I urge everyone to read James Bowman's column titled "Truth or Dare" in the current (January 2021) issue of The New Criterion. It is a stirring call for the primacy of law over brute power.

Along the way Bowman takes on the "Decency Agenda" recommended to Joe Biden by the editorial board of The New York Times on December 5th, with its sinister call for "accountability." Bowman:

These laughable claims to purity of motive in an implied pursuit of Mr Trump into private life can hardly be expected to reassure the half of the country that voted for him that he will be treated fairly, out of office, by those whose spite and spirit of vengeance were so much in evidence when he was the elected President. In a democracy the "accountability" of elected officials lies in the hands of the voters, not their political opponents, wielding the law as a weapon. But the pretense of such reassurance is only for show anyway. The real "decency agenda" is the effort by the Times, and the media culture which it leads, to do for decency what it has already done for truth: namely, to redefine the word so that it can no longer be applied to anyone not, broadly speaking, of the Times's own political persuasion.

Already we have seen again and again that "truth," as it is now used in the media, means nothing more or less than "conforming to the media's dominant narrative." That's how they have been able to dismiss out of hand all the claims of fraud by the president and others as false without submitting them to anything more than a cursory examination. They simply don't fit the predetermined Trump narrative cemented in place by the media over the last four years.

Unfortunately The New Criterion, while a very worthy magazine with masses of good content, has the worst website in this arm of the Galaxy. I don't know of any way to get to the full article without taking out a full subscription. Most libraries have a paper copy, though.