Sympathy for the Devils: The Plot Against Roger Ailes — and America

“Every Cop Is a Criminal/And All the Sinners Saints”

Five police officers are murdered in Dallas by a #BlackLivesMatter-type activist-turned-sniper, and President Obama says blankly, “It is very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter.” Actually, it’s not hard at all: Micah Johnson’s anti-cop, anti-white motivation was quite evident — and his murderous rationale has been bolstered by, even cheered on by, his sister’s Facebook posts.

So how, then, does the New York Times justify this Sunday’s headline, which appears, as they say, above the fold in the hard copy of the newspaper: “Police Face a Dual Role: Villain and Victim”? The answer, of course, is that the Times puts it there because it thinks it can get away with it. That is, it thinks that it can implant false memories in the minds of its readers — many of whom, of course, being loyal liberals, are all too eager to be bamboozled. And so while the Times uses two V-words in its header, “Villain,” of course, comes first. Yes, it takes some mental gymnastics to invert the truth like this, but then the Times and the mainstream media (MSM) have been in training for a good long while.

The ordinary American turning on his or her TV on July 8 saw it all clearly: Five dead cops and another half-dozen wounded. But that was two days ago — which is to say, the Dallas assassinations happened many moons ago, news-cycle-wise. And so now, as the MSM comes in to provide “analysis and context,” it’s going to be a challenge for Americans to remember exactly what happened in the Big D. As George Orwell wrote 70 years ago, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” And so it is with the MSM’s version of what Orwell called “Newspeak” and “Doublethink” — that is, systematic lying.

And yes, the MSM has been hard at it for a while: Here’s the headline from the Washington Post on July 7: “Fatal shootings by police are up in the first six months of 2016, Post analysis finds.” Yes, the “Bezos Post,” as in Jeff Bezos, is at it again, adducing “evidence” to make its case — the cops are bad!

Meanwhile, the Post doesn’t just bury the real lede, it outright ignores it. The real news is that it’s increasingly deadly to be a cop; the murder rate of police officers, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, is up 44 percent, just in the last year.

What’s happening, of course, is another giant MSM bait-and-switch as reporters and their Democratic allies and mentors seek to twist the subject from topics they don’t like to discuss — murderers with evil motives — to topics they do like to discuss, such as gun control. And oh yes, “more training” and “more sensitivity,” because that’s money in the bank for Al Sharpton-ish professional “diversity” mongerers.

It’s the same cynical process we saw in the case of Omar Mateen, the jihadist shooter at the gay nightclub in Orlando on June 12. And let’s realize: That horrific mass-murder took place not even a month ago, and yet already, it’s slipped down the MSM memory hole, to apply another Orwellism. In the wake of Orlando, the Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton cheering it on, intoned against guns and “hate,” and is now back to importing more hating Muslims. Meanwhile, stories with headlines such as “Syrian refugee assaults girl, 13, at Boston pool” are consigned to the media back-burner.

Yes, it’s very sick, straight out of the Rolling Stones song, “Sympathy for the Devil”:

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer

Lucifer. That sounds about right. There is something Luciferian about systematically ignoring dangers while bringing in more dangerous people.

But there’s one stumbling block for the left in its plot to take down America. And that stumbling block is . . . the American people. You see, ordinary Americans don’t want their country to be controlled by the likes of Micah Johnson. Indeed, in deep-blue-Democratic Maryland, the news that a 59-year-old economics professor at Johns Hopkins University was stabbed to death while walking her dogs in a park in Baltimore on July 8 is just one more indicator that things are going haywire, such that even liberals know something is deeply wrong. Indeed, the Baltimore murder is a tragic reminder that all the progress that’s been made in the last 25 years toward revitalizing cities could be washed away in an orgy of de-gentrification.

In the meantime, here’s a thought: What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent. On July 9, one such gun-toting miscreant was killed in Houston. Have a look for yourself and see if you think we lost much when Alva Braziel met his end: In the droll headline of Infowars, “Cops Kill Innocent Black Man Merely for Pointing a Gun at Them!” (Hat tip: @_Makada_, African-American female.)

So thus the mega-question for 2016: Who should run this country? The duly appointed authorities? Or street hoodlums? Do the American people want to see the police reprogrammed to look the other way while criminals do their thing? Or do they want tough-but-fair cops who will enforce the laws — all of them?

