Get with the program

America’s Left wants one thing from newspapers: Complete and total obedience. 

Consider Dan Pfeiffer. I talked with him once during Barack Obama’s first campaign in Nevada. Seemed like a smart dude. But, like a lot of politicos who gain some election success, they start sipping their own bathwater and come to believe they’re doing the Lord’s work worthy of worship by all.

Mr. Pfeiffer recently chided the New York Times for failing to sufficiently get with the program to defeat Donald Trump. This is not a joke told at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It was said – in fact, written – in dead seriousness. 

Mr. Pfeiffer said of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” 

Whoa. That’s an inappropriate suggestion in America’s system of democracy. I was glad to see the NYTimes editor, Joe Kahn, call him out on it. 

“I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House,” said Mr. Khan. “We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?”

I sincerely hope Mr. Kahn is as pissed as he sounds because who’s the authoritarian White House that got caught red-handed suppressing free speech in the Twitter Files investigation. Uh, that would be the Biden White House. 

I’d love to see the Times put a little journalism into that. Also, why have the Biden White House authoritarians met with the various prosecutors now bringing court suits that appear to be designed to bankrupt and silence Mr. Trump in a campaign year?

Fertile ground to plow, it seems to me. Please, Mr. Kahn, plow it.

TRUMP LEADS NEVADA

Former President Donald Trump is now up over President Joe Biden by 5.1 points in Nevada. Seems like a lot to me, but that’s the story out of Roll Call earlier this month. Please remember, May polls are, well, May polls.

TEACHING HATE

I’m a big fan of public education, but you gotta watch it like a hawk and guard it against it going off the rails. 

A case in point comes out of California. Just a week or so after the brutal Hamas attack on Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, a group of high school students in California marched off campus carrying signs to “Free Palestine” and chanting “from the river to the sea.”

I remember thinking “that was quick.” Where are they learning this stuff? Apparently some schools are teaching in class. 

Last week, Ed Source carried a piece about how the Berkeley Unified School District hired a consultant by the name of Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium. The Berkeley public education boss calls the group a “thought partner.” It offers a teaching model “with a focus on dismantling capitalism, systems of racism, and Zionism, which it equates to colonialism.”

When grilled about it in Congress, the Berkeley superintendent said the district didn’t use the consultant’s ideas verbatim, but had their teachers use it as source material to craft their own curriculum. But when a parent asked to see the actual curriculum, the district declined.

Declined? That speaks volumes. 

Now that a little sunshine has been directed toward this phenomenon, California is pushing back, just a little, on hateful “thought partners”. Gov. Gavin Newsom said in his usual baby splitting way that the core teaching of the group may be “insufficiently inclusive.” 

No kidding, governor. When 16-year-old high schoolers chant “from the river to the sea” a week after Jews were slaughtered by Hamas, you gotta think something’s amiss.  

Treasure public education. Guard it well. 

ONE MORE THING

– To the person who affixed coffee to the word cake, thereby justifying the eating of cake for breakfast, I salute you unnamed hero.

(Sherman R. Frederick is a longtime journalist and a member of the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame. You can read more of his work at shermanfrederick.substack.com/.)