you name it”, as Hillary croaked to her LGBT groupies in New York) wafting up from and infesting those vast regions of the country outside of the DC Beltway, Manhattan, Boston, Hollywood, and our staunch bastions of free-speech and moral courage, the universities.    

You have to experience Kristof in person – his irritating, prissy sounding voice and goody-two-shoes demeanor -- to really appreciate what a smarmy, self-promoting, snake oil salesman he is. Some years ago I sat through a slide show he gave at a university in Ohio, the content, as I vaguely remember, the tear-jerking details of one of his many sojourns through a third world hell hole.  All in all, however, the talk was all about Kristof.  He is a master of what now is called “virtue signaling” – following the proper grievance mongering protocols, publically voicing your deep concern for the oppressed, the point being that everyone needs to know that goodness beats in your heart -- and a university audience was the perfect venue for him to hit all of the right notes to demonstrate his compassion for the right kinds of people, who are, of course, victimized by the worst sorts of people, and, we all know who those people are.

Kristof’s columns as well are tributes to his virtue.  The best of his most recent efforts came shortly after his world came a tumbling down with the election of Donald Trump.  Thus: “A Twelve Step Program for Responding to President-Elect Trump.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/a-12-step-program-for-responding-to-president-elect-trump.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fnicholas-kristof&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection&_r=0

This piece is vintage Kristof, just the title alone with Kristof playing the therapist for the traumatized millions who, unfortunately, believed the the New York Times pundits as they confidently proclaimed that Hillary would follow Obama into the White House.  Things didn’t quiet work out the way the wise men thought they were supposed to, and the surprise election of the “racist”, “sexist”, “xenophobic”, “you name it” Trump was not simply an electoral defeat for the progressives. It is now, you see, January 30, 1933 once again, and Adolf Benito Grand Kleagle Trump will soon be resting his jack booted feet on the White House coffee tables. When you make every possible effort to paint your opponent as Hitler, Mussolini, the voice of the Klan, too vicious, stupid and incompetent to win – and he wins, yikes! – well, “it’s your party and you can cry if you want to.” But reality must at some point intrude even for Saint Nicholas. The Reichstag is not on fire. Time for the grief counselors to go home.  Kristof must rally the cry babies.

 “A Twelve Step Program” does not read well on a queasy stomach, but it does capture the essence of the ideology that defines Kristof’s New York Times hermetic world. Here we go.

“I will accept that my side lost, but I won’t acquiesce in injustice and I will gird for battle on issues I care about.”  Yeah, “gird for battle” -- wouldn't you like to see Nicky in a You Tube video girding himself up. As noted above, the opposition does not operate in good faith and its victory in the election means the subversion of justice. The “battle” will continue which means the racism-sexism propaganda barrage will be ramped up.  Much of what Kristof writes turns into verbal smog:  what exactly would he be doing if he “acquiesced in injustice”?  As if anyone would suggest that he would – more virtue signaling.

“I will avoid demonizing people who don’t agree with me about this election, recognizing that it’s as wrong to stereotype Trump supporters as anybody else.” Well, this sounds nice and civil of him, but don’t get your hopes up, because … “I’ll call a local mosque to offer support, or join an interfaith event. I will sign up for an “accompany my neighbor” list if one exists for my area, to be an escort for anyone who is now in fear.”  The horror, the fear, yes, indeed.  Kristallnacht is next on the agenda.  You see, those Trump supporters he instructed you not to demonize are now out on the streets hoping to be able to beat up your Muslim neighbors on their way to prayer.  As I recall, the last ethnic people in the U.S. to be rounded up and placed in detention camps were Japanese Americans, done under the administration of … wait a minute …. Democrat Patron Saint, Franklin D. Roosevelt, opposed by Democrat arch villain, J. Edgar Hoover.

“I will avoid Hitler metaphors, recognizing that they stop conversations and rarely persuade.”  This one is really worth parsing.  The Nazi name-calling tactic didn’t work so well for the election. “Nazi” and “Republican” have been interchangeable for long time, so maybe a different approach is needed. Kristof counsels his readers to eschew Hitler metaphors not because he believes they are wrong, but because those rubes who voted for the Klansman aren’t buying it. 

“I’ll do my part to support the society I’d like to see. I’ll eat Chobani yogurt because its owner has been subjected to racist attacks for his willingness to hire and promote refugees. Likewise, I will give blood and register for organ donation — for at least they’ll make me feel better. As will a tub of Chobani.”  This might be the best one of all.  You eat the politically correct food, feel good about yourself, (feeling good about yourself is really what this is all about) and …. “support the society [you’d] like to see”. Clearly, he doesn’t like the society he sees now. And, what kind of society might that be?  One without racists. Kristof is a one trick pony and yet once more, the de rigueur “racist” smear.  Of what race are refugees?

