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NEW YORK: I am sitting in the auditorium at The New York Times. It is the first time I have been back in nearly two decades. It will be the last. The newspaper is a pale reflection of what it was when I worked there, beset by numerous journalistic fiascos, rudderless leadership and myopic cheerleading of the military debacles in the Middle East, Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza, where one of the Times contributions to the mass slaughter of Palestinians was an editorial refusing to back an unconditional ceasefire. Many seated in the auditorium are culpable.
I am here, however, not for them but for the former executive editor they are honoring, Joe Lelyveld, who died earlier this year. He hired me. His departure from the Times marked the paper’s steep descent. On the front page of the program of the memorial, the year of his death is incorrect — emblematic of the sloppiness of a newspaper that is riddled with typos and errors. Reporters I admire, including Gretchen Morgenson and David Cay Johnston, who are in the auditorium, were pushed out once Lelyveld left, replaced by mediocrities.
Lelyveld’s successor Howell Raines – who had no business running a newspaper – singled out the serial fabulist and plagiarizer, Jayson Blair, for swift advancement and alienated the newsroom through a series of tone deaf editorial decisions. Reporters and editors rose up in revolt. He was forced out along with his equally incompetent managing editor.
Lelyveld came back for a brief interim. But the senior editors who followed were of little improvement. They were full-throated propagandists – Tony Judt called them “Bush’s useful idiots” – for the war in Iraq. They were true believers in the weapons of mass destruction. They suppressed, at the government’s request, an expose by James Risen about warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the National Security Agency until the paper found out it would appear in Risen’s book. They peddled for two years the fiction that Donald Trump was a Russian asset. They ignored the contents from Hunter Biden’s laptop that had evidence of multimillion dollar influence peddling and labeled it “Russian disinformation.” Bill Keller, who served as executive editor after Lelyveld, described Julian Assange, the most courageous journalist and publisher of our generation, as “a narcissistic dick, and nobody’s idea of a journalist.” The editors decided identity, rather than corporate pillage with its mass layoffs of 30 million workers, was the reason for Trump’s rise, leading them to deflect attention from the root cause of our economic, political and cultural morass. Of course, that deflection saved them from confronting corporations, such as Chevron, which are advertisers. They produced a podcast series called Caliphate, based on invented stories of a con artist. They most recently ran a story by three journalists — including one who had never before worked as a reporter and had ties with Israeli intelligence, Anat Schwartz, who was subsequently fired after it was disclosed that she “liked” genocidal posts against Palestinians on Twitter — on what they called “systematic” sexual abuse and rape by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions on Oct. 7. It also turned out to be unsubstantiated. None of this would have happened under Lelyveld.
Reality rarely penetrates the Byzantine and self-referential court of The New York Times, which was on full display at Lelyveld’s memorial. The former editors spoke — Gene Roberts being an exception — with a cloying noblesse oblige, enthralled with their own splendor. Lelyveld became a vehicle to revel in their privilege, an unwitting advertisement for why the institution is so woefully out of touch and why so many reporters and much of the public despise those who run it.
We were regaled with all the perks of elitism: Harvard. Summers in Maine. Vacationing in Italy and France. Snorkeling in a coral reef at a Philippine resort. Living in Hampstead in London. The country house in New Paltz. Taking a barge down the Canal du Midi. Visits to the Prado. Opera at The Met.
Luis Buñuel and Evelyn Waugh skewered these kinds of people. Lelyveld was part of the club, but that was something I would have left for the chatter at the reception, which I skipped. That was not why the handful of reporters in the room were there.
Lelyveld, despite some attempts by the speakers to convince us otherwise, was morose and acerbic. His nickname in the newsroom was “the undertaker.” As he walked past desks, reporters and editors would try to avoid his glance. He was socially awkward, given to long pauses and a disconcerting breathy laugh that no one knew how to read. He could be, like all the popes who run the church of The New York Times, mean and vindictive. I am sure he could also be nice and sensitive, but this was not the aura he projected. In the newsroom he was Ahab, not Starbuck.
I asked him if I could take a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard after covering the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, wars that capped nearly two decades of reporting on conflicts in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
“No,” he said. “It costs me money and I lose a good reporter.”
I persisted until he finally told the foreign editor, Andrew Rosenthal, “tell Hedges he can take the Nieman and go to hell.”
“Don’t do it,” Andy, whose father was the executive editor before Lelyveld, warned. “They will make you pay when you come back.”
Of course, I took the Nieman.
Halfway through the year Lelyveld called.
