The Salience Game

How The Free Press Manufactures Permission to Vote for Tyranny

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

I honestly cannot understand how anybody cannot see that The Free Press is not merely an anti-left-wing rag, but an operation whose mission is to make people who have somewhat of a heart, and money and influence in the greater social strata of the elite classes, vote for right-wing power as the lesser evil. It is, in fact, very clear that this is the editorial goal of The Free Press. For people who worry capitalism will be eliminated by revolutionary Marxists on the far fringes of the left-flank of the Democratic Party, but recognize how evil the Republican Party has become, they provide just enough justification fuel to hold their nose and vote Republican anyway.

Let me be clear from the start: I’m not saying that pro-Palestinian campus protests aren’t newsworthy. Or that a lot of the leftist excess they document isn’t excess—it often is. But the whole enterprise is playing a salience game, one that is whitewashing the facade of the Republican Party that is what FDR would have recognized as now being beholden to a vanguard of economic royalists. Bari Weiss’s mission here, not disconnected from her pro-Israel views, is to talk to the person who feels guilty about voting for someone like Donald Trump—because he’s a liar, a thief, a tyrant—and give them a permission structure that says: “yes, but he’s the lesser evil. Look at all this scary left-wing insanity over here.”