March 18, 2013
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Founded in 1865, The Nation‘s “founding prospect” made a bold promise of journalistic objectivity:
The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body.
Boy, did they drop that ball somewhere along the way, seeing as they are a relentlessly biased propaganda megaphone for the left, a robotic apologist for all things leftist (vanden Heuvel’s husband is known for downplaying Soviet atrocities), a reflexive duo-chromatic reality filter that depicts all things leftist as good and all things right as evil. And yet, like all good team players and true believers, they”ll insist it’s only the other side that caters to biased, lying ideologues.
Naturally, their economic and political hypocrisy extends into cultural hypocrisy. Just as they live safely sheltered from the downsides of the economic policies they espouse, they also are protected from the less pleasant aspects of the coercive multiculturalism they champion. Last year when The Nation dogpiled on the absurd and fabricated controversy over the HBO show Girls for being “too white””curiously, the show’s creator said that of the four main characters, two were goyishe and two were Jewish, although few seemed to take the show to task for being “too Jewish””I left a comment on their site suggesting that some people could fairly say their editorial staff was stacked to the rafters with a disproportionate quotient of a certain ethno-religious minority. I was blocked from commenting the next day.
Perhaps the most succinct analysis of leftist hypocrisy came from Ted Kaczynski, who suggested that all the drumbeating about “compassion” was merely a cover for fundamentally hostile personality types with an insatiable lust for power.
That appears to be what we”re dealing with regarding people such as Katrina vanden Heuvel and magazines such as The Nation. They don”t represent the nation at large; if anything, they”re a “nation” that doesn”t even have a country behind them.
So for all their grandstanding about fighting “the wealthy” and “the powerful,” the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the owners and writers of The Nation are inextricably entangled with power and wealth. In the relentless Texas Death Cage Match between corporate power and governmental power, they take the government’s side. So they’re not fighting power at all. They’re merely picking a team. Not that this is necessarily bad; I merely wish they”d have the honesty to admit it. Their behavior suggests that they know absolutely nothing about the poor and the working class and only use such people as chess pieces in a cynical game of moral status-jockeying against other elites.
I could be wrong. But the only thing that could make me change my mind would be if Katrina vanden Heuvel were to actually give all of her immense wealth to the poor and go live in a Harlem housing project amid roaches and crackheads and welfare queens. For once in your life go and get your hands dirty trying to uplift your imaginary comrades. You’d last about five minutes.
Until that happens”and it never will”I”ll be forced to conclude that she’s a rank hypocrite who feigns virtuousness to cover her immense selfishness.