“What are you studying?” he asked.
“Classics,” I answered.
“Like Latin?” he asked.
“Exactly,” I said.
There was a pause.
“Well,” he said, “I guess you can cover the Vatican.”
He hung up.
When I returned, he put me in purgatory. I was parked on the metropolitan desk without a beat or assignment. On many days I stayed at home and read Fyodor Dostoevsky. At least I got my paycheck. But he wanted me to know I was nothing.
I met with him in his office after a couple of months. It was like talking to a wall.
“Do you remember how to write a story?” he asked, caustically.
I had not yet, in his eyes, been suitably domesticated.
I walked out of his office.
“That guy is a fucking asshole,” I said to the editors at the desks in front of me.
“If you don’t think that got back to him in 30 seconds you are very naïve,” an editor told me later.
I did not care. I was struggling, often through too much drinking at night to blot out my nightmares, with trauma from many years in war zones, trauma in which neither Lelyveld nor anyone else at the paper took the slightest interest. I had far greater demons to battle than a vindictive newspaper editor. And I did not love The New York Times enough to become its lapdog. If they kept it up, I would leave, which I soon did.
I say all this to make it clear that Lelyveld was not admired by reporters because of his charm or personality. He was admired because he was brilliant, literate, a gifted writer and reporter and set high standards. He was admired because he cared about the craft of reporting. He saved those of us who could write — a surprising number of reporters are not great writers — from the dead hand of copy editors.
He did not look at a leak by an administration official as gospel. He cared about the world of ideas. He made sure the book review section had gravitas, a gravitas that disappeared once he left. He distrusted militarists. (His father had been a conscientious objector in World War II, although later became an outspoken Zionist and apologist for Israel.) This, frankly, was all we wanted as reporters. We did not want him to be our friend. We already had friends. Other reporters.
He came to see me in Bosnia in 1996 shortly after his father died. I was so absorbed in a collection of short stories by V.S. Pritchett that I lost track of the time. I looked up to find him standing over me. He did not seem to mind. He, too, read voraciously. Books were a connection. Once, early in my career, we met in his office. He quoted from memory lines from William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Adam’s Curse”:
…A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.
“You still have to find your voice,” he told me.
We were the sons of clergymen. His father was a rabbi. Mine was a Presbyterian minister. Our fathers had participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements. But that is where our family similarities ended. He had a deeply troubled childhood and distant relationship with his father and mother, who suffered from nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts. There were long periods when he did not see his parents, shuttled off to friends and relatives, where he wondered as a child if he was worthless or even loved, the subject of his memoir “Omaha Blues”.
We rode in my armored jeep to Sarajevo. It was after the war. In the darkness he talked about his father’s funeral, the hypocrisy of pretending that the children from the first marriage got along with the family of the second marriage, as if, he said, “we were all one happy family.” He was bitter and hurt.
He writes in his memoir of a rabbi named Ben, who “had zero interest in possessions,” and was a surrogate father. Ben had, in the 1930s, challenged racial segregation from his synagogue in Montgomery, Alabama. White clergy standing up for Blacks in the south was rare in the 1960s. It was almost unheard of in the 1930s. Ben invited Black ministers to his home. He collected food and clothing for the families of sharecroppers who in July 1931 after the sheriff and his deputies broke up a union meeting had engaged in a shoot-out. The sharecroppers were on the run and being hunted in Tallapoosa County. His sermons, preached at the height of the Depression, called for economic and social justice.
He visited the Black men on death row in the Scottsboro case — all of them unjustly charged with rape — and held rallies to raise money for their defense. The board of his temple passed a formal resolution appointing a committee “to go to Rabbi Goldstein and ask him to desist from going to Birmingham under all circumstances and desist from doing anything further in the Scottsboro case.”
Ben ignored them. He was finally forced out by his congregation because, as a member wrote, he had been “preaching and practicing social equality,” and “consorting with radicals and reds.” Ben later participated in the American League Against War and Fascism and the American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy during the Spanish civil war, groups that included communists. He defended those purged in the anti-communist witch hunts, including the Hollywood Ten, spearheaded by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Ben, who was close to the communist party and was perhaps at one point a member, was blacklisted, including by Lelyveld’s father who was running the Hillel Foundation. Lelyveld, in a few torturous pages, seeks to absolve his father, who consulted the FBI before firing Ben, for this betrayal.
Ben fell victim to what the historian Ellen Schrecker in “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America” calls “the most widespread and longest lasting wave of political repression in American history.”
