We are now entering Week Three of massive media outrage involving Khizr Khan, a Muslim attorney whose son, Humayun, was killed in Iraq in 2004. Both Khans, native to Pakistan, arrived in the United States in 1980. The son went into the military. The father went to Harvard and immigration law. While not a particularly featured speaker at the Democratic National Convention, the thickly-accented senior Khan took the opportunity to denounce Trump passionately, waving a copy of the Constitution and accusing Donald Trump of knowing nothing about said document, as evidenced by his (Donald’s) anti-immigration views.
The suggestion is that restricting American immigration is unconstitutional is wrong. Attorney Khan — specializing in immigration law (for large business firms) — surely knows it. It’s common knowledge that American policy has severely restricted immigration throughout its history, most recently from 1924-1964, for instance. Jimmy Carter personally cancelled visas for Iranians during the Iran crisis in the 1970’s.
That was not the point, however. Khan was aiming for the belly, not the head. His son had died in the Iraq war — had died for America! And the despicable Trump, he suggested, was disrespecting Muslims, nay, soldiers, heroes, the noble dead, grieving bereaved parents, by suggesting that Muslim terrorism might be reduced if less Muslims arrived from terrorist-supporting Muslim nations. Bad Trump!
Some feel Trump asked for the media storm that followed. Maybe he did. Clinton associate George Stephanopolous interviewed Trump about Khan’s speech, and The Donald had every reason to expect a trap. Nonetheless, he stepped in it. Trump’s exact words:
“He was very emotional, and probably looked like a nice guy to me. His wife, if you look at his wife she was standing there, she had nothing to say. Probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me, but plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet and it looked like she had nothing to say, a lot of people have said that, and personally I watched him, I wish him the best of luck.”
“A nice guy,” and “I wish him the best of luck” don’t sound particularly abusive, especially contrasted with Khan’s roasting of Trump alive on stage at the DNC, not to mention Khan’s references to Trump’s “black soul” and similar endearments. Trump even went on to call Khan’s son “a hero.” Did Trump mean to imply above that Mrs. Khan was not allowed to speak? , but then “Probably, maybe… you tell me… a lot of people have said that,” is hardly very clear, much less a firm “Yes.”
Doesn’t matter. Khan shot back at once, wasting no time re-denouncing Trump. The reticent Mrs. Khan got a full Op-Ed in the Washington Post to dump on Trump too. And then the whole of the Democratic establishment, Republican establishment, and assembled press of the Western world joined an ever-expanding gang Trump-rape. McCain and #NeverTrump, Obama and Gingrich, Ryan and Rupert, linked arms as one, utterly and completely appalled at Trump’s… er, what, exactly? The suggestion that Islamic tradition doesn’t encourage female oratory?
Well, whatever. The main thing is, some of those rocks actually seemed to land. Trump dropped a few points in the polls! Media glee was boundless. Had they actually, finally found a way to take down The Donald? True, the rise in Hillary’s numbers might be nothing more than the typical post-Convention bump, and (in a story much less covered by the press) no less a (Democratic) pollster Pat Caddell has thundered at the numbers in an article as “dishonest” and “cooked”.
Irrelevant: like the heartaches and posterior of Kim Kardashian, all other news has been pushed to one side as the mainstream media horsewhips Donald Trump for his boundless personal ignominy.
What, you may ask, has The Donald Trump done to deserve all this? When it comes to being an object of hate, Trump needs not do: it is enough for him simply to be. It’s hard, in fact, to find any actual core news whatever in all this. The outrage itself is the story.
Trump had nothing whatever to do with the death of Khan fils, who was killed by agents of (you guessed it) radical Islam. That death was facilitated by America’s entry into the Iraq war, which was facilitated not by Trump but by Trump foe George Bush and supported by Trump opponent Hillary Clinton. Trump was an early critic, and young Khan would not have died had Trump’s anti-war non-interventionist policies been implemented.
Nor, for that matter, would any of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims also killed in that intervention, or continuing to die under the ongoing intervention conducted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
So why isn’t Khan Senior beating up on neocons and their Great Anti-White Hope, Hillary? I’ve lost a son, Khan moans and writhes. pointing at Trump. How many children has Trump lost? He could have asked, with no less right, how many Muslim children have lost their lives as a result of the policies and actions Hillary Clinton supported and in some cases initiated?
But then Clinton is giving him a platform. And a good deal more. A microscopic few on the journalistic Right went on to unearth links between Khan and Hillary’s law firm, Khan and the Clinton Foundation, Khan and the Muslim Brotherhood, even Khan and Sharia law, which legal writings by Khan suggests properly overrides lesser secular documents like the infidel Constitution he saw fit to wave.
One could argue that it is rather callous to profit from a candidate who has some responsibility, however indirect, for a misconceived war that costs one’s son his life. Trump, however, has not made that argument.
And that’s the odd thing. Given that Trump had nothing to do with any of this, and Hillary does, why is Trump being torn to shreds?
The short answer, of course, is that the media wants to tear him to shreds. But perhaps the more relevant question is: why? And perhaps: does it matter?
One is tempted to advise Trump to merely honor the late Khan’s sacrifice, point out that what caused Khan’s son’s death was the pro-war policies of his hawks like his opponent, and that those sincerely wanting to see fewer such deaths should support a candidate far less inclined to military adventurism than Hillary Clinton. Indeed, he should simply get on with pointing to Mrs. Clinton’s email scandals, DNC scandals, Clinton Foundation scandals, foreign funding scandals, etc. etc.
