Media Renew Assault on Jeff Sessions

Attorney General Jeff Sessions came under a renewed barrage of racially-charged attacks from the left-leaning press this week.

New York Magazine kicked off the attacks by including the Attorney General in a sprawling 12,000-word 19-author cover story on people and institutions, including Breitbart News, it considers part of a “the extremely reactionary, burn-it-down-radical, newfangled far right.” New York Magazine also included an interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow in which he defended Breitbart’s independence and integrity in a different section of the feature.

The anthology article, first published Sunday, is festooned with an ominous “evidence board” type image linking Sessions and other administration officials to dozens of real and imagined foes, including cartoon characters and “Nazi Furries,” explained later in the article to be “swastika fetishists” who dress up in furry animal suits.

Sessions, who struggled to maintain America’s borders as a Senator and has made enforcing immigration laws as they are written a centerpiece of his term as Attorney General, figures into New York’s vast right-wing conspiracy as “the radical right’s most powerful government asset.”

“A nativist is in charge of the police state,” a sub-headline by reporter Eric Levitz proclaims. “So long as Sessions remains attorney general, the alt-right, broadly defined, will control American law enforcement,” Levitz proclaims.

Levitz twice uses the word “racialist” to describe Attorney General Sessions’s politics. The “racialist policies [Sessions] supports,” however, include straightforward enforcement of the law of the United States. For example, Sessions’s appeal to the truism that all illegal aliens are subject to removal is transmuted to “threatening to deport undocumented immigrants brought here as children.”

Sessions’s review of the consent decrees Obama’s Justice Department foisted on cities plagued by riots and record violent crime is described as his “starting to roll back the Justice Department’s oversight of police departments that routinely violate the civil rights of their black constituents.” Not directing the Civil Right Division to act as if the 2013 Supreme Court determination that the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearence” sections are unconstitutional is painted as “refusing to challenge racially discriminatory voting laws.”

Elsewhere in the piece, New York Magazine, which, due to falling ad revenue, was forced to halve its decades-long weekly schedule and become a biweekly in 2013, quotes Brookings Institute scholar Shadi Hamid comparing former Breitbart News Chairman and Senior White House Strategist Steve Bannon and the nationalist-populist ideology he represents to the murderous Muslim death-cult of ISIS:

ISIS and the Bannon-ites, they feed off each others’ rhetoric. ISIS and Bannon both want to promote civilization struggle. There’s no moral equivalence between the two, but much of this rhetoric is an endless loop of being reactionary.

Not to be outdone by their competitors in print, the Ezra Klein-edited left-wing news site Vox ran a headline Tuesday claiming the DOJ “is literally prosecuting a woman for laughing at Jeff Sessions.” The “literal prosecution for laughing” stemmed from a January arrest of a Code Pink activist, Desiree Ali-Fairooz, at Sessions’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Attending the hearing in the full neon-pink garb of the radical “social justice” agitation group, Fairooz began laughing loudly enough for Capitol Police to ask her to leave the official hearing when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) spoke in support of Sessions’s eventual confirmation. Fairooz then began screaming, “This man is evil! Pure evil!” and waiving a sign emblazoned with her group’s web address.

Another protester escorted out of Sessions hearing. Her original offense appeared to be simply laughing. pic.twitter.com/p6lWzBVFRW

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) January 10, 2017

Fairooz was eventually charged with two misdemeanors: one for deliberately disrupting a congressional proceeding and another for demonstrating within the Capitol. This is not Fairooz’s first runin with the law. She was arrested for aggressive protesting and banned from the Capitol at least once before. In 2007,  she covered herself in stage blood and ran up to then-Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice screaming anti-war slogans.

Vox’s headline, that a woman was being prosecuted “literally” over the fact she’d laughed at the implication Jeff Sessions was not a racist, was further undermined Wednesday when Vox updated the story to confirm a District of Columbia Superior Court jury had literally convicted Fairooz on all counts. “She did not get convicted for laughing. It was her actions as she was being asked to leave,” the jury foreperson told the Huffington Post, which also have promoted the “prosecution for laughing” narrative.

Two Code Pink men who dressed in Ku Klux Klan outfits and waved signs at the hearing were also convicted Wednesday. All three face thousands of dollars in fines and potential jail time when they are sentenced in June.

The leftist press further retreated from the convicted-for-laughing narrative Thursday. Mother Jones, a decades’ old signpost of the liberal print media, was forced to update their headline from Wednesday’s original “Woman Convicted for Laughing During Jeff Sessions’ Confirmation Hearing” to “Woman Convicted After Laughing During Jeff Sessions’ Confirmation Hearing,” in order to “better reflect Desiree Fairooz’s conviction.” Fellow liberal old-media Vanity Fair, meanwhile, is still running with “A Jury Just Convicted a Woman for Laughing at Jeff Sessions” as of Thursday.

Both these narratives come as the political left has continued to openly demean Attorney General Sessions as a racist. All of the stories about Fairooz’s conviction above reference re-hashed accusations dating to Jeff Sessions’s failed nomination to the federal bench over 30 years ago as support for the “laughing” activist’s contention that Sen. Shelby’s statement that Sessions’s history of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented” was so ridiculous she simply could not hold in her mirth. “It was spontaneous. It was an immediate rejection of what I considered an outright lie or pure ignorance,” Fairooz told the New York Times, which then describe her actions as “a giggle.”

However humorous leftist agitators like Desiree Ali-Fairooz find the suggestion that their accusations of racism and bias by Jeff Sessions do not stick, the now-Attorney General was confirmed by the Senate February 9 with the support of the civil right activists who knew him best in his long career of public service.