“I may not be able to prevent a sexual predator from reaching the White House, but at events I attend, I may be able to prevent a sexual predator from assaulting a drunken partygoer.” Whoa, where did this come from? Maybe Kristof is laying awake nights in anguish, worrying that President Trump will be lounging in the Oval Office commandeering blow jobs from the twenty-something interns he keeps in tow and ejaculating on their dresses. With Hillary and Bill back in the White House, this, of course, would never have been a concern. But we will look forward in the times ahead for reports from Kristof’s heroic efforts at stopping sexual predators from assaulting drunks at parties. Perhaps there are a lot of them in the parties he goes to.  Maybe Bill Clinton will be at some of them with his travel pal from the “Lolita Express,” convicted sex-offender, Jeffrey Epstein.    

“I will not lose hope. I will keep reminding myself that politics zigs and zags, and that I can do more than shout in the wind. I can fight for my values even between elections, and even at the micro level I can mitigate the damage to my neighbors and attempt to heal a social fabric that has been rent.”  This is step 12, the last chirp in this particular installment of “fight the good fight” from the ideological cocoon Kristof lives in.  What is he hoping for? What is the “social fabric that has been rent”, and how does one "heal a social fabric"? This is some sort of therapeutic-sounding babble. What is “damage” that has been done his neighbors? The person they voted for lost the election.  In an election someone has to lose. “What is the “mitigation” involved?  None of these questions Kristof could answer in language that connects with anything other than the abstract, anodyne pieties that he constantly employs to bolster his delusions of moral heroism and perfection. His agony is now that the wrong people are now in charge, and he will continue toiling away with his non-stop accusations of hatred and bigotry.

Nicholas Kristof, the Walter Duranty of the 21st Century

The 2016 election is over and, against all odds and expectations, the candidate all time most loathed by the New York Times columnists won. Worth a parting comment on the corruption of the NYT hacks who slobber about the endless virtue of their favorite Democrats is a pre-election column, with its typical smarmy condescension, from the ever self-promoting columnist, Nicholas Kristof.  “I'm with her: the Strengths of Hillary Clinton.”  “So in this last column before the election I want to pitch you the reasons to vote for Clinton and not just against Donald Trump. I’ve known Clinton a bit for many years, and I have to say: The public perception of her seems to me a gross and inaccurate caricature. I don’t understand the venom, the “lock her up” chants, the assumption that she is a Lady Macbeth; it’s an echo of the animus a lifetime ago some felt for Eleanor Roosevelt.” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/im-with-her-the-strengths-of-hillary-clinton.html?_r=0 l

Ok, reader, all of this Hillary negativity nonsense over the years you’ve been exposed to is not real. Right at the start Kristof wants you to be aware of and bow to his privileged, insider-club status – unlike you, he knows her (“a bit”), just “a bit” of understatement for fake modesty purposes.
He wants to make sure you understand how connected he is, and for many years, no less. If I may, this is epistemological superiority by physical proximity – ‘What I know from socializing with her, trumps (no pun intended) what you know from observing her for 25 years from afar.’ The nonstop grifting, the scandals, the self-enrichment from influence peddling, as Kristof sees it, are overblown. We are talking venal, not mortal sins here. 

The invocation of Eleanor Roosevelt is quite the slick maneuver – poof goes Hillary’s many documented iniquities – beatitude by association.  Long bequeathed with liberal sainthood, that “animus a lifetime ago that some felt” for Mrs. Roosevelt way back when has just somehow annoyingly echoed its way up to 2016.  Stuff like this normally happens. Not every one out there is as enlightened as they should be.  Kristof doesn’t even have to spell out who that “some” is that felt this animus -- in Lady Roosevelt’s time it was the reactionaries who opposed the New Deal and objected to Eleanor’s favorite philo-communist, Henry Wallace; today, it is that “vast right wing conspiracy” and Obama’s “bitter clingers” who never tire of defaming this woman who, as he says, “is a morally serious person whose passion for four decades has been to use politics to create a more just society.”  She is also an avariciously serious person who along with her husband has accumulated a vast fortune selling government influence to high rollers, many of them from foreign countries.  She is also a seriously hypocritical person who slanders and bullies female victims of her husband while championing herself as an advocate for women. See: http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-question-hillary-cannot-answer.html

 

It is also worth noting here that Kristof has a certain blindness for fakers.  “In 2014, Newsweek revealed that Somaly Mam—the Cambodian anti-trafficking crusader endorsed by Nicholas Kristof, Sheryl Sandberg, and Susan Sarandon—lied about being sold into sexual slavery as a child, the story that underpins her wrenching memoir, The Road to Lost Innocence.” https://medium.com/galleys/greg-mortenson-disgraced-author-of-three-cups-of-tea-believes-he-will-have-the-last-laugh-760949b1f964#.c7gyfoakv  Kristof also continued to defend Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea after he was exposed as a fraud.  “‘One of the people I’ve enormously admired in recent years is Greg Mortenson,’Kristof wrote in his April 20, 2011 column. While conceding that the accusations against Mortenson ‘raised serious questions,’ Kristof countered that ‘it’s indisputable that Greg has educated many thousands of children, and he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.’”https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-con-man-and-his-pet-columnist/  Being a fraud and a liar, for Kristof it seems, doesn’t seem count  too much against you.  In light of this, how seriously should we take his endorsement of Hillary Clinton, widely distrusted by the American people as a liar and a fraud?

