Roger Kimball wears an incredible number of hats, including those of publisher of Encounter Books and editor/publisher of The New Criterion. I wrote Roger early Tuesday morning to ask if he thought I had overlooked anything that needed to be said about the the clamorous silence I wrote about in “The Russia hoax in review.” Roger responded in an email that I am posting with his kind permission below:
I am so glad that you wrote about the mainstream media’s policy of omertà regarding Andy McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion and Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President. Both books, as you say, are essential to our understanding of what has turned out to be the most serious political scandal in the history of the American Republic.
I am not being hyperbolic. And I say this frankly even though I am the publisher of McCarthy’s book because the nature of the scandal—the weaponization of our intelligence community in order to overturn a Presidential election—is at once so grievous and so misreported by the organs of a co-opted Fourth Estate that the usual niceties about declaring an interest pale before the egregious reality of this attempted coup. Again, I am not being hyperbolic in deploying the phrase “attempted coup.”
What we have seen in the response to both books is a perfect storm of unspoken media collusion to bury the books in order to preserve The Narrative: that the Mueller investigation, like the impeachment farce, were justified even though not a scintilla of evidence against Donald Trump or his campaign has been adduced to support the frenzied efforts to besmirch him and, ultimately, to remove him from office. The actions of the deep state in this episode are despicable, but no more so than the actions of such discredited entities as The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which have exploited this scandal to squander what little credibility they had left.
Fortunately, the public at large has become less and less beholden to such sclerotic entities (and one must include here formerly respectable outlets such as CNN). One sign of this is the fact that both books are bestsellers, a token not only of their wide appeal but also of the relative impotence of such once-powerful organs as the Times and the Post to censor opinions of which they disapprove.
It says a great deal that the only place these books appear in The New York Times is on the page listing bestsellers. McCarthy and Smith have done yeoman’s work and deserve the gratitude of the general public. Without their efforts—and the efforts of such public servants as Devin Nunes—we would still be in the dark about this wholesale assault on the foundations our democracy. Thanks for laying it out so clearly.
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