I & I Editorial BoardWhat do a $15 million settlement with ABC News, a Washington, D.C., waitress getting fired, and the Los Angeles Times planning to include a bias meter in its news stories have in common?
They are all welcome signs that the nation is embracing normalcy once again – something that Joe Biden was allegedly going to restore after Donald Trump’s supposedly chaotic years.
Trump’s first term was chaotic, but not because of what he did so much as the four-year hysteria unleashed by his opponents.
Biden, on the other hand, brought true chaos. A tainted election, foreign wars, open borders, runaway inflation, exploding deficits, shortages, censorship, weaponized justice, incompetent leaders and a senile president, two assassination attempts, rising disunity, despair.
But now that the left’s unhinged efforts to silence conservative voices and block Trump’s reelection have been soundly defeated, a return to some semblance of normalcy is actually possible.
ABC News’ settlement – which includes a public apology in addition to the $15 million to settle a defamation case over “journalist” George Stephanopoulos’ repeated assertion that Trump had been found “liable for rape” – is a sign that news media can’t do or say whatever it wants to push an agenda.
That came after two papers refused to endorse Kamala Harris for president because she is so undeniably unsuited for the office, causing some allegedly neutral reporters and editors at those papers to quit.
More recently, the owner of the Los Angeles Times’ spiked an editorial he deemed unfairly critical of Trump’s Cabinet picks and announced that Times news stories would be accompanied by an AI-powered bias meter rating. As CNN reports, “(Patrick) Soon-Shiong said major publishers have so far failed to adequately separate news and opinion, which he suggested ‘could be the downfall of what now people call mainstream media.'”
That also has the left freaking out. How dare a publisher ask journalists to do what they promise – report the news – and not propagandize their readers.
Then there’s the case of the employee at a Washington, D.C., restaurant who was fired after she was quoted in the Washingtonian magazine saying she “personally would refuse to serve any person” she could identify as working for the Trump administration.
For eight years, this person would have been celebrated as a hero. During Trump’s first term, prominent Democrats such as Rep. Maxine Waters urged open-minded and tolerant leftists to harass Trump administration employees. “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” Waters said, “And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
This time around, however, the owner of the restaurant issued a statement saying that the server’s remarks were “inappropriate, hostile, intolerant, and unacceptable. This staff member does NOT speak for us as a restaurant.” (Such language used to be limited only to those who violated the woke canon.)
It would be another sign of a return to normalcy if public establishments were to go back to doing what they’re supposed to do – serve the public, rather than openly discriminate against political opponents.
Corporate CEOs who had decided to play politics and appease the left for eight years are now giving Trump his due deference, just as they normally do to any president. If companies abandon politics and focus on making great products, that would be a return to normalcy, too.
Trump’s promise to cut the size and scope of the federal government and dismantle the administrative state would also mark a return to normalcy – at least the normalcy that the founders had envisioned of a limited federal government where elected leaders, not faceless bureaucrats, made laws.
As an added bonus to all this, the country won’t have to endure the freak shows Biden staged on the White House lawn.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I certainly hope that President Trump (and his cabinet) have the time to address our mounting problems.
For instance, the drones over many states in the country worry me. Gordon Chang, a noted Chinese scholar, notes in a video that the drones (especially the ones that hover over our military and research installations) could be the opening of a ChineseCommunistParty salvo against America.
There were many warnings that China is not only a competitor and adversary but also an enemy of us (eg stealing our technology; the spy balloon, creating its own police departments in areas of the America). The drones are just a step forward, a in-your-face thrust by an arrogant Xi.
I worry that the gap where Biden is suppose to be the President and when President Trump takes office on January 20, 2025 is more like a vacuum.
And it appears that with the drone-assaults the Chinese intent is to fill that vacuum sooner rather than later!
Just to be clear, Trump was not “normal” in his first term. Saying we are going back to normal isn’t accurate. Going back to Trump? That’s accurate. We’ll see if his chaos helps or hurts America. We now have the best economy in the world with a record stock market. Anything less and Trump will have screwed up.
Clear summary of what has happened under Biden’s handlers, chaos, and seemingly planned chaos
Stolen elections have very serious consequences.
In my childhood I learned that magic didn’t exist and no one was divinely inspired. This was called rationality or sanity or the scientific method to understand that our physical universe has and had only physical influences. Our teachers claimed that the laws reflected the official view of the common sense consensus; that physical evidence only supported physical reality.