The New York Times Slimes Tim Mellon

The New York Times is back with another hit piece on another conservative donor guilty of the grave sin of giving money to fellow conservatives. It drives liberals barking mad to imagine an America in which not every billionaire philanthropist is a left-winger. There’s no room in their DEI world for diversity and inclusion of a rich philanthropist who thinks differently than they do.

Their revulsion for such people is not just palpable but, frankly, kind of psychotic. They simply cannot tolerate people who financially support contrary ideas. Thus, their biased media sources engage in sensationalistic exposés seeking to shed light on these horrible individuals, these unpersons.

This isn’t a new tactic for the Times. Other recent victims were Barre Seid and Leonard Leo. You might recall an August 2022 front-page hit piece on the conservative philanthropist Barre Seid giving $1.6 billion to a new foundation started by Leonard Leo. The Times sought to unravel the two partner’s grand conspiratorial plot to create the Marble Freedom Trust. The Seid-Leo operation had liberals online half-crazed over this “pro-Israel” Jewish conservative (Seid), his “Catholic theocrat” co-conspirator (Leo), and their “dark money.”

This time around, the target in the left’s ideological crosshairs is Tim Mellon, who the New York Times is hounding with special rapaciousness. The latest Times article follows at least three others (click here and here and here), and is the third hit piece on Mellon by the Times since merely June 20.

The “Far Right” Megadonor

The latest Times offering spews the typical leftist bilge. The subject — that is, the target — is framed as a kind of cretin, reprobate, possibly even a criminal. Certainly who and what he supports, to the progressive mind, is criminal. The tone of the article is sinister, composed in dark hues. If Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor could emanate from the text on the page, the Times copy editors would have arranged it. Maybe even with an accompanying photo of Tim Mellon aside Bela Lugosi.

The hit piece begins half-cleverly, at least to the undiscerning individual unfamiliar with how these slick attacks are marshalled. The lead portrays Mellon to Times readers as at once a malignant supporter of Donald Trump and, to boot, a crackpot obsessed with a weird large rock on his gazillion-dollar estate:

Timothy Mellon, a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, has reached the stratosphere of American political influence as the top supporter of Donald J. Trump, doling out millions to try to elect the former president and his allies.

But to his neighbors in a Rhode Island beachfront enclave, he is better known as the prime suspect in the Narragansett Runestone Affair.

A hulking boulder once positioned just offshore in Narragansett Bay, the runestone bears inscriptions that some believe were left by Viking explorers. It was the stuff of local lore and attracted visitors at low tide — to the consternation of Mr. Mellon, the pedigreed businessman whose home looked out on the rock.

And then one day it was gone.

And then with that, the Times was gone; off and running with its latest salvo at a billionaire who dares to give money to conservatives rather than to liberals. The Times reporters then tossed this hunk of red meat to their progressive readers, who no doubt foamed at the mouth at the very thought of these grossly immoral figures:

He [Mellon] has surprised even political insiders with the size of his contributions this year, throwing $75 million behind Mr. Trump’s attempt to return to the White House and an additional $25 million toward Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential run, making him both candidates’ single largest benefactor.

All told, he has given $227 million in contributions to federal candidates and political committees since 2020, nearly all to Republicans — a sum that puts him in the top echelon of the party’s donors.

No doubt, Tim Mellon’s spot in that top echelon of GOP donors also placed him in the top echelon of targets for the New York Times.

Adding further suspicion to his nefarious ways, Mellon, believe it or not, didn’t want to talk to the Times for this news article. Hmm, what must he be hiding at that mansion? The reporters averred:

Yet for all his financial influence, Mr. Mellon and his interests — and what exactly is motivating his largess — have remained largely a mystery.

Interviews with his associates, along with a review of court documents and other public records, reveal an ideologically driven conservative with a combative streak. Mr. Mellon spent most of his life leveraging his family fortune to create his own. His freight railroad, a regional line that repeatedly ran afoul of worker and environmental protections, was recently sold for $600 million.

Over time, Mr. Mellon’s politics shifted far to the right….

Mr. Mellon rarely engages with the news media and did not respond to interview requests.

Gee, imagine that. If only Mr. Mellon had talked to the Times. It’s such a fair, objective, wholly unbiased newspaper.

That bias runs way back. Indeed, quite tellingly, the reporters next fired a shot across the bow of Tim Mellon’s ancestors, most notably, his grandfather, Andrew Mellon. Let us here pause for a crucial point.

