Reagan appointee Judge Silberman's rant against "leftist" media "domination" only shows that the modern world has left him behind

 

Politico reported last week that Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court delivered a “withering frontal assault” on the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan, which Silberman claimed allowed left-wing media to “defame” right-wing political figures with “impunity.” However, it seems a bit hypocritical to claim that presenting facts is evidence of “actual malice,” although this is essentially what Silberman’s tizzy-fit would suggest. Silberman claimed that “the holding has no relation to the text, history, or structure of the Constitution, and it baldly constitutionalized an area of law refined over centuries of common law adjudication.” But it would seem that Silberman himself is guilty of invention for his own self-serving purposes; after all, people like Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t need anyone to “defame” them, because they do that very well themselves. Silberman seems to believe that reporting their own words amounts to “actual malice.”

Silberman decried the alleged “single-party” media, and fulminated about how the power of the press stifled right-wing thought. This is a man who clearly only cares to hear his own bigoted beliefs aired, and seems to be the kind of person who when he hears anything he doesn’t like, he is consumed by it. Silberman seemingly ignores the existence of Fox News and other right-wing outlets like OAN and Newsmax, and seems to be unaware of the complete domination of right-wing talk on the radio. Further, he doesn’t seem to understand that more and more people get their “news” from the Internet, where dangerous far-right fantasies, white nationalist and QAnon conspiracies provide a sinister concoction for many millions of people in this country, and more than a few Republicans. Why is it “malicious” to call this out?

Donald Trump is said to be creating his own social media platform, and how dangerous will that be to democracy? The truth is what Silberman clearly fears from so-called “leftist” media is the exposure of the right-wing media being heavily influenced by crackpot conspiracy theories and the actual malice aimed at groups vulnerable to the predations of white nationalists. We know, for example, that Stephen Miller is a racist because he has made that more than plain through both his words and his actions, and he predictably is a fixture on Fox News, wailing away on his favorite topic, Hispanic immigration. His most recent wail is making preposterous claims about the Biden administration’s relaxing of the most inhuman Trump policies that Miller himself masterminded are “morally monstrous,” “inhumane,” encouraging the “brutal monstrous trafficking of minors.”

Miller’s language was clearly malicious in both intent and as a reflection of his own personality. Remember that a former high school classmate who was Hispanic reported that Miller had called him and told him they could not be friends anymore because he was Hispanic. Miller, like many of his ilk, seems ignorant of the fact that these “children” grow-up in the harsh realities of life a lot faster in Mexico and Central America than they do in the pampered U.S.; but more to the point, Miller is deliberately fabricating his own “law.”  The law in regard to the handling of minors who are allowed in the country requires that they be eventually put in HHS facilities, where they await either for family members in the U.S. to take them in, or potential guardians or foster homes which are vetted for the purpose—none of them are “controlled” or  handed over to “traffickers” as Miller fulminates.

It is clear that Miller’s chief complaint is not of a “humanitarian” nature, but of the racist, xenophobic variety: for him, it is simply too “easy” for children to obtain legal status—a notion that Fareed Zakaria also shares with him, even though they are allegedly on separate sides of the ideological equation. Which of course brings up the question if the “mainstream” media is as “leftist” as Silberman charges. I say not. We have seen how that media allows itself to be used by those with malicious agendas to destroy the careers of even “liberal” politicians, and we have also seen how so-called “leftist” media also allows itself to be used to promote intolerance and bigotry not entirely dissimilar to that promoted by Miller.

Take for instance The Washington Post, which employs op-ed writer and CNN commentator Zakaria. Not surprisingly, the Post doubled-down on his nativist position by deploying four white reporters to the border who went apeshit on their reporting on the “crisis” with “no end in sight,” which only “confirms” Miller’s own hyperbole. The Post story naturally doesn’t illuminate who these migrants are or why they are coming here; they are just a faceless mob of subhuman refuse. Nothing at all about the years of Trump administration policies that created the “crisis” by blocking all legal avenues into the country for a people who have for 200 years played an important, but rarely acknowledged, role in the development of this country—and until the 1970s, they were portrayed in “westerns” on television and in the movies as part of the cultural and social milieu—but now have receded from view as a part of the American scene as blacks (and now rather quizzically Asians) began to dominate the social discussion in regard to the continuing American problem with prejudice and discrimination. Today, Hispanics are almost always viewed through the paranoid prism of immigration and the alleged negative consequences of it, despite the fact that the vast majority in the country—50 million—are U.S. citizens.

Thus Silberman, who was first appointed to his seat by Reagan, is a man so consumed by his paranoia, bigotries and tunnel-vision that he cannot see that his view of the ideological landscape is literally obsolete, seemingly oblivious to a modern world where the Internet, social media and cell phones have literally spelled the doom of the so-called “leftist” print media that survives mostly through its connections with broadcast and social media, and the fact that people who do not wish to get their “news” from “leftist” media have literally numberless alternative sources of “alternative” news. Further, even “leftist” news sources are not so much “liberal” these days, but beholden to certain “special interest” groups that literally eat their own out of pure malice.