USA Today recently published a piece excoriating Project 2025 and all who worked on it as (you guessed it) “racist.” I had very little to do with Project 2025 — I was asked for some thoughts on how best to organize the National Security Council staff, provided those thoughts, and then was never contacted again — but my name ended up on the thing, so I suppose, according to the sketchy rules of “journalistic ethics,” that makes me “fair game.”

At any rate, USA Today reported that I did not respond to a request for comment. In fact, I did not receive any word that USA Today wanted a comment, but I guess that doesn’t really matter since I wouldn’t have commented anyway. It’s obvious from the resulting article, and would have been obvious from the inquiry, that this was just another example of “murderous gutter journalism,” which I previously described here.

This is not journalism. This is character assassination with scarcely the pretense of reporting.

Both the paper and the writer were and are acting in bad faith: They had a narrative all pre-cooked, they looked around for things they could twist to fit that narrative, and they proceeded to slap together a paint-by-numbers “story” to smear their enemies as “racist.”

Make no mistake, that is how they see us — as enemies — and how they see their own role — as righteous avengers destroying the wicked. This is not journalism. This is character assassination with scarcely the pretense of reporting.