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The Democrats were distraught when Rachel Maddow negotiated with her Comcast paymasters to only do her show one night a week. What would the Left do with their Maddow magic cut by 80%?

For media critics, Maddow has been tougher to analyze as a cable "news" host. She goes on long pseudo-intellectual benders of historical analysis and then tries to bring it right up to today's politics. She especially loves identifying Hitler sympathizers from the 1930s and attaching it to today's Republicans. It's like making Joy Reid sound more ponderous and in-depth, even if it's not.

On Sept. 30, on the cusp of the vice presidential debate, Maddow naturally sought to connect Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to a series of antisemitic and fascist revolutionaries who wanted the universities destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s because they spread "communistic" ideas. Viewers were "treated" to nine minutes of this lecture, which began with the founder of Walgreens dragging his niece out of the University of Chicago.

Then came more "unearthed" video of Vance from 2021, before he ran for the Senate. Vance gave a speech titled "The Universities Are the Enemy." To Maddow, this sounds like the hayseeds are against "book learning." Or Vance is rebelling against his time at Yale Law School?

We're supposed to overlook that you can barely find a conservative professor in our most prestigious institutions of higher education. The last survey found only 1% of Harvard professors identified as conservative. The idea that "Harvard hates America" has been around for decades, and it's been true for decades.

As Vance put it, "You go to Harvard and put your preferred pronouns in your bio and learn to hate people in the heartland."

Vance dared to say, "The universities do not pursue knowledge and truth. They pursue deceit and lies." They are "fundamentally corrupt." This sounds like MSNBC talking about Fox News and Newsmax. But worse yet, Vance is also upset about woke corporations -- like Maddow's DEI paymasters at Comcast. So Maddow warned Vance has "a larger plan to destroy all the things which conservatives don't have complete control over." It's like MSNBC wants all Republicans to sound like "MSNBC Republicans."

This is a fascinating claim at a time when John Kerry is complaining at the World Economic Forum that "Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence." They pose as guardians of democracy, but they can't really stand it in practice.

Then she found Vance in a podcast talking about anti-Americanism in the schools and how we should "rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American political religion." That's easy to say, but pretty impossible to accomplish. Wild talk of firing all the professors, all the government employees, "draining the swamp," scares the Left, but it's not something you can do in a democratic system.

Vance made all these remarks before being elected to the U.S. Senate, so it might be interesting now to learn how much he thinks can be accomplished by joining the so-called swamp in Washington.

In the end, Maddow thinks it's incredibly weird to associate college professors with Marxism, but she doesn't think it's a wacky conspiracy theory to find some villainous Hitler sympathizer from the 1930s and staple them to J.D. Vance, who is not a neo-Nazi.

What Maddow does isn't "news." It's hurling nasty invective in a way that sounds like she's reading a term paper -- one that deserves a failing grade.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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