“In order to eliminate the alleged threat of domestic Communism, a broad coalition of politicians, bureaucrats, and other anticommunist activists hounded an entire generation of radicals and their associates, destroying lives, careers, and all the institutions that offered a left-wing alternative to mainstream politics and culture,” she writes.
This crusade, she goes on, “used all the power of the state to turn dissent into disloyalty and, in the process, drastically narrowed the spectrum of acceptable political debate.”
Lelyveld’s father was not unique in succumbing to pressure, but what I find fascinating, and perhaps revealing, is Lelyveld’s decision to blame Ben for his own persecution.
“Any appeal to Ben Lowell to be prudent would have instantly summoned to his mind the appeals made to Ben Goldstein [he later changed his last name to Lowell] in Montgomery seventeen years earlier when, with his job clearly on the line, he’d never hesitated about speaking at the black church in defiance of his trustees,” Lelyveld writes. “His latent Ezekiel complex again kicked in.”
Lelyveld missed the hero of his own memoir.
Lelyveld left the paper before the attacks of 9/11. I denounced the calls to invade Iraq — I had been the newspaper’s Middle East Bureau Chief — on shows such as Charlie Rose. I was booed off stages, attacked relentlessly on Fox News and right-wing radio and the subject of a Wall Street Journal editorial. The message bank on my office phone was filled with death threats. I was given a written reprimand by the paper to stop speaking out against the war. If I violated the reprimand, I would be fired. Lelyveld, if he was still running the paper, would not have tolerated my breach of etiquette.
Lelyveld might dissect apartheid in South Africa in his book, “Move Your Shadow,” but the cost of dissecting it in Israel would have seen him, like Ben, blacklisted. He did not cross those lines. He played by the rules. He was a company man.
I would never find my voice in the straightjacket of The New York Times. I had no fidelity to the institution. The very narrow parameters it set were not ones I could accept. This, in the end, was the chasm between us.
The theologian Paul Tillich writes that all institutions are inherently demonic, that the moral life usually requires, at some point, that we defy institutions, even at the cost of our careers. Lelyveld, while endowed with integrity and brilliance, was not willing to make this commitment. But he was the best the institution offered us. He cared deeply about what we do and he did his best to protect it.
The newspaper has not recovered since his departure.
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AKA “He was a jew.”
Don’t forget such classics by the New York Times as “6 million Jews” being holocausted dating back to at least 1900.
The New York Times has always printed misleading propaganda. Its creator, Henry Raymond, was one of the founders of the Republican Party in 1854, when the paper was just three years old. That party was not founded to selflessly crusade against slavery but to represent the interests of the Yankee capitalist class, who were locked in a life-and-death struggle with the ferociously aggressive slaveholder lobby for dominance of the national government.
In the course of my researches I have read many N Y Times of the 1850s, 60s, and 70s. The elitist bias is consistent. It is especially dramatic during the Civil War, which is presented largely as an unbroken series of national successes. On those occasions when the magnitude of a defeat was too evident to conceal, “The Retrograde Movement of Our Troops” was a favored euphemistic headline for a skedaddle. There were also endless attacks on disloyal vermin such as New York’s hated Irish-American community and others uncomfortable with the increasingly savage conduct of the struggle against fellow Americans.
The “free press” courageously championing truth has always been more fictional than real. Journalism is first and foremost a for-profit enterprise. No editor has grown prosperous challenging the real power behind the status quo – unless of course he is doing so in the service of a rival faction of the ruling elite, to increase its share of the plunder of the public, as is so transparently the case in our time. It may be at least somewhat encouraging that the astonishing political naiveté of 19th century Americans no longer exists as it once did. More than a century of non-stop lying and betrayal has had unintended consequences, at least in some circles.
The author sounds like a typical, out of touch liberal elite, just another NY Times writer.
He’s not. He’s a courageous truth-teller.
Gee that was really poignant. Next maybe you could write a heartrending requiem for MEN magazine.
I would take two more seconds and try to give a fuck about that too.
the old gray whore just ain’t what she used to be.
Another liberal newsman sorry he lost his cushy sinecure(job). Almost everyone in print media has suffered a similar fate with the consolidation and gradual demise of newspapers-serves them right-these vermin who did their best to ruin the lives of white Southerners and conservatives and ultimately got their just desserts. Their fate is poetic justice and delicious irony. Join the people whose careers you ruined with your liberal bilge in the unemployment line. No one is shedding any tears for you.
