#Biden’s ‘devout’ Catholic faith is gaslighting and other commentary

Media watch: Gaslighting Without End or Shame

American media have descended to “full-blown gaslighting to facilitate whatever the left wants,” rages Robert Knight in The Washington Times. The lies include President Biden’s “devout” Catholic faith, the nonexistence of a border crisis and — most shameless of all — the notion that it was the GOP that sought to defund police. “Read or watch at your own risk.” 

From the right: From MAGA to Madness

MAGA has become “a racket for conspiracy theorists and the con artists who exploit them,” and it “is holding the Republican party hostage,” even as “the Biden administration is lifting” President Donald Trump’s “policies and stealing the Republicans’ thunder,” Dominic Green warns at Spectator World. Democrats won the White House after they “stigmatized a vote for Trump as downwardly mobile” and so “peeled off just enough aspirational white suburbanites, women especially.” But the GOP base insists the “election was stolen. Not bungled. . . . Not mismanaged or corrupted, as electoral processes tend to be everywhere — and especially in big cities. But stolen, in an organized and elaborate conspiracy to overthrow American democracy.” If the party doesn’t wake up, it faces disaster, ­because “moderates and swing voters won’t” buy it. 

Conservative: Race-Theory Bait-and-Switch

The authors of the many media pieces painting critical race theory as a “bogeyman of the right” must “be trying to drive readers mad” by “presenting one vision of the world and then denying that it even exists,” fumes Douglas Murray at UnHerd. CRT has been “openly heralded within American academia and has now been forced upon the wider world,” and yet its proponents now “claim that our understanding of CRT has become confused — as if an ideology that is willfully obscurantist ought, in fact, to be straightforward and agreed upon.” As “American parents have finally woken up to what is being taught to their children,” CRT advocates have taken a “sudden retreat into contradictory forms of self-defense.” But it is ultimately the fault of CRT’s creators “that their ideology’s first mass encounter with the general public is proving such a failure.”

Iconoclast: Bezos’ Wokeness Masks Exploitation

The blue-check media warmly greeted Amazon Studios’ new “inclusion” policy — but, scoffs Bari Weiss at her Substack, it amounts to the retail giant “turning the making of TV and film into the same woke numbers game played at every other elite institution.” Under the policy, Amazon will strive to have “women and people of color” fill “50 percent of creative roles in its movies and shows” by 2024. Plus, “the studio promises to try to cast actors whose identity . . . matches that of the characters they play. One wonders how Ariel from ‘The Little Mermaid’ or the sea monster from ‘The Shape of Water’ would be slotted.” The goal of all this, the company says, is to achieve “lasting change.” Is it though? Weiss wonders “how the Amazon drivers afraid to take a bathroom break in order to keep up with their delivery quotas would feel about that. Or the workers in JFK8, the company’s Staten Island warehouse, who labor under the all-seeing eye of Jeff Bezos.”

Neocon: ‘Infrastructure’ Language Games Failed

Commentary’s Noah Rothman declares: “The progressive gambit to redefine ‘infrastructure’ to include any and every left-wing policy priority is definitively over. Progressives lost.” Team Biden and its media allies had for weeks attempted to reframe the full spectrum of “Democratic hobbyhorses, few of which had anything related to do with conventional infrastructure.” But the very brazenness of the messaging effort “provided Republicans with an opportunity they skillfully exploited.” Most notably, rebutting President Biden’s address to Congress, Sen. Tim Scott made it clear that the GOP supports traditional infrastructure — “roads, bridges, ports, airports, waterways, high-speed broadband,” as the South Carolina lawmaker put it. That has forced Dems and the political press to append the adjectives “hard” or “physical” to the word “infrastructure,” making it clear that the bill that enjoys Republican support is just the one most people understand when they hear the word “infrastructure.” The public gets it. 

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board