Mark Cuban’s recent series of woke rantings are sophomorically wrong, and yet he continues rambling on with the confidence of a billionaire who thinks he understands society better than the peasants to whom he is lecturing.
Cuban’s latest woke contribution to the discourse is to blame social media for a rise in racism. “I think racism has become worse on the political edges of American society, which makes it more virulent and impactful to POC and women,” Cuban posted on X. “People can come on @X and other platforms, remain anonymous, and find common ground with other racists, homophobes, anti-semites etc that just makes them more fervent.”
It isn’t clear what exactly Cuban means by “other platforms,” given that railing against X and new owner Elon Musk has become one of his new hobby horses (Instagram and Chinese Communist Party spyware app TikTok, on the other hand, are “chill”). But Cuban’s insistence that it is somehow social media that has made racism more prevalent falls into the common trap people regularly get caught in: assuming social media is real life.
If you want to know where the rise in racism and discussions about racism stemmed from, it was not the fault of Musk or other, more obscure social media websites. It was the fault of Cuban’s friends in liberal media and the Democratic Party. Race relations stayed steadily positive, according to polling throughout the 2000s to the point that the country elected its first black president in 2008.
What happened then? Barack Obama, and other Democrats, used his race as a cudgel to wield against his detractors. When it came time for Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, the media blew up the death of Trayvon Martin to make it a condemnation of America and “institutional” racism. Around that same time, mentions of the words “racist,” “racists,” and “racism” in liberal media spiked. From 2011 to 2019, the mention of those words in the New York Times increased 700% and in the Washington Post increased nearly 1,000%.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Those race relations polling numbers tanked in 2014, not because of Musk or lack of moderation on social media, but because of the death of Michael Brown and the creation of Black Lives Matter. The movement lied about Brown’s death at the hands of police and enflamed racial tensions, as did liberal media and Democratic politicians who began making everything about skin color. The rise in racism isn’t because of social media; it is because of the very DEI-obsessed people that Cuban is allying himself with.
Cuban’s own political biases blind him to this, just as they blind him when he claims that DEI is just some harmless diversity initiative that makes everything better when it has proven to be anything but. Cuban, again, is out of his depth, stuck in a bubble of his own making.
