While you were out this July Fourth weekend, grilling, swimming, blowing up fireworks, and being an otherwise sane, normally adjusted adult human being, our deeply unserious news media devolved further into problematic-obsessed hysteria.
President Trump delivered an address Friday in front of Mount Rushmore, extolling America’s virtues, institutions, and heroes and decrying the radical activists who have called for destruction and total revolution. It was a fine speech, despite a few passages that may seem overly harsh. Overall, the president did a good job of pushing back on the increasingly frenetic and bitter anti-American sentiment promoted by the “wokest” authors, activists, athletes, journalists, and so on.
But you would never know this from listening to members of the corporate press, many of whom are invested completely in advancing a hyper-racialist form of social justice. The way they tell it, Trump on Friday brought the Nuremberg Rally to America, and all because he spoke out against those who say America is an inherently evil county whose icons must be demolished and institutions overhauled.
“President Trump’s unyielding push to preserve Confederate symbols and the legacy of white domination,” reads the Washington Post’s description of the Mount Rushmore address, “crystallized by his harsh denunciation of the racial justice movement Friday night at Mount Rushmore, has unnerved Republicans who have long enabled him but now fear losing power and forever associating their party with his racial animus.”
The Associated Press reports, “Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore.”
In reference to the president’s specific mention of the targeting of monuments of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, the Associated Press claims, “He zeroed in on the desecration by some protesters of monuments and statues across the country that honor those who have benefited from slavery, including some past presidents.”
“Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message,” said the New York Times.
CNN reports, “On a very different Fourth of July holiday, when many Americans are wrestling with the racist misdeeds of the country’s heroes and confronting an unrelenting pandemic with surging cases, their commander-in-chief is attempting to drag America backward — stirring fear of cultural change while flouting the most basic scientific evidence about disease transmission.”
It is worth pausing here to note two things: First, Trump’s speech never once mentioned Confederate monuments. Second, the above examples of the Mount Rushmore coverage are all supposed to be straight-news reports. They are not opinion articles, though they all read like it.
But none of this news coverage should surprise you. Indeed, it was clear before Trump even spoke a word that this was how the press would play it.
CNN correspondent Leyla Santiago, for example, informed viewers in the hours leading up to the address Friday that the president would speak in front of “a monument of two slave owners and on land wrestled away from Native Americans.”
That is an interesting way of putting it. It is interesting because CNN had a very different take on the monument in 2016, back when Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont was running in the Democratic primary. Back then, CNN marked the senator’s visit to Mount Rushmore by describing it as a “monument to four great American presidents.” What a difference a presidential election cycle makes.
Later, well after Trump’s address, denunciations of his supposedly “dark,” “divisive,” and so-called white supremacy speech continued.
“We’re seeing a celebration of America’s independence on land that was stolen from Native Americans, and it’s over, and it’s being seen and overlooked by two presidents, they’re figures, rather, that owned slaves and a third president in Roosevelt who — who talked about going westward and oversaw the desecration of native land,” said PBS White House correspondent and book-deal recipient Yamiche Alcindor.
Just a quick reminder here that Alcindor, who hosted a segment recently wherein it was suggested that the late segregationist George Wallace was a Republican governor (he was not; he was a Democrat), is supposed to be a hard-news reporter.
She added, “[Trump’s] fitting in this history that is, in some ways, a Republican history about the idea they’re really looking at white resentment … President Trump wants to be on the side of the myth of America.”
This is how members of the press responded this weekend to a single speech by the president, and all because he claimed correctly that radical activists are targeting America’s institution and founders not for any cause of justice, but for political purposes. Amazingly, there is more. If you think the coverage of Trump’s address is unhinged, you have not even seen the full picture of how media comported itself this weekend. As it turns out, the Mount Rushmore freakout is just one part of press’s broader July Fourth meltdown.
I have not mentioned the Washington Post’s social media team seemingly advocating for the “pulling” of “problematic books.” I have not mentioned the accompanying Washington Post op-ed decrying “the unbearable whiteness of Jane Austen.” I have not mentioned the parasitical New York Times tech reporter who gleefully exacerbated the apparent familial tensions between George and Kellyanne Conway this weekend by promoting their 15-year-old daughter’s angsty and rebellious social media posts. I have not even mentioned the 1,400-word New York Times report excusing the “experts” who condemned the anti-lockdown demonstrations, arguing they pose a serious COVID-19 public health risk, but now support the George Floyd protests.
I am only sort of joking when I say the corporate press is suffering some sort of psychotic break amid the Floyd protests and coronavirus lockdowns, indulging itself in all manner of deeply unethical and deranged behavior in the name of promoting an uber-racialist ideology. It really seems some days that — amid its apparent attempt to spearhead a quasi-Maoist revolution whose canonical texts, as journalist Matt Taibbi aptly put it, are “a corporate consultant’s white guilt self-help manual, and a New York Times series rewriting history to explain an election they called wrong” — the American news media have lost their minds.
