Why media-driven hypocrisy is driving division, the mental health crisis and the new woke dogma
/I wrote Unequally Yoked to embolden those on the right to share their opposing ideas in Silicon Valley, where it’s assumed everyone is part of the elite, liberal, compassionate intellectual class. Conservatives are reticent because they fear they won’t get a job, they won’t get funding, they'll lose their advertising sponsors, they won’t strengthen relationships, they won’t get speaking engagements -- in other words: they’ll get cancelled.
In short: 1) This book calls out the BS and here are six examples of hypocrisy. 2) This book shows why the media is propagating this hypocrisy. 3) This book shows why media-driven hypocrisy (along with its ugly step sibling social media) and the decline in faith together drive division, hatred, a mental health crisis and the new “woke” dogma and safetyism culture.
Hypocrisy Highlights from the book
Hypocrisy 1: Division hypocrisy.
Trump and conservatives are racist/divisive; Biden and the left are unifying. Many believe Trump started the current race war and divisive rhetoric. He didn’t. Obama began dividing the nation along racial lines in his first year in office. Obama’s polar bear problem didn’t help.
From the book: “In November 2008, history would be made. Barack Obama became
the first black President of the United States. One would think, and many did, the cultural revolution which ascended the first black man to the White House meant the country had moved beyond race. Yet something unexpected happened over the course of Obama’s two terms and Lisbeth Gant Britton, an African American History professor, nailed it when she said, Obama’s presidency was to “start, not end a national conversation on race.”
From the book: Obama should have let that polar bear go. Just the discussion around whether to say Islam or not, perpetuated the idea that somehow Muslims needed protection from being alienated in America. While well-intentioned, Obama’s suppression of the word “Islam” ironically made more people think of identity in a racially-divisive way.
Hypocrisy 2: Media distortion hypocrisy.
Media distorts Trump’s words, while ignores their own. I call it: Graecum est, non legitur (It’s all Greek to me) -- words take on new meaning. Trump’s words are always manipulated by Democrats projecting their racist and negative narratives while flying over the underlying issues. The latest distortion: Trump won’t commit to a peaceful transition of power. Hilary’s explicit statement to not concede is swept aside. Mexico is the oft-cited projection of racism.
From the book: In January 2017, Trump called for the construction of a Mexican wall to crack down on immigration. By taking Trump’s words about Mexican immigrants out of context, the media doubled-down on their “Trump is a racist” narrative for calling all Mexicans “rapists” and “drug dealers.” Never mind that Obama’s immigration reform efforts resulted in more Mexican deportations than Trump, so much so that Obama earned the sobriquet “Deporter-in-chief.”
From the book: The main negative effect of outsourcing is it increases U.S. unemployment. The 14.3 million outsourced jobs are double the 5.9 million unemployed Americans. If all those jobs returned, it would be enough to also hire the 4.3 million who are working part-time but would prefer full-time positions.” For Mexico, the NAFTA trade deal also ignited a wave of illegal Mexican migration to the U.S. because Mexico stopped its corn subsidies, forcing many Mexican farms to shut down, pushing Mexicans out of jobs at home.
Hypocrisy 3: Moral equivalent hypocrisy.
The right must always identify and implicate its own but never make moral equivalencies. When Trump denounced evil on “many sides” in Charlottesville, liberals said he took sides with White Supremacists. When Joe Biden failed to denounce the riots by BLM radicals and antifa, liberals praised his speech. He even pointed to Charlottesville, reminding people that Republicans are “spreading hate” while the left have “the courage to stand against it.” Before 2020, Charlottesville was the most oft-cited one-sided false narratives.
From the book: I applauded his words. He was trying to build a two-sided solution. But the one-siders didn’t see it that way… Two days later Trump issued a second statement “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups,” Trump said at a press conference. By contrast, over his entire two terms, Obama never specifically labeled the offenders who murdered nearly 100 Americans. He was even defensive: “There’s no magic to the phrase radical Islam…It’s a political talking point,” he said at a press conference. “Someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting?”
