As Washington Post faces employees revolt and reader outrage after refusing to again Kamala Harris… LEO MCKINSTRY asks why does the Left-wing media howl ‘heresy’ at anybody who dares problem its ideological groupthink?

In 2003, during President George W Bush’s first term, a psychiatrist who doubled as a political columnist identified a condition he dubbed ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome’, something he defined as ‘the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay – the very existence of George W Bush’.

As the US approaches polling day, and the Republican candidate Donald Trump looks increasingly likely to prevail over his stumbling Democratic rival Kamala Harris, a similar combination of hysteria and intolerance is taking root in the country’s Left-wing media.

And there was no better illustration of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ than the irrational fury that greeted this week’s decision by the Washington Post, one of America’s leading liberal newspapers, not to endorse Harris.

The Post is more than a mere organ of the Press. It is a bulwark of the self-regarding, progressive establishment, still – 52 years on – fiercely proud of its role in exposing the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon.

For more than three decades, it has endorsed every single Democratic candidate, from the priapic Bill Clinton to the senile Joe Biden. This time round it won’t back anyone.

And the Post is not unique in provoking Left-wing indignation by failing to support Kamala Harris. 

There were also staff resignations and protests from readers at the Los Angeles Times, which had backed Biden in 2020, when its proprietor refused to endorse the Democratic contender.

A similarly neutral stance was taken by America’s largest newspaper chain, USA Today, despite backing Biden four years ago. 

Other previous Democrat supporters refusing to cheerlead for Harris include Florida’s Sun Sentinel, the Minnesota Star Tribune and the Tampa Bay Times.

‘Disgraceful journalism’ was one liberal response to this wave of impartiality. ‘This is how democracy dies,’ moaned a hand-wringing academic.

Such comments reveal not only the partisanship of the Left-wingers but also their belief that newspapers have a duty to act as propaganda tools for their cause.

Like a Puritan witch-hunt of the past, the Left now imposes its own ideological purity tests and hurls the accusation of heresy at those who fail to show compliance.

What makes the Washington Post’s decision all the more extraordinary is that the paper has long been ferocious in its condemnation of Trump and equally lavish in its praise of Harris.

One absurd recent article maintained that her ‘ebullient laugh has the same tempo as some truly excellent dance songs’.

The Post’s British publisher Will Lewis – formerly an editor of the Daily Telegraph – justified the move on the grounds of wanting to return to the paper’s earlier tradition of political independence.

Sceptics, however, detected the hand of the paper’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who made his fortune with Amazon and is now said to be concerned about retaining his lucrative federal contracts if Trump wins the White House.

Whatever the motivation, the reaction from the Left to this non-endorsement has been explosive. 

The Post’s former executive editor Marty Baron called the step ‘a moment of darkness that will leave democracy a casualty’, while the Pulitzer Prize-winning associate editor David Maraniss said it was ‘a contemptible act of cowardice’.

There have been at least three resignations, while 18 columnists signed a collective statement which claimed the policy ‘represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper’.

Some elements of progressive opinion are so infused with moral superiority that they even reject the concept of free expression, which is meant to be the keystone of the US constitution.

When the cable news channel CNN held a live, televised ‘town hall’ meeting with Trump in May 2023, the Left went into meltdown. ‘CNN should be ashamed of themselves,’ said the far-Left congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The Left’s attachment to groupthink was summed up in a video from Rick Wilson, founder of the fanatically anti-Trump Lincoln Project. ‘This insanity should be pulled off the f***ing air,’ he said.

This kind of hostility to diversity of opinion was also highlighted by the demented wail that greeted billionaire maverick Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media giant Twitter (now X) in 2022.

Musk’s professed aim was to make the platform a bastion of free speech after years of creeping Left-wing censorship – a trend epitomised by a ban on Trump himself – but that was precisely what terrified parts of the Left.

‘It’s like the gates of hell opened tonight,’ shrieked Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz.

Similar attitudes can be found in Britain, where Left-wing ideologues seek to crush any deviation from the fashionable orthodoxy. That is especially true of the Guardian, the strident Left-wing paper.

Writers who fail to conform to the ruling creed are forced out, as happened to columnists Suzanne Moore and Hadley Freeman, both distinguished by their willingness to question the Left’s dogma when it came to gender self-ID.

One column by Moore, in March 2020, provoked such opposition that 338 Guardian employees signed a letter demanding that the paper ‘do more to become a safe and welcoming workplace for trans and non-binary people’.

Moore later wrote that her enemies wanted her replaced by writers who ‘simply think the right things’.

The Left’s demand for uniformity can be seen in so many other aspects of British life: the cancel culture at universities, the corporate training courses that promote indoctrination, the branding of alternative views as ‘disinformation’, and in the chilling pressure for censorship.

During the summer, Adam Boulton, a former Sky News presenter, openly called for action against the Right-leaning GB News.

‘I think there is a delicate and important broadcast ecology in this country. I think GB News is trying to bust that ecology and frankly what Ofcom (the media regulator) should do is shut it down,’ he told BBC Newsnight.

America, the land of the free, is infected by the same sinister contagion. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the New York Times published an article by the military veteran and senator Tom Cotton, which called for troops to be deployed to restore order and prevent looting.

Yet again, the Left went berserk, with journalists at the paper claiming that the piece was ‘a clear threat to health and safety’.

The most senior editor at the Times, Dean Baquet, was stunned at the whirlwind of grievance and aggressive victimhood. ‘Are we truly so precious?’ he asked. But he could not prevent the head of the paper’s editorial pages, James Bennet, from being forced out.

Within a month of Bennet’s exit, another member of his department, Bari Weiss, quit. She went not with a whimper but a bang, in the form of a devastating resignation letter.

She said: ‘The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people.

‘This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its ‘diversity’; the doxxing [posting of personal information on the internet] of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.’

As the prospect of a Trump presidency looms ever closer, if he does reclaim the White House, of one thing we can be sure: the Left will reach new heights of derangement.