https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-obscene-public-humiliation-ritual-of-cbss-tony-dokoupil/
EXCERPTS
The mainstream media has been afire over the past week about a major internal controversy at CBS, where CBS Mornings anchor Tony Dokoupil has been called on the carpet, publicly upbraided by his own network, and forced to apologize to his colleagues, all for the crime of asking literary activist Ta-Nehisi Coates a series of challenging questions.
In fact, I already covered many of those angles half a month ago. For those unfamiliar with who Ta-Nehisi Coates is, or the public controversy surrounding his new book The Message — in which Coates, after a ten-day visit to Israel as part of a “Palestine Festival of Literature” junket, concluded pre–October 7 that the Jewish state was illegitimate, identical to the Jim Crow South yet worse, and must be abolished — I invite you to read my piece about him from late September.
To summarize: Coates is an overpromoted naïf with profoundly radical priors and a proud ignorance of history — this is in fact part of his purported appeal, the supposedly untutored “freshness” with which he approaches things — a black autodidact whose ability to write passable prose got him advanced to the forefront of American racial, political, and literary discourse during the ferment of the later Obama era. After accumulating a mountain of elite hosannahs — to the point of literary deification — he ducked out of the public conversation, but has now re-emerged to use that moral capital to plead for the elimination of Israel in the wake of the October 7 massacres.
