RFK Jr. Donor Tim Mellon Is Smeared as “Racist”

Plus, Bret Stephens on 10 American ideas; why Martha Stewart, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Milken deserve RBG awards

An unfortunate development in the contemporary press is the habit of labeling people or ideas as “racist” rather than considering the substance. I wrote about this the other day when it was a New York Times news article labeling Senator Cotton as racist for expressing concern about Chinese Communist influence on TikTok, a concern that is now shared by the Biden administration and by 352 members of the House of Representatives.

The most recent example of this phenomenon comes today from the news columns of the Wall Street Journal. An article by Tarini Parti is headlined “A Reclusive Heir Is Giving Millions to Help Trump and RFK Jr.” It reports on Tim Mellon, “a Wyoming-based recluse” who “has so far contributed $20 million to Kennedy’s super PAC and an additional $15 million to Trump’s for the 2024 election.”

Let’s leave aside the description of Mellon as a “recluse” or “reclusive,” which is newspaper terminology for anyone who doesn’t immediately drop what they are doing to get on the telephone with any newspaper reporter who calls.

What got to me about the Journal piece was this passage: “Mellon previously self-published an autobiography online in 2015 that has since been taken down. He used racist language to describe his political views in the book, according to the Washington Post, referring to social safety net programs as ‘Slavery Redux.’”

“Slavery redux”? A political donor’s comparison of welfare dependency to slavery is being called “racist.” “Two iron shackles consisting of iron loops joined together by a length of iron chain. The iron is heavily rusted.” From before 1860. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from the Liljenquist Family Collection.

Sorry, just because the Washington Post ran a news article claiming it’s “racist” to argue that welfare dependency has been bad for black Americans doesn’t mean that it is accurate. The Post article is by Michelle Ye Hee Lee. Lee’s bio says she served as president of the Asian American Journalists Association from 2019 to 2022, a period in which the Association issued guidance on the 20^th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks telling journalists to “Avoid using the word ‘terrorism’ or ‘terrorist’ unless it is in a quote by a source, as the words are emotionally and politically loaded.”

That’s media bias in a nutshell for you—you can’t call a September 11 terrorist a terrorist because it’s “emotionally and politically loaded,” but it’s totally fine to label as “racist” a Republican donor who worries about the effects of welfare dependency. Talk about a double standard. “Where were the editors?” as we often ask here at The Editors.

Mellon overcame his supposed reclusiveness to tell Bloomberg in 2020 that he had no regrets about the book. I’m certainly not here endorsing every word choice of his; I haven’t read his book. I’ve never met him. But at least some at the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal news columns would clearly prefer to write about the “racist” rhetoric of political donors than they would risk writing about the perverse incentives of welfare programs and tax benefit phaseouts that encourage dependency, discourage savings, and penalize marriage.

A good story would be the way that “racist” has become such a frequently used term that it’s become almost meaningless, losing the ability to shock and becoming just a general label applied to “someone or something I disagree with.” Instead of critically covering this trend, news organizations are too often participating in it.

The RBG Awards: The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Mother Jones have all piled on against the decision by the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation to honor Elon Musk, Sylvester Stallone, Martha Stewart, Michael Milken, and Rupert Murdoch with the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award. Ginsburg’s children weighed in to object. Even Reason magazine’s Volokh blog called it inappropriate, absurd, and “unbelievable.”

Ginsburg’s children certainly deserve some deference. Yet as an author of the 2008 New York Sun editorial “Martha Stewart and the Law,” in which Justice Ginsburg was quoted about “the sweeping generality” of the statute with which Stewart was prosecuted, let me speak up to say I think it’s a wonderful, and entirely appropriate, group of honorees. Milken and Stewart were both subject to prosecutorial excesses of the sort that Ginsburg, as a justice, worked to curb. Ginsburg and her husband both died of cancer, which Milken has been working philanthropically to defeat. Musk and Murdoch are both immigrant entrepreneurs who embody America as a land of opportunity, upward mobility, and First Amendment freedom in the best tradition of Justice Ginsburg.

Mother Jones carps that Murdoch’s “Fox News purposefully spread Trump’s disinformation about the 2020 election,” but neglects to say that Fox News called the 2020 election on election night for Joe Biden, or that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has consistently rejected the idea that Trump won in 2020 or that the election was stolen.

Bret Stephens on 10 American Ideas: New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has a side gig as editor of Sapir, “a quarterly journal of ideas for a thriving Jewish future.” The new issue of Sapir is just out and includes two pieces by Stephens. In one, he names what he says are 10 “traditional ideals” of America that he says have been championed and exemplified by Jews: merit, patriotism, integration, free enterprise, free expression, “think different,” “the content of our character,” “self-empowerment,” Zionism, and heritage. There’s some overlap among these ten.

There’s also a Stephens interview with black, Latino, gay, pro-Israel congressman Ritchie Torres, Democrat of New York.

Stephens: I once heard you joke that the reason you’re pro-Israel is that you dropped out of NYU. Can you say another word about that?

Torres: Look, when I saw the congressional hearing and the testimony of the three Ivy League presidents, I said to myself, I’ve never been more proud to be a college dropout. I did not graduate from Yale, Harvard, or Princeton. But I did graduate from the school of common sense. … I see academia and social media as the disproportionate drivers of antisemitism, particularly on the far Left…

My favorite part of the interview was this line from Torres: “I refuse to live in fear. The Achilles’ heel of most elected officials is a pathological need to be loved by everyone. And I have no need to be loved. I would rather stand up for what I think is right, even if it means standing alone, even if it means facing criticism and ostracism.”

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