NYT Discovers Partisanship, Ignores Domestic Military Use
The New York Times breathlessly detailed Trump's 'partisan speech' to Navy troops, a concern apparently outweighing the more salient fact that a president deployed active military and federal agents to American cities like Portland. While the establishment media focused on rhetorical decorum, they normalized a dangerous precedent: using federal forces against citizens during protests. This echoes
historical deployments, not often to 'quell' dissent, but to enforce state power against civil rights movements, like Eisenhower federalizing the Arkansas National Guard in 1957 – a far cry from targeting peaceful demonstrators in the streets. Is the real scandal a 'partisan speech,' or the erosion of civilian liberties by deploying unmarked federal agents (as witnessed in Portland, July 2020)
without local consent? The Times critique of rhetoric seems to miss the forest for the trees, granting legitimacy to the very militarization it purports to observe. One might ask: how many 'partisan speeches' equal a militarized police state?