Reviling Andrew Mellon, Tim Mellon’s Grandfather

Andrew Mellon was an American hero, whose ideas and policies produced vast wealth for millions of everyday Americans. (Read: “Andrew Mellon: Hero of the 1920s.”) Progressives ought to hail the man for what he did for the arts alone. They can thank him for the National Gallery of Art. That gallery is Andrew Mellon’s direct doing and legacy, not to mention countless jobs created at Gulf Oil, Alcoa, and his many other industrial-entrepreneurial enterprises. And then there were the millions of jobs created in the Roaring ‘20s by his tax cuts.

Ah, yes, his tax cuts.

Andrew Mellon’s tax cuts of the 1920s, which he spearheaded as the best Treasury Secretary that America ever had, momentarily curtailed the beastly progressive federal income tax bestowed, hiked, and bowed to by Woodrow Wilson and FDR and every liberal Democrat ever since.

President Wilson in just eight years mushroomed the upper income rate from 7 percent to 73 percent. Mellon brought it down to 24 percent. But then came FDR, who soared the top rate to an astounding 94 percent. As detailed by historian Burt Folsom, FDR actually wanted a rate of 99.5 percent on income over $100,000. Yes, you read that correctly. Roosevelt was stopped by both congressional Democrats and Republicans alike.

Who criticized FDR for that? Andrew Mellon. In turn, Mellon would pay dearly, as FDR used his presidential powers to pursue the former Treasury Secretary for tax evasion. He wanted to toss the elderly Mellon in prison.

But here’s today’s New York Times on this episode, as laid out in the hit piece on Tim Mellon, Andrew’s grandson:

Mellons have long converted wealth into political power. At the turn of the last century, Mr. Mellon’s paternal grandfather, Andrew Mellon, parlayed his vast industrial empire into more than a decade atop the Treasury Department, where he pushed for tax cuts for the rich and later became reviled for resisting government intervention to stave off the Great Depression.

Reviled? Oh, yes. Reviled by FDR, by progressives, and to this day by the New York Times. In truth, what Franklin Roosevelt did to Andrew Mellon was nothing short of criminal, all the while treating Mellon like a criminal and ruining his life.

But for liberals, abuses of executive power are not abuses when the abused is a conservative. I urge the Times reporters and any liberal with a genuine respect for civil liberties to pause and read about what President Franklin Roosevelt did to the quiet, humble Andrew Mellon in the 1930s. They will be appalled by the raw, naked abuse of power. It was inexcusable, and it was a petty, vindictive FDR at his worst.

Notably, another Mellon who was acutely aware of FDR’s persecution of Andrew Mellon was Richard Mellon Scaife, who himself was long villainized by the New York Times, which at his death labeled him the “far right” “real-life Citizen Kane.”

Dick Scaife was a close friend of The American Spectator, of our founder R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., and of me personally (I knew him as a fellow Pittsburgher). If you wanted to see Dick Scaife’s blood boil, just mention what FDR did to his great-uncle, Andrew Mellon.

“What FDR did to my great-uncle was just awful,” Dick Scaife told me. “It was horrible. He tried to ruin his life, and basically did.” Dick believed that his great-uncle’s death in August 1937 was exacerbated by the intense stress of FDR’s federal pursuit of his scalp.

In his self-published memoirs, titled A Richly Conservative Life (I own one of the few printed copies), Dick Scaife included a revealing anecdote about his great-uncle and FDR:

I never met … Franklin Roosevelt, although I did catch sight of him when I was eight. It happened in a large crowd in Washington at the March 1941 dedication of the National Gallery of Art donated by Andrew Mellon. My great-uncle was in his grave by then. A shy and decent man, he had been victimized by this same president on a charge of income tax evasion. Pure politics.

The New Deal tried to crucify him for one reason: he was the poster boy for capitalism and its “failure.” Think Depression and they wanted you to think Mellon and Hoover. The attorney general at the time, Homer Cummings, went after the frail and aging A.W., who in fact had scrupulously paid millions in taxes. But it was a jury trial, and a jury of his peers found the old man not guilty.

Yes, not guilty, albeit ideologically guilty in the eyes of Roosevelt. Imagine the audacity of FDR, there on hand to celebrate the National Gallery of Art bequeathed by Andrew Mellon, who FDR had strived to place in a jail cell.