Since Kristof likes to find “echos” of long ago, raise your ears and catch this echo:  Nicholas Kristof as the Walter Duranty of the 21^st century. Walter Duranty, a British born journalist served as the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times from 1922 through 1936.  Like Kristof, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner. Duranty’s was bestowed for 13 articles written in 1931 and published in the New York Times analyzing the Soviet Union under Stalin’s leadership.  Unfortunately, these articles were devoted to the crafting of a false image of Joseph Stalin as someone whose obvious crudeness and brutality could be excused as the darker side of of a great and determined man whose better instincts were focused on the advancing the well being of toiling working class whose interests he claimed to represent. 

Duranty, like Kristof, was an insider with the power people.  He “knew” Stalin "a bit" for many years.  He witnessed Stalin’s show trials up close in the mid-1930s in Moscow and confidently declared to The New Republic after observing the 1937 trial that he found the confessions of the defendants to be credible.  [S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow, Oxford, 1990, 267]

Like Kristof, Duranty was an apologist for a dishonest, ruthless politician and served him (in Kristof's case, her) well.  He was rewarded for his loyalty with what he craved the most, proximity to a powerful man, the prestige and attention that this proximity brings.  His gratitude was displayed by his eagerness to promulgate to the outside world a softened and idealized image of Stalin. Duranty helped Stalin conceal from the outside world a famine of his creation in Ukraine that plunged three to seven million people into starvation, depending on varying accounts. “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition, especially in the Ukraine, North Caucasus and Lower Volga” Duranty had written in 1933 at the time when people were starving by the millions. [Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist, 207]  The late Robert Conquest has written Harvest of Sorrow,  the definitive account of Holomodor, Stalin’s Ukrainian holocaust.

https://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Sorrow-Soviet-Collectivization-Terror-Famine/dp/0195051807  And by the way, in the New York Times executive offices hallway where over 80 portraits of Pulitzer Prize winners hang, Duranty’s still resides with the inscription that the award recognized “a profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia [consistent with] the best type of foreign correspondence.”  [Douglas McCollam, CJR, November/December, 2003, 43]

Back, however, to Duranty’s power-sucking echo in Kristof: here, the court weasel does a bit of his own sycophantic softening: “Clinton has made thousands of compromises and innumerable mistakes, her pursuit of wealth has been unseemly and politically foolish, and it’s fair to question her judgment on everything from emails to Iraq. But understand this, too: At the core she is not a calculating crook but a smart, hard-working woman who  is profoundly concerned with getting things done for those left behind.”  Again, a very skillful touch. Hillary is not perfect (he has to make some nod to the empirical world), and here comes the imperative: “But understand this” – Kristof now is pulling rank on us.  He has the deep insight into her “core”, an interesting choice of words given that she is widely perceived to lack one. Perhaps the proximity she has afforded him over the years has enabled him to peek into her soul – the cocktail parties, the interviews, the hobnobbing. But, understand this: if Kristof was not an effusive bum-kisser, how close would he have ever been able to get to this “seriously moral" woman and observe her core?

Kristof’s airbrushing of Hillary (who just like Stalin is all about bettering the toiling masses, the “left behind”) would be incomplete without an obligatory final thrashing for The Donald. “[Trump] simply falls outside the norms: A fraudster who seems a racist, who has cheated people not only at Trump University but regularly through his career, who boasts of sexual assaults and whom 17 women have publicly accused of improper behavior, who has flip-flopped 138 times by one count, who lies every five minutes by another, and who has less public service experience than any incoming president in history.”  This could be a cut-and-paste from any of the hundreds of NYT and Washington Post editorial pieces over the last months.  Every Republican candidate since Richard Nixon has been routinely labeled by the Democrats and their shills who mascaraed as independent journalists with the "old reliables" -- “Nazi”, “KKK-er”, “Fascist”, ad infinitum.   

Kristof recently wrote a NYT column, “Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-is-everyone-a-little-bit-racist.html?_r=0

What is to made of this? So, Kristof himself must be a little bit racist? How then do Republicans and Trump differ from Democrats? What happens to the handy-dandy, old-reliable “racist” smears of NYT scribblers? 

Don't waste your time trying to decipher Kristof's silly meanderings. His columns are a just reflection and verification of his status as a court lackey who recycles the prescribed PC bilge, a stooge who loves to hang out with important people and then brag about it to his credulous readers.

Kristof’s “racism” charge has become a word largely empty of specific meaning, used to condemn a critic as, well … a very bad person.  “Racism” is a broad brush assault, perhaps unique in its smearing capacity in that, unlike with other kinds of allegations of moral or legal culpability, once charged, there is no way to demonstrate that you are not a racist. It is possible to prove that you are not a liar, a fool, a rapist, a robber, and a plagiarist; you can never effectively dispute the claim that you are a racist.  No protest or evidence counts. Name one person who has ever been successful in doing it?  Being a racist now is sort of like it was to have “cooties” back when you were in fifth grade.  There was no remedy for the mysterious virus of cooties and you were deemed infected because someone decided that they didn’t like you.  

Kristof is the complete NYT columnist package – self-promoting, condescending and a tool for the rich and powerful.  No thoughtful person should take him seriously.