Massa Shlomo died? I am sorry for your loss, Mr. Moore.
My condolences.
Oy vey, stop whining about your old boss, what about me, your current one? Why are you writing articles?
I told you to get me a cheese platter and some purim wine, you lazy, fat bitch!
My purebred Anglo Saxon blonde hair is already turning gray, I have been waiting all day, you filthy goy!
Oy gevalt, you are fired!
What a whiney, liberal prick. I hope you’re mugged by a nigger.
Typical Hedges article. Tone-deaf and pseudo-everyman. For someone who claims to have a finger on the pulse of political discontent, he really underestimates the magnitude of the anger. Why anyone would be compelled to “wax poetic” about the supposed glory days at the Jew York Times at this point is beyond me, guess I jez’ be being a slow country bumpkin who jez’ can’t be no understandin the life and times of these shining stars.
He stood up against Bush and the IRAQ WAR. That should be enough to earn respect. You have to remember that very few of his kind have that level of courage and understanding.
He also seems well aware of the harm caused to truth and justice by outsized Jewish power and influence.
Why such animus here?
If you look through past archives, NYT was good up to the early 90s when it totally shilled for Clinton against Bush. Not as extreme as in 2020 when it went totally against Trump, but the signs were all there.
NYT was always biased in favor of Democrats but 1992 coverage was so blatant and cartoonish(though sober by today’s standards).
Pre-boomer generation that worked at NYT came from a culture of maturity.
Boomers were less mature but believed in stuff like free speech.
But things got progressively worse as later generations weaned on PC took over the newsrooms.
No maturity and not even respect for freedom of speech.
Hedges is a man of some courage but also a scold, onboard with PC.
Sorry to break it to you but the Times was never good. On the I/P issue they were always bad–they had William Safire and Abe Rosenthal anchoring the opinion page and the news articles were a bewildering thicket of bad prose that made it impossible for any reader to figure out what the hell was happening and whose boot was on whose throat.
I remember back in the 80s when the Times led the media campaign for an Israeli war criminal named Ron Arad who was bombing civilians in Lebanon until he fell out of his plane and was captured. The Times was outraged that Arad wasn’t released, but they had little to say about his bombs that fell on kids.
Hey, Chris Hedges, did you have anything to do with the Al Sharpton attacks on several absolutely innocent White men in the Twanna Brawley case? Or any of the other lying crusades against White men? Maybe the Duke LaCrosse team victims of woke commie progressive liars? Whipping up the Rodney King riots?
I’ve been reading the NYTimes off and on all my life. To keep up with what the foremost enemy of White America is doing. When I was a kid I remember the Sunday editions of the Slimes glorifying Castro. And every communist enemy of western civilization. And then Blacks blacks and more blacks. And absolute Jew hatred of the White goyim on every page.
And the ads. Not 10K fur coats but 100 K fur coats, 300K pieces of jewelry antique furniture from not Butterfield and Butterfield but the most expensive auction house in the world.
A page away from the editorials glorifying the worst black criminals in the country. And hating every White goy police officer and district attorney trying to make NYC safe for the goys who had to take buses subways to get to work. To pay the taxes that supported the black housing projects and affirmative action retarded black government workers.
Ben the heroic Birmingham Rabbi who defended the Scottsboro rapists. What is it with Jews and their love affair with rapists? Serfs raping the landowners women, American blacks raping Whites usually poor women who live near black neighborhoods or who don’t make enough money to own a car and grabbed when they get off the bus at night. European rabbis defending the Muslim rapists invading Europe. It never ends. Sick perv mofas
What courage? He never told the truth when he worked for the NYSlimes. Now he’s been laid off he can say what he wants.
He lied for years about the Bosnia Serbia conflict. When he worked for the Slimes.
I realized you’re very impressed that Hedged the commie progressive anti White racist deviated from the woke ideology. I’m not
I can see why you were fired.
There’s something happening here,
what it is ain’t exactly clear.
Over the years, there’s been too much of this elite New York Times style Jewish run witch-hunting and it looks like it’s starting to fail.
There’s that significant portion of the public who realize that they’re being conned into these endless “for Israel” wars, along with an active minority will no longer cheer for the Gaza genocide.
So, my guess is that when the propaganda starts to fail they’ll go for violence against dissenters. In fact they’ve already started legislating for it.
It’s a Most Important Election Ever.
Remember “LOCK HER UP!” back in 2016? The words “GENOCIDE JOE!” never leave Mr. Trump’s lips in this clip, either.
