Here's the thing that strikes me about Uri Berliner's essay on Tuesday about National Public Radio's leftist agenda: The guy is still working there.
He now has whistleblower status, which offers social and legal protections, but it makes him persona non gratia at the workplace. That's gotta be uncomfortable, though I suspect it signals that he knows others at NPR share his concerns about its exclusively-leftist agenda over the past eight years.
It also signals that he's simply fed up with the bad-faith bias.
Here's the thing. A person can hold dogmatic views but still object when co-religionists engage in violence, which is what the legacy media has been doing over the past eight years. A Nazi guard might sneak food to a prisoner; a Klan member might refuse to participate in more lynchings. At some point, people within a deformed movement refuse to participate in the deformity.
I think that's what we're seeing with the growing spate of leftists who are tired of seeing non-leftists vilified and their views suppressed or distorted.
"Look, I don't like conservatives or libertarians, either, but do we have treat them as sub-human?"
That appears to be what's happening with these defections from the left. They're not even defections: Joe Rogan is still liberal; I'm sure Berliner is still on the far left. They're just people who see a gross deformity and refuse to participate in it anymore.
From whence this gross deformity?
Everyone knows the deformity became gross after Brexit and Trump 2016. When that happened, the Establishment knew it had to get things under control . . . and fast. The suppression campaign was thorough.
But what I find most interesting is that the Establishment brought into its efforts the furthest reaches of the left. The Marxists.
Leftism as asserted by outlets like NPR, WaPo, NYT, and most universities is now Marxism. Or at least more "Marxist" than "liberal." It's not "liberal" any more than today's Unitarianism is Christian.
Marxism has an exclusive worldview: all institutions rise from the mud, are built from the mud, and reflect the mud. The mud is "economics." The institutions are part of the superstructure. If a person thinks otherwise, his opinion is valued as much as a Catholic's opinion would be valued in a mosque. The opinion is simply wrong. It can be discarded, ignored, and righteously suppressed if the opinion starts to interfere with the Leftist's program to change the economics and superstructure of society.
The uncompromising worldview fit well with the Establishment's uncompromising opinion that Brexit and Trump must be stopped at all costs.