From the book: “American exceptionalism does not merely connote cultural and political uniqueness belief that, because America has a special devotion to democracy and freedom, its sins are mostly incidental.” AOC was exposing a much larger truth, according to The Atlantic’s Beinart. I agree. The enemy is evil and we’re all capable of it. But where was Beinart’s enlightened position eighteen months prior? The same moral equivalency could have been applied to President Trump’s words “many sides” being capable of wrongdoing. It was not. In 2017, The Atlantic published Beinart’s piece titled: “What Trump gets wrong about Antifa.” Beinart wrote: “Trump is right that, in Charlottesville and beyond, the violence of some leftist activists constitutes a real problem. Where he’s wrong is in suggesting that it’s a problem in any way comparable to white supremacism.” Both AOC and Trump essentially made visible the same truth. AOC got a break. Trump not so much.
Hypocrisy 4: Guilty until proven innocent hypocrisy. Media applies this approach to anyone on the right, such as Nick Sandmann, Brent Kavanaugh and Amy Cooper. But the left is assumed to be blameless, like Jacob Blake, who resisted arrest, was tased twice and reached for a knife. The Cooper dog walking incident convicted a nation of their inner racism, yet if we deconstructed the news and understood the context, we might find a different truth.
From the book: What reasonable, non-confrontational, non-dog person walks around with dog treats in his pocket for the sole purpose of reprimanding people who have their dogs unleashed? Secondly, I might have reacted the same way as Ms. Cooper. I walk and run an eight mile stretch of undulating hills through trees and underbrush several times a week. Sounds a bit like The Ramble. There are clear signs that say dogs must be leashed, but most dogs walk freely. If I were walking alone with my dog unleashed at 7:30 am and a strange man came out of a bush “screaming” to leash my dog, according to Ms. Cooper, I would certainly be startled if not offended. Then if he threatened me by saying: “Look, if you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it,” and proceeded to call my dog over to feed him, I’d be startled, scared, threatened and frantic. Are you poisoning my dog? I’d say I’m calling the police and I’d say what I’d tell the police: a very detailed identification of that person, which would include race, gender and other visible attributes. Ms. Cooper should have leashed her dog. Maybe she should have chosen better words. But that’s not the point. It’s about reducing her life to nothing without due process; rushing to judgment to celebrate an ideological win at the expense of the more nuanced truth.
Hypocrisy 5: Postmodern view hypocrisy.
Violence is good, as long as it’s in the name of the left’s cause.
From the book: Hannah-Jones, the New York Times author of the 1619 Project declared that “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.” … “Property destruction is a ‘reasonable articulate expression in itself” and “attacking police stations, for example, makes rational sense.”... “Property is itself a violent thing because it was created through exploitation.” The author also argues that white Americans have no right to define violence since the current institutions that empower white people are violent in and of themselves... I wouldn’t consider The Nation a mainstream publication, but their articles captured the prevailing sentiment on the left, tacit (and as we’ve seen even explicit) approval of violent protests in the name of social justice while in the next breath berating the anti-lockdown protests by folks struggling for their livelihood and wellbeing.
Hypocrisy 6: Racism hypocrisy.
The right is racist until they believe in systemic racism, a life of self-flagellation and embracing BLM, better known as Bitterness Ladened Marxism. But racist evidence against the left is ignored. To wit: Harris conveniently drops her racist charge against Biden.
From the book: DiAngelo has five ways to deal with inner racism. The first is to remove from your vocabulary “I’m not a racist.” The second is to spend the rest of your life “grappling with what it means to be white.” She has created the world’s first perpetual motion machine of guilt. No breaks for possible salvation, it just spins with no end… The position that one race is being told to live a lifetime of self-flagellation as Robin DiAngelo suggests, or that we should be “done forgiving” as Roxanne Gay says, is bankrupt.
From the book: I don’t think many people know the specifics of what BLM actually stands for and how its emphasis is less on helping blacks and more about pushing a far-left political agenda. Given the reach of the BLM brand, it would be crazy for the organization to change the name, but there should also be truth in advertising, so the underlying name should be more inclusive of all the intersections it represents, and closer to the core political thrust. Something like Bitterness Ladened Marxism would make sense. Branding aside, in time their real motives will become visible and the movement will lose steam, sadly repeating the pattern of false narratives squandering opportunities for progress.
