Jonah Goldberg made a welcome admission in today’s (April 29, 2023) edition of The Remnant podcast. He said, “I’ve actually been trying to follow the truth” and “I sincerely try to have integrity when it comes to this kind of stuff.” However, he confessed, “I haven’t been perfect about it.”
Goldberg proceeded to demonstrate his imperfection.
Goldberg’s frank talk was a bit of throat clearing to preface a disquisition on his status as a “principled both-sideser.” Here is what Goldberg said at the 59:55 mark:
[I have] written many times and spoken many times now about how I am a principled both-sideser. That both parties have real problems, I get endless grief from the left and from the right for making both-sides arguments. But my argument about the both sides thing isn’t necessarily that there's no ideological difference between the parties. It’s that there is increasingly little tactical or strategic difference between the parties. The parties think that the best way to run is to demonize their opponents, to unfairly lump the really bad versions of their opponents with the really good versions of their opponents all together and say that they’re all evil.
That’s what Biden’s announcement video was, right? That he’s running against MAGA. And who’s MAGA? The entirety of the Republican Party. You know, the entirety of the Republican Party is represented by the people who showed up on January 6, and if you don’t like what happened on January 6, you have to vote for Joe Biden and otherwise you like what happened on January 6. Those are the semiotics. That is the implications and insinuations of that video and so much other of the mainstream media’s and the Democratic Party’s rhetoric. And I think it’s cynical, factually false garbage. And it’s bad for democracy. And it’s dangerous and it perpetuates this cycle.
Were I acquainted with Goldberg, I might pose to him a series of questions:
In their October 2021 Open Letter in Defense of Democracy, Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey Isaac, and William Kristol stated, “The primary source of [the danger to liberal democracy] is one of our two major national parties, the Republican Party, which remains under the sway of Donald Trump and Trumpist authoritarianism.” Was this cynical on their part and that of the letter’s 48 co-signers? If you believe so, please explain what self-interested or mercenary goal they cynically sought to advance.
Toward the conclusion of his June 2022 testimony to the January 6 Committee, Judge Michael Luttig spoke the following words:
Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. That's not because of what happened on January 6th. It's because, to this very day, the former president, his allies, and supporters pledge that, in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don't speak those words lightly.
I believe that were one to ask Judge Luttig whether a vote for Joe Biden over Donald Trump is necessary to defend against the clear and present danger to American democracy that the latter represents, he would respond heartily in the affirmative. If you disagree with that prediction, please explain why. If you agree with that prediction, please explain whether in saying this Judge Luttig would be spreading “cynical, factually false garbage” that is “bad for democracy.”
Last month, Judge Luttig reaffirmed and reiterated his warning. In an address to the University of Georgia School of Law, he stated:
With the former president’s and his Republican Party’s determined denial of January 6, their refusal to acknowledge that the former president lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square, and their promise that the 2024 election will not be “stolen” from them again as they maintain it was in 2020, America’s Democracy and the Rule of Law are in constitutional peril — still. And there is no end to the threat in sight.
[...]
The Republican Party has made its decision that the war against America’s Democracy and the Rule of Law it instigated on January 6 will go on, prosecuted to its catastrophic end.
Would Goldberg put up his decency, sense and sincerity against Judge Luttig’s?
As it happens, Goldberg’s both-sidesing followed a quite righteous rhetorical thrashing of Tucker Carlson, who until his firing this past Monday was, at Fox News, the most highly rated talk show host on cable. At the 54:24 mark of his podcast, Goldberg said with regard to Carlson:
Stop talking about how he’s a truth teller. He’s a truth manufacturer. It’s sort of like saying how it’s so sort of almost on point sort of like from an allegory that Donald Trump’s social media company’s called “Truths,” where he posts “Truths” and it’s like he’s posting truths in a post-truth era that in the pre-post-truth era would be known as lies. The Patriot Purge thing and all the stuff that Tucker does on a regular basis is – they’re not all direct lies, but they’re all fundamentally or mostly fundamentally dishonest. And I take it kinda personally, I have to admit.
A little while later, Goldberg released more great rhetorical heat:
The thing I take personally, like, I take it on the chin for like seven years for my political apostasy when it comes to Trump and MAGA and all this kinda stuff, and I refuse to say that the emperor’s suit is awesome about all this pretextual nonsense that is built into national conservatism and post-liberalism and all this power-seeking, philosophically flaccid garbage that is all over the place. And if you’ve listened to this podcast for the last – I don’t know, how long have we been around, five years now? – the thing I always say is, like, the one thing I won’t do is lie. I think it’s really important not to lie. I think it's, you know, how many times have I said on this podcast the fundamental definition of journalistic ethics that handles like 97% of journalistic ethics problems is, “Don’t say or write things you do not believe to be true.”
I heartily agree with the proposition that not every Republican, in office or out, is aligned with the MAGA extremists who threaten our democracy. However, I join William Kristol and his co-authors and co-signers, Judge Luttig, and the many other principled people of all political leanings and none at all who recognize the threat that Goldberg blithely dismissed in his both-sides disparagement of President Biden’s campaign announcement. To me, that disparagement, while not a direct lie, is, as Goldberg put it, “fundamentally dishonest.”
Goldberg shared a very important dictum on journalistic ethics: “Don’t say or write things you do not believe to be true.” May he more perfectly honor it.