The last time this question was put to a national vote, the forces of order won big. That was during the 1968 presidential election when the Democrats tried to win a third term for their party with Hubert Humphrey, a hapless liberal who proved himself helpless in the face of urban rioting and other unrest. Fortunately, Humphrey was stopped by Richard Nixon, who campaigned on a stern message of “law and order.”

The ’68 election is remembered as a squeaker, and in a way, it was; Nixon won the popular vote by just seven-tenths of one percent. But that closeness was something of an illusion: In that crux year, Alabama governor George Wallace launched a quixotic third-party candidacy, winning 13.5 percent of the popular vote and actually carrying five Southern states. Had Wallace not been in the race, all of his votes would have gone to Nixon, and the Republican would have won in a huge landslide.

So we can see that 1968 is a beacon for the conservative team: We just need to steer our ship of state toward that lighthouse. If it worked for us once, it should work for us again.

Yet the Democrats remember 1968, too. And they have to have a plan for making sure that this time, in 2016, America doesn’t make it to conservative safety.

The Plot Against Roger Ailes

As it happens, about the last surviving linkage between 1968 and 2016 is Roger Ailes. Way back when, nearly half-a-century ago, Ailes was the hotshot daytime TV producer who was recruited by the Nixon campaign to make their man more presentable on television. It was a tall order as Nixon was not handsome nor a natural, TV-wise. Yet at the same time, Ailes knew Nixon was smart and tough, like a prosecutor, and so he played up that prosecutorial smartness and toughness. And that’s a big reason why Nixon won — because Ailes knew that the Republicans had to live and breathe their law-and-order message every day on the television tube.

Ailes has been out of politics for more than a quarter-century now, but it’s fair to say that his basic sensibility is visible on the Fox screen. Critics say that Fox News leans right, but the truth is, it’s more centrist — it just looks right-wing in comparison to the other news outlets.

But Fox, as a lonely fair-and-balanced bastion, is still an obstacle to Democratic victory plans in 2016. And that’s the real story of the Gretchen Carlson lawsuit against Ailes, which I wrote about here at BNN on July 8. I said then, and I still think now, that Carlson’s case has no merit, but I now see more clearly that her case has depth — that is, lots of resources. Yes, it is a huge operation that they have mounted against Ailes. And who is “they”? I think it’s virtually the whole of the Democratic establishment, including the Obamas, the Clintons, and their billionaire financiers, such as George Soros. These are the people who are plotting to take down Ailes. And if Ailes goes, I’m afraid, so could America.

The hulking size of the anti-Ailes juggernaut became fully evident on July 10, when Politico, always a loyal consort for the Democrats, headlined a piece, “The Carlson Camp: Inside the team of lawyers and P.R. agents strategizing former Fox anchor’s battle against Roger Ailes.” The 2300-word piece, credited to no fewer than six Politico authors, has obviously been in the works for some time. But then, just as obviously, so has the entirety of the Carlson team; they’ve been prepped, big-time. This was a set-up ambush, pure and simple.

And then, later that same day, in an obvious attempt to rush to judgment, Politico followed up with another long and deeply sourced story under the ominous headline, “After Ailes: It’s almost impossible to imagine Fox News without its creator and guardian, Roger Ailes. Almost.” Politico, of course, has no direct power over Fox, but the publication has made a specialty out of whipping up frenzies inside the media hothouses of DC and NYC.

As if it were needed, further proof that the anti-Ailes forces are deeply synchronized is the reappearance of Gabriel Sherman. You remember him: He’s the longtime Ailes-hater at New York magazine, who attempted to ruin Ailes with his sludgy biography, published to flat sales two years ago — it didn’t even make paperback.

Yet tellingly, Sherman had a lot of PR firepower behind that book, including a boiler room of partisan Democratic operatives — and by the way, who paid for them? And now Sherman is back dusting off — or is it, making up? — charges of Ailes sex-harassment from 30, 40, even 50 years ago. If one goes through the torture of reading through these archaic accusations, mostly from unnamed individuals, one gets the distinct feeling that it’s material that the sober lawyers at Sherman’s publisher, Random House, wouldn’t let him put it in his 2014 book. But now that Sherman is getting a second bite at the Ailes apple, he is throwing everything out there, desperately trying to fuel the media flames, and perhaps redeeming himself. Indeed, it’s a safe bet that in the near future, Sherman will “find” more such bombs to lob.

