by Roger Kimball
If you have been awake these last several days, you will know all about how the aspiring First Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, publicly slapped a former girlfriend so hard she spun around. I believe, but am not sure of the chronology, that that was after Emhoff inseminated the nanny he and his former wife had engaged to, well, possibly to help him in his task of “redefining masculinity.”
Let us draw a veil. It is impossible to distribute air-sickness bags through the internet, and I do not want my readers left with so nauseating a spectacle as Kamala Harris’s repulsive husband.
I realize, though, that, should you be so unfortunate as to acquire your news from the Propaganda Press — from The New York Times or The Washington Post, say, or from CNN, MSNBC, or the other legacy media outlets, it is doubtful that you will have run across the true story about Emhoff.
The reason is that telling that story would violate The Narrative that the Propaganda Press exists to support — whatever that Narrative happens to be today.
As an aside, I have often wondered where the scribes and pundits that staff the ranks of the Propaganda Press go to get their daily marching orders about The Narrative. Does it somehow arrive with the morning oat milk and boiled, free-range egg? Or is it a subtler process, akin to the way bees perform dances to inform their fellows where the nectar is? I suspect the process may be closer to what happens when a body dies. Within minutes, or even seconds, various insects are attracted to the corpse. They lay their eggs, much like a New York Times reporter files his story and the putrefaction proceeds.
However it happens, the Propaganda Press is always au courant. Had Doug Emhoff been a Republican, you can be sure a detailed chronicle of his misdeeds would be swelling the news cycle like a distended corpse. Cast your mind back to what the media did to Mitt Romney — Mitt Romney! — when he had the temerity to run against The Chosen One in 2008. He picked on a kid in high school. He rode to a summer vacation spot with his dog on the roof of his car. Really, you can’t make it up.
Of course, that was small beer compared to the disgusting fury that was unleashed against Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in 2019.
Those looking for the origin story of this partisan smear machine often adduce the campaign against Judge Robert Bork during his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court under Ronald Reagan. That unseemly episode, which had media trolls sifting through Bork’s trash and movie rentals for incriminating tidbits, culminated in Ted “Chappaquiddick” “waitress-sandwich” Kennedy’s scurrilous denunciation of Bork on the Senate floor. That originary instance of character assassination even contributed a new verb to the language: to bork.
All that is one side of what the Regime Party is about. Another side has been on view these last several days as the destruction and human misery left in the wake of Hurricane Helene has haltingly become public. As I write, the official death toll of that disaster is somewhere around 300. Reports from people on the ground say it is much higher, probably around 2000.
Quite apart from the human toll exacted by the storm, there are two things to note about the response of our government and the Propaganda Press struggling to control what reports leak out about that response.
First, notwithstanding the efforts of the Propaganda Press to keep a lid on the facts, it is now widely known that FEMA, the chief federal agency in charge of responding to such disasters, has failed miserably. What initially sparked public outrage was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ statement that, sorry, but the agency was out of money. He’d love to help but the “funds” were not there.
That was quickly followed by the news that, over the last 18 months or so, the Biden-Harris administration had spent some $1.4 billion to house, tend, and cater to illegal migrants (and how many billions have been siphoned off to Ukraine?). Hundreds of thousands of those migrants were salted around the country, especially to vulnerable counties in red states, where they were provided with cash stipends and housing at taxpayer expense. I note that Mayorkas, as head of the HSS, is also in charge (under “Border Czar” Kamala Harris) of that porous figment, the Southern border.
News that FEMA had plenty of money for migrants but none for the citizens of North Carolina and Tennessee was met with rage, especially as horrific stories of the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene piled up.
However, that fury was tame compared to the response to the news that not only was FEMA inert but also that it was actively hampering private efforts to aid those in distress. Probably the most high-profile such story came from Elon Musk, who described in several posts on X how his efforts to bring Starlink terminals to those without internet were being actively hampered by FEMA.
“SpaceX engineers,” he wrote in one post, “are trying to deliver Starlink terminals & supplies to devastated areas in North Carolina right now and @FEMA is both failing to help AND won’t let others help. This is unconscionable!!” Many other observers are echoing Musk’s sentiment. “We have seen report after report,” said one, “all saying the same thing. At first, they decided not to help. Now they are blocking people from helping. Criminal.”
The destructive Biden-Harris administration seems finally to have woken up to the PR dumpster fire in their midst and they have been squirting out cheery messages about what a great job FEMA is doing. The most nauseating clip I have seen is this one, which features “Marty,” who claims to be with FEMA, but who knows? Maybe he is just an actor. But he has the reassuring dress and look of somebody’s friendly uncle, calmly explaining that all will be well, and all manner of things will be well if only you get in line and file for your cup of porridge from the teat of the beneficent government bureaucracy.
I believe that the essential thing to understand about what FEMA is doing (and not doing) in places like North Carolina and Tennessee revolves around the Biden-Harris administration’s thoroughgoing efforts to weaponize government against any rivals. Residents of North Carolina and Tennessee were denied aid because in just 30 days they are likely to vote for Donald Trump. In other words, this deployment, or pseudo-deployment, of FEMA is just the latest sortie in the Democrats’s ongoing efforts at voter suppression.
If that sounds hyperbolic, you haven’t been paying attention. One of Lord D’Abernon’s most oft-quoted mots is this: “An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” Is that also true of an American’s mind? We’ll know in 30 days. Anyone with the future of the republic (including, you miserable wretch, John Kerry, the First Amendment) had better hope so.
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Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Image “Doug Emhoff” by Doug Emhoff and “Hurricane Helene storm damage” is by Rep. Diana Harshbarger.
