After Donald Trump called the modern-day mainstream media “the enemy of the people,” many mainstream media organizations got very, very upset, calling his charge “extraordinary” and “totalitarian,” comparing him to Stalin and Mao, and sounding off in high-minded paeans to their vaunted roles as “protectors” of the people from the likes of Trump himself. What we learned from this is that, while the media can and does attack Trump every single day for faults great, small and purely imaginary, keeping count on all his lies even as no one tracks their own, they don’t like it very much when he fires back at them. Now, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to endorse Trump’s claim that the mainstream media is “the enemy of the people.” But I’ll say this: it’s certainly proven itself to be the enemy of whitepeople time again.
As you have likely heard, The New York Times recently hired Asian-American tech journalist Sarah Jeong to join its editorial board. Her Twitter history betrayed an absolutely virulent hatred of white people, including such highlights as taking joy at the notion that white people “would go extinct soon”:
Although this was the same news organization that, back in February, had rescinded its offer to a technology writer (Quinn Norton) when news of her past friendship with neo-Nazis had surfaced, the hypocrisy didn’t seem to register, and when it came to Sarah Jeong, The New York Times made excuses (the “she was only joking...” excuse that’s worked oh-so-well when anti-black racists have tried it out) and stuck by someone clearly and disturbingly obsessed with hating white people, while other mainstream media organizations took to the airwaves (here, here, hereand here, to adduce a few prominent examples) to say that anti-white racism simply doesn’t and/or can’t exist. Really, white people, you can’t possibly be offended by someone who takes pleasure in the thought of your genocide, because … well … because anti-white racism simply doesn’t exist.
Or, maybe, white people, what you’re suffering from is an irremediable case of “white fragility”? Recently, Slate ran a softball interview with the seriously deranged anti-white racist Robin DiAngelo (likewise entertained by The Atlantic), who has made a career out of perpetuating a demeaning caricature of white people and who has now written a book on this topic of “white fragility,” a racially coded label for the notion that white people (uniquely?) don’t seem to like it when others (like DiAngelo) use them as punching bags for racist notions. Like many like-minded white sheep on the regressive left who dream of dying their woolly white coats a different color, DiAngelo claims that all white people, herself included, are damned to be racists for the rest of their lives, so that the best they can hope for is to “do less harm than [they] used to” do. And, needless to say, white people need to be less “fragile” and stop taking offense when they’re on the receiving end of racial prejudice. Taking offense, you see, is reserved for snowflakes, the ones who try to silence speakers and flee to safe spaces when they hear something with which they disagree. Such snowflakes are not “fragile,” of course. Like the media “protecting” us from Trump, they’re just protecting themselves from the toll of white supremacist oppression.
And if we are going to talk about “white supremacist oppression” and the mainstream media, we would be remiss not to give a nod to the egregious case of our most renowned anti-white racist of the decade, Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Atlantic has, for years, given a prominent platform to this guy, who couldn’t get a sentence out without some comically inflated reference to “white supremacy,” whose every race-obsessed articleseethed with anti-white animosity and who is possibly more responsible than anyone else in America for swelling the ranks of white extremist organizations and the new rise of white identity politics in response to his bare-faced bigotry.
But he is far from the only culprit. Who can forget that mainstream media has also given rise to the toxic meme of a completely fabricated “epidemic” of black-killing cops. The best statistical evidence we have, when we actually bother to compare apples to apples, is that cops shoot white people at a slightly higher rate than the rate at which they shoot blacks, but reading the likes of The New York Times, which now has a whole section entitled “Police Brutality, Misconduct and Shootings,” you’d never know that (as the Nazi master propagandist Joseph Goebbels is reputed to have said, “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth”). When the same paper then tells us that “Police Killings Have Harmed Mental Health in Black Communities,” it is hard to suppress the urge to scream, “No, New York Times: police killings haven’t harmed blacks’ mental health. You have!” But mental health is only a small part of the problem. The #BlackLivesMatter narrative, perpetuated with the mainstream media’s full complicity, has directly brought about the “Ferguson Effect,” a rise in crime, especially in black communities, resulting from cops, armed with a reasonable fear of trumped-up charges of racism, turning sheepish about the prospect of making stops and arrests.
The falsehood that we are living in a society responsible for the baseless and racist “mass incarceration” of blacks is another mainstream media favorite. This is yet another empirically unsupported falsehood, with the best evidence being that the overwhelming majority of blacks in prison are there not because of low-level drug possession offenses, but rather, serious crimes of violence and property crimes (e.g., robbery). Our problem, in other words, is not mass incarceration but a high level of crime stemming from and afflicting black communities. But that reality is too messy and unpleasant for the mainstream media to address, and anyone who dares bring up black crime is naturally and reflexively tarred and feathered by the same media organizations that insist on burying their heads in the sand.
I could keep going on like this. I could talk about the thoroughly debunked results of implicit bias tests that are supposed to show that all white people are racist and that have been repeatedly touted by the mainstream media machine, or I could give more than a passing mention to all the poison-penned ink spilled about the racist notion of “white privilege,” but what would be the point? The mainstream media is so locked in the punch that it can’t stop anymore.
But we can. We are the ones who have the power to tune these people out or, better yet, keep on giving them a piece of our minds. If you happen to be white, after all, the mainstream media, as you can see, is definitely notyour friend. But, given the havoc the mainstream media’s irresponsible species of yellow journalism has wrought in black communities — higher crime rates, psychological trauma, the rising tide of white identity politics in response to the media’s propagation of angry minority identity politics — it seems that if you are black, the mainstream media is likewise not your friend. And so perhaps I’ve convinced myself: Trump is right on this one. If you’re American, whatever your race, the white-hating, black-hurting mainstream media is not your friend. It is your enemy. While it could, if it actually brought integrity to the table once again, help to protect us against the specter of totalitarianism, the only thing the media currently protects is its own selfish interest in feeding you a never-ending, sensationalized stream of race-baiting headlines padding its own bottom line.
