Amid a pandemic, the woke-ist media are experiencing a psychotic break by Becket Adams
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/amid-a-pandemic-the-woke-ist-media-are-experiencing-a-psychotic-break
If the press suffered a nervous breakdown after the 2016 election — and they did — they are experiencing a full-on psychotic break amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests.
It is as if the lockdowns and nationwide demonstrations caused media executives to snap, leaving them in a wide-eyed, obsessive frenzy to cleanse society of all problematics, screaming all the while, “Out, damned spot!”
CNN, for example, engaged in explicit political activism this week when it sought to shame companies that have yet to pull ads from Facebook over CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s persistent refusal to censor problematic speech.
“These are the big brands that haven’t pulled ads from Facebook yet,” reads the headline. The report then goes on to name and shame the businesses that have had the temerity to continue to advertise on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.
This is not news reporting. This is activism. It is a poorly disguised effort by a major newsroom to pressure companies into boycotting a social media platform that is too committed to political neutrality and too opposed to political censorship for the media’s taste. In any other time and place, the press would have mocked and condemned the CNN article. But these are unusual times. Many journalists today agree with CNN’s shaming tactics and the reasons behind them, and so the Facebook report came and went this week with barely a whimper of objection from our brave Fourth Estate.
Over at the New York Times, the occupied opinion section, which claims to have standards against “needlessly harsh” commentaries that fall “short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate,” published an especially unhinged article this week titled “America’s Enduring Caste System.”
“Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out,” writes contributor Isabel Wilkerson. “The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.”
She adds, “Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.”
Yes, it seems a bit off for Wilkerson to lump the U.S. in with Nazi Germany, but that is not even the craziest part. That distinction goes to her exceptionally ignorant assertion that 2 of the 3 most notable caste systems in history come from the last 250 years. Several ancient empires would beg to differ. Then again, if your viewpoint is the right one, New York Times editors will not be sticklers for facts.
Elsewhere at the New York Times, the news section decided this week that now is a good time to remind its readers that Mount Rushmore is very problematic.
“Mount Rushmore was built on land that belonged to the Lakota tribe and sculpted by a man who had strong bonds with the Ku Klux Klan,” the paper reported. “It features the faces of 2 U.S. presidents who were slaveholders.”
All true. Also, while we are on the topic of unjustly seized land, please enjoy this excerpt from Reason magazine explaining how the New York Times Building in midtown Manhattan came to be built:
“We believe there could not be a greater contribution,” Golden told a clutch of city officials and journalists, “than to have the opportunity to start construction of the first major icon building in New York City after the tragic events of Sept. 11.” Bruce Ratner, president of the real estate development company working with the Times on its proposed new Eighth Avenue headquarters, called the project a “very important testament to our values, culture and democratic ideals.”
Those “values” and “democratic ideals” included using eminent domain to forcibly evict 55 businesses–including a trade school, a student housing unit, a Donna Karan outlet, and several mom-and-pop stores–against their will, under the legal cover of erasing “blight,” in order to clear ground for a 52-story skyscraper. The Times and Ratner, who never bothered making an offer to the property owners, bought the Port Authority-adjacent property at a steep discount ($85 million) from a state agency that seized the 11 buildings on it; should legal settlements with the original tenants exceed that amount, taxpayers will have to make up the difference. On top of that gift, the city and state offered the Times $26 million in tax breaks for the project, and Ratner even lobbied to receive $400 million worth of U.S. Treasury-backed Liberty Bonds–instruments created by Congress to help rebuild Lower Manhattan. Which is four miles away.
The New York Times report this week claims that the history of Mount Rushmore is of particular relevance now because President Trump plans to attend July Fourth festivities at the South Dakota monument. Curious, then, that the New York Times did not think that history worth reevaluating when former President Barack Obama visited the exact same site during the 2008 campaign or when the New York Times’s own Maureen Dowd wondered in 2016 whether Obama would qualify as a “Mount Rushmore president.”
Lastly, ABC News published a report this week titled “New government data, shared first with ABC News, shows the country’s premier outdoor spaces – the 419 national parks – remain overwhelmingly white.”
The story’s headline reads, “America’s national parks face existential crisis over race,” adding in the subhead, “A mostly white workforce, visitation threatens parks’ survival and public health.”
“Just 23% of visitors to the parks were people of color,” the report adds, “77% were white. Minorities make up 42% of the U.S. population.”
As it turns out, white people really enjoy hiking and camping, and that is a problem for the parks, the ABC News report claims, because people of color will be a majority in America by 2044. The article then goes on to quote outdoor enthusiasts of color who say they do not feel welcome at the “overwhelmingly white” national parks. These advocates, the article reads, “say they hope the moment since George Floyd’s death in police custody brings attention to systemic racism in the outdoors as well as other parts of society and translates into a long-term change in attitudes and behavior.”
Sorry, everyone. Even national parks are racist now.
This is not normal behavior from our press. This is a mental breakdown in the works. People of the future will look at all this and wonder how on earth these stories made it into print.
The best thing that can happen now for the news industry is for the pandemic to pass, the lockdowns to lift, and for everyone to go outside and get some fresh air. Because the way nearly everyone in the press is behaving now, it seems clear that cabin fever has set in hard, and it is an epidemic we may not shake as quickly as the coronavirus.
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