Sherman has made many of his silly charges before and gotten nowhere, but this time, there’s a difference. And that difference is the new leadership of 21st Century Fox, the parent company of Fox News, which might be more receptive to anti-Ailes venom.

As I noted two days ago, the grand patriarch of Fox, Rupert Murdoch, is a great friend and fan of Ailes. But Rupert is 84, and he has substantially turned the reins of the company over to his two sons, Lachlan and James. And nobody really knows what they think of Ailes. Or maybe we do, since the Murdoch boys immediately declared, in the wake of the Carlson lawsuit, that they would instigate their own investigation of Ailes. And that, of course, could be Trouble with a capital “T.” After all, hired guns have a way of shooting those whom they’re hired to shoot.

Indeed, the wormy Sherman has written that the backdrop is corporate skullduggery, aimed directly at Ailes:

Executives I spoke with over the past 24 hours said the hiring of an outside lawyer is also an indication that Murdoch’s sons may be capitalizing on the Carlson scandal to achieve a long-held goal: forcing Ailes out. “It’s a coup,” one person close to the company told me. If the investigation into Ailes’s management confirms Carlson’s account, or turns up additional episodes of harassment with other Fox women, it stands to reason the Murdoch children would have the leverage they need to push Ailes aside and install a less-right-wing chief.

So there you have it: The real goal is to “install a less-right-wing chief.”

Of course, Sherman has been incorrect a lot more than he’s been correct, but David Folkenflik, media-beat reporter for NPR, offered some cautious corroboration to CNN on Sunday, “The interests of Roger Ailes… may diverge from the interests of the Murdoch family.”

To be sure, a few voices have warned the Murdochs against defenestrating Ailes. One such is Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik, who on Sunday stressed Ailes’ essentiality to the ongoing success of the channel. As he told CNN:

This is [Ailes’] channel.  It’s built on his ego, and when you ask about stepping aside, they can’t let him step aside unless he’s going to run it like a manager who’s ejected from the game and runs it out of the club house. They will fall apart if he’s not in the lead.

Of course, the younger Murdochs might not agree that Fox will fall apart if Ailes goes. Perhaps they think that they are the unheralded TV geniuses, who will only get their chance to shine if Ailes is out of the picture. (Actually, it’s hard to think of anything that the younger Murdochs have actually done that counts as a success, but such negative thinking doesn’t reach into the high sanctums of the company headquarters at 11211 Avenue of the Americas.)

And without a doubt, the young Murdochs will see some upside in displacing the Fox chief—it will count as a sacrifice on the altar of political correctness, and that’s important to the Manhattan media culture. It will be recalled, for example, that CNN got rid of Lou Dobbs a few years ago, because he was making too many un-PC points about immigration and trade. Dobbs, of course is now at the Fox Business Network, where he is doing well—but nobody at CNN paid a price for pushing him out. 

Yes, 21 CF would be much less profitable without Ailes’s skilled hand at the tiller—it’s not easy to run a TV network—but the Murdoch scions may calculate that they would rather have the high-fiving and back-patting of the Manhattan glitterati than the many billions in profits that Ailes has earned for them. And if that seems like a strange choice to you, dear reader, well, it just might be the case that you aren’t a Manhattan progressive. If you were, you would immediately see the upside in making Ailes walk the plank. 

I’ll close with a quote from a Fox News insider, who lays out the stakes:

If you’re looking for evidence of a vast left wing conspiracy, open up your screen or turn on your TV. Hillary and her media shock troops have been buffeted by two decades of FOX News coverage that has uncovered Bill and Hillary’s greatest scandals and has so far derailed Bill and Hillary’s greatest ambitions—to win the White House for her. Now they need to take down one of the few media outlets that will actually do its job to ensure their ambitions are realized. From Whitewater to Lewinsky to impeachment to Benghazi to the e-mail scandals, FOX News has been the outlet that has reported truth to power. So now Hillary & Company, joined by the vast left-wing conspiracy, run through the Clinton Foundation and inspired and financed by Media Matters—and with failed Ailes biographer Sherman riding shotgun—are ready to settle the score and take out one of the last truth Sheriffs still standing: Roger Ailes and the network he created, FOX News.

All I can say to that is, “Amen.” If Ailes goes, Hillary is a lot more likely to win. And so is #BlackLivesMatter, the New Black Panthers, and all the rest of the crazies. 

And that terrifying prospect is enough to keep me on the firing line. Maybe you, too, feel the same way.