Bill Lueders hates me. I wish he didn’t but he does. Bill is bilious that Your Humble Squire calls out his pervasive Left-wing bias, extant throughout his career as a Professional Journalist.

Tuesday evening at the High Noon Saloon, Bill was a panelist considering a question posed by The Capital Times: “Is the Wisconsin news media biased?” (Which is like Nancy Pelosi asking whether she might be a drag on the ticket.)

Bill made the case that he works hard, sources his writing, strives to be accurate. No arguments, there. Bill Lueders is one of the finest journalists in Madison. (Bill, stop reading here!) Also one of the most liberally biased. (Too late.)

But he never addressed the question of mainstream news media bias and, by so avoiding, made my point. He doesn’t believe he is biased nor does the larger Professional Journalist community. They can’t help it that truth and justice are on their side.

Bill let down his guard later in the symposium after the one conservative journalist on the four-member panel, Matt Kittle of MacIver, uttered the term “illegal immigrant.” That lit up Lueders’ circuit board.

“Undocumented immigrant,” Bill corrected.

No bias there! Or when Kittle offered that the First Amendment was in danger at the very place where it should best be understood, on our college campuses. He cited the case of Ann Coulter, threatened with physical violence if she spoke at UC-Berkeley this spring.

Pshaw, Lueders retorted. University officials canceled her speech “out of concern for her safety” — as if that wasn’t the point. Coulter could have returned to speak but wanted to be a martyr, Lueders averred.

The record offers no succor for Lueders’ version. We’ll even defer to the Mainstream News Media for this account, National Public Radio (hardly Bannon’s Blightbart):

Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said that the campus could not accommodate the speech because the planned venue was deemed inadequately secure by local police, and there was no other venue available where the talk could happen safely.

Sheesh. They’ve got safe houses in Fallujah but none in Berkeley? In Madison, Charles Murray had to speak off campus.

Democrats get quoted; Republicans don’t

Speaking of Wisconsin’s Campus Free Speech Act, it passed the Assembly this week despite no votes from Democrats. (Un)naturally, the “news” account in the publication that bills itself as “Your Progressive Voice” quoted only Democrats — four of them, to be precise. Zero Republicans.

Take this lede sentence (please):

In debate on the Assembly floor, Democratic opponents of a Wisconsin campus speech bill accused Republicans of hypocrisy in presenting themselves as champions of free speech while they routinely squelch protest in the Capitol and try to silence speech at the University of Wisconsin that they don’t like.

One of the quoted Democrats cited a ban on signs in the Assembly spectator gallery as evidence that Republicans are free-speech hypocrites. But the U.S. Congress has the same rule and had it when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid ran the store. The legislative chamber is not a Manchester United soccer match.

There is no mention of the protestors who disrupted Ben Shapiro’s speech on the UW campus. Nor did the Capital Times offer evidence that Republicans disrupted “The Problem of Whiteness” class.

But it’s not just the Corporation that Speaks in the Progressive Voice. The Associated Press (a serial offender) provided a wire service story on the Senate healthcare bill this morning that maintains:

Senate Republicans launched their plan for shriveling Barack Obama’s health care law.

“Shriveling.” Not “reforming.” But “shriveling”! Anthem is leaving Wisconsin under ObamaCare but Republicans are “shriveling” health care.

Americans understand the liberal bias, which is why they turned to Rush Limbaugh and Vicki McKenna, then Fox News and (cough!) Sean Hannity, which in turn spawned Rachel Maddow, which begatteth Breitbart, which gave us Vox, rinse and repeat.

Republicans are ‘pretty damn stupid’

Bill’s animus toward the Squire of the Stately Manor goes back to the Republican wave election of 2010.  The Republican victories that year, Bill said in the print Isthmus on November 18, 2010, represent “The Triumph of Stupidity.” Otherwise, “How could the electorate opt for an obvious phony like Ron Johnson over Russ Feingold?”

Bill quotes a UW political science professor addressing (who else?) a conclave of Professional Journalists:

“I’m not endorsing the American voter,” he answered. “They’re pretty damn stupid.”

Lueders’ essay continued:

“Thank you, professor,” I responded. “That’s the answer I was looking for. Frankly, it’s an answer embraced by many people I know.”

Of course, Bill knows all the right people. At the time, Your Humble Squire was himself scribbling for Isthmus, only on-line. Blaska’s Blog jumped all over Bill’s pecksniffery. Bill took umbrage and responded by calling me a liar without refuting my point. In fact, he dug deeper into the hole. Walker voters aren’t really stupid, they were “duped,” Bill offered. The inference is that Democrats were too intelligent to be duped.

Ironically, Walker was to dupe ignorant Wisconsin voters twice more; RoJo the Phony was to repeat his triumph over Feingold. Not to mention a certain Donald J. Trump. Walker’s secret Master Plan to Destroy Public Education is working! Wisconsin is now dumber than a box of rocks.

Except for University of Wisconsin-trained Professional Journalists, of course. After his gig at Isthmus, Lueders was able to infiltrate its journalism program in a George Soros-funded front group for four years until becoming associate editor of (Spoiler Alert!) Progressive magazine.

(Matt Kittle, who acknowledges he writes from the conservative viewpoint, unravels the liberal dark-money group here. He also details its dogged defense of the John Doe speech police. Lesson: Professional Journalists have the First Amendment, the rest of us must surrender our computers and smart phones.)

Deplorable Stephens

Let’s close with Brett Stephens, who jumped from the Wall Street Journal into the frying pan of the New York Times. Of the special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district:

Democrats didn’t lose for lack of political talent, campaign financing and organization or enthusiasm among their base. They lost because of their brand.

What is that? Democrats may think the brand is all about diversity, inclusion and fairness. But for millions of Americans, the brand is also about contempt …

Contemporary liberalism now expresses itself chiefly in the language of self-affirmation and moral censure: of being the party of the higher-minded; of affixing the suffix “phobe” to millions of people who don’t appreciate being described as bigots. — “Democrats and the losing politics of contempt.”

That Bret Stephens (University of Chicago, London School of Economics, 2013 Pulitzer Prize) is pretty damn stupid! Is that the answer you’ve been looking for, Bill?