Max Boot: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PC: Unscrupulous Trump-Hater and Two Editors at Foreign Policy Win Their First Duranty-Blair Awards!

By Nicholas Stix

[Postscript, January 4, 2018, 4:54 p.m.

I just took another look at Boot’s subhed:

“I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at ‘political correctness.’ The Trump era has opened my eyes.”

That subhed would only make sense if Boot had gone, since Trump’s inauguration, from a Trump supporter to a Trump-hater. However, he was a Trump-hater, from the get-go. Thus, he is engaging in retroactive disingenuousness, implying he has undergone some sort of epiphany or process of enlightenment. I suppose that if I were willing to waste even more time re-reading Boot’s, er, thing, that I would find even more examples of his dishonesty.

Note, too that the hoax campaign Boot supports was unleashed before the election, in order to help Hillary Clinton get elected.]

Max Boot hates President Donald Trump. Boot fancies himself some sort of intellectual, but on the few times I’ve read his rants, I have never found signs of intelligent life. Indeed, Boot’s lack of intelligence, or intellectual or moral integrity are an ongoing problem for me, because Boot is a Jew. Thousands of people look at Max Boot, and think to themselves, “So, this is what a Jewish writer and intellectual sounds like.”

Max Boot is the face of Jewish intellectual and moral mediocrity, and of fake conservatism. I’ve harped on this problem for years. Ever broader swaths of the gentile public are bound to conclude from the Max Boots, Jennifer Rubins, et al., that Jews’ reputation for intellect is a fiction, and that they have only thrived via some sort of affirmative action, or religious cabal.

People like Boot have been a political problem for generations. While they pass themselves off—with the help of powerful accomplices—as “conservatives,” conservatives and populists of intellect and integrity are marginalized and vilified, often by Boot himself. Public discourse is thereby perverted, and the public is left with false dichotomies, lies, and evil.

The prime job of a Republican like Boot has always been to keep someone like Donald Trump from ascending to power, and now that Trump has won election, Boot is trying to get him deposed.

The problem goes at least as far back as 1954, when “respectable” Republicans plunged a knife in Joe McCarthy’s back.

Boot won his first Duranty-Blair Award for the pathetic rant reprinted below. While denying that he’s a leftist, Boot runs through the standard leftist catalogue of hoaxes, which he thoughtlessly retails.

During Boot’s appearance on the Tucker Carlson show, note that he engages in the typical leftist practice of constantly interrupting and insulting his opponent.

Since Boot’s stale rant was published by the Website Foreign Policy, the men responsible for publishing it, Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tepperman, and Executive Editor, Online, Ben Pauker also won their first D-Bs.
 

Tucker Carlson KOs Max Boot


 

Transcript here.
 

2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege

I used to be a smart-alecky conservative who scoffed at “political correctness.” The Trump era has opened my eyes.
By Max Boot
December 27, 2017, 1:55 P.M.
Foreign Policy
 

“Men wave rainbow and “black lives matter” flags while marching in the annual LGBTQI Pride Parade on June 25, 2017 in San Francisco.”
 

In college — this was in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley — I used to be one of those smart-alecky young conservatives who would scoff at the notion of “white male privilege” and claim that anyone propagating such concepts was guilty of “political correctness.” As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace discrimination suffered by women. I wasn’t racist or sexist. (Or so I thought.) I hadn’t discriminated against anyone. (Or so I thought.) My ancestors were not slave owners or lynchers; they were more likely victims of the pogroms.

I saw America as a land of opportunity, not a bastion of racism or sexism. I didn’t even think that I was a “white” person — the catchall category that has been extended to include everyone from a Mayflower descendant to a recently arrived illegal immigrant from Ireland. I was a newcomer to America who was eager to assimilate into this wondrous new society, and I saw its many merits while blinding myself to its dark side.

Well, live and learn. A quarter century is enough time to examine deeply held shibboleths and to see if they comport with reality. In my case, I have concluded that my beliefs were based more on faith than on a critical examination of the evidence. In the last few years, in particular, it has become impossible for me to deny the reality of discrimination, harassment, even violence that people of color and women continue to experience in modern-day America from a power structure that remains for the most part in the hands of straight, white males. People like me, in other words. Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender — and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.

This sounds obvious, but it wasn’t clear to me until recently. I have had my consciousness raised. Seriously.

This doesn’t mean that I agree with America’s harshest critics — successors to the New Left of the 1960s who saw this country as an irredeemably fascist state that they called “AmeriKKKa.” Judging by historical standards or those of the rest of the world, America remains admirably free and enlightened. Minorities are not being subject to ethnic cleansing like the Rohingya in Burma. Women are not forced to wear all-enveloping garments as in Saudi Arabia. No one is jailed for criticizing our supreme leader as in Russia.

The country is becoming more aware of oppression and injustice, which have long permeated our society, precisely because of growing agitation to do something about it. Those are painful but necessary steps toward creating a more equal and just society. But we are not there yet, and it is wrong to pretend otherwise. It is even more pernicious to cling to the conceit, so popular among Donald Trump’s supporters, that straight white men are the “true” victims because their unquestioned position of privilege is now being challenged by uppity women, gay people, and people of color.

I used to take a reflexively pro-police view of arguments over alleged police misconduct, thinking that cops were getting a bum rap for doing a tough, dangerous job. I still have admiration for the vast majority of police officers, but there is no denying that some are guilty of mistreating the people they are supposed to serve. Not all the victims of police misconduct are minorities — witness a blonde Australian woman shot to death by a Minneapolis police officer after she called 911, or an unarmed white man shot to death by a Mesa, Arizona, officer while crawling down a hotel hallway — but a disproportionate share are.

