Media Smears

Here is an article from Ross Douthat that makes many pertinent points. I do disagree about Trump being a race-baiter. Obama was the race-baiter who stirred up racial tensions in America that most of us thought were long gone. And in my personal experience, I have known more racists who were liberals, not conservatives.  The New York Times:

At the same time, the American right in the Trump era faces a liberalism that’s eager to discover and condemn racism where it does not actually exist. Positions that any de-Trumpified conservatism would necessarily hold are conflated with white nationalism, figures who opposed Donald Trump are hammered as enablers of racism, and progressives indulge a political fantasy in which the racist infiltration of the mainstream right is an opportunity to delegitimize conservatism entirely.

The coexistence of these two realities was usefully illustrated in the last two weeks. If you want evidence that bigotry on the right is a bottom-up problem as well as a feature of the president’s birtherism and Twitter wars, just read last week’s SplinterNews exposé on the email group where a cluster of youthful and not-so-youthful right-wingers gathered to play at white nationalism while holding down normal jobs for conservative publications and institutions. What was reported in the piece I can confirm anecdotally: Every extended conversation I have with 20-something conservatives includes a discussion of how to deal with racist flirtations in their peer group. But if you want evidence that unjust delegimitization is happening as well, consider that in the very same period that the email exposé appeared, a succession of mainstream media outlets served up bogus accusations of racism against prominent and not-so-prominent conservatives. (Read more.)

From The Federalist:

 A senior official in the U.S. Department of Labor who resigned last week after being wrongfully accused of anti-Semitism by Bloomberg News was reinstated Wednesday following criticism from both liberals and conservatives.  The Labor Department’s acting Secretary Patrick Pizzella “personally made this decision after carefully reviewing all the facts and circumstances,” according to a senior agency official who spoke with the Daily Caller. Leif Olson had resigned after Bloomberg asked the department to comment on a series of Facebook posts that Bloomberg labeled anti-Semitic, when the posts were clearly sarcastic. (Read more.)

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