“It is no surprise that his Wikipedia entry refers to him as a white nationalist without the slightest hint of evidence to justify that slur,” Frank Miele writes of me in his very kind review of my new book, “Unmasking Obama.”
Upon reading that, I laughed and said to myself, “Well that’s an improvement.” The last time I checked my Wikipedia entry I was listed as a “pornographer.”
Nothing against Wikipedia. It’s a brilliant service. I donate from time to time. The problem Wikipedia faces is the problem all internet sites face: leftist trolls who have nothing better to do with their lives than mess with the lives of others.
Watching these clowns go about their business, amateur and professional, I am reminded of a scene in Ray Bradbury’s 1951 dystopian sci-fi classic, “Fahrenheit 451.”
In the way of background, 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns. In the novel, the state employs “firemen” to burn paper lest the few civilians who care about books avail themselves of information the state does not want them to have.
“Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?” a young woman asks her friend. The friend tells her she has been misinformed. “Strange,” she answers. “I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.”
Years ago, young journalists aspired to gather information and spread it. Today, however, the firemen on the left, like those in Bradbury’s novel, aspire to destroy inconvenient information before it can spread.
At the risk of sounding sexist, I will use the term “firemen” both in homage to Bradbury and in recognition that men take to this dirty work with more relish than women.
The firemen have numerous ways of messing with the news: defaming opposition journalists, mocking their work, exposing their past sins, trivializing their information and twisting their facts, among others.
At the amateur level, firemen routinely subvert the Wikipedia pages of perceived opponents, write one-star book reviews of their work on Amazon, and troll the “comment” sections of conservative journals.
Former CBS journalist Sharyl Attkisson saw the mission shift up close. “After Watergate,” she writes, “few would have predicted today’s dynamic in which some journalists view their job not as questioning the powers that be, but undermining those who report on the powers that be.”
For the next three months, the firemen have no greater goal than incinerating news that is unflattering to the Democratic cause and burying the ashes. Like Bradbury’s firemen, they do not want people to know what they are not supposed to know.
Two recent examples help clarify the role of the firemen. When a group of doctors spoke positively about hydroxychloroquine a couple weeks back, the professional firemen smeared the doctors in print, the amateurs reposted and retweeted the smears, and then their pals in the social media kicked the docs off their respective platforms. Can’t have a cure before election.
Early Sunday morning in Washington, D.C., three shooters took aim at a large crowd gathered for a block party, killing one, critically injuring a D.C. cop and wounding at least 20 others.
Although this was the largest mass shooting of 2020, the major media did a heroic job of ignoring the story. The fact that all the victims were black should have earned it added attention in an era when black lives are alleged to matter.
In America’s newsrooms, however, black lives only matter when a white male, preferably a cop, is responsible for the death.
So Christopher Brown, the unarmed 17-year-old killed in the melee, will be forgotten by all but his family before the week is out. The amateur firemen will spread no hectoring, self-righteous memes in his honor. And the reasons for the catastrophically high crime rates in black neighborhoods will continue to go unexamined.
For the big-time firemen, these stories are all just practice runs, dumpster fires. The test will come if, hopefully when, U. S. Attorney John Durham drops his Obamagate report.
The firemen at the Washington Post are already rushing to the scene, matches in hand. “Barr may try to spin his ‘investigation’ before the election,” claimed a Post headline a week ago. “Don’t believe him.”
No, of course not. We’ll believe the Post. After all, the Post won the Pulitzer in 2018 “for its revelatory examination of Russian interference in the 2016 election, possible links between the Trump campaign and Kremlin agents, and the U.S. response.”
And no, that’s not a punch line to a joke.
Note: @jackcashill’s forthcoming book, “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency,” is available for pre-order at Amazon.
