Last month veteran Washington Post reporter Mike DeBonis and a junior colleague were manipulated by the top staffer of far-left freshman Congressman Mondaire Jones (D-NY) into writing a breathless story suggesting that at least one Capitol Hill Police officer was reading an infamous antisemitic tract while on duty. Ignoring recent media history filled with divisive Jussee Smollett-like hoaxes, the story offered little skepticism of the staffer’s claim that he’d found a tattered copy of the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion at an unmanned police post on a Sunday afternoon when nobody else was around. And rather than take the photos he’d snapped directly to his boss who in turn could take them directly to the Capitol Police’s acting chief for the purposes of a proper investigation, the staffer brought them to the Post instead.
Of course, as Post-deconstruction mused in a March 16 post, if a hypothetical staffer “were to plant a copy of the Protocols near a briefly unmanned police post and photograph it as the foundation for his hoax, he’d be stupid to share the photos directly with police and risk later criminal charges for making a false report.” Better to “avoid legal jeopardy and instead launder his fraudulent photos through First Amendment-protected journalists….”
Apparently, such wary thoughts never occurred to Post reporters who volunteered to take the photos to Capitol Police and demand a comment. Talk about bootstrapping a scandalous headline. Meanwhile, the purportedly frightened staffer, Zach Fisch, didn’t wait to give a discreet statement to police investigators. No, he excitedly ran off to Twitter: “Our office is full of people — Black, Brown, Jewish, queer — who have good reason to fear white supremacists. If the [Capitol Police are] all that stands between us and the mob we saw on Jan. 6, how can we feel safe?”
Well, the hysterical nut doesn’t fall far from the tree. This week the Post aided and abetted still more hysteria from Mr. Fisch’s fabulist boss, Mr. Jones, who bills himself as “the first openly gay Black member of Congress.” The first sentence of his p. A21 Tuesday op-ed, “Only Congress can stop Jim Crow’s return,” preposterously claims that “White supremacists are closer to restoring Jim Crow than at any time in memory….” The memory of a fruit fly perhaps. But surely no sober, objective observer of contemporary America and its politics believes that the perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 misfit racists running around the back woods and training for a Charlie Manson race war have any capacity whatsoever to turn our 21st-century nation of 330 million diverse and generous people into Hitler’s homicidal Third Reich of the 1930s and 1940s.
Yet that is exactly what Mr. Jones claims, with the Post’s blessing. Why? Because he and Post management believe it’s in their interest to fan flames of division so Congress will federalize state election laws, skirting the Constitution’s small “r” republican text that leaves to state legislatures decisions about the “time and manner” in which elections are to be conducted. The radical left wants Congress to pass and President Biden to sign the so-called “For the People Act,” also known as H.R. 1, which ought to be more truthfully titled the “Democrats’ Consolidation of Power Act.”
As the Wall Street Journal’s far more honest editorial staff pointed out both in January and again last month, Democrats don’t want to leave to the whims of deplorable, center-right voters decisions about who leads the nation and which policies are pursued. So, among many other fat thumbs this bill would lay on election scales nationwide would be the normalization of fraud-inviting ballot harvesting, the anti-First Amendment outing of donors to nonprofits that inveigh against command-and-control progressivism, and even the federalized drawing of congressional districts so as to end “partisan gerrymandering,” as Rep. Jones calls it. What he means is the drawing of any district that doesn’t give the Democrats’ candidate an advantage on Election Day, or should we say Election Month.
Yes, the bill also mandates interminably long periods for early voting and ballot harvesting. All the better for unionized employees in big blue cities to count and count and recount until the proper results desired by the reigning political machine are achieved.
In any case, H.R. 1 doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in the Senate, so it’s going nowhere, thank goodness. But that didn’t stop editorial page editor Fred Hiatt from irresponsibly choosing to give Mr. Jones’ incendiary fantasies still more space on the pages of the once liberal-but-respected Washington Post. Meanwhile, readers are still waiting to find out whatever came of that Capitol Police investigation into young Mr. Fisch’s accusations of antisemitism. Don’t hold your breath while Democracy Dies in Darkness.