Source: Bigstock

No one sober and in their right mind trusts or believes in what is called the media nowadays. Once upon a time the news media in America was highly respected and trusted. It took professional liars who brought down a president who had won the largest majority ever, Richard Nixon, for the public to realize that journalists suffer from pathological distortion and suspicion. A lawyer can be disbarred, a priest can be defrocked, but a journalist can ruin someone’s life with lies and get away with it with impunity. In the old continent of Europe wiser heads have prevailed, and libel laws prevent mendacious journalists from ruining careers and lives. Not so in America, where main media networks and papers such as the Times and Washington Post dispense with the truth in order to fulfill their goals. It began in 1964 with the Sullivan versus The New York Times landmark decision that limits the ability of public officials to sue journalists for defamation. This gave the right to unscrupulous hacks a license to lie, as President Nixon called it. I was a friend of Richard Nixon’s, and what he was guilty of was excessive loyalty to some stupid pro-Nixon individuals who illegally broke into Watergate to search for a Nixon hater’s psychiatric records. When one thinks of the lies that Biden—and, of course, the Donald—have peddled to the American people lately, President Nixon’s refusal to destroy the tapes linking the fools who broke into Watergate seems a mere bagatelle, which it certainly was.

But two wily and extremely mendacious reporters, Woodward and Bernstein, invented a monstrous plot and peddled it daily to the anti-Nixon crowd that still makes up Washington, D.C., leading the president to resign in order to keep the country from actual civil war. The whole conflict was based on the enormous lie that Richard Nixon was a crook and did not deserve to be president. And this from a man called Bernstein who was reluctant to pay rent and came up to me once in front of Michael Mailer and asked for a truce. (“If you’re such a big shot, how about paying your rent to a very poor woman who is afraid to sue you?” was the way I put it in my New York Post column, I believe.)

After the success of dethroning a president who had carried 49 states only two years earlier, journalists all over the land decided they were the cat’s whiskers. And like Richard Nixon had predicted, the Sullivan act had ensured they had a license to lie. Politicians ran scared, public officials ditto, and suddenly Hollywood was making movies about heroic liars such as Woodward and Bernstein. When I began my writing career, my father was appalled. Journalists in Greece and in Europe were considered one step above child molesters—in other words, the pits. I’ve never understood why in America hacks have more or less been given a pass. Fifty years ago, in fact, the fourth estate was among the most highly regarded institutions in the land of Al Capone. Many Americans have come around since, realizing that most journalists are envious, mendacious left-wingers who hate normality and success. The Donald called the media the “enemy of the people,” and I’m afraid to admit that this was not a typical Trump exaggeration but quite to the point.

Why are so many of the media lefties? I wish I knew the answer, but it takes a certain character to be a lefty, with the kind of traits I’ve mentioned above. Take, for example, the brouhaha over Defense Secretary hopeful Pete Hegseth. There is a smear campaign taking place à la Brett Kavanaugh—the Supreme Court justice who was confirmed when the allegations against him were proved as false as they were malicious—except the ones against the double Bronze Star recipient are ten times worse. The witch hunt began with unsubstantiated allegations from unnamed persons in a Bagel weekly owned by the multibillionaire Newhouse family (not their name when their quest for wealth and power began). Why does the Newhouse family hire only left-wing minions? Again, I wish I knew, but that is the only kind they hire. The Newhouse clan is Jewish and has been accused of tax avoidance in the past. They beat the charges and continue to publish very lefty glossies in these United States. Does the Newhouse gang hate America so much it hires only left-wingers? I am incapable of telling you for certain, but it sure looks like it to me. If I was coming from some very poor Central European shtetl and had made billions in America while dodging paying my taxes as much as I could get away with, the last thing I’d do is have my glossies write positive stories about left-wing clowns and charlatans. But that’s what Anna Wintour and David Remnick have done and continue to do, and to hell with what’s good for America.

Never mind. The good old US of A will survive phonies like la Wintour, whose father was a London lower-middle-class newshound, while she puts on aristocratic airs for the peasants. The same goes for the social climber Remnick. No matter how hard they tried and try, Trump is in the driver’s seat, and I only hope he doesn’t repeat the follies of his first term when he gave access to those who hated him the most, the scum at The New York Times and the above-mentioned phonies.