From the book: In a blog post, Sobantu Mzwakali says that “black people do not have the resources to impose such oppressive structures which enforce their superiority. White people, on the other hand, have…Black people can be prejudiced but not racist.” This is a reductive argument because the main premise is that people in power are the only ones that can be oppressive. The second premise is that black Americans are not in power. The conclusion is they can’t be racist. President Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan are blacks in America who have more than enough power to be racist. Let’s find solutions that don’t divide us along racial lines, but instead pull us together against the common enemy, evil.
Media Machine Hypocrisy Highlights from the book
Why has the media become 24/7 Crossfire with the left dominating the national narrative? The Hutchins Commission warned of media self-destruction 70 years ago.
From the book: The commission might not have envisioned Twitter, but it did understand the self-destructive power of technology and gave this caveat: “The modern press is a new phenomenon. It can facilitate thought or thwart progress. It can debase and vulgarize mankind. It can endanger peace. It can do it accidentally, in a fit of absence of mind. Its scope and power are increasing… These great new agencies of mass communication can spread lies faster and farther than our forefathers dreamed when they enshrined freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the Constitution. With the means of self-destruction now at their disposal, men must live, if they are to live at all, by self-restraint and mutual understanding.” In short, new technologies, like the internet, would not only offer journalists’ the means of their self-destruction, but also threaten free speech itself.
From the book: A study by the Media Research Center found that between 2008 and 2016, ninety-four percent of donors affiliated with five major news outlets—Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC, NBC and CBS—contributed to Democrats… One reason often given for the media’s left lean is that it is the product of the ideologies on college campuses. In a 2018 study published in The National Association of Scholars, Democrat professors outnumbered Republican professors ten to one. Another reason is that geographically, most media outlets and therefore journalists are clustered on the predominantly blue state coasts. This clustering of “coastal, college-educated, liberal journalists” has been underway for over sixty years.
Mental Illness and Woke Religion Highlights from the book
The number of adults with mental illness jumped to 53 percent recently, largely due to COVID. But the rise in mental illness and woke religion are due to the God-sized hole in our hearts and centuries of a Rousseauian philosophy that says we are naturally good which is opposite from the Judeo-Christian view that we are broken.
From the book: The woke apologists offer us another solution. To wrestle with our inner racism, and fight, violently if need be, to reverse the current power structures. The Judeo-Christian faith offers an alternative solution and it’s not to drop down on our knees and pray for Christ’s second coming, though that’s not a bad idea. It is to start with the posture of forgiveness—a power position from which outpours gratefulness and so many other virtues that make up our humanity. At its core it’s about understanding that the human condition is broken and needs a God to heal and redeem it. Nietzsche predicted that there would be no redemption without a God, and those who have followed his path have yet to show us a better way.
From the book: This chapter explores why we need forgiveness to lighten our loads, not only with family and friends, but on a broader scale with people who disagree with our ideology. Forgiveness is bigger than releasing someone from a trespass. It is how we grant legitimacy to those who we see as different so that we can actually hear them. If Judeo-Christian doctrine could offer society one gift, it would be its embrace of the profundity of forgiveness. Grace, or unmerited favor, is the antidote to the human condition. Trading religion for self-reliance is bad for us, something we did when we took prayer out of schools sixty years ago. Put the weight of the universe on individual shoulders and it’s not hard to see why mental illness and discontent are on the rise… Ironically, what science has tried to bury—our sinful natures—is now becoming self-evident as mental illness plagues the country. I asked Dr. Nina Vasan, Chair of the Innovation Lab at the American Psychiatry Association, if more people believed that their human condition was naturally broken, would mental health improve? She believed yes.
From the book - With this shift as the backdrop it’s not hard to see how the radical left has commandeered the national conversation. Unilateral views on right and wrong; a culture of victimhood; a quick cancel over a thoughtful discussion, and most frighteningly a clamp on free speech. We took prayer out of schools, stopped teaching courage, and left kids to make the rest up on their own. This is what they came up with.