But Jackson Hinkle saying so exemplifies the wishful thinking of those who will trudge to the polling places (or mail in ballots). Voting at each other does nothing but legitimize and sustain the rule of RedBlue politicians who’ll continue pillow fighting while serving their actual constituents.
I have respect and appreciation for Hedges but it is (appropriately) tempered. He’s a valuable truth-teller but also a limited hangout analyst. Hedges pulls his punches. He therefore deserves a little rough scrutiny. Why not?
As for his ‘courage and understanding’, sure, Hedges criticizes Israel– but never global Jewry. (Has he ever even used the term?)
Why not?
Too upsetting?
But let’s get real: World Jewry is the bigger problem here. Diaspora Jews make certain that continuous and unconditional US financial aid as well as military support will flow to Israel from Washington at all times. Meanwhile, these same agents censor and de-platform domestic critics of Zionist policies. This is not good news.
This shadowy network serves the interests of Israel but not the American people. They are also embedded throughout our government. Has the NY Times ever covered this urgent matter in broad detail?
Nope.
Conclusion: organized Jewry has distorted America’s cultural, intellectual, and political landscape. This situation is oppressive and dangerous.
Indeed, there’s far more to the Washington’s Jewish problem than the ‘independent’ actions of one small and distant nation. If only that was the case!
Were it true, America’s deep dilemma involving Israel would barely be a problem at all. Our nation’s elected representatives could make independent decisions based solely on public sentiment and ‘what’s good’ for America.
But America’s entire political establishment caters to Zionist pressures. And our ‘mainstream’ media is owned and/or controlled by them.
No other political force has anywhere near their clout.
This is a recipe for… what?
Don’t expect to find the answer from reading the NY Times (old or new.)
As for the glorious NY Times of yesteryear, this is the same ‘newspaper of record’ that sanitized (if not hid) the grisly details surrounding the communist-orchestrated famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1931-33. Some eight million people perished. Following this, communism spread its tentacles into Europe. This communist aggression stimulated the rise of Fascism and Naziism. Yet this key political fact has been largely memory-holed by the Times and other mainstream news outlets. Why? Partly because of the oversized Jewish role in promoting communism as well as steering the US into (unnecessary) hostilities with Germany.
During the era before WWII, the Times (like most of America’s Jewish press) not only downplayed communist atrocities, but they also hyped-up the need for America to confront Hitler, even though Germany wanted to avoid any conflict with the US.
Later, the Times began its heavy-handed glorification of ‘civil rights’ (forced racial integration) movement here in the US while justifying Israeli segregation and ethnic cleansing abroad. This pattern continues.
Whites in America are now supposed to reject their racial heritage and produce ‘mixed’ families while ‘democratic’ Israel expels/decimates what’s left of its non-Jewish population. What’s wrong with this picture?
For decades, the Times has worked to uphold these devious double-standards. It’s a grand charade.
With these facts in mind, Hedges’ mushy tribute to a crypto-Israeli journalist does not impress.
Thx for the otherwise fine work, Chris. Keep digging. Please keep speaking out. We do appreciate your voice.
But please stop gushing over the NY Times. That rag deserves to die.
Anyone who reverentially capitalizes the BLM demographic, and is an ordained minister in a leftist church, probably doesn’t have my best interests in mind.
Here’s the thing. If you’re eighteen years old and are taking a required history course at an elite college and you need a one-up on your classmates who are drinking most nights, read and quote NYT articles in your class discussions.
That’s always been the purpose of the NYT. No one ever really believed it was the news.
I believe it’s possible that the NYT used to be a little better. It would be hard for it NOT to be better than it is now, in terms of integrity and objectivity. But anyone who thinks the past was some golden era of righteous reportage at the NYT, needs to do some research. Start by Googling the name Walter Duranty.
Which Bush? Which IRAQ WAR? (Mr. Hedges was working for TNYT during both.) Nor do we see here any details about which sides he flattered reporting from all the other “war zones” destroyed by Uncle Sam.
If you know more about Mr. Hedges’ career than what he chooses to recount, let us know. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be surprised when people around here old enough to recall the newspaper’s warmongering during the 20th Century find the preening and intramural whitewash distasteful.
One more dead Jew prick…
Open a bottle of Champagne clown, and pour it over his tomb…
After filtering it thru your kidneys.
I havw relied upon what he has stated in the article as being true.
