In 2007, a leftwing journalist named Ezra Klein formed an online group called JournOlist, which consisted of 400 equally leftist journalists, ostensibly to discuss politics but in fact to insult, degrade, vilify, marginalize and generally try to destroy anyone who disagreed with their largely radical points of view.
The “O” stood for the man then ascending in the political world who two years later would find himself at the pinnacle of power in the White House. One of JournOlist’s first tasks was to savage any media person––or guest––who questioned Mr. Obama’s viciously anti-American and anti-Semitic pastor of 20 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Their magic formula was to call anyone who said or wrote anything negative about Obama a “racist.”
As if to prove that this kind of liberal intolerance wasn’t a fluke, we now have, according to reporter Andrew Stiles of the conservative Washington Free Beacon, an active campaign involving Democrat Party operatives like Obama handler Valerie Jarrett, liberal activists, and media pundits to declare almost every criticism of Kamala Harris to be off limits.
The long list of words the group say are forbidden for the media to utter include, among others: “ambitious,” “angry,” “unlikeable,” and “unqualified.” Don’t report on the “heritage” of non-white candidates, they were told, and don’t publish unflattering images.
And to anyone who does these sinful things, the self-appointed guardians of the Biden-Harris Censorship Committee are advised to use the magic formula: Cry “racist”––and then throw in “sexist”!
Clearly, the Biden-Harris ticket is so vulnerable, indeed fragile, that it cannot withstand legitimate criticism, probing policy and personal questions, and what most of the country continues to cherish as a bedrock American value: Free Speech!
These are today’s Democrat “values” – camouflage the ailing and failing and prettify the ambitious, angry, unlikable and unqualified – or else!
Yet, laughably, Democrats continue to entertain the conceit that they are tolerant.
Joan Swirsky
Great Neck
(Editor’s Note: Journalists used the private Google Group forum to share views about politics and the news business on an e-mail network where comments were off the record. Klein shuttered the site in 2010. Some right-wing media outlets saw the chatroom as a conspiracy to support Obama, but the mainstream press said reporters and editors joined the forum to swap opinions about politics and other news in small, confidential conversations.)