But don’t tell any of this to America’s intrepid progressives. To them, the totality of Andrew Mellon can be summed up by his dastardly act of tax cuts, and his heir, Tim Mellon, is the misbegotten grandson who bears the sin of the grandfather. That is, the unpardonable sin of tax cuts, for “the rich.” Let him be reviled.

Our R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., who likewise heard from Dick Scaife about FDR’s persecution of Andrew Mellon, says this about the Times attack on Tim Mellon: “You might say the attack on Tim is but the latest attack by progressives on the Mellon family. It began with FDR’s attacks on Andrew Mellon in the Thirties.”

It did indeed. Tim Mellon is the latest victim in a long line of Times attacks on his family.

Playing the Race Card

The Times piece is, predictably, painful to read. It laments that “Mr. Mellon’s personal politics shifted from youthful liberalism to small-government conservatism. One of his earliest recorded federal contributions was to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat.” To the Times, that was the good Tim Mellon, who in those days didn’t merit hit pieces for his philanthropy.

The Times piece gets still worse. It slithers to the next level in the sliming, brandishing the most predictable card in the liberal deck. What might that be? Any guesses? Yes, the scarlet “R.” To wit:

But in the 1980s, Mr. Mellon wrote in his memoir, he came to resent “citizens dependent upon government largess,” whom he called “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.”

“Black people, in spite of heroic efforts by the ‘Establishment’ to right the wrongs of the past, became even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations,” he wrote.

In a statement, the book’s publisher, Tony Lyons, defended Mr. Mellon’s view, saying that he had used “words that some readers might now consider harsh” but that “it is not racist to report that reality and truth.”

Liberals have been playing that disingenuous trick forever: If any conservative dares to attack their sacred welfare state as creating a kind of “liberal plantation” that hurts, demeans, and economically subjugates black recipients (and whites as well), liberals get so furious that they start spitting the word “racist!” hysterically, uncontrollably.

The mere accusation that their favorite policies — from welfare to abortion — disproportionately hurt the black people they claim to champion hits way too close to home. Their heads spin at the suggestion. It makes YOU a “racist.”

The Times piece rolls on, with no intimation that anything decent could be said about the target of its exhaustive investigation. The reporters eventually circle back to the big hunk of rock at the start of their story. That closing of the loop allows for a tidy, nasty little conclusion to kick the cretin in the keister one final time, namely: Tim Mellon is a crappy neighbor. The article quotes some fellow down the block from Mr. Mellon: “He did everything you shouldn’t do as a neighbor,” the witness intones. “It was always like, how did this guy just waltz away from this?”

The Times doesn’t want the menacing Mellon to waltz away from anything. They’d surely like to see him marched through the streets of Washington in chains. And for what crime? For the grand transgression of being a conservative and supporting fellow conservatives.

My advice to Tim Mellon: Don’t let these smears bother you. I quit reading the New York Times long ago because I couldn’t suffer such ordeals like this. I regret reading this piece, too, but knowing the history of the Mellon family so well (I coincidentally have David Cannadine’s seminal biography of Andrew Mellon on my desk as I write), knowing the noble history of the family and what it has done for my birth town and region (my mother helped put me and my brother and sister through college working as a teller at Mellon Bank on Main Street in Butler, Pa.), and hating to see injustices slung like this at an 82-year-old man who ought to be able to politically support who he wants with his own damned money, I just had to write a response.

A Badge of Honor

For the record, I tried to track down Tim Mellon. I evidently got closer than the Times reporters did. I did not reach him directly, but I talked to sources who work with and know him, one of them going way back to the late 1970s. He declined to comment, believing that responding would only “prolong the agony” that he’s being subjected to, though “kindly” thanking us at The American Spectator for defending him.

In the words of one source, “He’s grateful and very appreciative of the outreach, but he doesn’t want to participate.”

No problem, Mr. Mellon. And no need for agony. Don’t let these creeps get you down. It’s not a sin to be conservative. Wear the Times smear like a badge of honor. It’s unmistakable confirmation that you’re doing the right thing with your money.

READ MORE from Paul Kengor:

Thanking God — Reagan and Trump

In My Hometown — Trump the Fighter

Unsung Hero: A True Family-Friendly Film

The post The <i>New York Times</i> Slimes Tim Mellon appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.