The Iranian Uprising and the Media’s Moral Blind Spot

 From Alexander Muse at Amuse on X:

The uprising now unfolding in Iran presents Western media with a problem that is not logistical but philosophical. Journalists are not confused about what is happening. They are avoiding it. The avoidance is systematic, patterned, and revealing. It stems from two pressures that converge on the same conclusion. Honest coverage would shatter the moral framework through which Western liberal institutions interpret the world, and it would require admitting that President Trump’s strategy of direct, unapologetic power is working.

Begin with the first pressure. To explain the Iranian uprising honestly is to say something that Western progressive discourse has trained itself not to say. Millions of Iranians are not merely protesting corruption, inflation, or particular leaders. They are rebelling against Islamic rule itself. They are rejecting a governing ideology that regulates speech, family life, women’s bodies, work, art, and survival. They are not asking for reform within clerical power. They are repudiating clerical power as such.

This creates an immediate problem for Western media. Islam, within progressive moral language, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political theology but as a protected identity, analogous to race or ethnicity. Criticism of Islam is therefore framed as prejudice. It is morally suspect by definition. Once this move is made, the Iranian uprising becomes difficult to describe, because its central claim is unintelligible within that framework. The protesters are rejecting something that, according to the framework, cannot be rejected without moral wrongdoing.

A puzzled reader might ask why this is different from criticism of Christianity or other religions. The answer is that it is not different in substance but it is treated as different in discourse. Christianity is analyzed as doctrine, institution, and history. Islam, in progressive media, is treated as identity. This asymmetry matters. If Islam cannot be named as an ideology, it cannot be held responsible for political outcomes. And if it cannot be held responsible, then a revolt against it has no vocabulary. (Read more.)

When reason dies. From Unlicensed Punditry:

Last night I posted on Facebook that I want Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, and Jacob Frey to answer ten very simple questions like “Does America have a border?”

There was not a single question on that list for which the factual answer is anything other than “yes.” None of them rely on emotion, interpretation, or ideology. They simply describe what is, not what some people wish were true.

And unless we get our arms around the emotional instability now driving American political life, we are cooked—aluminum foil in the microwave, timer set to ten minutes, cooked.

Why?

Because no issue—large or small—is being approached through truth or reason anymore. Everything is filtered through raw emotion. We are watching a full-scale renunciation of reason by a significant portion of the population, including its political leadership. Worse still, much of that leadership is doing this by design.

This did not happen by accident. A good deal of it traces back to intellectual arsonists who taught generations of students that language itself is a weapon and truth is merely a social construct. Jacques Derrida and his descendants may not have intended to light the house on fire, but they handed out plenty of matches.

Once language is severed from reality, everything becomes negotiable. Illegal aliens become “our neighbors,” “our people,” “migrants,” or “undocumented persons”—terms that feel good while erasing the fact that these individuals are, by definition, in the country illegally. ICE is accused of “snatching people off the street who committed no crimes,” when in reality it is executing legally mandated removals of people whose very presence constitutes a violation of law—whether by illegal entry or visa overstay. Families are said to be “ripped apart,” yet no similar outrage is expressed when an American citizen is sentenced to prison and separated from his family as a consequence of criminal behavior.

Emotion is selectively deployed, not consistently applied.

I said recently that Minnesota has become the epicenter of the most successful brainwashing operation since Hitler consolidated power in Germany. If that sounded excessive a week ago, the intervening days should have erased any doubt. This is not fringe behavior. It runs from the top of the DFL straight down through the voters who keep rewarding it. Democrats are fond of calling Republicans Nazis, but the people who enabled Hitler were not jackbooted monsters—they were ordinary citizens who swallowed propaganda wholesale. The resemblance is uncomfortable, and it is real.

So much of what the modern left believes—what it wants to believe—is simply false. (Read more.)

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