We now know more than enough to know that Nathan Philips is not trustworthy.
This TimCast video actually isn’t about Covintongate. It was posted a few days earlier. He talks about how formerly free-speech organisations on the left are now openly advocating censorship.
But boy is the headline on point.
Finally, this is an excellent piece from the National Review, and it was quoted extensively in Instapundit today.
The Covington fiasco has proved to be a clarifying moment. And here is what has been made clear: Much of the American media is no longer engaged in journalism. It is engaged in opposition research and in what is sometimes known among political operatives as “black p.r.”—the sinister twin of ordinary public relations. As Joy Behar, as profoundly dim and tedious a person as American public life has to offer, forthrightly confessed: The hysteria and outright dishonesty surrounding the Covington students had nothing to do with them. It has to do with narrowly partisan, selfish, deeply stupid, entirely unpatriotic, childish, foot-stamping, fingers-in-the-ears, weeping, cooties-loathing, teary-eyed, tremulous, quavering, pansified, gormless, deceitful, dishonorable, and cynical politics of the lowest kind — the politics of Us and Them.
When Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Obama failed, the left when nuts. Now, they try to destroy anyone who isn’t saying the exact same thing.
And the fact that a couple of children in MAGA hats engaged in boorish behavior — which isn’t even a fact, as it turns out, but a lie constructed and wholesaled with malice aforethought — wouldn’t have told us one damn thing about Donald J. Trump, his administration, or his political supporters at large. The fact that we had a momentary national moral crisis over the (as is turns out, fictitious) actions of a couple of nobody teenagers is all the evidence anybody needs of the fundamentally hysterical and unserious times in which we live. In a sane world, nobody cares about whether a 16-year-old boy somewhere . . . smirked.
The fact that anyone ever did is crazy. The fact that I am still encountering people who think this outrage is even slightly justified is flat-out insane. It’s been a week, we know the initial outrage was based on a lie. But somehow it’s a lie people want to believe is true, even if it’s taking the side of crazy homophobic nutcase adults and against kids.
Everybody who has pretended like that smirk tells us something serious about the state of the world is a liar and a fraud. I don’t mean the people who were legitimately taken in by the deceit — especially those who have had the honor and self-respect to admit their errors and correct them — but those who willfully persist in the lie. […] I’m talking about you, editors of the New York Times. You sorry specimens are poor excuses for journalists, which, of course, we already knew. What’s more relevant here is that you are bad citizens. Trafficking in lies and distortions because you think the guy in the White House is kind of gross is unworthy of adults with responsible positions in a free society that depends on honest and functional institutions.
I like his style here. He’s abusing people, because they’re bad people. Guilty adults, who did something wrong. Something they should have known was wrong. Something that undermines the very freedom the west depends on, because if your information is tainted, how can your vote be properly informed? Heck, they’ll admit lecture on and on that fake news does this, but when they’re caught, where’s the consequences? There should be mass firings over this gross breach of ethics, where are they?
As some of you may recall, I wrote a little book called The Case against Trump. I didn’t think much of him in 2016. I don’t think much of him now. But we aren’t three tweets away from the Holocaust. Nobody seriously believes that we are, unless they are insane. Sane people who insist that the United States in 2019 is something like Germany in the 1930s are liars. They don’t really believe it. They have an investment in hysteria.
This is something that’s easy to forget. These people who talk about the end of democracy coming from Trump don’t in any way act like they’re going to be arrested for opposing him. They know, but they prefer to hyperventilate about Nazis. And they still do it months later, when Trump’s record is well established as someone who hasn’t done any of the things they were scared of.
Of course he’s done a bunch of things they disagree with. Because when Obama did those things, that as different, right?
We all have our jobs to do in a republic. Newspaper reporters are supposed to cover what’s going on in the world. I don’t know what you call people who cover what’s going on on Twitter. I have a few ideas, but I don’t think I can print them here.
Back in the day, these stupid rumours would have run into a solid firewall when they arrived at the newsroom door.
Now, they’re quickly grabbed and amplified. And we all lose as a result.
My own suspicion is that this moment of mass hysteria, like other hysterias before it, eventually must collapse under the weight of its own tediousness. But I cannot say with any confidence that I expect that to happen soon. And it will not happen at all until Americans start deciding to take on the difficult responsibilities of citizenship, which starts with acting like a goddamned grownup. Nicholas Sandmann is a 16-year-old kid — but the people who made this empty episode into a national crisis are not. They are grown adults, and answerable for their actions.
I’d love to see a fundraiser for legal action on this one. I think I’d donate a couple of hundred bucks, and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I sincerely hope that if they do, it raises hundreds of millions. Because if the media wont act ethically, they need to face the consequences.
And anyone who thinks this was ethical needs their head seen to.
Something should go here, maybe later. 