The discourse of
today’s political left is invariably marked by jaw-dropping degrees of
hypocrisy and psychological projection. Case in point: last week columnist Paul
Krugman posted an opinion piece at The New York Times titled “Intellectuals,
Politics and Bad Faith,” in which he strove to smear the political
right as intellectually dishonest – exactly the same sin of which Krugman was
guilty in his own column.
Nobel Prize-winner
Krugman long ago ceased being reliable as an economist but has maintained his
political stature among the left as a race-obsessed smear merchant who
habitually demonizes conservatives in his Times columns. As noted in his
profile at DiscoverTheNetworks.org, the David Horowitz Freedom
Center’s encyclopedia of the political left, Krugman’s “view of Republicans and
conservatives as hate mongers has been on display again and again.” As an
example, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and six others were shot in
Tucson, Arizona in 2011 by an obsessed lunatic, Krugman falsely blamed it on
“the rising tide of violence” in America stemming from “toxic,” “eliminationist”
rhetoric “coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.”
In another
instance, on Election Day in 2016, a bitter Krugman lashed
out by attacking Donald Trump’s supporters as racist misogynists
“who don’t share at all our idea of what America is about.” At least he got
that last part right – Trump supporters most assuredly do not share Krugman’s
Progressive vision of what America should be about.
More recently,
this February he wrote
that “America in 2018 is not a place where we can disagree without being
disagreeable, where there are good people and good ideas on both sides, or
whatever other bipartisan homily you want to recite.” Distressingly, there is
much truth to this, but which side is largely responsible for this hostility
and division? Which side is it that seems pathologically incapable of civility?
Which side is it that violently seeks to shut down the free speech of its
political opponents? Which side is it that has weaponized the culture –
education, news media, and entertainment – and is waging a campaign of
relentless partisan hatred through it? Krugman, of course, blames the right,
and Krugman, of course, is wrong. More precisely, Krugman is lying.
Krugman blames the
media for not doing enough to expose the “dishonesty [which] prevails within
the Trump administration.” He claims that Trump is an inveterate liar who
perpetually complains about his treatment at the hands of the media, the fake
news activists whom Krugman laughably calls “people who accurately report the
facts.” He then goes on to snipe predictably at Fox News, which he asserts “has
spent decades misinforming viewers while denouncing the liberal bias of
mainstream media.”
Fox News is
literally the sole, (barely) right-leaning mainstream media outlet, but that’s
one too many for leftists like Krugman, who dismiss Fox as “faux news” while
ignoring the blatant leftist activism of purportedly objective news sites like
CNN.
In his Times
article, Krugman targets right-leaning historian Niall Ferguson at Stanford
University for having engaged in an email conversation with “right-wing student
activists” in which he urged them to “unite against” campus Social Justice
Warriors. By comparison to the nationwide campus collusion among leftist
academics and their SJW minions, Ferguson’s indiscretion shouldn’t even rate a
raised eyebrow, but Krugman treats it as an example of dangerous far-right
subversion, all the while refusing to acknowledge the open, rampant
totalitarianism of left-wing academic activism.
Krugman goes on to
speculate condescendingly that there are few conservatives in the hard science
departments of universities because “in modern America being a conservative
means aligning yourself with a faction that by and large rejects climate
science and the theory of evolution.” Then he makes the nasty insinuation that,
for similar reasons of intellectual backwardness, there aren’t many
conservative historians either, “which [Ferguson] takes as ipso facto evidence
of biased hiring and a hostile environment.” It takes a special kind of
intellectual dishonesty to refuse to concede that today’s universities are
biased and hostile toward conservative academics and students.
Krugman then
asserts that “conservative claims to be defending free speech and open
discussion aren’t sincere. Conservatives don’t want to see ideas evaluated on
their merits, regardless of politics; they want ideas convenient to their side
to receive (at least) equal time regardless of their intellectual quality.”
This is not only a
bald-faced lie but typical leftist psychological projection of their own
characteristics upon conservatives. After all, a key Marxist tactic is to
accuse the opposition of what you yourself are doing. It is the left
that has been waging a full-court press against free speech precisely to
control not only political discourse but all cultural discourse as well. It is
the left that must resort to shouting down conservative speakers on
campus (on those few occasions on which conservative speakers are actually
invited or allowed on campus by violent protesters) because the left knows that
their own ideas cannot bear objective evaluation on their merits.
Krugman
condescendingly argues that conservatives do not deserve equal time
because their ideas lack “intellectual quality.” If that is true, and if
Progressive ideas are so demonstrably superior, why is it that the left resists
debate and works so violently to shut down supposedly indefensible conservative
ideas? If conservatism is so easily demolished on the intellectual battlefield,
why don’t Krugman's Progressive compatriots welcome that debate? Why not prove
your philosophical superiority for all to see? Why is it necessary to argue, as
the masked thugs of Antifa do, that conservative speech is a form of violence
that must be countered with pre-emptive violence in self-defense?
Krugman goes on to
make another ludicrous claim: that “conservative groups are engaged in a
systematic effort to impose political standards on higher education.” This is
yet more projection. Leftists absolutely have owned higher education
because ever since their failed revolution of the streets in the 1960s, they
have adopted a more subversive strategy, imposing their own political
standards on the educational system and indoctrinating entire generations with
their Marxist anti-Americanism. Conservative groups like the David Horowitz
Freedom Center want to de-politicize the universities and get back to
teaching students how to think, not what to think.
For many years
Horowitz has proposed an “Academic
Bill of Rights” to reform our universities by restoring balance and
fairness in the classroom. Krugman states that such reform “has nothing to do
with fairness; it’s all about power.” Still more projection on Krugman’s part.
True conservatism is about preserving the rights and freedoms of individuals;
true progressivism is about consolidating all power in the state. The left
resists a code like Horowitz’s because they don’t want their own ideological
stranglehold on the educational system loosened.
In short, to
paraphrase Mary McCarthy’s jab at playwright Lillian Hellman, every word of
Paul Krugman’s op-ed is a lie, including “and” and “the.” His column spews a
litany of charges of crimes that his own side is actually guilty of: media
disinformation, ruthless partisanship, an assault on free speech, political
indoctrination in higher education, and a lust for power. You can’t get much
more intellectually dishonest than that.
From FrontPage Mag, 6/12/18
