In June 2018, just before then-President Donald Trump was set to meet him, The New York Times took a gander at North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong-un, and the creative way he rides herd over his people.
The Times noted that Kim used execution, rape, torture, starvation, forced abortion, and other ghoulish devices to keep his constituents in line.
Such “extreme brutality,” the Times said, was designed to enforce “an all-encompassing indoctrination machine that takes root from childhood to propagate an official personality cult and to manufacture absolute obedience” to Kim. “Independent thought is bred out and propaganda glorifying the state is plentiful,” the Times said.
Here in the United States, we’ve now reached a point where American journalists see it as their responsibility to enforce a similar “personality cult” around President Joe Biden.
In the United States, this thinking goes, now criticizing our own Dear Leader is akin to overthrowing the government – as a recent piece in the left-wing New Republic makes clear.
There, columnist Jason Linkins defended a recent idea by The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank that the national media needed to grow ever more partisan – as if that were possible – to defend, promote and protect Democratic policies, if not Biden himself.
“Blind fealty to heads of state is the hallmark of dictatorships, not democracies,” Linkins noted in his column on Saturday, in a sop to potential critics from the right.
But then he gave the game away.
“Milbank”, he wrote, “successfully brought attention to a more urgent underlying matter: The GOP is the enemy of democracy, full stop.”
“It’s not Democrats who are waging a well-funded war to suppress the vote, reviving Jim Crow–era electoral tactics, installing apparatchiks and gaming the rules to subvert voter intentions, chasing dedicated election officials out of their posts with threats and intimidation, or fomenting political violence. These are the deeds of Republicans alone, and Milbank’s willingness not to subject the matter to the media’s pathological ‘both-sides’ tendencies should be commended.”
Yes, it’s all the GOP that’s to blame.
No matter that in the 2016 election, the Democratic candidate paid foreign operatives from a hostile power to dig up dirt on her opponent, and then leaked that wholly concocted brew to a friendly administration, whose bureaucrats spent the next four years harassing and undermining a duly elected Republican president with innuendo and rumors that have all fallen apart.
And no matter that the current occupant of the White House is the one who mandates forced vaccines because he’s run out of patience with the American people.
Or that he ignores legitimate adverse Supreme Court rulings to impose his agenda.
Or that he issues countless decrees that his own party treat as if they have the weight of law, while actual lawmakers are relegated to the sidelines.
Or that he turns his military and his people against each other by citing and promoting provable lies about “white supremacy.”
Or that he throws open the nation’s borders to illegal immigrants, despite concerns about potential illegal activity beyond the first offense of breaking into the country, in the hope of seizing permanent political advantage for his party.
Yes, and for this Dear Leader, our national media pretzels itself into an “all-encompassing indoctrination machine” to champion him as a savior of the very democracy he routinely hobbles and hinders with his lies, radical policies, and half-baked history.
The irony is that we grow ever more like the enemies of democracy criticize and which we’re supposed to guard against.
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