Very interesting interview from Unherd…
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Ex-NYT Reporter: The world went crazy!June 5th, 2024 |
 8 comments to Ex-NYT Reporter: The world went crazy!Leave a Reply |
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Many on the Left need to get mugged by reality before they come into the light (sometimes literally mugged, or having your ‘tribe’ turn on you because you dared to remark on some unpalatable truth, the form of the trigger varies).
I admired her for admitting she was part of the cancel mobs before she snapped out of it.
However, I have a sneaky suspicion that contrary to what she says, she actually is going to vote for Trump 😀
I have little doubt that she will not vote for Trump. This is people that only when were put into guillotine by their own side noticed something was wrong.
Her timescale is interesting as from my admittedly limited reading of the NYT Trump Derangement Syndrome was de riguer for several years before she and Bari Weiss eventually upped and left.
By her own admission it was the generalised media reaction to the mostly peaceful blm riots along with her first hand experience of Antifa/CHAZ that led to her/their (it makes a pleasant change to mean two people here) decisions. Damascene conversions are always welcome but both ladies went along with, even contibuted to, a lot of bullshit for many years beforehand and I listened in vain for any aplogy so only a qualified “well done”.
John – yes the history is important.
The drive to declare anything conservative “disinformation” clearly started before Covid, and had nothing to do with Donald John Trump.
So if people such as myself had been successful and Ted Cruz had been elected President in 2016 – history, at least in this respect, would have been THE SAME.
People who are prepared to label Praeger U (the mild manned Denis Praeger and his associates) “disinformation” are Collectivist fanatics who will label anything conservative “disinformation” and seek to have it banned.
This mindset is actually pre (yes pre) Frankfurt School of Marxism – for example Richard Ely (an inspiration to both “Teddy” Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) believed that people who opposed his “Progressive” opinions should be driven out of the universities and the mainstream media (which in his day meant the newspapers – there was no radio or television back then) – and his Orwellian named “academic freedom” campaign was designed to give a monopoly of education to interventionists like himself.
lucklucky and Ofnir – the lady noticed, and rebelled, when the lying became obvious, when it was clear that the people screaming “disinformation” were themselves the people pushing the disinformation – noticing when the lying becomes obvious is better (a lot better) than nothing – but it is not good enough.
The New York Times was pushing wildly twisted propaganda (indeed blatant lies) when the lady joined it – and had been doing so for decades (since at least the 1930s – no mass death in the Soviet Union, Mao an agrarian reformer, the Castro brothers not Marxists – and-on-and-on) – yet the lady only noticed in 2019.
Does the lady, even now, understand that many of the things that she herself was taught, at school and at university, were a pack of lies?
If the lady does understand that then, yes, she will be voting for Donald John Trump – if not, then, perhaps, not.
Only if enough people understand that the cultural hegemony of the left (of the Collectivists) is doing terrible harm, will that cultural hegemony be ended – as it must be ended if Western society is to recover, indeed is to survive at all.
A couple of examples of why the word “lie” (rather than “mistake”) is correct in dealing with the teaching of history.
Ireland in the late 1840s did not have “laissez faire” policies – the Poor Law taxes (only created a decade before) were crushing in the late 1840s. There was also a national police force and a national system of state education – neither of which existed in England and Wales at the time.
And Herbert Hoover was certainly not a “laissez faire” President from 1929 1933 (although he may have become a conservative later in life) – on the contrary he accepted vastly higher tax rates (over 60% top rate of income tax – there had been no income tax at all a couple of decades before, and vast taxes on imports) and, even more important, was the first President in American history to intervene to keep wages UP – in a time of a Credit Money Bubble collapse, in every Credit Money Bubble collapse in American history, from 1819 to 1921 wages had been allowed to fall, sometimes dramatically, in 1929 President Hoover actively intervened to prevent that happening, prevent the labour market clearing.
Hence the mass unemployment of the 1930s.
Now such “errors” could be forgiven if they came from people who one is just talking to casually – but they are not “errors” if they come from professional historians who have spent their lives in the study of the relevant periods.
When a history text tells people, for example, that Ireland in the late 1840s had “laissez faire” policies, or that Herbert Hoover was a “conservative” President – the historian (or historians) who wrote the text is not making a mistake, they are lying.
They have a political and cultural agenda – and they believe that it is acceptable (indeed praiseworthy) to lie (about basic matters of fact) to achieve that agenda.
And, yes, people who think like that do, sometimes, end up bringing to power a regime that will chop off heads.
Short version – not only are the people pushing the “disinformation” narrative not telling the truth about Prager U (and so on), they are themselves the people who push the disinformation. For example, pretending that Antifa is a Marxist movement – or even pretending that it does not exist at all.
They are accuse us of lying – when it is they who are lying. “Projection”.
Where I disagree with the lady is that she believes they have “good intentions” – and I do not believe they do.
If they call you a “Fascist” (when they know you are not) and they want to cancel you – they do not have good intentions.
Paul Marks:
I thought of writing a similar comment.
In fairness to American people, though, when the NY Times lied about Stalin, Mao, and Castro, they were lying about foreign events.
Back then, American people could not (rhetorically) ask: Who should we believe, the NY Times or our own lying eyes?
Because their lying eyes did not tell them anything about Stalin, Mao, and Castro.
But now, their lying eyes tell them something about the economy, the border, antifa, BLM, antisemitism, and American “justice”.
Excellent point Snorri.