The videos do not lie. [Some of them certainly do!] One after another, we have seen the horrifying evidence on film of cops arresting, beating, even shooting black people who were doing absolutely nothing wrong [liar!] or were stopped for trivial misconduct. For African-Americans, and in particular African-American men, infractions like jaywalking or speeding or selling cigarettes without tax stamps can incite corporal, or even capital, punishment without benefit of judge or jury. African-Americans have long talked about being stopped for “driving while black.” I am ashamed to admit I did not realize what a serious and common problem this was until the videotaped evidence emerged. The iPhone may well have done more to expose racism in modern-day America than the NAACP.

Of course, the problem is not limited to the police; they merely reflect the racism of our society, which is not as severe as it used to be but remains real enough. I realized how entrenched this problem remains when an African-American friend — a well-educated, well-paid, well-dressed woman — confessed that she did not want to walk into a department store carrying in her purse a pair of jeans that she planned to give to a friend later in the day. Why not? Because she was afraid that she would be accused of shoplifting! This is not something that would occur to me, simply because the same suspicion would not attach to a middle-aged, middle-class white man.

The larger problem of racism in our society was made evident in Donald Trump’s election, despite — or because of — his willingness to dog-whistle toward white nationalists with his pervasive bashing of Mexicans, Muslims, and other minorities. Trump even tried to delegitimize the first African-American president by claiming he wasn’t born in this country, and now he goes after African-American football players who kneel during the playing of the anthem to protest police brutality. (Far from being concerned about police misconduct, which disproportionately targets people of color, Trump actively encourages it.)

Adam Serwer argues persuasively in the Atlantic that Trump’s election could not be explained by “economic anxiety,” because the poorest voters — those making less than $50,000 a year — voted predominantly for Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, “Trump defeated Clinton among white voters in every income category,” from those making less than $30,000 to those making more than $250,000. In other words, Serwer writes, Trump does not lead a “working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one.” That doesn’t mean that every Trump supporter is a racist; it does mean that Trump’s victory has revealed that racism and xenophobia are more widespread than I had previously realized.

As for sexism, its scope has been made plain by the horrifying revelations of widespread harassment, assault, and even rape perpetrated by powerful men from Hollywood to Washington. The Harvey Weinstein scandal has opened the floodgates, leading to the naming and shaming of a growing list of rich and powerful men — including Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Roy Moore, and John Conyers — who are alleged to have abused their positions of authority to force themselves upon women or, in some cases, men.

As with the revelations of police brutality, so too with sexual harassment: I am embarrassed and ashamed that I did not understand how bad the problem is. I had certainly gotten some hints from my female friends of the kind of harassment they have endured, but I never had any idea it was this bad or this common — or this tolerated. Even now, while other men are being fired for their misconduct, Trump continues to sit in the Oval Office despite credible allegations of sexual assault from nearly 20 different women.

I now realize something I should have learned long ago: that feminist activists had a fair point when they denounced the “patriarchy” for oppressing women. Sadly, this oppression, while less severe than it used to be, remains a major problem in spite of the impressive strides the U.S. has taken toward greater gender equality.

This doesn’t mean that I am about to join the academic political correctness brigade in protesting “microaggressions” and agitating against free speech. I remain a classical liberal, and I am disturbed by attempts to infringe on freedom of speech in the name in fighting racism, sexism, or other ills. But I no longer think, as I once did, that “political correctness” is a bigger threat than the underlying racism and sexism that continue to disfigure our society decades after the civil rights and women’s rights movements. If the Trump era teaches us anything, it is how far we still have to go to realize the “unalienable Rights” of all Americans to enjoy “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” regardless of gender, sexuality, religion, or skin color.

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His forthcoming book is “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam.”
 


The Duranty-Blair Award recognizes those journalists whose work embodies the spirit of Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair, two of the most notorious “journalists” in the history of the Fourth Estate. It is no accident that both men worked for the New York Times.

Walter Duranty wrote a series of early 1930s dispatches from the Soviet Union, where he was Times Moscow bureau chief, in which he lied about the Ukrainian Holocaust, in which Stalin deliberately starved millions of Kulaks (farmers) to death, through a man-made famine. Instead of reporting the truth, Duranty reported that the peasants were happy and well-fed, and was rewarded for his lies with a Pulitzer Prize.

Jayson Blair (here, here, and here) was an early 2000s black affirmative action hire, who alternately plagiarized reporters at other newspapers, and fabricated articles out of whole cloth, all for stories set hundreds and even thousands of miles away, while he sat in New York City cafés.

New York Times operatives who are Duranty-Blair laureates are Farhad Manjoo and Francis X. Clines.
 

Previous Duranty-Blair winners are:

• CBS News producer Mary Mapes in 2004;

• Seven reporters and editors at the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2006;

• ABC News reporter Brian Ross in 2012;

• Peter Berger (not the brilliant sociologist), of The American Interest, in 2013;

• Associated Press operative Tom Hays, in 2014;

• New York Times operative Farhad Manjoo in September, 2016;

• CNN’s Symone Sanders (2), Don Lemon, and Kate Bolduan (2), in November 2016;

• New York Times Propaganda Officer Francis X. Clines in March 2017;

• CNN Activist Jim Sciutto, in May 2017;

• Associated Press “Reporter” Duncan Mansfield (posthumous), in September 2017;

• CBS Sports operative Jack Maloney, Chairman Sean McManus, and President David Berson;

• Associated Press operative Julie Pace, in October 2017;

• Associated Press Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and Managing Editor Brian Carovillano; and

• “New York Times Operatives Richard Fausset (Alleged Reporter), Executive Editor Dean Baquet, and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn.”