The problem is, he’s done all this. And the firestorm rages on. It’s not merely Clinton scandals that are being given short shrift by the press. It’s events in general. Transfer of $400 million to Iran, Muslim beheading of a priest here, migrants setting fire to a bus while shouting Allah Akhbar there, are noted, but that’s simply not news, that stuff that pundits endlessly discuss and that interviewees are called upon to examine, explore, and exponentially share. News consists of major figures like Anderson Cooper inviting guests who call Trump a “loud-mouth dick” on screen.
I confess that all this has me re-thinking things. Since only 7% of journalists describe themselves as Republican, a certain slant was to be expected from the remaining, not always fastidious, 97%. But one likes to think that slant is moderated by a lingering homage to objectivity. That avowed Trump foes like Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, who own the press and preside over the onslaught that is being unleashed on Trump, might diminish that hypocrisy somewhat, and surely some appearance of objectivity would be maintained.
Except it isn’t. Whether it’s Trump the coming Hitler or Trump the Russian agent or Trump the closet Klansman, any mud that can be thrown is being thrown, as all restraint is lost.
Liberal commentator Glen Greenwald seems to concur:
“The media has used Trump as this kind of once in a lifetime threat, like Hitler, and there is this kind of moral exercise that you engage in when you say, “If I were a German in the 1930s, what would I want history to have recorded that I did? I would want history to record that I did everything I possibly could to stop Hitler.” I think that is now translating into everything and anything goes when it comes to stopping Trump. I think journalists are now of the mindset where they are saying, “Anything we can use against Trump, we can.” And I think that in and of itself is pretty dangerous, and I am just not comfortable with that… “
If anything Greenwald understates the case. The 24/7 wall-to-wall fury currently directed at Trump is something new in my experience. The press are not merely what they seem to become of late, scrambling capitalist whores plying their trade for ratings, hits and derivative celebrity. There is a willful manipulation, an all-encompassing, visceral, passionate hatred for Trump one has not seen in the United States since the Abolitionists. What in the world is behind this near-pathological loathing? Comparisons to Hitler are no measure of it. The press is not as upset by Hitler.
We continually hear that Trump voters, like the Right in general, is driven by fear, anger, hatred. Despite police shootings, violent protests, campus free speech shutdowns, one never hears of similar motivations on the Left. Yet when it comes to Donald Trump, the hatred is so vast, vivid and palpable that even some on the left are becoming concerned. What is it all about? What accounts for it? The object of their hate — a stumblingly inarticulate real estate investor with a Twitter account — is simply not worth this degree of passion. Trump may be at the eye of the hurricane, but he himself is surely not the cause of the hurricane. What is?
Almost as interesting is the question of why it is so universal. The Republican establishment dislikes Trump, but as his poll numbers have grown they seem to have accommodated themselves to him. The Democratic establishment affects to loath him, but they certainly did not loathe his campaign contributions back when, and even now disappointed Bernie supporters are taking the Trump Train.
But the media’s fury ranges across the mainstream board. Is there one single mainstream news entity not in lockstep with the rest in their rage against The Donald? In a country where the electorate seems evenly divided, there is simply no division among the mainstream media, and no interest in the popular preferences of their presumable readership base.
I am not a conspiracy theorist; I don’t believe the Elders of Zion have distributed anti-Trump guidelines to the media in their weekly email newsletter. I don’t think the fact that Rupert Murdoch owns Fox requires Fox to publish polls that put Trump 10 points behind when an LA Times poll puts him one point behind.
Murdoch can commission cynical compliance, to be sure, but not hatred, and not mass hatred across an entire profession and industry. On the contrary: what seems to be happening is some sort of social phenomenon, like the Martian scare of the Thirties.
And that is interesting, because it suggests that something primal and subterranean is being has been triggered. What? I won’t speculate here, but just as the Martian scare anticipated the coming World War, this palpable, collective fear of a class, the class that interprets ourselves to ourselves, portends matters of significance. Something is coming.
And yet one of the other startling lessons of this amazing political season is the indifference — no, contempt — of the general population for mainstream media opinion, and an equal indifference and contempt for its unanimity.
From Brexit on down, polls say one thing, pundits say the same thing, and political establishments repeat the mantra over and over with uniform, virtually pre-scripted, regularity. And the voting population could not care less. Clinton rises in the polls, and her acceptance speech is deemed “historic,” but the number of people coming to her rallies number in the dozens. Trump falls, and his every word is labelled racist spittle, yet his appearances draw tens of thousands. The Khan story, waved by media like the Soviet flag over the burning Reichstag, has really had little to no impact on Trump; what is truly relevant is that it is irrelevant.
What seems to be happening is that a kind of informational cocoon is forming: Trump haters who move in exclusively Trump-hating circles (principally media-related and academic) read Trump-hating publications which commission comforting Trump-hating polls. These elite peruse the Times and the New Yorker and listen to PBS and NPR and have no notion at all that there is a vast population out there that not only never reads these publications and does not even know they exist.
Conclusion? The trickle-down effect no longer trickles down, because the class divisions and media options have grown so wide and deep that an abyss now separates them. Why go to the Times when Alex Jones and Michael Savage are on the car radio, when Drudge and Breitbart are ready at hand on the smartphone, when Molyneux and Zizek are on Youtube? Why read media spin about Trump when Trump himself is tweeting you directly right this minute?
As in the Edvard Munch painting, the figure in the foreground is frozen in a perpetual scream, and in the distance one or two other figures look on. But only one or two. No one else is listening; no one else cares.