Look, no disrespect, but if your claim to fame is that you were against the Iraq War 20+ years ago, it just isn’t impressive to us younger people. We just consider it obvious. Maybe if you remember the climate at that time, it was an impressive stance to take, but to us it’s like being against Vietnam or something. It’s like saying the sky is blue. So I’m tired of boomer pundits trotting out this routine about how Iraq was a mistake like this is supposed to be some profound dissident opinion that commands respect. It’s 2024 man. We have major fucking issues in this country. And you won’t catch Hedges talking about them.
It started out as a good article.
I had actually taken a deep breath and leaned back in my chair ready to enjoy some deep and well written insights on the collapse of moral and journalistic integrity at the New York Times by someone who had been an up-close witness personally affected by the fall.
Instead, it devolved into another groveling cuck-piece focused, again, on Jews.
Stockholm Syndrome can take many forms.
Check out Hedges wiki entry the Princeton Community News interview and the many short bios of Hedges on the web. Because of vast experience with anti White race anti European civilization anti American people like Hedges all my assumptions about Hedges turned out to be true. And he’s even worse than I assumed.
From heterosexual activist for homosexuals in 1975 , communist revolutionary in 1980s S American jungles to his latest animal rights and vegan activist regenerative veganism activities read all about Chris Hedges. The only somewhat normal thing about him is he didn’t take his youngest kids to a sex change clinic. He hates us Whites as much as the most militant progressive Jews and blacks do.
He’s a complete caricature of a woke commie progressive anti White racist. A Babylon Bee caricature.
As a White Nationalist, I only care about the survival of White Americans. Not anyone on else on earth. Certainly neither Muslims nor Jews in a foreign country. Domestically, here in America both are the enemies of me and mine., In domestic affairs. Hedges follows the fanatic religion of anti White racist woke progressivism. In foreign affairs he’s pro Palestinian anti Israel.
Has he ever even acknowledged that Jews are completely destructive to American and European Whites? No, not ever he’s been an enthusiastic running dog of the anti White Jewish agenda his entire life. Reading his bio, it’s no different from the bios of the Jewish boomers from communist families who destroyed America.
Just read his short bios on the web. It’s even worse than I assumed. From a homosexual activist at age 18 to an animal rights activist vegan regenerative agriculture activist in his old age., And always,,eternally anti White.
Thanks for the interesting perspective. In hindsight supporting the Iraq war does seem pretty stupid.
Hedges has taken a pretty firm stance against Israel and its genocide of the Palestinians.
My soul is divided on this.
MEN appears to be a beacon of light and maturity, truth and timeliness compared to the NYT in any era.
On the principle that if they can afford a print run big enough to get national distribution they must be lice, I’ll have to agree. On the other hand Dante considered hell as a series of circles, some relatively lower or higher than others.
The NYT gets the lowest circle on pretense alone. This puts honest trash a bit higher.
@Mark Green, your post should be required reading material for students. But if course the NEA: No Education Anymore wouldn’t allow it. Well done. p.s. It’s gotten to the point that the commentary is more eye opening than the articles. Sorry Ron. Keep up the good work though.
Hedges pathologically avoids in the elephant in the room: the black and brown wave of “reporters” at the Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair who are barely literate.
They have no well of Classics to draw on, no historical mind – they do research on Twitter and Google.
Identities as victims are their credentials, and the amount of snark and hatred they can dump on the White Working Class.
I used to read The New Yorker cover to cover. When Trump appeared on the scene is when the magazine lost its mind.
However, I have a new theory about why the entire Regime and its engines hate Trump. As the Reporter Greg Palast says over and over: Follow the Money.
When Hillary Clinton lost, thousands of people lost lucrative gigs. I imagine the money was already spent, Maine cottages already picked out. Face lifts booked. Condos bought in Georgetown. All the appointments, think tanks, contracts, special advisor roles. Many promises had been made and Trump blew it all up. This outrage over “democracy” is as phony as hell.
They are enraged they lost money. It has now morphed into something much more frightening, as the DOJ/FBI are weaponized, but filthy lucre was ground zero.
Because he is Anti White and ignores the rampant criminality, culture destroying cancer that is the American Black.
Christ in Heaven, great writing by Hedges on his early years, but … what baloney as history – the press in the US has been the lapdog of the Jews for at least 100 years ….
From ‘La Démocratie Victorieuse’, E. Malynski, 1929
Hedges does ask Finkelstein about a quote from Ariel Sharon that Jews control America.
Finkelstein acknowledges the power of “billionaire Jews”, but still clings largely to the Chomskian fiction that Israel is some sort of guardian of American imperial interests in the ME.
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