Memo to the NY Times: Conservatism is Caused by Fighting It

Has it always been this way? Has mainstream journalism always been so transparently agenda-driven as it is today? Probably. It’s just that we didn’t notice it until the rise of alternative media in the form of talk radio and blogs that began challenging our state religion of illiberal leftism.

The question is again raised because of the fraudulent reporting of those slimese twins, the New York Times and the Washington Post, on the National Intelligence Estimate. Now that President Bush has declassified the document, we see that its overarching conclusion is the exact opposite of what the liberal media would have you believe.

There’s plenty of good blogging on this story already (e.g., Dr. Sanity, Right Wing Nuthouse, American Thinker, et al), so there’s little I can add in that regard. As always, I will try to consider the cosmic implications.

There is absolute truth and there is relative truth. Ironically, contrary to what most sophisticates will tell you, it is possible to know absolute truth absolutely. Being that truth is another matter, but knowing it is a human birthright. For example, we may know absolutely that reality is One, that appearance is not the same as reality, that the world is intelligible, and that human beings possess free will with which they may choose good or evil. This is the realm of perennial religious truth, which expresses metaphysical knowledge in sometimes mythological language accessible to virtually everyone.

As I mentioned in my book, you might think of religion as the science of the Ultimate Subject, and science as the religion of the ultimate object. While we may possess objective knowledge of the ultimate subject--e.g., he is love-truth-beauty, or being-consciousness-bliss, or father-son-holy spirit--we can possess no similar knowledge of the relative world, where everything is tinged with human subjectivity. But “subjective” should not be confused with “arbitrary” or “untrue.”

The philosophical tragedy of our day is that the postmodernists use this subjective opening--which is an inevitable artifact of our humaness--to come in with their wrecking ball and destroy the whole idea of objective truth, thus elevating relativity to an objective truth. In so doing, they promulgate the “false vertical” idea that there are absolutely no absolutes, a metaphysical absurdity if ever there was one. In other words, as soon as you say it is absolutely true that all knowledge is relative, you have disproved your own statement. You have actually acknowledged that humans may objectively know absolute truth.

In order to understand the relative world, we must begin with an objectively true framework or paradigm that puts everything in its proper place and allows us to “see” what is important or significant. But the secular assault on religion has badly damaged the extraordinarly bountiful framework ("fruitfulness" being an aspect of truth) that guided western civilization for hundreds of years , only to replace it with their own thoroughly secularized pseudo-religion that we know of as “leftism.” (Memo to moonbats: I am not making the absurd suggestion that all leftists are somehow “bad people.” Rather, I am drawing out the implications of the leftist world view, implications that the average well-meaning leftist surely doesn’t even understand, much less approve of.)

I have heard estimates from reputable members of the elite media that the typical newsroom probably tilts fifteen or twenty to one, liberal to conservative. But at the same time, virtually every one of them believes that they can see beyond their own biases and report the news “objectively.” One wonders what they would say if the situation were reversed, and all newsrooms, not to mention universities, had twenty times as many conservatives as leftists. Especially given their built-in victim mentality and sense of entitlement, there would be howls of indignation. There would be calls for civil rights investigations, ACLU lawsuits, boycotts.

But because of their absurd philosophy, these leftists would see only a structural problem of “not enough liberals” instead of recognizing the truth that their own opinions, attitudes and perceptions are thoroughly colored by their own leftist assumptions. They would have to concede that “I see the world completely differently because I am a liberal,” and they would have to abandon their pretense of journalistic objectivity.

This is why so few people trust the liberal media anymore, because they will not admit their biases. Whatever President Bush’s perceived level of trustworthiness, you can be sure that the MSM’s is significantly lower. And yet, the latter will arrogantly opine on the former, as if their opinions about Bush’s trustworthiness are trustworthy! If they were forthright, they'd say, "don't trust me on this, but I don't think Bush is very trustworthy."

And this is why people flock to alternative sources of news such as talk radio, blogs, and Fox news--because they are transparent. I don’t pretend that I see the world through anything other than the lens of classical American liberalism. Viewed through that lens, the world is an entirely different place than it is when viewed through the lens of illiberal leftism. We literally see different things. We have different assumptions, different ideas about what is important, different values, different notions of good and evil, even entirely different ideas about fundamental causes.

For example, the typical liberal unreflexively believes that “poverty causes crime” (thus the New York Times' clueless headline, "Crime Down Despite Rise in Prison Population") whereas I believe that bad values cause crime. The difference is that the typical liberal has never thought this through. They are generally quite naive about their beliefs, for the simple reason that they have never been challenged. They don’t experience the kind of constant cognitive friction that a conservative does, so they don’t even know how to argue or defend their ideas, which we saw with Clinton last Sunday.

Liberals will typically say that Israeli policies somehow have something to do with Palestinian terror, while I believe that Palestinian terror is caused by their psychotic death cult theology. After all, there are no Christian Palestinian terrorists. They are just as “occupied” as Palestinian Muslims, and yet, it doesn’t occur to the Christians to strap on bombs with pieces of twisted metal and rat poison in order to kill and maim as many women and children as possible.

You and I are not even able to entertain thoughts so evil. We cannot even go there. Under no circumstances whatsoever can we imagine decapitating an innocent journalist or murdering a baby. But could I waterboard a terrorist to stop a terror attack? In a hearbeat. I literally cannot understand the mind of the person who wouldn’t (or the truly "pro-torture" mind of someone who makes excuses for Palestinian terror, which is to essentially say that they would not rule out engaging in it themselves). Different values. Different world. If fighting Islamo-nazis means that more of them are willing to fight for the cause of evil, that's okay. There is a ready solution: kill them faster.

If you unreflexively believe that poverty causes crime or that the cause of terror is fighting it, then all of your reporting is going to reflect those basic assumptions, something we constantly see in the liberal media. For them, these notions are simply “reality,” whereas the idea that bad values cause crime or an evil theology causes terror are “conservative” ideas. Neither point of view is absolutely true, but one is much more true.

Thus, we should not be surprised when liberals take things out of context and distort reality to fit their peceptions. For them to say “the war on terror causes terrorists” is simply a cherished assumption dressed up as a conclusion. If you give it a moment’s thought, their whole world view is just so stupid. Would they ever report that terrorists are the cause of the American military that liberals so despise, and that if terrorists would only appease America, our military would stop trying to harm them? Or that Islamo-nazis have to stop their unwinnable war on the west, because it will only create more George Bushes and Tony Blairs and John Howards?

Or that they themselves must stop mindlessly attacking conservatives, because it will just make us stronger?

Personally, I hope they never figure out that last one.