Today in Racism! It’s almost as hard to find a real racist these days as it is to find a serious journalist. Good riddance to the former. As for the plight of the latter . . . they did it to themselves
About 20 people attended the white supremacist rally that got nonstop media coverage last weekend
Sometimes the media just make things up, and when they do we properly call it fake news.
But just as often, the media create news, and this is a slightly different but still dishonest beast. They did it this past weekend in Charlottesville. It’s a case of their deciding that something is going to be treated as big news before it ever happens, and regardless of whether actual events warrant the attention they’ve decided to give it.
This weekend marked the one-year “anniversary” of the clash in Charlottesville between right-wing jerks and left-wing jerks, which the media turned into a narrative built on their condemnation of Donald Trump’s condemnation of the participants. The whole thing was idiotic beyond belief, but they came out of it convinced they had damaged Trump. So it was a foregone conclusion that they would go balls-to-the-wall covering the event’s “anniversary,” and the reason I keep putting that word in quotes is that not every event deserves to be marked as special one year after it happens.
No one marks the “anniversary” of the day they bought a shirt, or ate soup, or butchered a Tom Petty song in the car. It’s not that important. Neither was this, but the media want you thinking about it like it was yesterday, so they spent a week hyping the coming “anniversary” of this occasion.
They were also very excited about the prospect of the “Unite the Right” rally, which wasn’t put on by tax-cutting, regulating-slashing conservatives but by white nationalist a-holes. The media geared up to cover this like the Weather Channel would deploy personnel to cover a hurricane. They couldn’t wait. You had to know that racism is alive, huge, dominant and in love with Donald Trump, and their coverage of this rally would prove it to you.
But there was, it turned out, a fairly large problem:
Anyone who pays the slightest attention to the daily passage of events in the news was aware that white-supremacist alt-right groups were planning a rally in Washington, D.C., this past weekend. The anticipatory media coverage of the event didn’t quite reach Super-Bowl hype levels, but it was close. And the number of white supremacists who showed up for the Sunday rally?
Not 200. Not 100. About 20.
This whimper of an alt-right rally raises some interesting political questions about what has transpired in the year since the tragic confrontation in Charlottesville between alt-right groups and left-wing groups like antifa left one woman dead.
Yep, there were way more journalists there to cover this thing than there were actual racists participating. And there were far more protesters, including members of Antifa who got violent with police for absolutely no reason other than their hatred of police.
And that actually makes sense, because to the extent the legend of racism is kept alive in America, it is kept alive much more by the journalists who endlessly cackle about it, by the politicians who finger-point about it, and by the often-violent protesters who justify what they do by claiming it’s necessary to be “anti-hate.”
The racists who turned out in Charlottesville over the weekend are pretty much what we’ve long said they are: Fringe characters who are small in number and almost entirely lacking in mainstream societal influence. Their ideas are far too stupid to gain traction with just about anyone who matters, because in order to achieve anything in modern society you cannot afford to be such an idiot. So they sit around in the back woods shaking their fists at the blacks and the Jews and whoever else – but no one listens to them and America moves on. They are irrelevant and they deserve to be.
But the media and the left don’t want them to be irrelevant. They need them. Because their foundational narrative requires racism to be rampant and ubiquitous, making necessary a powerful state driven by social justice warriors who will prevent the evil racists from taking over. That’s why they were so excited about the events they expected in Charlottesville, and why they weren’t about to let this event’s complete non-occurence affect their coverage.
First they would create a news story by inventing an “anniversary.” Then they would play up as massive an event that turned out to be tiny and embarrassing, and cover it anyway like the gigantic explosion of bigotry they hoped out would be.
It’s almost as hard to find a real racist these days as it is to find a serious journalist. Good riddance to the former. As for the plight of the latter . . . they did it to themselves.
Sometimes the media just make things up, and when they do we properly call it fake news.
But just as often, the media create news, and this is a slightly different but still dishonest beast. They did it this past weekend in Charlottesville. It’s a case of their deciding that something is going to be treated as big news before it ever happens, and regardless of whether actual events warrant the attention they’ve decided to give it.
